Okay, Just Not a Certain Class of Tweets Then

...I also wonder if the cutting wit isn’t itself the insight. I’d propose that in some cases the act of calling out the game helps others see something they may have simply taken for granted, or taken as a hardened truth instead of as a point of negotiation where they didn’t before. Can’t that be considered progress or at least a catalyst toward same?

Yeah, I think this is definitely true, and I was being too broad in my criticism. I think satire often does what you describe here, maybe better than most things.

A few clarifying points then.

First, part of my frustration is that it feels like the whole field is flooded with the pointing out of the problem. When someone points out that boat is taking on water–and does so in a way that gets people's attention–that's doing a great service. When a thousand additional people are all pointing out the same thing, and are pointing out how shitty the captain is, or are standing on the deck raving about the futility of sea travel, that's not helpful anymore. What's needed is people fixing the problem.

Second, there's a type of fatalistic commentary that I find very frustrating. Most of the quotes from my last post fall into this category, like saying that politics is always "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles", or that governments never learn from history. I would argue that "governments don't work" or "these people are all crooks" doesn't meet our criteria of useful criticism.

Actually, I think criticism like this does real, active harm. When we speak in absolutes like that, when there's nothing to be done–no resolution, no room for redemption, then we're robbing people of agency. It seems we speak in absolutes now, I think that under-girds a lot of the division we see. If the opponent is irredeemable and government is hopelessly broken, why engage at all, why bother? Even when packaged up with wit and humor it's dangerous. It's its own form of control, it's the opposite of calling out the game or clarifying the truth, it's obscuring the truth.

I think the reason that I'm having so much trouble with this is that, having worked just a little bit on trying to bring about change I have a small taste of how difficult it is. More than that, I've met people who have spent their lives working in earnest to try to make things better, and to me that makes the person waving their hand and saying that it's all broke or a whole class of people is hopelessly corrupt all the more infuriating, it's a cop out.  It's easy to mock and to be witty, it's hard to work to make things better.

Brené Brown is one of my favorite authors and speakers. I'll end on a great quote that I've heard her cite several times from Teddy Roosevelt, and that gets at some of this:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena ... who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly