Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 15, 2009

So Misunderstood

Upgraded from the Moot, in response to the question:
[W]hy do you think many people seem to not understand your critique at pretty basic level?

I don't think many people, strictly speaking, have even read the superlativity critique. Of the ones who have read it I don't actually think more misunderstand it than understand it. I do think it's right to say that plenty who comment on it here in the Moot exhibit such misunderstanding, however.

But there are plenty of reasons why that might be so. An obvious one is that it is very proper to use a comment space to seek clarification if you don't understand something, while there rarely seems much point in using a comment space simply to declare that one understands or agrees with an argument in general.

Much more to the point, though, clearly many of the people who care enough about the critique to comment on it are themselves public advocates of superlative themes and "outcomes" themselves: Many of these aren't familiar with the customary moves and terminologies of cultural and rhetorical arguments like mine in the first place, many of them don't even know how to take such arguments seriously, many defensively prefer to treat the arguments as some kind of con-game rather than shifting perspective enough to grasp the force of the critique, many of them feel personally maligned by the argument more than anything else and so they are already predisposed to this defensiveness, many of them are True Believers unreachable for now by even the clearest reasoning.

To adapt the critique to ameliorate the distress of these readers makes less sense than it might seem to do, since I think the necessary adaptations (pitching the critique at a different level of generality, approving their preferred frames, including within the sphere of the non-problematic a host of actually quite marginal and "speculative" claims which fail to pass muster in consensus discourses but which they declare to be straightforwardly "factual" and "technical" and so on) would blunt the force of the critique on its own terms into near irrelevance.

And when all is said and done, not to put too fine a point on it, whatever the proportion of their participation in the Moot, Robot Cultists whose feelings get hurt by the superlativity critique are far from its target audience in any case.

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