I’m kind of a relentless optimist.  I was asked in the interview for my current job to describe myself in 5 words: “optimistic” was the only one that came easily.  One quality optimists tend to have is the ability to take the long view, to believe that things have been better before and they’ll be better again.  I think my optimism is one thing that makes me such an American.  I think the US is a really optimistic concept and that our system of government really relies on optimism.  The whole concept of “checks and balances” is profoundly optimistic in a way I can really get behind.  Not sunny-stupid, it recognizes that people are going to act like asses but trusts that someone will eventually call them on it one way or another.  So, yeah, I’m optimistic and it takes a lot to rattle my faith in progress.  I was embarrassed by this outlook for years, it was hard to explain to my angry punk friends that, yes, I was angry too but that while I could get behind some good epistemological nihilism for the sake of discussion, in my heart I really believed in human kindness, civic duty, natural beauty, and the rest of the sorta ridiculous small-town values I was saddled brought up with.

But, lately, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve been feeling really discouraged.  Like really discouraged.  And I know it’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of bad shit going down making us all feel pretty discouraged but this feeling of profound discouragement is rare enough for me that I want to examine it a little.  or, probably, a lot.  Here I’m going to examine, mostly, reasons that I can plausibly related to libraries.  (Note: I can pretty much relate ANYTHING to libraries as long as you don’t poke at it too much, if you do you’ll see how far I had to stretch it).  So here it is…part 1 of “why Rachel might snap at any moment”:

I think the idea of “balance” is one of the most horrible, corrosive things that could have happened to our discourse.  And by “balance”, I don’t mean true balance, I mean this fake, intellectually bankrupt idea that has permeated the media, the classroom, and, yes, quite profoundly, the library.  The idea that when you’re discussing something about which there are multiple opinions you must, to be responsible, present “both sides”.

First of all, “both sides” is fake and lazy.  BOTH sides?  I have a hard time thinking of ANYTHING for which there are just two sides.  Dude, even the proverbial coin actually has that whole swath of surface area between the two sides.   I’ll tell you what, want to provide balance?  Start by recognizing that there are rarely two sides.  There are twenty sides.  Twenty thousand sides.  Two million sides.  When journalists (or teachers or librarians or whomever) constantly and relentlessly show “both sides” in the interest of fairness they collapse a whole range of opinion into a fake, facile pro/con.   “Both sides” is easier for all of us.  It’s easier for us as consumers of information, it’s easier for journalists as reporters of information, it’s easier for librarians as collectors and sharers of information.  Unfortunately, it also doesn’t really exist.  Except, how it kind does now because that idea BOTH SIDES has been hammered into us so relentlessly at this point that we’ve lost our skill for subtlety and our desire for nuance.  (see?  discouraged!)

So, yes, I question the whole “both sides” idea at its very root.  But say there are two sides, for the sake of argument.  Those two sides, they are not always equal.  In fact, they are often not equal.  We will take as our example global warming.  Why the hell did it take us so long to get serious about global warming?  Well, a huge part of the reason is that whenever we heard about global warming we heard “both sides”.  It is pretty reasonable for a busy, lazy, skeptical person (ie, most of us) to conclude that scientists disagree about global warming when every “good”, “unbiased” article they read shows them “both sides”.  What those stories mask is that one side is, like, 5 lunatics who can’t get even get papers published because, YOU KNOW WHAT?, they’re WRONG! and the other side is SCIENCE.

If the media would just man-up and refuse to play that game, imagine how much richer our conversations could be.  If we didn’t waste 20 years on “does global warming exist” just because there were a few ass-hats saying it didn’t and instead have the “sides” presented to us be about things that are actually debatable.  Like, say, what to DO about it.   The mainstream media is so shit-scared of being called “liberal” that they’ve more or less washed their hands of doing any kind of respectable journalism.

Actually, Anne-Marie and I experienced this first hand at ACRL in Baltimore.  Shopping in Hampstead the day after John Waters’ hilarious lunchtime keynote, shop-keepers and residents kept asking us some variation of “WHY DO LIBRARIANS HATE JOHN WATERS?”.  We were pretty baffled, having just sat in a room full of librarians ranging from drooling fangirls (okay, maybe that was just me?) to people who were at least amused by Waters’ talk.  We SAW the standing ovation.  We heard the hoots, hollers, and laughter.  So why did all of Hampstead think we hated his talk?  Well, they’d read the article in the Baltimore Sun.  What would you think if you read it?

Although during the speech about a dozen people left the room, most audience members guffawed and chuckled, sometimes shaking their heads as though in disbelief.

