News Reporter: Act Four: On not weighing in on every controversy

Wednesday, 18 October 2017

Act Four: On not weighing in on every controversy

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

(Reuters/Kacper Pempel/Illustration)

Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Oct. 16 chat here and submit questions for the Oct. 23 chat here. This week, a reader has an observation more than a question, but one that I wanted to respond to anyway.

I read an intriguing interview in the Atlantic with Alan Jacobs, the scholar of religious literature who has a new book coming out. He fears that we are anxious and exhausted because every day brings people a fresh requirement that they “mark their place on the ideological landscape through social media.” This resonated with me, especially because social media have a tendency to reward brevity and clarity (rather than nuance), as well as speed and frequency (rather than reflection). We simply can’t live every day in outrage, or paint everyone with the same shade of villainy for every outrage.

In the interest of nuance, I want to proceed a little bit carefully here. My friend and blogmate Sonny Bunch has long referred to something he refers to as “the politicized life,” the idea that more and more areas of our lives are being turned over to partisan politics. He and I disagree a little bit on this: There are a lot of things that we treat as neutral when they are, in fact, highly politically determined, just not along partisan lines. And there are a lot of facets of modern life that are outrageous and ridiculous, and the disapproval people are expressing is another way of saying that a lot of people have decided that they don’t want to tolerate those absurdities anymore.

All of that said, I do think Jacobs has a point. The idea that we all have to weigh in on every single controversy or risk losing our partisan credentials is ridiculous and exhausting. Each controversy is distinct even if it has something in common with other kerfuffles or scandals. Increasingly, I’ve slowed down the rate at which I respond to the debacle of the day depending on whether I actually feel as though it’s important, whether I feel I have something new to say about the underlying issue, and whether I feel it’s actually worth it to surface an old set of arguments. Also sometimes I’m traveling, or on vacation, or at a meeting and just don’t have time to weigh in. I am only one person, and if folks have questions about where I stand on any given issue, that’s what the chat is for. If people are watching me somewhere, keeping score, that’s up to them: I’m a columnist for a newspaper, not someone seeking public office or position. I’m better at my job when I embrace uncertainty and ambiguity where I genuinely feel it. And I definitely feel better for not spending my whole life thinking about who’s watching me.

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