It seems as though, at least monthly, the public is served a new wedge issue over which to waste time and energy. September’s flavor of the month, for instance, had something to do with kneeling, football, the national anthem and, vaguely, police brutality. Such flavors of the month become, in effect, products meant to appeal to a dark area of our brain. It is that area of the brain that compels us to click certain web links and linger over chatter on television — multiplying the hits, boosting the ratings, increasing the profits. From a certain point of view, these dark areas of our brains are simply parcels of real estate to be exploited.
If we were in earnest, yes, we might examine police brutality trends. We might also put police violence against civilians in context, taking into balance factors such as civilian violence against police and civilian violence against other civilians. And then we might try to identify remedies, where needed.
But the flavor of the month is never about remedies. It’s about our addiction, as a society, to the noise of conflict.
To be sure, the problem of noise is not new. The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “Everything in our day … is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever-new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale.”
There is another way, however. There’s the quiet refuge of nonpartisan, solutions-oriented information. But being informed is not just the responsibility of wonkish public policy researchers. It’s a basic responsibility of citizenship. It’s also the only way forward, ever.
This is not to say that the noise of conflict is altogether avoidable. Some of the first citizens of this country, those most invested in its success, had bitter disputes. Jefferson and Hamilton loathed each other. Jefferson and Adams, once the best of friends, for many years were not on speaking terms. While personality and pride played a part, ideological differences were significant in their conflicts.
Washington, exasperated by the divisions within his Cabinet, stated in his farewell address that “the spirit of party … is a spirit not to be encouraged. From (a free country’s) natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
Yes, there will always be differences. There are those who embrace divine revelation and those who adhere to a secular religion. There are those who believe government is the answer to most of our problems and those who believe government can answer few of them. There are hawks and doves, country folk and city folk. Such divisions date back to Washington’s Cabinet.
But beyond the politics of emotion, there is a quiet, sane place where facts reside. And facts, as John Adams once said, “are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
We owe it to our country, our fellow citizens and ourselves to dwell as often as possible in the quiet refuge of facts and nonpartisanship — and to thereby defy the flames that consume.
Peter Reichard is president of Utah Foundation (www.utahfoundation.org), a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy research organization. Reach him at peter@utahfoundation.org.