ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

By: Paul S. Marchand

Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.
    -René Viviani, Prime Minister of the French Republic, August, 1914

The next great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.
    -Attributed to Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, sometime Imperial Chancellor of Germany, c. 1898.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
    -Hillel the Elder

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
    -Confucius, Analects, XV.24


Following Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, it was perhaps inevitable that both sides of the political divide should begin to lob rhetorical broadsides at one another, in what has become a flame war about flame wars.

Comment boards, message threads, the blogosphere, and the MSM, all lit up with instant analysis, most of it directed at assigning blame.

On Sunday, in a previous blog entry, I suggested that, in the wake of the shootings, we should all take a deep breath and ask: what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  While I was not alone in suggesting such a thing, it has become clear that those of us who have called for calm and reflection seem to represent a minority, at least within the larger conversation.
 
Perhaps we should not be surprised; it is always easier to throw a bomb or issue a “fatwa” against one’s political adversaries than it is to remain calm and keep one’s head when others are losing theirs.  Yet, when bullets have flown, a United States District Judge is dead and a Congresswoman is fighting for her life, du calme, du calme, et encore du calme is often the wisest, if not necessarily the most emotionally satisfying, course of action.

Unfortunately, the tone of much of the conversation seems to have become almost as unhinged as the mind of the shooter who authored Saturday’s dreadful events.  One cannot help but recall how nearly a century ago, on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, another unbalanced young man, a 19-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo.  The assassination of the Archduke and his wife was, of course, that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” that precipitated the Great War.

Today, the anathemas which both sides have been flinging at one another since Saturday have started to bear an ominous resemblance to the rhetoric directed by Vienna at Serbia in the days and weeks following the events in Sarajevo.  As both sides scramble to try to claim some kind of moral high ground and to put the other in the wrong, both sides also have engaged in what is, given the circumstances, an unseemly effort to wrap themselves in a gaudy mantle of self-defined victimhood.

To do so, commentators, bloggers, message-board posters, and trolls of every stripe, have availed themselves of often conflicting claims, reports, and allegations concerning the shooter, his views, his associations, and his mental state.

The arguments of both sides are flawed in direct proportion both to their stridency and to the extent to which they have been enhanced by persons who have publicly staked out controversial or highly partisan positions.  As much as it may be unhelpful for Keith Olbermann to overstate a liberal position on Saturday’s events, it is equally unhelpful for Sarah Palin to do so from a conservative perspective.

Nonetheless, there is something disturbing about the argument/narrative which is emerging in some quarters that because the shooter --at least as far as we currently know-- seems to have operated alone, that we need not take a moment to ask ourselves whether, in some way, shape, or form, the overheated and angry tone of our recent political discourse may not, in fact, have helped push the shooter over the line that separates disturbing behavior from homicidal violence.

For, in truth, the tone of our dialogue has become angry and embittered.  We seem not only to have forgotten the affirmative formulation of the Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you,” but also the negative (and perhaps easier to follow) formulations of Hillel (“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”) and Confucius (“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”)

Yet there is a reason why we should refrain from embarking on the kind of extended flame war that seems to be emerging from Saturday’s events.  The greatest challenge for a democratic society is perhaps the one expressed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, that of being human alongside others -- particularly others with whom we may entertain the most serious and comprehensive differences of opinion.  The greatest danger that faces any democracy, but particularly one as diverse as ours, is that, in our own certitude that we are right and those with differing views are wrong, we come to regard one another as members of warring and irreconcilable political tribes, and not as Americans, linked by a common stakeholdership in a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal.

For when any society begins to Balkanize itself along tribal lines, whether those lines be ethnic, religious, racial, political, it sooner or later finds itself on a short route to chaos.  There is a kind of infantile paralysis that takes hold when the Truly Believing adherent of any particular ideology falls into the absolutist trap of believing that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, or that anyone whose views are not absolutely accordant with one’s own is not merely wrong, but in fact an enemy to be eliminated by any means necessary.

What makes matters worse is when such True Believers seek to arrogate to themselves a concurrent status of both Holders of the Moral High Ground and victims of The Other Side.  Such resentful and self-indulgent victimhood, when indulged in a regular basis, is poison to the body politic, especially when, as seems to be the case here, the facts are still altogether unclear.

At the beginning of this week, I asked what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  The answer four days later is that we still don’t know much more about the shooter than we did on Sunday.  In terms of what we think, there has been an awful lot of self-indulgent, even narcissistic, overthinking on both sides of the aisle, much of it intended to buttress pre-existing confirmation biases.  Finally, there is no certainty at this point as to what we can prove.  There will be an investigation, followed --in all likelihood-- by a trial, or at the very least, by some kind of evidentiary hearing with respect to the shooter’s mental state.

In the meantime, instead of allowing ourselves to elevate Saturday’s events to the status of that damned foolish thing in the Balkans, perhaps we should all, as Fox News’s Roger Ailes --of all people-- has suggested, tone it down.  At a time when six are dead and 14 wounded, a decent respect for them ought to counsel us towards sober and thoughtful reflection about the kind of country we want to be and how we want to interact with our neighbors, as well as militating against continuing an unseemly flame war over the etiology of Saturday’s horrifying and tragic events.
 
At all events, Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he practices law and recently completed two terms on the city council.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice.