Yes, This Is Tone Policing

The logic goes something like this: critiquing the tone of someone’s argument is a tool of oppression.

Accusations of “Tone Policing” are designed to limit the scope of a political debate to the content of one’s rhetoric, not its mode of delivery.

Which is really great on paper until you attempt to have a reasonable argument with someone whose veins are roping to the point of rupture because they cannot control their emotions.

When it comes to political debate, we’ve reached a point where potent communications technologies have enabled a curious (and dubious) fascination with engaging every single soul with a computer in debates they are not qualified to have.

The result is a dead-end back alley of aborted opinions, unacknowledged bias, and haughty histrionics delivered in a ringing cacophony of self-entitlement masquerading as democratic discourse.

Wrong. You’re all wrong.

Just because you feel strongly about an issue does not mean your opinion suddenly has more weight.

In fact, quite the opposite. Our political process, judicial system, court of public opinion, and society at large privilege rationality. Why? Because we like to hope that our affairs (and, incidentally, the affairs of the other 6.5 billion people on this earth) will be administered by level heads that can keep their cool.

Do you want a doctor to perform surgery on you while they’re pissed off about losing a bet? Do you want your house built by a sobbing carpenter who can't get over a loved one’s death? Do you want your taxes filed by an accountant having a manic episode?

No. Because their emotions prevent them from handling the task at hand with a clear eye.

In this experiment on self-government known as American democracy, every citizen supposedly gets an equal voice. Which is problematic given that some of you have become emotionalized to the point where you have lost all touch with reality. Everywhere I turn, some perceived slight or injustice is being conflated with an absolute failure in the world as we know it. End result: we give our emotional selves permission to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater and dig our collective hole even deeper.

There’s plenty to be upset about. “Prosperity” seems like the exclusive purview of a chosen few while the rest of us are left to bicker amongst ourselves over scraps. There’s terrorism and institutional racism and no real sign that things will get better.

But the fact that you get to bitch and moan about things like Capitalism and the Military Industrial Complex while typing on a capitalist derived computer connected to other similar machines by a DoD-generated internet accessible by people of all ethnic, religious, and class categories suggests to me that we allow dismay an undue influence in skewing our rational perceptions.

Incidentally, I’ll wager that the likely cause of this distortion is the privilege of emotion. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted that “you become what you behold,” which wasn’t far off from the condition of western democracy today where millions of individuals feel they have carte blanche to duplicate the hyper-dramatized narratives presented in media via their own expressions of self.

There was a day and age where emotion (pathos) was used as rhetoric garnish alongside the meat and potatoes of ethics (ethos) and logic (logos). That script has been flipped. Nowadays, our minds dine on a thought pyramid built on the quicksand of convenient emotional response supporting a flimsy foundation of shoddy logic that may or may not be roofed with ethics.

This paradigm is untenable. It’s a slovenly flirtation with catastrophe, especially in a world predicated on the harmonious operation of oh-so-many moving parts.

We need a new stoicism. We desperately need sincere and emotionally sensitive voices in the public sphere that communicate their understanding of the great collective social unconscious with a cool and calculated rationality.

Think what you may of the man, Barack Obama is the textbook example. He took heaps of abuse and rarely showed emotion. That’s called maturity.

Unfortunately, the world is plagued by impetuous children who have confused their discontent with a viable mandate to institute hasty change. The phenomenon is wide ranging. You see it in the Tea Party and elements of the hysterical left. You see it in our infantile president.

Shouting and screaming is fun. It’s a necessary outlet for the frustrations of this increasingly hamstrung life. But if you’ve mistaken shoot-from-the-hip emotionalism for healthy discourse, just know that you are ultimately contributing to the thoughtless, uncivil, broad strokes stereotyping that fuels the fire that rages through our collective dignity.

Tune in next week as we discuss “ableist” language: why it’s uncouth in polite conversation but useful to ensure a mentally unstable person doesn’t seize control of the United States government.