There Be Scarecrows Among Us

When I was a kid, a road we drove on often to get to town passed by a field with a mechanical scarecrow. It was holding a broom that wagged slowly back and forth, back and forth. I loved seeing it, waited for it, and thought about how the crows would be reacting to it. Until I saw a crow sitting on the scarecrow’s hat one day.

I see mechanical scarecrows all the time anymore. One of the biggest reasons I’ve emigrated from Facebook to mostly my own company. Somebody earnestly posts a link or a link-plus-observation on a timely topic, and the echo chamber tinkles intermittently with Likes and Attaboy comments (amiable scarecrows, I guess), and then there are the naysayer lefties. The would-be SCAREcrows who show up as if on cue to wave their brooms back and forth, back and forth.

There are multiple broom designs, but each scarecrow has basically just one broom. A scornfully dismissive attack on the source being linked. A tu quoque non-rebuttal in which whatever lefty nonsense is being highlighted pales in comparison to some particular rumor of right wing wrongdoing. A scathing attack on the intelligence or morality of the linker and anyone anywhere who might agree with him. A supposed Gotcha Fact, usually irrelevant, that is presented as sufficient to end all disagreement with the scarecrow waving this broom in the field of discussion.

Back and forth. That’s what seems to follow on both sides. Seemingly reasonable persons repeatedly attempt to employ the tools of reason in response to the scarecrows. Who come back immediately with another wave of the exact same broom. Wave, wince, repeat. And the reasonable people being held hostage In this manner rarely seem to lose patience with it all. They even have scarecrow familiars, who return week after week to wave the same broom at every topic that comes along.

What is going on here? Presumably conscious people are attempting to have a productive dialogue with people who are clearly not conscious at all. They are mere mechanical gimcracks. Fortunately, they are endowed with a limit switch that can be tripped. If you attack them fiercely and witheringly enough, the circuit will break with a sharp F-Word sound and they will be comfortably ignorable afterwards. But if you try to explain to the presumably conscious people that they should stop being sweetly reasonable with inert scarecrows, they get offended. They will protest that some of the scarecrows are dear personal friends.

Which is the point at which I begin suspecting that both sides of such discussions are essentially unconscious. Either the topics one posts about matter or they do not. If they do not, then eat pie with your dear personal friends and stay off the Internet. If they do matter, please stick the self-righteous lectures about civility and tolerance and decency where the sun don’t shine. You can quote Gandhi all day long, but when push came to shove, Gandhi was a killer too. A fact somebody could look up before wasting more time with dear personal friends waving broomsticks with empty eyes in their rotting pumpkin heads.

One sad closing fact. In more than four years at Facebook, I have almost NEVER witnessed or been party to a real discussion. By which I mean an exchange of differing viewpoints — accompanied by facts, ad-rem argumentation, and meaningful attempts to persuade — that accomplishes anything at all. Usually, the mentioned accompaniments are missing in action, and the conclusion of the exchange is simply a drifting away into irrelevancies and repetitions, until one and all are bored to sleep. To sum all this up, NO DISCUSSIONS ARE OCCURRING AT FACEBOOK. Just the flapping of mechanical scarecrows on all sides.

Why I’m here. And why they’re there. So be it.