Will Outrage Trump Outrageous?

I told them. They didn’t listen to me. They were right and I was, well, unacceptable. They went from effective, hardcore, flea-bitten realists to fighters for the resistance, because everything was literally Hitler, every burp and fart, and more importantly, every twit had to be noted, excoriated, ridiculed and ripped to shreds. It felt so good to be outraged, and there was always something new to be outraged about.

Remember when NBC was under fire for broadcasting a comedian’s light mockery of Pearl Harbor survivors? And when a costume that the recording artist Macklemore performed in struck some as anti-Semitic? And when Jennifer Lawrence made a rape joke? And Ira Glass’s dig at Shakespeare? And a Washington Post contributor’s remark on marriage and gender violence? And Raven-Symoné’s comment about her racial identity?

Yeah, me neither.

That’s the problem with outrage. It’s not just that you get outrage fatigue, burned out on hourly outrage and unable to keep up the zeal to be furious about something new every day, every hour, but that when everything is outrageous, nothing is. When you blow your top at every provocation, and there’s something provocative every day, you get lost in the weeds. And then it’s all weeds, nothing standing out as finally, finally, being so real, so serious, so outrageous that it’s crossed the line.

No, this isn’t about 2018. This was 2014, the year that Slate called “The Year of Outrage.” Such innocent times.

“All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?” Jamelle Bouie asked in 2014. “It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular.”

Not everyone agreed.

In that same Slate package, Amanda Hess offered a characteristically astute defense of some digital outrage, describing its value to some people:

Social media allows people who have been boxed out of journalistic, academic, and political spaces to speak out about their lived experiences (#ICantBreathe) and call on the elites to address their own unexamined entitlements … Disrupting the rigid structures of language and standards of argumentation enforced by the elites is part of the point.

But even Hess recognized that her word salad could leave an unpleasant aftertaste.

But she also warned about pitfalls of this mode: “This new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions, and thinkers who don’t play by the rules will themselves be made the target,” she wrote. “A new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness.”

What makes this poignant is how both Hess and Bouie have forsaken their own words, their own ideas, in favor of leading their own cohorts in the battle of outrage. Conor Friedersdorf asks the question.

So how to find the sweet spot? How is someone who wants to deploy outrage constructively, ethically, and effectively to proceed in the year ahead?

Is there a “sweet spot”? Is it possible that there can be any mutual agreement as to where that sweet spot can be found?

One answer is to study recent history and stay cognizant of its lessons. While “The Year of Outrage” was worth reading back when it was published, the package is even more valuable to today’s thoughtful reader. This is partly because the rise of Donald Trump (has any other president ever expressed outrage so promiscuously?), fueled partly by populist-right outrage and a backlash to political correctness, illustrates a consequence of outrage culture as it was described in 2014 that few anticipated.

When it comes to finding a sweet spot, Trump has won the battle, whether intentionally as some believe or inadvertently because he just can’t help himself. By being promiscuously outrageous, so far beyond the pale of any sense of normalcy, he’s tested the rest of us. He’s tested Bouie, Hess, Friedersdorf and me. And you. And he’s still in office, and still twitting, and still being outrageous.

If being outraged makes you feel good, feel useful, then you’re going to continue to be outraged. But be clear, it’s not because of Trump, racism or sexism, but because of you. You do it for you, for your catharsis, for your virtue signaling, for that hole in your ineffectiveness to pretend that you’re somehow contributing to the good of society. You’re lying to yourself.

Done right, chipping away can and does improve the world.

The words “done right” carry a lot of weight here. It’s not only a matter of when and how to be outraged, but what the ultimate purpose of outrage might be. The lesson of history is that we were filled with outrage back in 2014, long before the idea of Trump, a third-rate Queens real estate clown who was reinvented as a reality TV show host, becoming president would have evoked anything by hysterical laughter.

It’s unclear whether Conor is right, that chipping away “can and does” improve the world. We’ve been working on improving the world since the beginning of mankind, and look at what we manage to produce. The hubris of believing that now, at this “unique” moment in human history, we’re suddenly better and righter than all of humanity that preceded us is breathtaking.

What is clear, however, is that for all the emotional capital being spent on outrage, we’re getting a really poor return on investment. If 2014 was an outrage recession, than 2018 has brought us to the brink of the Great Outrage Depression. We would get a far better rate of return if we spent our outrage more wisely in 2019.

And maybe, if we’re allowed to buck this “new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions,” we might even come up with effective ways to improve the world. Wouldn’t that be outrageous?

Will Outrage Trump Outrageous? curated from Simple Justice