Title : Ezra Klein learned from the Quakers that you need to shut up.
link : Ezra Klein learned from the Quakers that you need to shut up.
Ezra Klein learned from the Quakers that you need to shut up.
I'm reading "The Great Delusion Behind Twitter" (NYT).
Midway into that diatribe against Twitter, Klein takes what he calls "a weird turn" and starts talking about the Quakers:
In a typical Quaker meeting... community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” If they must decide an issue collectively, “they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.” There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”...
Then he gets back to the diatribe against Twitter.
Democracy is not and will not be one long Quaker meeting. But there is wisdom here worth mulling. We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. And yet “active and fretful” is about as precise a description as I can imagine of the Twitter mind. And having put us in an active, fretful mental state, Twitter then encourages us to fire off declarative statements on the most divisive possible issues, always with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus viral power. It’s insane.
I think it's funny that this is the only story about Twitter on the front page of the NYT. It exudes a desire for Twitter to just disappear. It's hurting us, don't you know? Well, it's surely hurting elite media, which seem to long for the days when they could speak and the people would listen. But that's wasn't like a Quaker meeting, where everyone observes silence and is committed to the good of the group, even if those in elite media — such as Mr. Klein — dearly believe that they are "standing up to speak" because they are "led to do so" — led by their elite status? — and that they only speak because they have carefully determined that what the say "will be of value to others."
I am sympathetic to the idea that people need to calm down and think more deeply, but there will always be aggressive, vocal people who barge forward and dominate the debate. They're never going to be quiet. You're only going to inhibit the people who are already restrained. And more and more people these days are afraid to say anything at all. It's a complicated problem.
Thus articles Ezra Klein learned from the Quakers that you need to shut up.
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