Lots of Space, but Nothing to Say

In an entry (which is worth reading on its own merits) about the media's and others' disregard of history, Marc Comtois quotes a perspicacious observation by Peggy Noonan:

It occurs to me that all young people who graduate from elite American universities now want to go into communications. It's a whole generation that wants to communicate. ...

I see no sign they are going to start thinking anything truly unusual for their time and generation--that religious conversion can be a wholly beneficial and life changing event, for instance, or that breaking with liberal orthodoxy might be the beginning of wisdom.

It must leave them finding it a challenge to speak of their beliefs in an interesting way. They often seem to fall back on attitude--wit, irony, poking fun at the thick-witted--in place of sustained thought, or meaning. And still they want to communicate for a living. I think of this problem as "big mike, no message." They are trained in the finest points of communication, but when they turn on the microphone, they have nothing serious to say.

Marc mentions Bill Maher as typical and suggests:

The problem for these new graduates is that, while they are aware that spouting tired clichés won't set them apart and get them noticed, they don't have the means, the intellectual or critical training, to question the "liberal orthodoxy" they were taught in academia. All of their training has been one-sided. Conservativism and tradition have been chastised, belittled and demonized. How could any thinking individual even consider them?

Both Marc and Noonan refer to the necessity of "Deeply Held Beliefs" for powerful communication, but I think a lack of it is more extensively relevant than either implies — as a cause as well as a difficulty. What the big-mike-no-message type wants, as evidenced in practice, is not so much to communicate as to declare — to proselytize. That urge, paradoxically, results from a lack of belief.

There's a self-defeating neurosis that I've noticed in myself and others whereby one mimics a behavior that follows from an understanding or quality that one lacks. Since the quality does not derive from the behavior, the person begins to feel as if everybody is similarly faking it and forecloses the possibility that the content exists apart from, let alone prior to, the medium.

They speak because they wish to hear, but in speaking so persistently, they can hear only themselves.

Posted by Justin Katz at June 5, 2004 1:08 AM
Culture