The Big Condescension

  Over the past two years, the approach to "new" hams (i.e. anyone that doesn't pretend to know everything) has changed. The snarling hostility designed to sort out the "worthy" and "serious" from the mere dabblers proved to be disastrous. Some were willing to stick it out, especially if they found a friendly corner of sanctuary. Many, many more decided that it wasn't worth the effort and abandoned the hobby. We arrived at a strange situation, where licence numbers were at record levels, but activity was extremely low. 

 This hit the amateur community "where they live", so to speak. There isn't a lot of self-reflection or introspection to be found (or even tolerated) among the 'elite'. There isn't really a good term to describe the long-time operators with very insular tendencies that use the hobby to create an artificial world where they can portray themselves as intellectual giants, leaders of men, and powerful rulers of their micro-domain. Some use "old guys" or "old-timers", but age isn't the determining characteristic of this phenomenon. Most of these operators are old, of course, but that's because most hams in general are old. 

  Whatever term that you use, the 'discussion' immediately focuses on the term, and not the phenomenon. It's one of several ways that this particular type of operator uses to derail discussion, rather than engage in introspection. I'm going to use the term 'elite', because this type of operator sees themselves as superior. They have "paid their dues" by spending long years working their way up a (vanished) totem-pole, and they are all about reaping the "rewards" of that status. You can't be superior without having a healthy population of inferiors, after all. The paradigm that these people embraced when they cut their teeth in the hobby is gone. You spent long years, even decades, sucking up to your social "betters", and you learned which opinions are acceptable and which are heresy. You memorised stock responses to parrot regarding every issue -- the 'right' ones -- and you got a little pat on the head every time that you said the 'proper' thing. You learned the well-worn methods to deflect any discussion that ventured outside of the scripted domain. Most of all, you learned not to question the wisdom of your "superiors", and to avoid looking at any problems in the hobby itself. From time to time, your superiors would provide you with fear-mongering "threats" to the hobby -- always some nebulous, unwashed "other" wishing to destroy everything for some unfathomable (but diabolical) reason -- and you would bleat the approved phrases. Then, after a good go-round of declaring amateur radio as "the greatest hobby in the world", the evil menace would be driven away by the solidarity of your applause. And, when your turn came, you would take your place as one the "superiors".

  This paradigm, I'll concede, served a purpose in a different time. But that time is past, and I've written about this before. It's not surprising that friction developed between "old" and "new" hams. The "old" hams were completely willing to accept "new" hams into the hobby -- under the terms of the old paradigm. 

  Instead, the "old" hams encountered a brash breed that didn't acknowledge the unwritten rules. They didn't "know their place". They expressed opinions, almost as if they were unaware that were considered to be on the same level as children. They actually considered themselves to be equals in the community. They weren't interested in the approved menu of conversations. They didn't bark the right responses on cue. They didn't find your old stories about dead people fascinating. They associated with people that were the "wrong" status, and avoided the boring (but "superior") operators who deserved deference and allegiance. 

  And so began The Great Snarling, in which those that embraced the old paradigm bravely stepped up to the plate to sort out the worthy from the unworthy. Many were found to be "not serious", and we all know that amateur radio is SERIOUS BUSINESS. It's not so much that those who failed to meet the standards of the 'elite' were run off the air. It's more that it was made abundantly clear that there wasn't any place for them in the established structures. The failures could stick around if they wished, but they would never be accepted or find any enjoyment. The Great Snarling was supposed to leave the hobby strengthened with new blood of "the right sort". Of course, the strategy was 'proven' to be a great success by the increase in licences. People were thronging in to rub elbows with the 'elite' and take their place at the bottom of the pile. 

  It was the very lack of introspection regarding the hobby that made putting the brakes on this strategy so difficult. And the time-tested means of derailing discussion were employed in a knee-jerk fashion that frustrated those who saw the inevitable result of this course. Activity declined, new people mysteriously failed to get on the air, club memberships dropped, and segregation increased. Stupid 'explanations' for this situation abounded: everyone was getting on HF instead of repeaters, it's those damn Chinese radios that disappointed new hams, people want things handed to them, it's those other cranky guys that are the problem, because my crankiness is endearing, etc.

