I start this post by admitting that I am about to critique a practice that I’ve been guilty of before. (And of which I have recently been accused.) After absorbing far too much election coverage for the past ten days, I feel that any argument of the type “No one is talking about X” is necessarily wrong, and any argument of the type “Too many people are talking about X/not enough people are talking about X” is rhetorical bloat that depends on perceptions crafted almost entirely be ideology.
“No one is talking about X” is never true in a world that has created a massive, perpetually-churning takes machine. It’s certainly not true in a world with hundreds of millions of people on social media. (As I’ve complained in the past, “no one is arguing X” usually means “X is not an argument that it’s rhetorically convenient for me to defend right now.”) Someone somewhere is talking about X, I assure you. Meanwhile the perception of the relative prominence of given arguments seem to me to be 100% dependent on ideology and on what’s argumentatively useful for the person complaining. It’s not that I think people are lying. It’s that I think we are psychologically inclined to perceive arguments we like as insufficiently prominent and arguments we don’t as impossible to get away from. And given the sheer mass of media today, the reality of content bubbles and reading filters, and the inherent difficulty of keeping an accurate running tally of what’s getting written about, how often, and by whom, what you end up with is the constant repetition of the lie “no one is talking about this.”
The rhetorical advantage is obvious: by highlighting the supposedly unfair levels of attention given to different arguments or topics, you shift the burden of your argument from actually making whatever substantive case you want to make to simply demonstrating that there is an imbalance, which you then go about doing through cherry picking and selective reading of what’s being discussed. You also give yourself – and, crucially, your readers – the laurel of seeing through the veil. Everyone else is talking about the wrong things, but me and my savvy readers, we’re focused on what really matters.
Perhaps a better approach would be just to discuss what is argued to be a good/bad or important/impermissible claim, and leave relative attention out of if. For example, take the argument that it’s inherently racist to discuss how best to help/seek the votes of the white working class, or claims that such discussions are an essential part of figuring out where to go next. There you might find an actual solid foundation to have a useful argument. (Not that I’d hold my breath.)
I write this because I have seen at least a dozen pieces shared by my (very heavily left and liberal-leaning) Facebook friends that claims that no one is pointing out that the working class is full of people of color, and that too many are talking about the white working class and not enough people are talking about people of color…. But enough people are writing just pieces that use this frame that I can say for sure that the claim “no one is writing about this” is demonstrably wrong. Plenty of people are writing about it; you just want that to be the consensus. Which, fair enough, but that’s just saying that you have an opinion on a matter of controversy.
I am going to try, and no doubt fail, to not make these claims in the future.
Another version of the problem you’re addressing here is arguing against “the narrative”. Arguments framed as a refutations of “the narrative” (or even the weaker “a narrative”) rather than engaging with specific claims made by specific people often end up shooting holes in a story that nobody is actually telling. It’s not quite the same thing as the “straw man” argument, where an opposing case is deliberately characterized in a weak way so as to be easily pwned. I think people argue against “the narrative” out of a sincere but often mistaken belief that there’s consensus on something that’s actually contested.
The question of whether the working class contains people of color is not a matter of controversy, it’s a matter of fact. I don’t have access to your left-leaning Facebook feed, but I would imagine a lot of the posts are using “no one is saying (the working class has people of color)” to mean “too many people are ignoring the part of the working class that isn’t white”. That’s not a complaint about the distribution of opinions, but a complaint that those who hold certain views are making incomplete arguments that don’t account for all working class people.
As you say: you are not subject to my Facebook feed.
Your obvious intent in bringing this from Facebook to your blog audience is to draw an analogy between what you’re seeing in your Facebook feed and what’s out there in the larger leftosphere — otherwise there’s no reason to remind us that your feed leans left, or to tell us all about it.
Says you!
“No, you’re the puppet.”
The white working class behaves in electorally unique ways due to the contradictions of their “hegemonic” identity and material concerns. A critique of analyzing their behavior as such needs to make an argument of substance, and cannot be empty virtue-signalling. “Your viewpoint is incomplete” is usually misapplied, as no arguments are comprehensive evaluations of all reality, and so you should engage with the argument itself, and mention what is left out only when doing so is material to that response
In a piece with which I almost entirely disagree, http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/, a fairly convincing argument is made that too many people are talking about the KKK.
yeah, but he doesn’t imply it’s wrong because too many people are talking about it. he demonstrates thoroughly why he believes it’s wrong to talk about it in the first place.
Similarly pointless (in some cases, even toxic) critical remark to be eschewed: “So-and-so’s work is overrated/underrated.”
Yeah, nobody is talking about the fact that all of these “nobody is talking about X” are a bunch of crap.
Nobody’s talking about how nobody’s talking about how nobody’s talking about X. This may be trivial, but I’m fairly certain it’s true!
“nobody is talking about X” can join the litany of lazy rhetorical tics that appear in so many “hip” articles now adays. “..and thats not OK” “X is really important, heres why” etc etc.
The most egregious is when there’s a flood of articles about how no one is talking about something, which happens from time to time…