As social media took off, the track of reason ran out
But does “as” mean “because”? What is really to blame for polarisation and dysfunction?
Earlier this year, in The Atlantic, social psychologist and well-known thinker Jonathan Haidt offered an account of increased polarisation and dysfunction. It is titled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, and seems relevant to some other Western countries, too. Unsurprisingly, Haidt says that social media is the key to the stupidity.
Clearly the social-media story has truth to it. One particularly plausible point I have come across in this context, for example, constitutes the first of ten factors in Zachary Elwood’s list: people are less able to change their minds, now that their previous opinions are publicly archived.
Haidt’s focus is a bit different, coming down on product features, an aspect that Elwood de-emphasises. And throughout his Atlantic article, Haidt uses the biblical Tower of Babel as a metaphor. A new happy age of cooperation and communication that was cut short and ended in shattering and fragmentation. In Haidt’s diagnosis, social media was initially great, then, and machine translation really ushered in Babel. But a darker side had emerged as well, he writes, and from 2009 to 2012 certain new features began to put an end to the happy state. Such as “like” buttons, and especially Twitter’s “retweet” and Facebook’s “share”, with anger at out-groups particularly likely to go viral. Ten years later, a state has been reached where people anxiously avoid any nuance, as any suspicion of insufficient loyalty to one’s in-group could result in viral punishment and destruction of one’s social status. Also, to complete this quick impression of Haidt’s diagnosis, what goes viral and incites emotions is often objectively rather trivial, or even false. The trust in leaders and institutions that holds society together gets eroded.
One way or another, social media looks like the culprit. Nonetheless, here I submit a different story, if only for the sake of discussion. As Haidt stresses, the problems are enormous and urgent. In the analysis of what underlies them, no stone should be left unturned. And rather strangely, I have not yet encountered any clear general expression of this alternative account of increased polarisation and dysfunction. An expression that, like Haidt’s, would look down on the issues from a bird perspective, rather than commenting on this or that incident of the day. Though admittedly, my lack of such encounter is probably just due to the fact that much current-affairs material I consume is too “liberal”, in the American sense of the word, to entertain it.
Thus what if Haidt gets structure but not content right, in a sense? More precisely, what if a happy state was indeed reached about a decade ago before it all went wrong — but if this state had little to do with the media landscape? The following is from a 2014 passage in The Economist’s column on American politics:
Fierce warnings that radicals were seeking to upend a biblical institution helped lure Christian conservatives to the polls to back Republican candidates, and secured gay-marriage bans in dozens of states.
Then in 2012 gay-marriage supporters suddenly began winning. [...] Nationwide, solid majorities now back such unions.
Apparently it was possible for American attitudes to shift considerably on a contentious topic related to discrimination. Progressives fought discrimination against gay people, conservatives tried to defend the status quo, and progressive reason prevailed. But in the most recent years, with social-media-induced stupidity entrenched, reason stands no chance any longer. Or so Haidt might say. And perhaps point to the acrimonious conflicts about trans rights, the sort of successor to gay rights in the spotlight.
Except that there is a complication.
Are the trans-rights demands actually still reasonable?
You might see where this is going. Once upon a time, a few people inherited absolute power, many were born as slaves. We can be thankful indeed that at some point the progressive train started rolling forward on the track of reason. Conservatives slowed it down, but over time privilege repeatedly lost out to reason. And so it should not be impossible, in principle, for the train to reach its destination eventually, a happy state without discrimination. Yet what then? The train will still progress, it’s a progressive train, but there is no more track of reason ahead! Could that actually describe the new age of stupidity?
Namely, on the progressive side, clearly there is much more need for enforcement of in-group beliefs and positions once those are unreasonable rather than reasonable. And as for the conservative side, they are now under “genuine” threat, rather than just confronted with challenges to their privileges. Such a threat may also cause ranks to close and nuance to die.
Haidt’s story is more parsimonious than this unending-progression one when it posits the same social-media phenomenon on both sides. Then again, it includes pronounced asymmetry as well, with the commanding heights of the culture controlled by the progressive side alone (even by extreme elements of it). And there is also an angle from which it loses to the unending-progression story in terms of parsimony. Unending progression combined with a destination must push the train off the rails eventually, whereas in Haidt’s story additional features just so happened to turn social media from good to bad.
As already stated, I submit unending-progression only for the sake of discussion. Actually, I even might put less money on it than on social media, though I would definitely split my bet. The most obvious objection would be that no, we have not reached a happy state without discrimination. Indeed, just take the trans rights. When someone who identifies as a woman cannot enter women-only spaces, yes, surely that is discrimination?
Then again, what’s the point of safe spaces for women, or of women’s sports, if any man can just declare himself a woman and enter. At least from a standpoint of “common sense”, rather than of “lived experience”, there would seem to be trade-offs here without real counterpart in the case of absolute power, or slavery, or anything to do with gay rights. Perhaps one could still discern a somewhat happy state, then, not one without discrimination, but at least one without discrimination that would clearly be reasonably avoidable. The basic unending-progression story could then still be the same.
No, one could not, many will fiercely object. Did I not even think of “Black Lives Matter”? I’m not from America, where this movement originates from (but, as I said at the start, consider the issues of wider importance). What appears to be the case, as I understand it, is that much of current discrimination in America against black people at least no longer operates in explicit ways. This is suggested by the need for implicit-bias training and such. We would finally be left with, not a “happy” state at all, just one without a lot of clearly reasonably avoidable explicit discrimination.
But if reasonably avoidable discrimination is still rampant, even though just implicit, the unending-progression story would seem to no longer fit, right? For with this diagnosis the track of reason did not run out a decade ago, and there is no “genuine” threat to conservatives!
Then again, implicitness on its own has explanatory power here. There is still increased need for enforcement on the progressive side, to smother any nascent doubts about whether the implicit discrimination is really all it is made out to be. And the conservative side, I guess, has basically lost trust in academic theories about social justice, theories such as implicit bias that are now required. After all, academia is dominated by the progressive side, as Haidt has famously called out some time ago. That some progressive theories (“sex is a social construct”) are not exactly easy to accept won’t have helped. From a conservative vantage point, there is still a genuine threat, one of being intellectually defrauded (perhaps helped by careerscienceability) and targeted by (not so implicit) reverse discrimination.
If we accept academic theories about implicit discrimination, the train metaphor might be amended as follows. The track of reason has not run out a decade ago in that case, but the conservatives slowing the progressive train down are now assisted by winter weather, which covers the track in snow, after a long summer ended a decade ago. Still a qualitative change. Still a possible explanation of polarisation and dysfunction that should be kept in mind when thinking about solutions.
Actually, has my earlier post on American politics, one year old today, aged well? Indeed, the third of the three modes described there, Donald Trump being a vote-loser, has just become truly mainstream, after the midterm elections. But the first mode, culture wars favouring Republicans, is looking shaky after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on abortion (a topic that I chose to leave out of the present post).
I have arguably progressive positions - anti-classist thoughts like the law should not be different for slavers and slaves... ah, politicians/bureaucrats and serfs... citizens, I meant to say, sorry. Not *popular* progressive thoughts, obviously; on par with geolibertarianism or radical markets, I suppose.