On being bland

Over at Olaf’s there is a thoughtful post about the Robert McClelland affair.

I commented:

The McClelland affair underscores just how pernicious the organization of the Canadian blogosphere into partisan lists has become.

Robert himself is a grade “A” asshat and his remarks are often offensive. So what? The entire point of blogging is to allow even the looniest a place where their opinions - however demented - are published and examined.

However, once the taste police and the guardians of civil discourse get involved - as is inevitable when one blogs as part of a partisan group - certain topics are no longer acceptable. The good of the group (or, indeed, party) trumps the value of an individual’s right to express his opinion.

In this case the dissident opinion was deemed to be anti-semitic and therefore beyond the pale. However, what if Robert had committed the heresy of questioning climate change or, in Tory circles, Stephen Harper’s leadership capacity? What if a blogger were to suggest that current immigration policy was a bad idea or that women, on the whole, like raising children more than working full time? Remember a couple of months ago poor Elizabeth May was read out of the feminist left for daring to suggest that having an abortion was not the best thing in the world for the woman concerned?

The blogosphere and the party system are at odds with each other. In a mass media driven, gotcha, political age, political parties have to exercise strict message control else they be accused of a “gaffe”. The essence of blogging is that there is no message management, no party line, no whip or talking points.

Vile as McClelland often is, his accusers and eventual executioners do indeed endanger my liberty. Worse, they threaten to homogenize political discourse to the point of such blandness that no one will bother to read the blogs.

As Alan at GenX at 40 gleefully points out regularly, blogging has not lived up to its early promise to provide a genuinely alternative agora where all opinions are written and weighed. That naive promise died once political parties began to take bloggers seriously enough to want to organize them and once blogging partisans decided to help out with this predictable effort. Gradually there emerged certain topics which were off limits and, worse, various people took it upon themselves to police their little patches of the Canadian blog world.

Party politics in Canada is all about the creation of coalitions and to do that a party politician needs to avoid giving offence. The politics of polite means that you are not allowed to notice a broad range of topics. Which, of course, makes sense politically. The problem is that this polite political world tends to reject ideas which run contrary to received wisdom (or last week’s polling results).

At this point Canada is blessed with four political parties who have all become fervent believers in man made climate change and the need to “do something” about it. Each is proposing ever more expensive measures to combat this scourge of our time. Each is committed to raising public awareness and none are prepared to countenance debate as to the science or the policy implications of their new found orthodoxy. The case is closed and people who raise questions are unwelcome.

Orthodoxy, by its nature, confines and directs debate. It has no room for outliers, none for dissidents. It creates and enforces political no go areas in which no debate is allowed, no deviation tolerated. For the party pols the stakes are too high to allow discussion.

One of the great gifts of blogging is that the stakes are incredibly low. A person can write what he likes with next to no consequence, pro or con. Which, until the parties began to see blogging’s potential, was what allowed the rapid, often vitriolic, occasionally incisive, exchange of ideas which is how blogging started. The echo chambers and mass traffic of the current world was unknown when virtually the entire Canadian blogosphere read each others’ work without regard to party affiliation.

In many ways, Robert’s expulsion from the Progressive bloggers is typical of the relentless logic of “bland”. What he wrote and what the excretable arthurdecco wrote to prompt is revolt me; but the point of blogging is not to be reassured in one’s positions but rather to have them challenged again and again. This scares the Hell out of the appartchiks like Cherniak who want to pretend that politics is confined to the well rehearsed banalities of party politicians.

Party politics and blogging have had their starter marriage - some people will try to keep it going, some will quit altogether, but a few, and Robert, for better or worse will be among them, will accept the inherent contradiction and get on with their lives. Blogging is an outsider’s medium and, to stay interesting, it needs to stay that way.

Update: Kate observes:

While I may find much of what he writes to be repulsive and the remainder of it uniformed, I agree with Peter Rempel and Kathy Shaidle. When members of the blogosphere - particularly those of us who write under our real identities - find themselves the target of campaigns orchestrated by self-rightous speech herders, it’s the responsibility of bloggers to set aside personal differences and partisanship to defend our individual freedom to offend.

Written by jay on March 8th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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