Over at languagehat today, in a post entitled German in America, there was an interesting tangent on the comment threads that took off from an observation about the different ways that the phrase "I just don't understand it!" can be used rhetorically. The discussion took a detour through a very useful observation by a poster with the handle Grumbly Stu: In fact it's easy to recognise when you are on the wrong track - it's when you find yourself getting nowhere.
But it was the following comment from him that really caught my eye:
Of course I don't regard myself as getting nowhere merely when other people don't agree with me. That's because I no longer try to get people to agree with me. I used to try, but then changed my goals when I found I was getting nowhere.
Now there are people who don't bother to disagree with my occasionally unusual views, but instead prefer to resent the very fact that I don't agree with their commonly held views. This has given me an opportunity to rethink, in theoretical terms, what the relationships might be among understanding, not understanding, consent and dissent.
Clearly rocking the boat is not conducive to consent, although it is a good policy for getting the boat off the discursive rocks. People who moralize everything under the sun should not be surprised when they meet with as much dissent as consent. Morality is inherently divisive.
The second paragraph of his comment really resonated with me, as it echoes many of my own experiences and follows a line of thought I've been tossing about in my head concerning the vitrol in much contemporary right wing discourse. So I took up Grumbly Stu's challenge for myself and spent the evening trying to rethink what some of the relationships among and between understanding, not understanding, consent and dissent might be.
The piece I chose to focus on was the observation about folks who don't respond to unusual viewpoints with disagreement, but opt instead for resentment. This seems to capture a sizable portion of right wing discussions on cultural matters. I think, too, that I continue to push myself to try and--in Grumbly Stu's words--rethink in theoretical terms what is going on in those communicative moments because it is such a familiar response that I have been confronted with for much of my adult life when dealing with certain members of my extended family or my hometown.
As a white Southerner, I have grown up with many flavors of both racism and racial awareness feeding my consciousness. I tend to think of racial questions in this manner, I believe, in part because I am Southern. I know that what we have in our society are racisms, not simply a monolithic oak tree to be chopped down, but rather multiple strands of an overarching kudzu plant that has worked at times to take all the sunlight and choke the life out of whatever tender shoots are trying to take root in its shadow.
Recognizing these different strands, or flavors has led me to admit that I personally, have a somewhat well-developed scale of rejection and dismissal as I encounter them. There is the overt and out-dated racism of my grandfather's generation, which, though always unpleasant and eventually uncomfortable to me, I nonetheless brought myself to tolerate (at least from him) because of his age, my love for him and my recognition that it and his time had genuinely passed and no amount of struggle over it with him would bring about a change. I do not think that my own experience with this kind of question is unique, though I am confident that my own personal resolution for it is not the only one. We tolerate, within reason, the racisms of another time from a generation of older people, sometimes unfortunately, even those who committed some fairly vile acts in the past, but we do that mostly because we know that is no longer the norm, and somehow we can accept these vestiges of the past, because we expect that they will die as that generation passes on.
More difficult is how to deal with those flavors of racism that come from folks of our generation, or even those younger than we are. For me, the most difficult is the one I seem to encounter most among family members and their friends, folks of roughly my own generation who seek to express rather more indirect racist views, but do so with venom and resentment when they hear me express my own attempts toward some kind of racial awareness or even anti-racism. It is as if the racism itself is directed at me as a form of punishment for not sharing their views, that resentment for not agreeing with what should be (in their minds at least) the commonly held view. In these instances then, racism isn't about racism but is about changes in the conventional wisdom, in those commonly held views. And the reaction to those changes isn't one of understanding, or even of not understanding, it is one of immediate dissent and disagreement, overlaid with a heavy dose of defensive maneuvers: argumentation, belligerence, and combativeness are the general tone.
And that's what so much of the publicly-available right wing discourse feels like to me: it isn't about consent or consensus, nor is it about understanding (or even not understanding), it is primarily about resentment that what they believe is not only not shared by everyone, but that it isn't even the commonly held view anymore.
I don't know the answer to any of this, but I do find that thinking about it in this way reminds me that the classical liberal tenets of communication that we generally think of as our norms, particularly for political engagement, such as consent, consensus, persuasion, civility, dissent and even opposition are not the only functions and uses of communication. Nor is the liberal enlightenment goal of increasing understanding via more dialogic communication the only objective of communicative acts. Rethinking the relationships between things like understanding and not understanding, consent and dissent seems very necessary to me at the moment, since one of our greatest needs may well be to find a way to reintroduce the accommodation of disagreement back into our public and political sphere.