A dear and respected friend has been writing about her family’s experience under lockdown. Sprinkled here and there are policy comments and cultural observations that have drawn the odium of her conservative relatives in the US. Pillories were erected on both sides. We meet once every month where I enumerate the latest rights and plights, to the latter of which she is unwittingly exempt as an expat.
Another has started channels on Youtube and Tiktok to talk about what it means to be a man, a father, an athlete, a defender, a provider. A proselyte of Jordan Peterson and that Jocko-something Navy Seal guy, he is braced for the ire of social media. Neither of his idols would likely hold me in high regard, so we often have spirited debates about this issue. I like to think that I usually come on top in these exchanges. After all, the pen is mightier than the bicep, and I have weaponised mine.
Nevertheless, I would never dream to broadcast my opinion on these things. I tend to abhor commentating on anything other than the inanely personal.
On one hand, as a man of colour going through life circumscribed by other people’s borders, speaking languages over which I hold no claim, I tend to not assert my opinions strongly. This is an implicit outcome of not belonging – it gets expensive to be wrong. I am a little sapling pressed at the front of stormy perspectives, bend either way and winds will snap me true. (But here be tornadoes).
On the other, there’s my trepidation around unstudied thought. At the risk of sounding supercilious, having not spent 12 years in med school nor authored a dissertation on gender studies, I’m pretty ignorant about these things beyond the limits of my very biased perception. I have an undergraduate degree in Economics and walked away knowing that I know nothing about economics, which is perhaps marginally better than thinking one knows a lot about economics. When we feel emboldened to pontificate on a matter, that is cues to cautiously opine. A 30-minute Youtube video does not a sociologist make.
This is the age of platformed idiots. The rest of us are deluded into thinking that loud idiots are representative of the acme of knowledge.
#00117F 