Miller notes that public discourse is dominated by contention, by intersecting monologues. Anger, lack of inhibition, letting it all hang out are treated as assets in public debate, in place of a willingness to listen and adjust ones point of view. Politics thus becomes a platform of rival angers. American politicians are ever more polarised, reduced to conveying a genuine hate for each other.
Likewise, the lack of tolerance in American Christianity can be as frightening as it can in Islam. When I once professed support for IVF, a man glared across the table, tight-jawed, and asked: What does it feel like to be a mass murderer? With such people there is no conversation, only a tiptoeing from the room.
All that said, the death of conversation has been announced as often as that of the book. Samuel Johnson and David Hume worried that the decline of political conversation would lead to violent civil discord. George Orwell concluded that the trend of the age was away from creative communal amusements and toward solitary mechanical ones. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott professed himself desperate to rescue the art of conversation. Somehow we have muddled through.
The post-digital phenomenon, the craving for live experience, is showing a remarkable vigour. The US is a place of ever greater congregation and migration, to parks, beaches and restaurants, to concerts, rock festivals, ball games, religious rallies. Affinity groups frantically seek escape from the digital dictatorship, using Facebook and Twitter not as destinations but as portals, as route maps to human contact.
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★ 2013年大学英语六级考试六级阅读理解专项练习与解析 03
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