David Brooks’ column today tackles what he sees as a pervasive intellectual laziness in modern political discourse, emerging in good part out of confirmation bias run amok and coddled by a culture that errs on the side of affirmation as opposed to challenge.
The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.
Brooks figures maybe this has something to do with that simple fact that giving people what they want is always more profitable than the alternative:
In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.
Brooks is surely right on this point. But here are two additional ways in which the current media environment probably contributes to intellectual laziness:
1) Given the inexhaustible availability of content at any given moment, it is easier than ever to stay on a selective media diet, only munching on the news you know you like. Gone are the days when if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, you had only your local papers and evening television news to guide you. Today, you can read and read and read and watch and watch and watch to your heart’s content without ever so much as having to encounter an idea with which you disagree, or even a discomfiting fact.
2) The infinite chaos of the modern media stream might just be too overwhelming for anyone to approach without the crutch of an ideological filter. Imagine, for a moment, that you were truly agnostic as to some policy question, and you earnestly wanted to research it objectively. Where would you start? And more importantly: where would you stop? And when contrary ideas and facts emerged, how would you evaluate them? Picking an ideology to start provides coherence in a chaotic world (as it always has). And with the news environment more chaotic and expansive than ever, having a starting ideology seems even more helpful.
All of this suggests that those of us who agree with Brooks about the dangers of intellectual laziness built on ideology may be facing more obstacles than ever before. In short, we have our work cut out for us.
