Finis de Respublica

By Michael Gryboski

Having not even reached its 100th birthday, the United States of America was in the midst of tearing itself apart. Already people were being killed, States were declaring their separation from the more perfect union, and regiments were being formed. As the tension was about to break into a full scale war that would lead to more American fatalities than any American war since, President Abraham Lincoln made a speech in the Hall of Representatives. It was in this oration that President Lincoln declared a warning: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Division is the ultimate danger of dissent. In a rights-based republic, the freedoms so necessary to unite a population can also lead to fierce separatism that can eventually lead to destructive results. 150 years ago, two sides created two worldviews that became so polarized that the end result was war. There is an increasing problem developing in this modern time, which shall lead to increasing division which can lead to the termination of our grand American Experiment. The United States of America shall be terminated through the manifestation of unhealed division unless the right and left wings change their ways.

Events went along quite naturally at first. There would be dissent in the republic, opposing sides would gather, debate would ensue, and then there would be some resolution with at most a very small fragment remaining in resistance. This was the matter of normal debate, with legislation and civic participation ending many a dispute before they could erupt into division. This is why virtually everything disagreed upon in the first couple decades of United States history are debated no more. Reasons for this series of solutions abound, but the greatest reason of all was that no matter the extent to which political groups may have disagreed, they acknowledged the same core values and intellectual givens.

In the modern day as with the past controversial problems are discussed and debated with distinct sides having two or more different approaches. Yet unlike before there is a difference. With many of the debates going on today there is no common ground or commonly accepted intellectual givens. Polarization has so captivated the populous that neither side of many a debate can agree on failure or success. Partisans are now more than ever using their own intellectual givens to amass evidence and structure arguments. When they collide with their opponents in intellectual battle, they neither gain nor lose ground since no ground is mutually contested. Either it turns out both sides unknowingly agree on a matter or have so demonized their opposition that they have a warped view on their opponents’ intentions.

As aforementioned, this is the fruit of a laborious process that shall lead to our doom. It goes as follows: first, two sides clash over a controversial topic but no immediate or resounding victory is accomplished by either. Second, both sides either completely or near-completely flee into isolation. From this isolation comes the third step, in which the side in question develops an ever-growing and eventually overwhelming empire of information and (more commonly) misinformation. Finally, to solidify this empire the side in question turns to the Internet to further their evangelism and to continue to expand their influence.

Some issues just tend to garner excessive emotion and controversy. For some, matters of eternity and their application to the ephemeral world is a source of debate that would be on a fiercer level. For others, it could be personal political convictions and mantras, defense of status quo, or a desire to change a perceived wrong. Whatever the reason, there are issues that can be so divisive, so emotionally draining, that eventually the polarization produces two bitterly opposed camps. What oft occurs is a major battle, usually with heavy media coverage, taking place between the two camps. After the dust settles and the firing has stopped the world looks over a hushed battleground and no confirmed victor.

Neither side has eliminated the other. Many other results could have been the reason. Maybe neither side could get the edge over the other for lack of evidence, therefore leading both battered camps away from the fight. It may be a situation in which one side might have been successful enough to win the day and take the field, but after that was unable to finish the job. Or it could be the side that held victory by the end of the event had barely triumphed and was given such a beating that further advance would have been impossible.

With the two sides in this deadlock, those that remain committed to one camp or another do the only thing they can: they retreat. Too beaten to hold the field or having been driven from it, they run away from the objective debate and as a result withdraw from the public discourse. They leave much of their equipment behind, taking none of their objectivity or antithesis with them. With none of the conventional forces sent with them in exile, they create their own separatist state, an entity devoid of the things that made the mainstream the effective area of discourse. Instead they create their own discourse, mainstream, and in effect create their own republic, complete with constitution and government.

