On “Polarisation”
Our public conversations both love and hate controversy. Social media channels are full of clips of (mostly) men debating each other. And politicians and pundits are always decrying “culture wars”, “extreme left/right” perspectives. As a society we have transformed conflict in beliefs into a neutered dichotomy between a toothless theatrical battle of rhetorical flourishes, and outrage against anyone who actually undertakes practical steps to implement the necessary results of any particular set of beliefs about the world whether it’s trying to address stop climate change or genocide or, implement racist pogroms. Both the fetishization of debates between views in stark conflict and outrage against anyone implementing their perspective are frequently described with concern for the dangers of “Polarisation” in our society. But why?
It’s self evident fact that for any two opposing claims on an issue of material consequence, one will hold true, and the other false, and the material concerns at the centre of it will demonstrate which. It’s the basis of the scientific method — hypothesis, antithesis, experiment, thesis. We shouldn’t be concerned about the alleged distance of a given perspective from the established “common sense” norms or from their antagonists who believe the opposite. We shouldn’t be trying to triangulate a half way solution in the middle between any two “extremes” of claim about the world we live in. The cry against “polarisation” is a cry against progress and learning from reality. We should care what’s right and what’s wrong.
Obviously what it right or wrong is not always trivial to verify. But again we find a space where anti-polarisation narratives trip us up here! Where possible, it benefits society to let the extremes of any dichotomy in belief TRY IT OUT so everyone is able to learn from the outcome. In questions of truth the insistence that we come to a premature compromise harms innovation.
Consider a situation where some part of a population becomes aware of a crisis. Maybe other parts of society don’t believe when told about it. So the fringe with specialised knowledge start implementing solutions to the crisis without waiting for the mainstream to catch up. Slowly the mainstream start to see the impending crisis and are able to listen to and benefit from knowledge from early adopters. This is largely the story of addressing the climate crisis.
We ought to consider cases where a perceived crisis is wrongly perceived or misconceived. For instance there are numerous and growing white supremacists pushing the idea of “white replacement” and a crisis in white population replacement. Here is where the inherent conservatism of arguments against “polarisation” are often pushed as being of benefit — pushing back against “extremes of both sides”. But the problem is this is a terrible, poor and ineffective check against racist conspiracy theories that simultaneously marks out anti-fascist responses to racist gangs as being “as bad as each other”. At best the outcome is passivity in the face of chaos being caused by people being extremely wrong. Instead, the right response is to note that the racists are wrong, measurably wrong in an objective human rights sense, by any measure that takes as its basis a general Public interest, rather than prioritising a specific Racial interest. If we’re developing an ethic for responding to controversy that ethic should be guided by a general public interest rather than chauvinism towards particular groups because anything less than that all allow tyranny and totalitarianism. The racists are following a framework which under values of general public interest are objectively wrong.
I say objectively wrong, having picked “general public interest” as a starting framework because while “which ethics are the best” is a matter of perspective on an individual level, defining a subject whose interests should be valued sets that requirement as a basis we can measure our decisions against objectively. The racists doing their pogroms are brutalising other members of the public, people they feel should not be treated as members of the common public but who are nonetheless. We should generally be suspicious of attempts to narrow the scope of common public interest to private, racial, or other supremacist interests because those are inherently a power play by the group doing this.
Summary
The problem of “polarisation” is not one anyone should be worried about. We should be instead interested in setting a suitably general definition of public interest by which we can measure the consequences of policy decisions, and letting people adopt and explore perspectives as divergent from the consensus as seem useful to them, so far as those are checked by a need to respond to evidence, and to operate within the limits of common public interest.
