Posted on Tue, Jul. 08, 2008

Discrimination" is a powerful word that has fallen into ill repute because not enough people, well, discriminate among its many useful applications.

There's invidious discrimination in which one makes a distinction among people based on the group or category to which they belong rather than on merit. That's not a good thing, and there's too much of it around in today's society.

But there's also the root meaning having to do with the ability to see distinctions, to discern, as between truth and falsity, importance and triviality. That is a good thing, and there's not nearly enough of it around.

Words are the imperfect skin in which ideas are wrapped; they aren't the ideas themselves. But in the superheated media echo chamber -- a noxious mixture of mainstream media, fringe media, Web sites, blogs and Internet search engines -- that distinction is lost. Thus, to use one recent example, former Gen. Wesley Clark's truthful if politically clumsy declaration that John McCain getting shot down in Vietnam doesn't alone qualify him to be president becomes a worldwide, weeklong pseudo-event.

The full context in which Clark spoke reveals clearly what he meant, but the full context of an event is never sucked into the maw of the echo chamber, which has zero capacity for nuance.

That sad reality means that citizens are obliged to do the discriminating. Reverberating in the media echo chamber are words about things that did not happen at all, things that happened but can be properly understood only in full context, and actual happenings that deserve our attention.

Sorting them is the difficult challenge facing earnest voters.

The best tool for taking on that challenge is intellectual honesty, which is a combination of self-knowledge and objectivity and which requires real work.

Faced with the overwhelming flood of undifferentiated information, our survival instinct tempts us to believe what fits into our preconceptions and deny that which does not. Life is just easier that way.

To operate with intellectual honesty, we must first recognize our preconceptions, then step outside the shadow cast by them and objectively examine uncomfortable ideas. For instance, a McCain supporter might want to believe that Clark, a Barack Obama supporter, was denying McCain's heroism. Certainly the media echo chamber's shorthand keeps implying that he was. But how likely is that? Clark is no dummy, is himself a war hero, and would have zero interest in doing so. Objectivity requires that we get beyond the skin of words and examine the full context of the ideas beneath.

A similar fate befell Charles Black, a senior McCain adviser. In responding to a direct question from Fortune magazine, Black admitted, accurately if foolishly, that a fresh terrorist attack would work in McCain's favor, keying another white-hot pseudo-event. Obama supporters wanted to believe that Black had wished for an attack, though he was nowhere near that.

Usefully discriminating between truth and falsity, importance and triviality is a survival skill of citizenship. It's a way of sorting out one of the most important decisions most of us will make in our lifetimes. But one has to be willing to do it.

Davis Merritt is a former editor of The Eagle. Reach him at dmerritt9@cox.net.