Drawn on April 26, 2024 |
Published from Miami |
This year’s Earth Week has been ruffled by quite a few college campus protests. Typically, protesting is healthy for democracy. Yet, ruckus notwithstanding, a general lack of focus has somewhat obscured the central messages of these gatherings. Focus is a balanced composition of criticism and humility, exercised by thoughtful agents capable of appreciating the waltzing counterpoint to a point. It’s a lot like classical music; whether tuning the orchestra or the main event, different instruments take turns, speak their mind, and occasionally overpower each-other. Every sound is different, every peep original, but the common goal is to create a night worth remembering for everyone. The law of the land is written in the notes of a partitur, but it's the conductor and their musicians who massage the sound. Problem is, nowadays, instead of harmony, the only thing we seem to see is the lopsided construction of straw men and hear the dissonant banging of ad hominems. People are loud and apparently discouraged from tuning before the show. Why would anyone want to hear the performance, what is the point of a debate?
Protests and their occasional derailment into civil unrest are nothing novel. That said, in observing these recent demonstrations and their conductors, it's become clear that the practice of the subtle, yet demanding, mental gymnastic of massaging an idea — nuance — is an art almost completely extinct from debate. Even within universities, renowned as bastions of reason, batches of students, professors, and administrators have forsaken the skill of nuance, opting instead for bans on dialogue, sensationalistic screaming, and vacuous apologies. Witnessing partisan upheaval of this scale in institutions of higher-learning is a tectonic shift from the original journey that colleges embarked on — to share ideas — making it ever more complicated to navigate these pressing issues. With conversations of urgency having morphed into gaslighting, could self-immolation not be the next naturally proactive step to underscore the gravity and intensity of modern day problems?
There are many good reasons for people to be angry. But this troubling devolution in popular rhetoric has transformed the notion of an "adversary," once characterized by attentive opposition, into a far more alarming designation: "enemy," a belligerent afflicted by deafening obstinacy. The result is runaway polarization, causing nuance to wither to the extent that serious issues, like the cosmic threat of mass extinction due to global warming on Anthropocenic Earth, appear mundane.
Nuance, the mightiest tool for appreciating gradations of severity and the humor in irony, has now become a brittle twig, an empty idea, a limp expletive with its foundational meaning lost to confusion in a maelstrom of intellectual auto-da-fés like the one depicted in our drawing here.
Earth, the celestial spectator, is watching.