Content area
Full Text
James Hoggan (with Grania Litwin) I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up. Gabriola Island (British Columbia), Canada: New Society Publishers.
Reviewed by Howard A. Doughty
One of the many annoyances of living in the beginning of the twenty-first century is the frequency with which we are exposed to superlatives. Barack Obama is the greatest orator in American history! Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt presidential candidate in American history! Donald Trump is the greatest/worst [fill in the blank] in American history! Nor are Americans the only ones whose profound ignorance of history - American or any other - contributes to the willingness to indulge in sloganeering which turns unpleasant historical events into unprecedented tragedies and modest achievements into world historical triumphs.
Our overexposure to hyperbole makes it difficult to distinguish the merely good from the magnificent or the merely bad from the catastrophic. So it is that we are regularly exposed to claims that human relations from global politics to casual social contacts are fraught with ill-will, incivility and intolerance of opinions and interests other than our own.
There are a few profoundly evil people in the world, but if you think you're surrounded by them, you probably need to change your own psyche. - Roger Conner
As though to compensate for our chronic bad manners and, of course, the genuinely loathsome rhetoric that demonizes this or that ethnicity, religion or political belief, we are beginning to see efforts made in our schools, workplaces and, of course, the pervasive and invasive social media to bring us back to attitudes a little closer to reason, reciprocity and mutual respect. It's about time.
We seem to have become almost immune to or, worse, excited by demagoguery that justifies everything from tribal-based terrorism to horrifying acts of recrimination and retribution against people who demonstrably intend to do us harm. And that's not even raising the fearmongering, dissembling and attempts at character assassination that have become common in election campaigns in even the most stable Western liberal democracies!
Indeed, so distorted are our coffee shop and water cooler conversations (never mind the scripted boorishness of "talk radio) by impassioned and polarized opinions that, in response, I expect any...