Look What You Made Me Think
Why communication matters so much
I think a lot about disentangling what we say from how we say it—form versus substance. I also think about the question of whether people really do reject certain ideas because they don’t like the people who promote them, or they don’t like the way they say them.
You’ll see this argument over whether “tone” matters - some people make fun of that whole idea. They’ll say, mocking the people who might care, “I don’t like your tone so I’m going to not believe something that I actually think makes sense.” You see this in politics a lot, of course. For example, people who dislike Trump but don’t like the style of the Resistance folks will get caricatured as supposedly thinking “I don’t like Trump but now I’m going to vote for him because some leftist on the internet was annoying to me.”
For the record, I do think, while it might be silly, that it’s a real thing. I do think there are people out there who feel that if it weren’t for the actual advocates of certain ideas, they would embrace those ideas. Or, more pertinently, be able to trust those ideas and their implementation in the real world.
I think about this dynamic a lot, and here’s a recent example. A fellow I follow on Twitter responded to the Georgia governor offering his prayers to the victims of the latest school shooting. He wrote something like, “F—k prayers, ban the guns.” (He didn’t censor it.)
There’s enough of a conservative in me to write a right-wing response to this kind of social media stuff—which gets clipped and piled up and shown to people through right-wing media. It goes something like, 70 percent of the country is Christian, and this guy who wants to take our guns away also curses our faith. These are the same people who want to unleash criminals on our streets and close our churches and not let us defend ourselves…. It ties together all these disparate issues, reinforces the sense that the country’s majority is despised by its elite, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter how much of that is false or exaggerated or driven by selective or dishonest right-wing media portrayals.
The other important thing is that this guy doesn’t literally mean “F—k prayer.” That’s the really key thing, actually. That’s why words matter. I actually responded on Twitter with my own formulation of what I thought he meant. And he agreed with me! My wording was something like, “Damn this man for using the language of prayer to pretend we’re powerless to do anything about this problem ourselves.”
Maybe, if you’re not a religious person yourself, this seems like a distinction without a difference: swear word, call to action. Someone else added, semi-facetiously, that the original formulation, unlike mine, is pithy. True.
But his and my formulation really do express different things, even if they aren’t intended to. This is the whole point of dialogue, ecumenism, etc. To put aside the words and formulations we’re accustomed to using, and to really, really figure out what we’re trying to say.
“F—k prayer” implies that there’s something wrong with praying for the victims of a tragedy. That only dupes or cynics do it. The “damn this man” formulation, on the other hand, turns his use of religion around on itself—it’s powerful, in my view, precisely because it implies that God might judge him for using prayer to evade actions that are in fact within his power. (That’s a legislative question, and I don’t know to what extent it is—I’m just explaining the argument.)
Maybe there are some conservative Christians out there who would stop and be forced to pause and think, instead of being able to say “This leftist hates prayer, screw him. If he hates prayer he must also hate lots of other good American things…”
Yes, this is about urbanism.
Let me share this bit from my review of Chuck Marohn’s previous book, on his experience as a traffic engineer. I was focusing in on his pretty canny ability to reach conservative audiences in regard to urbanism:
The fact that Marohn never uses trendy “left-wing” language does not detract from his conclusions on matters regarding race. Rather, it magnifies them, making plain to any reader that even when you strip out the jargon, the heartbreaking injustices and inequalities that run through everything in America are not imaginary or ideological. They were not conjured up in coastal newsrooms or Ivy League academic departments. They are real; they are there. Marohn makes it far easier for those of a centrist or right-leaning persuasion to see this, and he forces such readers to reckon with it. He does not allow them to dismiss any of it on the basis of “sounding left-wing.”
There are people who would rather litigate entire political worldviews than simply allow a distinct point to be made in and of itself.
There’s a recurring argument on social media between certain YIMBYs or certain imagined YIMBYs and other people who are friendly to a pro-housing agenda or walkability, etc., but aren’t completely free-market folks or don’t like the style of new construction (or whatever). Basically, purity tests and assumptions and gatekeeping. These flashpoints often occur over things like skyscrapers or tall building, the question of “beauty” in architecture, and whether pure market fixes (i.e. supply) are enough and whether talking about other solutions is a sneaky way to pretend supply doesn’t matter.
As someone who stays out of these spats, it seems petty to me, and also like a lot of talking past each other. Do the people making fun of “beauty” really mean that aesthetics and design are completely irrelevant and don’t matter at all? They sound like they are, but they’re really responding to the whole viewpoint that they think “beauty” is a buzzword for (this is a really very-online thing but you’ll find these sort of weird right-wing accounts that link architectural beauty with the revival of the West or whatever), when many people might not mean anything by it beyond “buildings should generally look nice.”
Distrust can just keep growing as more people feel compelled to pick one of these two sides when in reality almost everyone agrees on everything. The words are actually creating the perception of substantial disagreement, which in turn becomes real.