About a year ago, after Gabriel Giffords was shot, people started talking about the need to restore civility to the national debate. I'm not going to comment on whether or not inflammatory rhetoric influenced the shooter - that's a question better left to mental health professionals than to the news commentators and political attack dogs who all chimed in with their self-serving analyses - but I am going to make a point. Before civility becomes a sacred cow in our canon of political correctness, let's remember one thing:
Inflammatory rhetoric is not all necessarily bad.
Look at a sincere polemicist like the late Christopher Hitchens. He had a penchant for saying inflammatory things that could make even people who agreed with him shift in their seats. But no less dazzling than his verbal pyrotechnics was his command of logic and facts whenever he debated. He used polemics to raise passions and to draw attention to issues, but not to divert people from debating the core of the real issue at hand. He took nasty comments directed at him in stride, sometimes even with sportsman like admiration, knowing that he invited much of the ire he received, and he never feigned indignation about it.
In other words, he inflamed passions in order to make people think.
Demagogues, on the other hand, use inflammatory rhetoric in order to make people stop thinking. They stoke people's emotions in order to heighten our appetite for simple, catch-all solutions, and then they exploit our fears and anxieties to force us to uncritically accept their dogma, conspiracy theory, or whatever bullshit they happen to be peddling. And then they'll use faux calls for decorum and civility to avoid answering important questions.
I'm not going to say more about demagogues here, because I'll be saying enough about them other places in this blog. I'll just say that if you don't want to invite a polemicist to your dinner party, fine, but don't write someone's opinion off simply because of their inflammatory rhetoric, and don't automatically give someone credibility just because they're polite. Cut through it and look for the substance and the facts.
I'll close with a video of Penn Jillette telling us about the wonderful ways a thinker like Christopher Hitchens can stimulate our minds.
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