Don't Blow Your Stack, But Do Follow Charles Blow Blowing His
And this week learn about how to foster "adversarial collaboration"
I hope you’ll welcome Charles Blow to Substack by subscribing to
. I’ve signed on as a founding supporter. I got to know Charles starting in the mid 1990s when he joined The Times as a graphics creator and editor just before I joined as a Metro environment reporter.He blossomed into a trenchant and eloquent voice for social progress in the Opinion section and his best-selling books. Now, like
, he has found his way here. In this violent, vitriolic and momentous stretch of days, he posted two short riffs making vital points.The first tragedy is that Kirk was killed. The second is that the media has allowed itself to be used in the resurrection of a chimera: a false, collaged creation, more noble and less toxic than the man ever was alive.
In doing so, the press is fueling the Republican martyrdom of an intolerant agitator, a man whose life was defined by provocation and whose death is now being re-cast as sanctity.
And, before the accused assassin’s father helped give him up, he wrote this about the wider picture:
We can condemn the murder without lionizing or absolving the man. That is how this tragedy could be viewed in a society not consumed and riven by partisan, mutually assured destruction.
But the latter describes today’s America. In such a factious climate, there is no neutrality in political tragedy, no space in which humanity alone—unmanipulated and unarmed—can express itself without the calculation of either losing ground or taking it.
It is a pitiful reality that we exist in. And it is on this contested ground, this battlefield, that each incendiary allegation explodes and each defensive trench is dug. Inevitably, each side goes too far, salivating or sniveling, with no muscle memory of the preceding tragedy, no sense of how quickly things fade or the balance shifts, no acknowledgement of how juiced the American metabolism has become by endless streams of internet outrage.
Keep it up, Charles.
You can also find him on Instagram…
…and TikTok.
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Disagree better (and safer)
And I have to post a key point made by Utah Governor Spencer Cox Friday about why political violence is particularly dangerous. Cox, who in 2023 launched a “Disagree Better Initiative,” said this about the shooting at the “We got him” news conference:
I’ve heard people say why are we so invested in this? There’s violence happening all across our country. And violence is tragic everywhere. And every life taken is a child of God who deserves our love and respect and dignity.
This certainly about the tragic political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of use. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.
Of course everything he said is just as true of violence directed at Democrats. Listen here, particularly to his points about finding a way to disagree safely:
Is “adversarial collaboration” possible?
With all of this in mind, join me this Tuesday, September 16, at 11 a.m. Eastern, for a relevant discussion of the merits of constructive engagement with intellectual or ideological opponents, centered on the Adversarial Collaboration Project hubbed at the University of Pennsylvania. You’ll meet project director Cory J. Clark and Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell.
Here’s the initiative description:
The Adversarial Collaboration Project provides both instrumental and moral support to scholars with clashing theoretical-ideological views to work together in order to construct better public knowledge, more quickly and efficiently than traditional methods.
Paste the preferred viewing link in your calendar now: Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn, my X account, Substack Live or on YouTube:
One other such project is the U.S. Geological Survey’s John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis - essentially a crisis counseling center for intradisciplinary disputes. I held a conversation long ago about a mediation related to earthquake hazard analysis with two seismologists and the project director Jill Baron.
It’s absolutely fascinating. The center is in the Rockies and one method for overcoming rancor is taking hikes that make everyone so short of breath it’s harder to argue.
Also click back to this evergreen conversation:
