No Argument

Only occasionally does a quote make me drop a book.

“A character is made by the kind of thoughts a man thinks when alone, and a civilization is made by the kind of thoughts a man speaks to his neighbor.”

The man who wrote it – Fulton Sheen – was an early user of mass media. First radio and then TV. His manner of speech, dramatic pauses, use of a chalkboard, and educated tone would seem a bit foreign to the quick cuts and highly stylized sets of today. That and the fact that he was a Catholic bishop.

But his TV series ran in various forms from 1952 – 1968. There is nothing comparable to it today because we have entered the post-mainstream TV era, among other things.

But back to the quote. Something kept drawing me to it. So to better understand I went to its source in the book Old Errors and New Labels and thought about the meaning of the quote’s individual terms.

• • A character (“the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual”): This is a term we don’t hear as much today.
  • Is Made: When we hear that character is to be made (or “character building”), we often think of dealing with hardship. The idea that a character is something to be made out of the awareness and practice of one’s thoughts is different.
  • The kind of thoughts: If thoughts over time can form a character, then we should be recognize what thoughts we have, where they come from, and whether they serve us well.
  • When alone: How often are we truly alone today? How often are we instead sitting by ourselves physically but tethered to the scenes, news, and ideas of somewhere distant? As a result, how often do those things become our thoughts, replacing whatever we would have thought if truly alone?
  • A civilization (“the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area”): Do we believe that we are in a common civilization with our neighbor? Is our civilization physically defined as people we live near or virtually defined as people who are distant? Can we have a civilization if we think inaccurate thoughts about each other and therefore, seemingly logically, come to hate each other?
  • Thoughts a man speaks: Not everything we think is worthy of being spoken and not everything we think is appropriate to be spoken. There is choice in turning thoughts into speech.
  • Neighbor (“a person living nearby,” alternately “any person in need of one’s help”): Is your neighbor of the same opinions as you? Should it matter? Would you want to move if they had thoughts you don’t like? Do you even have a relationship with your neighbor? Speaking your thoughts with your neighbor, are you at ease?
  • Character vs neighbor framing: Much of my writing here has been about scale effects and emergence. How more is not just the sum of all the individual smaller parts. Just so, civilization is not the sum of all the individual characters. Civilization is what emerges from the exchange between characters.

For context, earlier in the same book, we have this quote:

“The hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasms without the pain of labor.”

Based on this explanation, most of what I would have called arguing is actually just prejudice and sentiment. My habit of avoiding breaking news and going to the primary source being something that I’ve tried to maintain, but only for topics of interest. It’s less effort to have prejudice and sentiment instead.

This simple quote and these simple thoughts are part of a larger question.

Here’s the paradoxical first sentence of Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Bernays explains this manipulation as a positive and necessary force in society. “[S]ociety consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.”

But something Bernays didn’t foresee was the balkanization of society by and through individualized messaging.

As I wrote about years ago, this balkanization was enabled by new technology and business models:

“Today, news and the common social media distribution platforms design for addiction. They rely on their users frequently checking to generate advertising impressions and ad click-throughs.”

Something Bernays did not foresee was the extent to which propaganda efforts could be developed and how much new ground there would be to develop once society was balkanized through new business models.

Today we have many ways to avoid argument in favor of prejudice and sentiment. My short list is:

Distortion via editing: The Clip
Distraction by creating new internal meaning: Great American Safety Valve
Defining a replacement: Decreeing the Deity
Distribution of the replacement: Engineering the Current Thing

If you do have an argument and not simply prejudice and resentment, you’ve managed to avoid these four.