The pitfalls of polarisation

The Band’s famous — and increasingly infamous — 1969 hit song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, recounts the personal tragedy of war from the point of view of a poor southern rebel. This is the American Civil War, which means, of course, that the song tells a sympathetic story of none other than a perpetrator. The version of the song that appears in Martin Scorsese’s documentary film about The Band’s final concert, The Last Waltz, is so packed with poignant emotion, it sends shivers down my spine. I’m moved by the travails and traumas of this simple racist, whom I would have doubtless despised in person. And who probably would have enjoyed hanging me from the nearest tree.

Like anyone else, I usually don’t delight in sympathising with the plight of my ideological opponents — who are, in my case, the Indian (or the American) right. My instinctual prejudice is to dismiss them as ignorant, arrogant, entitled, chauvinist, racist, casteist, sexist, reactionary, unprincipled, and increasingly dangerous, with no grasp of either common decency or common sense. And what are their prejudices about a leftist like me? We should be able to read them in the comments section tomorrow.

While political life, to a certain extent, may require us to encounter one another, social life offers opportunities of near-total avoidance. It’s natural for us to seek the comforts of the familiar, and to avoid the aggravations of having to tolerate those whose thoughts and practices we find repugnant. But there is a serious problem of potential polarisation lurking here within our instinctual attitudes. And this problem is getting irreversibly amplified through a full raft of popular technologies.

Over the last couple of decades, ideological options have been narrowing considerably so that there are predominately only two widely acceptable points of view on national issues, one radically opposed to the other. We have long seen this reduction of nuance and increase in polarity via television news debates. Commentators representing one side spew venom at those from the rival position, humiliate and disparage them, seeking only to win the debate at all costs. Side effects may include egregious spinning of the facts and outright lies to all of us witless viewers. While public debate has been reduced to this kind of spectacle on television, even more dangerous is how we consume news and information through social media and the internet.

With Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms, we find ourselves increasingly living in echo chambers within which we hear only our own ideology repeated. We listen less and less to points of view that challenge our own. The algorithms of social media keep us in these bubbles, displaying only what we agree with or what agrees with us.

This constant comfort or repetition of the attitudes of our ‘in groups’ alienates us from the ‘out groups’, those who think differently from us. As studies in social and cognitive neuroscience have shown, this polarisation dehumanises the ‘out group’, making us less concerned for their welfare, indifferent to their tragedies.

At the same time, as we encounter only curated caricatures of rival positions, we continue to lose grasp of the art of compassionate debate — what ancient philosophers sometimes referred to as poorva paksha. Poorva paksha, although it may itself have sought to undermine and dismantle opposing positions, required transcending our own echo chambers and deeply inquiring into the logic and merits of opposing thought. The goal of debate was not merely to humiliate a rival and persuade the gullible, but rather, to force oneself to be clear about what one believed and why — to be able to communicate it not only to oneself but also to the ‘outed’ or the other.

Today, in this thoroughly polarised world, we seriously run the risk of losing this capacity to effectively communicate with our ideological rivals. With communication gone, the only option left is violent confrontation. And this is already the character of much violence today, deaf but deafening.