No improvement in professionalism

So I continue to be as erratic as John McCain in posting to this blog, but I refuse to give up.

I have been writing though over the past two months or so please don't judge me too harshly (bonus: here's the link to my first column I wrote for the CT over the summer but couldn't find--for some reason--the last time I posted). The editorial board position has certainly encouraged me to write on a regular basis and I think that this has, in part, disrupted my blogging. It has enabled me to be regularly published though and, for the most part, without changes being done to my work. One of my editorials did not run, however, for reasons that were never really made clear to me, so I suppose I'll make a blog post out of that too.

A downside that I've encountered is the comments that some of my editorials produce. I've been meaning to write a piece on the typical problem with this, as I see it, though I'm sure to do so on the editorial page would only exacerbate the problem, but haven't yet gotten around to it yet.

In a sense, I feel the problem is related to the kind of difficulty I have with evaluating the back-and-forth that we witnessed, to some extent, in tonight's final Presidential debate and to a lesser extent in the others. When people write comments online they do usually so very uncarefully. And by uncarefully I mean that they write things which are ambiguous as to the logic actually used to derive them and only tangentially related to the argument I actually made. Thus I'm left in the situation of either ignoring them and feeling like a dismissive elitist or having to write a tremendous amount to be sufficiently charitable so that I don't misinterpret their terse text and feeling like I'm wasting my time. I usually opt for the former option because, firstly, I suspect it would be inappropriate to engage the commenters in that forum (no quite sock puppetry, but still) and secondly, it would require another article to really be fair to the commenter, given the way that they commented. To do otherwise would be to assume too much about their logic or about their actual position vis-a-vis my article. Part of me thinks that I should just view their responses as mere replies to the gestalt of my pieces rather than arguments with the details therein. This is frustrating but I don't really see an alternative.

I feel like the Presidential debates are similar. Both candidates, though I honestly, if biasedly, believe that McCain is more guilty of this than Obama, say things that cannot be sensibly rebutted in a convincing fashion given the time constraints. I feel like the commenters do the same. They make assertions rather than arguments and so one can either, ignore which looks cowardly, counter-assert which looks weak or counter-argue which takes time and is actually frowned upon by the moderator in a lot of cases. This shows a failure to respect the norm of conversational reciprocity.

Last night's debate was certainly more confrontational--perhaps solely because it more closely resembled in its design the way people actually talk to each other--but I don't know that it really got to the bottom of anything. The CT editorial board ran an editorial (that I didn't write) lamenting this fact and I feel the same up to a point. However, I feel like debates just cannot cover the amount of ground that the moderator wants to cover while retaining the depth that is necessitated both by objective criteria that demand that we actually investigate matters of this importance to a sufficient degree and by the way they talk to each other. So I'm sure the candidates don't help but the format, even when the format is as different as it was last night, strikes me as being mostly to blame.

Talking to each other about deep issues is surprisingly difficult. One major reason is the conflict between emotions and reasons, but this is unsurprising. Another, more complex, reason is that many debates are over details and if we don't all have the same understanding of those facts then our conversation will stall. Now, ideally we could "look up" the facts and then proceed but we know that this doesn't often happen both because we're seldom so committed to the process so as to protract it this way and because the facts are often murky enough--or, at least, seem so these days--that we can even disagree over them if we were to look them up. I'm not usually so pessimistic but I think conversation and debate both require a discipline that we're not always willing to employ--it doesn't come naturally anymore, if it ever did, and so we'll need to work hard to regain this particular virtue.