There is not enough argument in British politics, although there is no shortage of dispute. Maybe the distinction is pedantic. The two words can be interchangeable. But right now, with waves of fear and fury radiating out of the Middle East, it feels important to recognise a difference between communication that increases understanding and its opposite; between words used as tools to assemble meaningful propositions and words brandished as weapons and decoys.
The sheer abundance of news, the processed info-mulch that we scoop off our screens throughout the day, is such a familiar feature of our lives that it can be hard to recall the era of rationing, when we waited to find stuff out. The truth is still often delayed but the interval is filled with synthetic truthiness – junk that feeds an appetite without nourishment.
There is nothing new about dodgy information galloping ahead of truth, especially in times of crisis. Shakespeare opens Henry IV Part II with Rumour alone on stage, “stuffing the ears of men with false reports”. The difference now is that Rumour moves at the speed of a photon down an optical fibre, while evidence seeps in slowly like ink drying on a notepad.
When there was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night, the surge of outrage and condemnation did not wait for confirmation of what had actually happened and who was responsible. The presumption that it was aerial bombardment moves more nimbly through channels that are primed to expect the worst of Israel than data supplied less than 24 hours later suggesting it was an Islamic Jihad rocket misfiring.
I’m not just talking about the struggle to confirm facts. A public debate can be toxic without pollution by misinformation.
After roughly 25 years as a journalist, I’m fairly confident in my ability to sift sources for reliability. I’m lucky also to have enough political contacts to be able to do some first-hand verification. We’re all fallible, of course. Sometimes politicians lie and journalists believe them. But I’ve met enough of both to reject the jaundiced view, tending towards conspiracy theory, that it’s all a self-serving sham. (I know that’s just what a conspirator would say, but if any testimony from political insiders is invalidated by proximity to the system there’s no way to prove or disprove anything, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.)
And yet I sympathise with anyone who now reaches for the dial when the news comes on. I get the lure of avoidance, which is not the same as apathy. I know plenty of people who are deeply engaged in politics, not (yet) despairing of British democracy, determined to vote at the next election, but who are also finding contact with news media distressing to the point of physical repellence.
I have felt that strongly in the past week, mostly as a function of being Jewish in the shadow of the single biggest act of antisemitic mass murder since the Holocaust. That isn’t a claim of special sensitivity to the horror of what is happening in Israel and Gaza, just an explanation for why I find myself particularly torn right now between the duty to be informed and the impulse to recoil from the process of getting informed; and also why I crave meaningful arguments amid a frenzy of pointless ones.
For example, I need no persuasion that “terrorists” is a correct label for Hamas. Nor do I need to hear from any more politicians or commentators who think the BBC calling them “militants” is a national disgrace.
There is an interesting debate to be had on editorial language and moral equivalence, but on the periphery of the bigger story, not the front page. The argument is lost once it is a rhetorical cudgel in the hands of ministers and rival broadcasters exercising muscle memory from countless previous BBC-bashing campaigns.
Swathes of what passes for debate about the Middle East has the character of displacement activity. It is the spectacle of people, left and right, grasping for agency when confronted with events that demand action and moral urgency but are unfolding way beyond their control in a complex geopolitical and historical context for which their routine shtick is pitifully inadequate.
Compassionate, well-informed, even-handed experts who are qualified to take a view on Israel-Palestine choose their words with painstaking care. Some I know have been left almost speechless by the scale of what is happening now. That makes me pretty suspicious of the dilettante chatterboxes speechifying all over the rolling news channels.
The dysfunction is amplified by the gravity of the present crisis but began long before it. The continuity of tone is one of the things that is hardest to bear. That and the pretence that trivialised politics can summon instant gravitas when the moment demands it. I struggle to respect the judgment of Conservatives opining on a military conflagration when, two weeks ago at their annual conference, they were earnestly demanding an end to a fictitious war on motorists.
There is a macabre kind of absurdity about this style of politics that manages to be polarised and monotonous, hysterical and portentous, all at the same time.
I must be vigilant against a slide into curmudgeonliness with this analysis. There was no golden age of public discourse. Idiocy and prejudice are not innovations. The digital cacophony is also an expression of greater diversity in media. Nostalgia for simpler times, especially in print, can sound like mourning for lost privilege.
It is possible to imagine a better kind of political conversation without scouring the past for models. The present has plenty: there are podcasts and blogs, live events and newsletters where healthy argument thrives, by which I mean the exchange of competing ideas, buttressed by analysis, built from facts. But it is less common in the institutions where democracy is supposed to dwell. Parliamentary debate is a gale of vacuous bombast with lulls of stultifying consensus and the odd sunny interval when an MP makes a good point well.
This all makes it hard to look forward to a general election without a hint of dread. I cherish the fact that Britain chooses its leaders by ballot. I wish the choices could be presented with campaigns that don’t leave the electorate feeling embittered and the process looking degraded. Maybe it is naive to suppose it can be otherwise. But I don’t accept the cynical view that it has to be like this; not without a good argument.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