  The Great Snarling gradually gave way to The Big Condescension. Sure, we all know that new hams are stupid and oblivious to the unwritten rules of the old paradigm, but they can be educated. They need someone to patiently explain that cheap radios aren't "cool", and that spending a lot of money is something that's expected of you, for example. Hey, we'll even offer you advice on how to spend your first thousand. Rather than jumping down your throat over petty issues, we'll talk down to you as if you were a small child and explain how the grown-ups do things. You don't want to use EchoLink, little one. That's not what real hams do. Forget all of those other things that you're interested in. We have a nice, pretty path all laid out for you, with well-worn conversations that you can nod along with. Don't talk to strangers; they have weird ideas and say things that piss us off. Oh, that's cute what you just said, but that's what the grown-ups call "heresy", and we will get very angry if you say that a second time. When someone says this, you're supposed to say that. No, don't improvise. Use the exact words that we taught you.

  This pathetic substitute for mentoring is really just a way to 'educate' inferiors in how not to irritate your superiors. What ends up happening is the mentor discovers that, the stupider they can imagine their student to be, the more 'help' they can offer. And, the stupider your student is, the easier it is to ignore what they want and focus instead on what's 'best' for them. Also, since your student is stupid, you don't have to listen to them, either. Thus, the inferior/superior paradigm is maintained. 

  The Big Condescension doesn't just apply to "new" hams, of course. Anyone that doesn't project a "know everything" air is fair game. As a "superior", the things that you don't know about automatically become inconsequential, weird, a waste of time, and possibly dangerous. You develop flip, reflexive phrases to dismiss discussion of those topics, and you 'know' that everyone wants to emulate you and will avoid those things. You know what's important. You don't ask questions, you give answers. And, of course, that's not arrogant at all. You're completely willing to take the time to teach your inferiors the proper ways to please you, and that's mighty big of you. 

  I was unbelievably lucky to find good people that didn't buy into this ugly mess. Some had decades of experience, but still treated me as a equal. They offered honest opinions, coherent explanations, and had a genuine interest in helping me explore the hobby on my own terms. I also met new people that were willing to puzzle things out, experiment with new things, and listen to the stories of exploration by others. There was no 'status'. Some people knew more, but that didn't make them better -- it made them a potential resource for the development of others.

 Like it or not, believe it or not, amateur radio is a social phenomenon. Your skills for interacting with people on an effective basis are far more valuable than your technical expertise. If someone calls me on the telephone, I am not especially interested in their comprehensive knowledge of the public switched telephone network. I'm interested in what they have to say, and how I fit into that. Now, you can dismiss this idea by using the magic word "appliance operator" if you wish. You can imagine that your knowledge of an arcane method of communication places you above "the common man", but don't expect the common man to envy you or even acknowledge your putative superiority. Much of the old paradigm is about minimising communication, or at the very least constraining it into tightly controlled parameters. It creates standards for quality over quantity, and those valued qualities are odd. Distance, for example, trumps content. 

  Personally, I find it interesting to see how far I can reach with a given setup, but I would much rather have one interesting conversation with someone ten miles away than ten boring, brief, meaningless conversations with people a thousand miles away. You can say that I don't 'get' the magic of RF or whatever. You'd be wrong, though. If that were the case, I wouldn't have spent my life playing with radios. You might like horses, but also realise that obsessing over the distance you can ride on horseback is not a compelling aspect of that hobby in the modern world. If you're trying to interest someone in horseback riding, telling them about a 200 mile ride you made might not be the best pitch. You probably would want to mention the solitude and quiet, the bond with the animal, the time for contemplation, and the interesting things that you saw on the way that people driving a car would miss entirely. Likewise, with amateur radio, your best pitch would be the sense of community, the interesting conversations, new people that you meet, and the experimentation that you engage in that people on their computers never experience. Unfortunately for the hobby, those are all things that the 'elite' (for lack of a better term) are intent on stamping out or pushing into little niches away from sight.

  The Great Snarling cost the hobby dearly in terms of the ability to adapt to the future. The Big Condescension is, at best, an effort to hold on to what we still have. The future is being sacrificed in order to allow some oblivious people the opportunity to believe that the post-cellphone, post-internet world never happened, and to maintain their irrelevant status of Lords of a declining realm. Worst of all, we can't discuss this because we've spent decades teaching people effective methods to derail discussion and praising them for expressions of unwarranted optimism.