“I think it was a very engaging speech,” said Pamela Snelson, president of the ACRL and a librarian at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “It was a clear representation of freedom of speech. He’s not afraid to approach controversy. He struck a note with the audience.”

But Anne Schwelm, a librarian from Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., who walked out during the address, said she was offended by its vulgarity. “It was shameless self-promotion. A vaudeville act would have been more interesting. I came not knowing what to expect, but generally [in a keynote address], there’s a message.”

Hmm, yeah.  So there were a couple thousand librarians there, about a dozen walked out, but the quote from the hater gets equal time.  I have to say, as these things go, this isn’t even that egregious but the people we met were still left with the completely wrong idea.  I did an experiment with my class after I got back.  I had them read the article and then asked them if they thought the librarians enjoyed the talk.  Overwhelmingly, they reported that “there were a lot of people walking out” and “people were really offended”.  Now, clearly there are information literacy/critical thinking issues going on here but it would be nice if stories could be reported in such a way that we could use our critical thinking skills on actually dealing with the information that’s being reported instead of just trying to parse the truth out of lazy-ass reporting.

And librarians?  This whole “balance” thing is tricky for us.  In many ways, libraries represent the very best of true balance and neutrality.  Libraries provide, foremost, physical and intellectual spaces for the utterly free flow of ideas.  The proposition that I can walk in to a library and I pick up something glorious, something crappy, something beautiful and something hateful and make my own decisions about what I’ve read is what made me want to be a librarian more than anything else I could have been.  And, as a professional value, you can’t get much better than neutrality.  The librarian’s respect for her patron’s mind, for her patron’s absolute right to inquire and to come to crap conclusions, is one of the things that makes the librarian different from the book peddler, what distinguishes the patron as a citizen, not a customer.  But balance, objectivity, and neutrality are tricky beasts and if you’re not vigilant they can shift on you.  Thinking about this reminded me of Rory Litwin’s piece in Library Juice 4:7 “Neutrality, Objectivity, and the Political Center“.  I read this while I was in library school and it had a profound effect on me.  Litwin really clearly described something that had been bothering me about the rhetoric in a lot of my library school classes.  You should really read the whole thing but I’ll quote at length here from two parts of Litwin’s piece that keep rattling around my head the last few days:

Ultimately, we can’t communicate about facts without lending our own point of view to our representation. However, objective information, if it is not falsified by its representation, has a way of advocating for itself, as a result of calling into play human values.  What this means is that good opinions are founded on objective information and objective information will lead authentic beings to adopt opinions and act on them, according to their understanding of their interests. Accordingly, we are making a mistake if we regard information sources that express opinions as less than objective.

and, also:

Finally, the Political Center.  Of course, centrism isn’t touted as a professional value or consciously sought out in reference sources.  But having a bias toward the political center is often mistaken for objectivity, and the effect of “neutrality,” as it is usually understood, is to support the interests of the political center, the existing balance of power.

The political center exerts a strong attraction for those who prefer not to think for themselves. There is an erroneous sense that the truth is to be found at the average of what various people believe, that the truth must be “somewhere in the middle.”  This comes partly from a graphical representation of a political spectrum that ranges from one side to another on a horizontal plane.  But this is not the most accurate representation of the political field.

The currently existing…balance of power is what is commonly understood as the “political center.”  It should not be mistaken for objectivity, though it often is. And it should not be supported by our interpretation of professional neutrality, as it often is.  We should understand objectivity as referring to whatever is verifiably true apart from what anyone might believe, without an implication that to be objective means to lack a point of view or an opinion.

Try as I might, I don’t think I’m going to be able to say any of that better than Rory did.  Librarians contribute to this “both sides” cancer on our discourse when we confuse the concepts of objectivity, neutrality, and centrism.

We sacrifice our role as professionals when we cave to the notion that objectivity and opinion are mutually exclusive.  It doesn’t matter what I perceive the middle to be, where I see the “balance”, the freakin’ glaciers are still going to be melting.  And when confronted with that objective information (the glaciers are melting), I form opinions.  My opinions might be different from your opinions, and that’s cool, let’s talk.

What Litwin doesn’t talk about in the piece is how bloody hard it is to be neutral (in the good sense) but to also have opinions.  To use your professional judgment to build collections, provide services, and do programming that reflect objective information, not “balanced” information in a culture that does not prize objectivity and that values spectacle over conversation, contemplation, and dignity.

I feel like we’re headed back to the dark ages and fake “balance” is just the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceburg.

Join me in the next installment where I will despair about the future of participatory democracy in a country where the people regard themselves as customers not citizens.