The Problem With Self-Imposed Echo Chambers
Driving positive change in our society ultimately requires conversation. Isolationism will harm our efforts in the long run.
One argument out there is that we on the left shouldn’t feel bad about restricting ourselves to left-leaning echo chambers and social bubbles because there is nothing to gain from engaging conservatives given the current state of play in American politics. Here I want to defend two reasons why this might be improvident, even dangerous, both intellectually and socially, in the long term. But before we get there, I need to issue two caveats.
(1) Some folks truly are a lost cause and aren’t worth the effort. As someone who has wrestled with climate politics for several years, I’ll be the first to recognize that dialogue is no panacea for consensus. There are people who will forever lie beyond the reach of reason, and we need to be honest about that. Depending on the arena of discourse we’re referring to, I peg this portion of the population at somewhere around 10-15%. Into this bucket we can put all of the alt-right sympathizers and Trumpist hardliners, the neo-Nazi types and people who think Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group, and the barely literate partisans who mainline Alex Jones-Limbaugh-Hannity-Barton-Beck-Palin-Bachmann. Clearly these are not the people on which we should be wasting our time. As such, what’s discussed here will not apply to those persons which partisanism and ignorance have rotted to the core.
(2) Another qualifier, one that I should have made more explicit in my previous post on this topic, is that collaborative engagement across party lines will, by function of one’s identity, be easier for some people and much more difficult for others. It’s one thing for cis white men to be willing to sit through and listen to abuse that isn’t actually aimed at them. It’s entirely another to expect minorities and marginalized communities to do the same when they are the rhetorical target. Attempts to educate, therefore, must always be accompanied by a recognition of the privilege that allows white men like me to do so in ways that put POC and other minority groups at risk.
Anyone engaging in politically charged debate, or calling for others to engage in such debate, should keep these prefatory remarks close at hand. Some percentage of our interactions will surely be destined for failure at the outset, and we should implicitly understand why less privileged groups may not be up to the task. By and large, I see bridging the communication gap as a project for the patient, for people who feel a sense of duty to stand up for the oppressed — white folks: this includes all of us — and for those generally at ease stepping into the trenches.
With those asterisks in mind, the first reason I want to put forward here is that echo chambers as ideologically homogeneous spaces become problematic when those inside them are unprepared for the arguments outside them. Part of what makes political discourse in this country so toxic is the lack of viewpoint diversity on the right. Far too many conservatives are stuck in a spin cycle of thinly veiled propaganda that preys on low information voters by telling them what they want to hear. And what they so often want to hear is how awful liberals are. Careful, fact-based analysis of the issues is fleeting or altogether absent, leaving them defenseless when confronted with informed debate. It’s why we can’t agree on basic issues like climate change and energy production.
There’s an asymmetry here in that this phenomenon isn’t mirrored on the left, at least not at the same scale; indeed, the American right is uniquely egregious when it comes to sharing fake news and falling for misinformation. For those on the left, mainstream media does a commendable job covering conservative commentary, despite some bad apples that traffic in distortion and mislead in other ways. All things considered, I suspect that most of us who follow politics closely have a good sense of what the right-wing media bubble is saying, especially those of us once oriented in that very bubble. But if we take the rather extreme step of cleansing conservatives from our social circles, we lose the opportunity to learn from our disagreement and clarify our differences.
We may possess the utmost confidence in our ability to dispatch the opposition’s arguments. Nevertheless, it can be worthwhile to perform our own ‘peer review’ and test our assumptions in the field. We may find less extreme versions of the click-worthy hot takes favored by social media, or updated arguments deployed in new contexts. Or we might not, but we can only come to this determination through dialogue. Engaging may indeed confirm our suspicions, or it might challenge our stereotypes and give us a clearer picture of the people we rail against on a daily basis.
That the right doesn’t reciprocate this is no excuse to follow their lead. Our ultimate goal, I take it, is better policy, especially for the excluded people whom the left champions. And that requires improving our political discourse, which in turn requires improving people’s rationality. But such fiercely ambitious aims will never come about by resorting to isolationism and pitting everyone not up to our ideological or intellectual standards as an enemy not worth our time and energy. Abandoning attempts to bridge the political divide chipping away at the fabric of American life will only drive us further apart, and make it harder to secure progressive policies.
Whatever ideological circles we run in, whether self-imposed or algorithmically imposed, it can be advantageous to step outside of our regularly scheduled programming and keep an ‘ear to the ground’ so to speak for when the arguments change — and they do change as the Overton window shifts — so that when those arguments arise organically, we are able to rebut them effectively. Again, what matters here isn’t intellectual lucre and personal edification but finding ways to urge social change.
A second, related reason to avoid scissoring out all news and perspectives from across the aisle is that it removes the possibility of discovering common ground where it was seemingly absent before. In recent years, for example, we’ve seen some incremental acquiescence on the part of climate contrarians, who once denied the planet was warming but who now tend to plant their flag beside the question of anthropogenic influence. (This is actually a recurring pattern in the history of science that’s been “fun” to observe in the arena of climate change, but I digress.) We can still prune away the dismissives — the roughly 10% of the population uninterested in meaningful dialogue — while working with people who have demonstrated a responsiveness to evidence, who are interested in genuine conversations, but who are nevertheless saddled with doubt.
If that estimate of malicious actors and bad-faith partisans is accurate, that leaves a lot of room for people who are susceptible to our arguments. A problem with only engaging those on ‘our side’ is that we risk missing out on connecting with people who are open to a change in conviction. There are countless people in this country who don’t follow politics and new developments in science closely if at all. That doesn’t mean they’re not curious about the facts. And if we condition ourselves to write off anyone who doesn’t pass our purity test, we miss out on reaching these individuals, many of whom make it to the polls.
In Sam Harris’ recent podcast with ex-white supremacist Christian Picciolini, Picciolini says that though the folks he speaks with diverge ideologically in many important respects, both sides of the table tend to agree that we want prosperous and healthy lives for ourselves and our families. This can serve as a useful starting point from which to build. We may not get climate deniers to concede that humans are reshaping the earth’s climate, but we can point out that the poorest countries around the world are the most vulnerable to a rapidly warming climate and that we shouldn’t wish the developing consequences on anyone. Empathy and compassion aren’t ‘liberal’ ideals but shared traits to which we can appeal when facts fail.
Interacting with nonsense for extended periods of time can no doubt take its toll, but permanently siloing ourselves in uniform spaces won’t be the best way forward if we actually want to drive positive change in our society. By cutting ourselves off from the opposition permanently, we’ll never know whether our assumptions are off base, whether the arguments have changed, whether our disagreements can be resolved or whether there is room for common ground that can shift policy in a better direction for all of us.
On the other hand, neither is an open door policy where we let absurd and offensive ideas circulate unchallenged. A healthy balance should be struck between querying the database, understanding the perspective of those we vehemently disagree with, disengaging where appropriate, and defending the values we cherish when they are put to the test.
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