Podcasts circling about the ideological accretion disk

Al and I listened to a pair of podcasts while we were on the road over the weekend. As usual, I'm going to skip what the podcasts were or even what they were about because neither piece of information would be helpful. 

What I will say is that they were both about A Current Topic of Intense Interest to Many. One was about The Current Topic from a slightly more ideological or theoretical point of view. The other was about The Current Topic, but in the form of a very lightly structured interview where the subject spoke mostly uninterrupted about their experience of The Current Topic and its impact on them in very personal terms. 

The subject of the interview episode was the guest on the more theoretically oriented episode. The interview took place a few years ago, over the phone, as the guest was working on a book about their experience. The theoretical one was a much more well produced conversation from late last year. 

The more theoretically grounded one was interesting for a while, then it devolved. The two participants are both members of a small movement of sorts that is undergoing a schism, and they were speaking in the aftermath of a little conference that went badly sideways over one of the participants. Probably simplest to say that it all sounded like the late stages of a terminal purity spiral. The host was pretty upset about this, because purity spirals feed off of our need to be consistent in our beliefs, even when that consistency can take us to places that don't work well for us. So they were fretting, splitting hairs, rolling around in contradictions and paradoxes, and also just worrying about losing a community they'd built up over the years. 

I was out of patience by the time it was over, because I could feel the conversation becoming more and more unmoored from anything tangible or real, drifting closer and closer to the accretion disk around a  black hole of theory that was going to swallow it. 

The interview-style episode was captivating from beginning to end. At no point did I think "this is getting way too heady." It was just a human being speaking plainly, sometimes haltingly, sometimes in obvious pain, about something that had happened to them. They didn't try to make complex connections, reach big conclusions, or lay out some grand unified theory of What is All Fucked Up About this Current Topic. They just talked about their experience of life with another human being caught up in it, and the loss they felt over a relationship that disintegrated.  

Al and I talked about the contrast between the two when it was over. 

Hearing all the theory was alienating. It was an hour of people getting angry and upset about abstractions. People whose conception of "activism" is going to conferences and splitting with people they are far more alike than different from over little differences, tearing apart their own community not because of a concrete harm that had happened, but because of a cascading list of possible harms from something that didn't happen but might have if it had been the sort of conference where that kind of thing could  happen (which it wasn't). 

I asked myself, "if the people in this conversation somehow convinced me of their position, how would I use this heady, theoretical, ideological conversation to go out and effect change in the world? What would I do with this?"

The answer I came up with was "pretty much nothing I wouldn't do anyhow. I seldom interact with This Current Topic. When I have interacted with it, I've shown care and sensitivity by asking questions and not saying much outside of whatever is enough to be kind or ensure the things in my power to change are changed for the better." 

On the other hand, the interview format reminded me I've been increasingly pulled in a direction by all the chatter around The Current Topic around me that has caused me to forget about the individual people caught up in it on all "sides" of the topic. The average podcaster or social media presence I'm going to be exposed to has a pretty pat set of thought-terminating clichés meant to make you feel a little bad about asking yourself any questions about the people holding contrary positions. It didn't threaten my foundational stance, it just reminded me that there are nothing but other human beings caught up in this thing, trying to make sense of it, dealing with its effect on their lives, trying to get on with their lives.