Since my drunken driving column, there has been a lot of talk at Technician about what constitutes a good editorial column and what the true job of an editorial columnist is. The consensus seems to be that an editorial columnist should express intelligent, well-reasoned, well-supported arguments that are relevant to the lives of readers.
However, no one ever said an editorial columnist shouldn’t make people mad. And it is in the nature of the job that an editorial columnist SHOULD make people mad. Why?
Consider the following column excerpt:
“Murder is wrong. To kill a human being is to rob him of future happiness and bring great pain to his family and friends. Murder should be punished with incarceration of no less than 10 years.”
What’s wrong with that? It’s true enough; everyone agrees that it is true. But in fact, that little excerpt is a bad premise for a column precisely BECAUSE everyone agrees that it is true.
A columnist should not merely express opinions. He should express opinions that differ from mainstream thought. People do not wish to read an opinion that is universally held; they wish to read an opinion that is new and fresh, and to which few people knowingly or openly subscribe.
It is in the nature of things, therefore, that many people should disagree with a good column. If everyone agreed with it, it would add nothing to the collective consciousness and would fail to enrich or edify anyone.
It is the job of the editorial columnist to make people angry. If no one gets angry, then either everyone agrees with the columnist, or no one cares what he has said in the first place. If no one gets angry, then he has either said something everyone already knows or has said nothing at all.
I suggest that the ideal model for a good editorial columnist is Socrates.
Socrates was the father of philosophy. He was a poor man in Athens who walked around all day, arguing with everyone, courteously but firmly. His goal in arguing, he claimed, was not belligerence for the sake of belligerence, but rather to make people question their opinions and prevent them from believing they knew things which they did not know.
That, I believe, is the job of an editorial columnist; to make people question their opinions. Take my colleague Daniel Underwood’s column about sorostitutes. As a result of his column, people were forced to reconsider their opinions about sorority women. Sorority women themselves were forced to wonder what sort of impression they were conveying when they walked around shouting into their cell phones with their cleavage open to the world.
Was Daniel correct in his opinion about sororities? I don’t know, and I don’t care. He forced people to reconsider the notion of sorority girls, and therefore did his job.
(I need hardly add that my drunken driving column was not a good column, though it differed from mainstream thought, because it advised people to hurt themselves, which no columnist has a right to do.)
So go ahead and send your hate mail, folks. Send it to us columnists. You’re only telling us what a great job we’re doing. It is unavoidable that we will make people angry, but we will cause people to think, too. We cannot have one without the other.
All successful editorial columnists are, to some degree, hated. For if they are successful then people like their columns, and if people like their columns these columns must be saying something original, and if the column is saying something original, then some readers will be angered by it. But other readers will think about it, and as a result they will grow intellectually and become better, wiser people. It is to these readers that we write.
E-mail Jeff at [email protected]