Pop 89: Contortionists of attention

By Madonna Hamel

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard came from the poet Billy Collins: “Dare to be clear.”

Pope Leo, in his first “state of the world address” warns against the prevailing “contortions of semantic ambiguity”. He refers to the way some people choose to employ language not to get clear, connect, have a dialogue , but whose choose, instead to turn it into “a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents.”

“Offensiveness is the president’s communication style, like he’s some kind of circus performer,” I complain to Robert Harris, my journalism mentor.  “And it always has been”, he replies. “From the beginning the goal was to ‘float the zone’- to use the football term.“You mean, just keep spewing outrageous bs until you get a click or a video clip?” I say “Exactly. It’s how the attention economy works.”

The other end of the attention economy circus is the media. And they seem to contort themselves to keep the ringmaster’s show going.They are just doing their job, you may say. But their job is to report on the state of the world, defend the truth as it pertains to the facts - not set up a tent for the circus.

America has, living in the White House, a clever contortionist troupe who disrespects citizenship, not to mention the English language, by talking trash, engendering fear and encouraging contempt.

Take the recent murder of woman who was videotaped by the man who shot her at point blank range three times then called her an “f’n bitch.” The fact that he didn’t edit himself suggests that he felt justified killing her and cursing her.

What movie/tv series does that agent think he’s starring in? I’d certainly want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. That wouldn’t make me a domestic terrorist, but a citizen trying to leave a bunch of gun-totting bullies as fast as possible.

Once my boyfriend and I were driving on our way back to Michigan, on our way back from a gig in Philly, when a cop pulled us over. My beau leaned over and said to me: “Watch, it’s called ‘driving while black. I’m just glad you’re here or it could be worse.” There’s a reason black men run when cops show up out of nowhere. And it’s not because we are guilty of something.

He also taught me not to talk back. Bullies cannot tolerate the slightest threat to their bully-hood. Any response to their shoving, hollering and threats is seen as questioning their power and position. So don’t call them “dude” or “big boy”.

I haven’t seen or heard a shred of sorrow over this woman’s death from the parties responsible. Bullies have zero empathy for anyone other than themselves. In fact, the very words “tolerance” and “empathy” are vilified these days. “Tolerance” used to mean being able to live with one’s neighbour, despite differences. But now a tolerant person is considered a “wimp” or a “pawn”.

And “empathy”, to be able to find a common humanity in recalling one’s own sorrows, that ability to be with others in their pain, will get you “labelled a bleeding heart” by one group and “having bad boundaries” by another. “Don’t have empathy, have compassion, we are told. That way, we can care for others without sharing their emotional pain.” But empathy isn’t an ideological choice or stance, and neither is compassion. It happens in an instant. And while we dicker over how our “caring” should look, the Titanic is sinking, the country is burning, the victim is bleeding to death.

And there are many victims here. Among them: due attention. The “gotcha” attention economy needs to be replaced by a “tending” vocabulary. Can we just all calm down and pay attention to what actually needs tending?

Elon Musk considers empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.” Empathy is a buzz-kill for men like him; it can really get in the way of cutting aid to hungry children, exploiting land and labour, arresting people for being hispanic, making oneself a trillionaire.

Contrast his take on empathy with Hannah Arendt’s. Arendt is the woman who warned us that when we start rationalizing acts of aggression and harm in the name of a smoothly running bureaucracy we adapt to evil as just another banal part of life.

Arendt was covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a perpetrator of the Holocaust, when she coined the term “the banality of evil”. The term fits the violent behaviour of agents hiding behind masks, flak vests and guns, just doing their job.

Arendt warned that “the death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” She begged us to pay attention.

Paying attention is one of the oldest spiritual practices in the world. It helps us face our own hurts and fears and connection to Reality so that we can return to the larger world clear-headed and open-hearted. Eastern traditions gave us meditation, while the Western Christian tradition gave us contemplative prayer. Both require turning attention inward instead of playing to or blaming the world.

Thaddeus Kozinski in his essay on Frankl’s “Man Search for Meaning” reminds us of the necessity of the whole picture: “Without scope, without tradition life becomes meaninglessness. Man either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism)….”

We need to resist a world wherein we each fashion a false reality to suit us. We need to disentangle contorted semantics, because, as Pope Leo says, “it’s the only way authentic dialogue can occur.”

However, before that, we will need to WANT to have real dialogue. We will need the desire to get clear about the ways we’ve made cruel language banal. Then maybe the crazy attention-grabbing circus of language contortionists will fold up their tent and leave town.