This new regime largely involves the written word as its marble. Entities driven from the mainstream create their own magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and journals. They build and maintain schools, determine their own curriculum, make their own television shows and documentaries, and most notably publish their own books. With each new journal founded, with each new article written, they add on to what was in place as their axioms. This means, of course, that anything problematic with the axioms will never be exposed. Viewpoints on life, liberty, and so on never get challenged, and with every new printed work get solidified.

It is growing mustard seed of a nightmare: slanders, misquotes, errors, and misconceptions get published and cited over and over and over again. The same arguments and theses that could not stand inquiry in the public square have now become unchallenged dogma masquerading as fact. A typical lie or fabrication can be announced in a paper, quoted by another paper, cited in an article, paraphrased by another article, and then published in a book or encyclopedia-like work, footnoted in essays and found in research assignments in academics. Before anyone can truly grasp it, a typical lie or fabrication can end up being “verified” by so many sources that who would dare challenge its authenticity?

This growth of literary empires built on falsehood can prevail any tempest of intellect, as more partisans go into neutral universities, attain academic credentials, and then proceed to write large bodies of work that nevertheless contain their original dubious preconceptions. This adds a problem to these ever expanding empires of partisanship: an increasing number of lettered proponents who can use (if not abuse) résumés respectable for their cause. As a result, this also devalues the degrees and titles for those who know that what is being written is not true, further devaluing whatever schools of thought were involved. Now any by-the-numbers partisan can simply quote biased academics and “peer-reviewed” journals to make an argument, using not only their evidence and assessment of evidence but their claims about the evidence, nature, and fundamentals of the other side.

As if this situation was not intellectually dire by itself, technology lent a helping hand to the disputing camps: the World Wide Web. Thanks to the new untamed dimension of the Internet, groups who have had trouble presenting their partisan views in the world of critical review can now post online and receive little if any opposition. Given the free market of the Internet now a side that is extremist needs only to learn how to post on a website. Within this open territory devoid of accountability, the bloggosphere has arisen as a key means of unchallenged punditry. Short for web log, a Blog is the most primitive form of website, requiring virtually no knowledge on how to operate an html. Once considered to be an effective independent fact-checking entity, Blogs have been found to be the most opinionated and politically biased online sources sans competition. As a whole they do nothing but perform the activity of being an echo chamber for whatever partisan group so fits them.

Now not only can dubious sources be found in elusive journals that have small circulation but now they can be located online in a matter a clicks. Whole libraries of misinformation and partisan babble are available in the Age of Information thanks to Internet business transactions. In this dimension, book, article, and essay publication for any well funded ideologically-driven entity can pump out volumes and volumes of rants to be distributed mass-production style, misleading countless people and enforcing false dogmas while also making it even harder for opposing sides to reconcile or reach any resolution. The more frustrating the attempt at civilized debate becomes, the more willing opposing sides will be to isolate and groupthink. The more this takes place, the harder it will be to find anything valuable about the other side, even intentions. The more hatred allotted, the more dehumanization shall be found. With that, all the factors necessary for violence are present.

So the question is found: is there any way to stop this conclusion from coming to pass? It is the responsibility of partisan entities to adopt a standard of ethics in gathering, organizing, and assessing evidence. There should be a willingness to have antithesis, to critically examine one’s own evidence and views, and to seriously consider claims put against the ideological camp in question. In addition to this groups involved in partisan campaigns should use sources from without their literary empires, use citations and quotations in context, and whenever possible the works of their foes. Constant usage of sources from without their empires will reduce groupthink and hopefully begin the healing process. Above all resolution has to be eventually found so that the divisions can be temporary.

In President Abraham Lincoln’s time, solutions to the fierce divisions in the republic ended up being civil war. The bloody struggle would end up taking more American lives than any other American-involved war fore or since. This is going to happen again if the sides in the controversial debates found in this American Republic refuse to reconcile and refuse to stray from their primrose paths. No benefit exists for us if our pundits and politicians do nothing but shout at each other using their own little literary camps from their own little worlds. We need dissent but we also need unity. This cannot be found in the current system of partisanship, which at its present rate of decline shall begat the end of the Republic.