In a podcast unpacking biofortification, Jeremy Cherfas explores how science has not delivered on the promises, especially regarding yield. One of the interesting points raised is the idea of ‘hidden hunger’, this is where people get enough food, but not enough micronutrients.
One aspect of malnutrition is hidden hunger, a lack of micronutrients in the diet resulting in poor health that may not manifest for months or years.
Source: What is wrong with biofortification by Maarten van Ginkel and Jeremy Cherfas
This idea had me thinking about our digital diets, where we often get too much information, but not enough critical content. This can subsequently leave us with ‘hidden hunger’. Although we may spend time clicking and consuming social media, there is something missing.
One place I have found myself continually going to over the last few years has been The Minefield podcast featuring lecturer in politics and journalist, Waleed Aly, and, philosopher and theologian, Scott Stephens. Their weekly discussions diving into wicked problems always leave me thinking differently about the world around me. In part, this is for the way in which they never quite agree, but always find some sort of consensus. (For me, their dialogue represents what Angus Hervey describes as holding on tightly and letting go lightly.) I was therefore intrigued to read their Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy
At its heart, Uncivil Wars argues that democracy cannot survive contempt. Democracy, Aly and Stephens explain, is about cultivating a common life even in the presence of serious disagreement, while contempt is about having no life in common at all. They suggest that, to make this argument requires a careful consideration of both contempt and democracy, but it also requires us to think about the conditions in which we are going about our democratic lives. So they divide their argument into three stages.
First, we draw on the insights of moral philopsohy to make clear what we mean by contempt and to identify precisely what makes it morally suspect. Along the way, we engage with recent philosophical and policatical arguments that seek to validate contempt in certain circumstances. Even those arguments, we note, require participants in public debate to practice a high level of restraint.
Next, we show that such restraint is rendered completely unrealistic given the environment in which our public conversation takes place. We argue that the machinery of public discourse, dominated by media and social media, is powerfully designed to manipulate, inflame and commodify our moral emotions, impelling us towards an unrestrainted contempt for each other.
Finally, we argue that such contempt is ultimately incompatible with and thoroughly corrosive of democracy itself.
Source: Uncivil Wars by Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens
Aly and Stephens describe contempt as being personal, judgmental, comparative, performative, an enduring disposition, a way of acting and feeling towards others. Breaking this down further, they identify three particular types of contempt:
- Patronising Contempt. This is ‘knowing without being known, speaking without being addressed.’ An example is Malcolm Turnball’s dismissal the Uluru Statement from the Heart where he showed contempt for indigenous people with the way in which he rejected it.
- Downward Contempt. This is contempt that focuses on hierarchical order. An example of this is slavery and the prioritising one group over another.
- Moral Contempt. This is contempt that is not necessarily pre-existing, but arises out of a situation. It is the staple of tabloid journalism. It is also epitomised in the Robodebt’s contempt towards those receiving government payments and cancel culture.
Aly and Stephens point out that these three types are not mutually exclusive. For example, the response to Yassmin Abdel-Magied a few years ago mixes cancel culture with a downward contempt of gender and religion. In the end, these three types are brought together by there deep dismissal of others with no place for forgiveness. Oddly, contempt is often self-fulfilling.
For Aly and Stephens, ‘air’ is more than the oxygen we breathe, it is the space that occupies the space, it is where democracy exists. They use a quote from Luce Irigaray to capture the way in which our public life is beholden to the air that we breathe.
Air is the medium of our natural and spiritual life, of our relation to ourselves, to speaking, to the other – Page 67
Source: Way of Love by Luce Irigaray
Sadly, actions such as ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ in the open air of Twitter serve as moral contagion and help build outgroup animosity. Social media acts as a contempt machine and helps push us all towards the tabloidisation of everything.
Aly and Stephens use a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson discussing the way in which Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 made everyone culpable for slavery to capture the situation.
We do not breathe well. There is infamy in the air.
Source: The selected lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rather than tending to the air, media platforms suck everyone into a game where virality is the goal. Every speech act is reduced to a positive or negative response, this leads to a situation where contempt occurs before moral considerations of the other. This leaves us incomprehensible, unknown and unknowable to others.
Although there are always limits, the problem is that in the modern world this has become the first questions we ask. Little room is left for complexity and consensus. For Aly and Stephens, our focus should be on ‘thick democracy’, the reciprocal act of hope, interdependence and attention.
Democracy lives by and through such incidental acknowledgements of the moral reality of other persons.
Source: Uncivil Wars by Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens
Borrowing from Simone Weil, they talk about the importance of being attentive to the best of arguments of the others view, rather than a caricature. Weil talks about the symbolic language of lovers and the way this cultivates the relationship. With this, we need to think of democracy as a marriage that is continually cultivated.
We have become profoundly unreal to each other and therefore inattentiveness to the moral reality of our fellow citizens. This is perhaps the greatest irony. For all the talk of the attention economy, attention is precisely what our social media saturated age disallows. We are living in a time of contempt and the future of our democratic life depends on whether we can resist it.
Source: Uncivil Wars by Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens
With the movement away from platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it can be a useful time to consider what such spaces serve and what a constructive alternative maybe to borrow from Doug Belshaw. What might it mean to form what Eli Pariser has described as ‘online parks‘:
We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.
Source: To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks by Eli Pariser
All in all, Uncivil Wars is a thought provoking book, which demands attention and consideration.
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REVIEW: Uncivil Wars – How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Virginia Trioli’s reflection on focusing on the wrong thing to me is another highlight to the challenges of having conversations in the modern world? This again has me thinking about Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ discussion of contempt. For me, this is all nicely captured in Tony Martin’s Sizzletown, a podcast that is hilariously funny, until you realise the truth associated with so much of the commentary. I guess here I fall back on my oft repeated quote from Peter Goldsworthy ‘Maestro’: