Do you mean Atheism+/Atheism Plus? (For those unfamiliar, the “atheist movement” split up when one side said atheism was simply the belief that there was no god/gods and the other side reviled the “dictionary atheists” and wanted atheism and atheists to become a movement for Social Justice causes. The Atheism+ side also fell into eating its own.)
Yeah, though the whole thing started earlier and spilled over into various adjacent communities like the broader “skeptics” movement and James Randi’s conferences (no surprise since it was a lot of the same people involved). There was a particular elevator ride incident that really seemed to touch things off, but I suspect things had been brewing earlier.
So I bowed out at about that time, because (although I’m not sure I’d have articulated it that way at the time), it was brewing into a purity spiral. I didn’t want anything to do with the social justice stuff, but I also didn’t want anything to do with the opposition to it. So I guess it was effective in filtering out moderate views.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with combining social justice with skepticism. But there’s a particular strain of social justice that is in direct opposition to skepticism. It’s what the author above calls Social Justice Fundamentalism. Some just call it “woke”, though that word is so loaded now to be meaningless. At any rate, it happens when certain broad ideas that back a movement become axiomatic. It’s one thing to say that patriarchy is a problem and should be rooted out whenever possible. But it’s deeply anti-scientific and anti-skeptical to say that patriarchy explains everything; that it is present in all interactions between men and women; that “western” science is actually patriarchal science; and so on.
But how to detect that transition? It must start occurring before it actually occurs. Moderates that don’t take the fundamentalist position must be driven away before the movement actually gets there. I don’t have any answers for why, except that maybe some of us sense something amiss in advance, and that this contributes to the problem.
But right now the extremists always win. They can shout louder and longer than the moderates, “care more.” We’re no longer a nation of joiners, many people don’t join anything ever, so no one has the back of the moderate voice. So each voice in the cacophony of voices is pitched to an extreme, partisan level.
It’s kind of the opposite of the 1950s, where everybody joined groups perhaps in fear of being left out. The 1950s had a rep for being very conformist, but there was probably a good deal of moderation there, a real push to smooth out extremes and rough edges. So the moderates had enough energy to speak more or less as one and win the day. That’s not happening now.
But I’m understanding better why the 1950s were what they were.
Yeah, though this kind of thing happens even in places where moderates are already there, like businesses and universities. Why do the moderates not speak up even then?
Well, if someone is singled out for punishment (being fired, social stigma, etc.), then every moderate faces the decision of speaking up or not. If enough speak up at once, they can fight back against the extremists. But what if you speak up and no one else joins? Then you’ll likely face the same punishment as the original person. Unless you can be really sure about a significant number joining in, it’s a dangerous move.
This can be ameliorated to some degree with things like voting by secret ballot. But extremists tend to tear down these mechanisms for obvious reasons.
I have heard that psychologists of the Adlerian school consider our polarized politics to be an outgrowth of smaller families - in their theory of birth order, middle children tend to be those who instinctively seek compromise as opposed to first/onlys or youngests. Hence, as family sizes shrink, the number of compromisers in the population plummets, and energy and power moves toward the poles on various issues.
MIght be a just-so story to me, but there might be some truth to it.
That’s pretty close - except that in my state ( NY - I think you are here , too) there are some additional nuances.
Bail in NY was never supposed to have anything to do with danger or the likelihood of more offenses being committed while awaiting trial. It was strictly meant to ensure that people returned to court . For as long as I can remember, judges ignored that and set bail for other reasons. Which of course resulted in people sometimes being jailed awaiting trial longer than the potential sentence would have been. So we got bail reform in 2019 and it’s been reformed a little every year since then. Because what seems to have happened is that the calculus for certain crimes seems to have changed or maybe it’s just that the people committing them aren’t incarcerated. So now judges can set cash bail for repeat felony offenders due to the reform - but someone who gets arrested for shoplifting 3X a week can’t have cash bail set.
A middle ground would be between the people who want it to go back to the old way and those who want to get rid of cash bail altogether. So maybe allow cash bail for those who aren’t likely to show up for court and for the person who has been arrested 42 times for misdemeanor shoplifting and the one who has been arrested multiple times for misdemeanor assault and set non-monetary conditions for the first time shoplifter ( like reporting to probation while the case is pending)
But if I say that, even if it’s not just for the sake of being in the middle , everyone will hate me.
Both of those positions would be the pro-human-rights position. They aren’t what I normally think of as middle ground positions. They’re just the normal default positions of those who are pro-human-rights, until and unless they learn more.
I can’t say I’ve seen a general trend of people getting upset at someone taking the position you described.
What happens is that someone says something that is worse than they realize, but then get offended because other people get offended. They can’t just listen to what the offended person says and try to learn from it. Or, at the very least, realize you don’t understand that particular issue and not harp on it.
I keep pointing out that some level of extremism just naturally arises if you accept the underlying premises. You can’t agree with the principles for why bigotry is wrong, and then make exceptions.
That’s the type “middle ground” I see being attacked. Not saying “I don’t understand, but I will stand up for your right to be who you are, when I can.”
Well, that and the people who flip out at other people being offended. Then the gloves tend to come off. It becomes dueling offenses.
Certainly it’s not the kind of middle ground that says ‘hey both sides/extremes are kind of ok’, but it is the kind of middle ground that will often be scorned by both extremes as siding with their respective oppositions.
You can occupy, say, the 90-95% space on some spectrum and still be denounced as an extremist by everyone. By the people in the 0-50% range for obvious reasons, but to an even greater degree by those in the 99-100% range. In some ways you’re worse than the actual opposition, because your disagreement on small points fractures the movement from the inside.
Or rather, is thought to by those that desire total conformity. Communities which celebrate thoughtful disagreement (and gain strength from it) don’t have this problem, but they are harder to come by.
Because people needs followers not leaders is why everything is polarized these days.
Reductionism is a factor in all of this. It is part of human nature to seek a simplified understanding of a phenomenon, but social media provides a powerful flux for that; when you reduce a complex, nuanced issue down to a post or a reel or a tweet or One Simple Weird Trick, nuance is inevitably lost - and because a lot of social media has a feedback mechanism that favours attention, the more attention-grabbing pieces (in which the more extreme views are disproportionately represented) tend to be the ones that float to the top.
And as the thread title rightly observes, it’s everything - not only politics, race, gender, social equality, but everything; your allegiance is demanded everywhere: you are either using the smartphone that cool people use, or the other one, that idiots use; a foodstuff has to either be something you should eat every day, or something you should NEVER eat, and so on.
This book looks really thought-provoking – thanks for the recommendation!
Humans are lazy social animals and polarization happens in part from the search function feedback loop. You can watch whatever you like on many devices and those companies are incentivized to get eyeballs on screens watching ANYTHING and so what happens is a loop where a person is fed things similar to what they’ve already seen, not what is true or what people around them believe. What happens is a sort of localized artificial popular culture.
You might click on a link one time about florescent racoons. If you see loads of videos about florescent racoons on your feed you don’t even need to watch them to be more likely to get additional florescent racoon content in the future and this person is far more likely to believe florescent racoons are a real threat.
I cannot be the only adult with a Boomer parent who has said, “Have you seen that funny video on YouTube?”
To be fair, one’s position on EVs is not related in any way to injustice or oppression, we can relax a little bit.
LGBTQ rights, Racism (inclusive of things like cash bail, police violence or immigration) do involve injustice and oppression, and taking the middle ground is just ceding the position to those who seek to harm people with no power.
I think they’ve always been there, but they just never had the platform to communicate with one another and reinforce each other, and political parties didn’t tend to pander to them quite as directly as they do now. That was the province of local populist demagogues like Huey Long, not respected national political parties.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about- it feels like as a rabid pro-vaccination person, that I’m somehow supposed to also subscribe to a whole slate of other beliefs as well, as if I’ve picked my team, so to speak. And the converse is true for people who are on the other side of things- they may be pro-vaccine, but woe to them if they say that out loud, because it’s not part of the ‘package’.
I mean, I personally fall more conservative than liberal on gun control- I don’t want bans or forfeiture of legally owned weapons or sales restrictions based on type, but I’m all for for licensing gun owners complete with comprehensive and mandatory background checks on relicensing, etc… That makes me something of a middle-of-the-road person. But all my liberal friends are very much the “guns are evil!” types, and all my conservative friends think that the design of the AR-15 was divinely inspired much like the books of the Gospel. Having a practical middle of the road opinion doesn’t really cut it with either side, and I feel some pressure to move one way or the other.
The above is a good example of a pattern I see among people complaining “things are getting too darned polarized”: all the examples are of negative left polarization.
Why is it that the right-wing polarization doesn’t warrant a complaint from you, but mild disapproval from the left wing does?
The usual pattern is that people get so tired of being unloved by the left that they declare they’ve been “left behind” and rush into the arms of the right wing. They wanted to be seen as good people, but were always going to abandon it the moment they were asked to reconsider any belief.
The positions on trans rights are that people should have the freedom to exist as they choose (absent any harm to others), or they don’t have that freedom. Believing there is a “middle way” is not a moderate position here.
Not all of your fellow board members, though. I’m certainly well on the liberal side. I’d favor some sales restrictions based on type if sensibly written; I’m all for licensing, background checks, red-flag laws, and for that matter required gun safety courses; but I’m certainly opposed to bans, to forfeiture of legally owned weapons, and to making it unreasonably hard for reasonable people to legally own them. My neighbors hunt my property with my permission – and the youngest hunter this year was 12; with her youth hunting permit and her very skilled father right with her.
I think there are a whole lot of people with mixed opinions – but many of them may not realize how many there are, because they don’t know whether the person they’re talking to is safe to acknowledge mixed opinions to.
Mostly because the right is so far out there, that I generally don’t even interact with them most of the time.
Basically I’m someone who used to be on the liberal side of the Republican position a couple of decades ago, but can’t even come close to stomaching the religious nuttery, anti-science/ignorance, and hatefulness that they’ve been cultivating. And yes, the idea that it’s a package deal; you can’t be a tolerant, pro-science who’s a small-c conservative anymore - you have to be a overtly religious, socially backward, pro-cops, anti-science, and generally hostile to anyone save white people type, or you’re looked at in those circles as suspect.
So now that I’m in more liberal circles, it seems like it’s expected to be an all-or-nothing sort of thing as well, and I don’t like that either. And since it seems like people are self-selecting into communities and social networks (not the computer kind) by their social/political views, it feels a lot like I’m being pushed to pick a side, as it were.
If you look back at the 1950s to today, there were far more people that were members of the parties themselves than there are today. A lot of that was traditionalism. You probably joined a party like you joined a fraternity, you had some community or family connection, knew someone, that was your party. But that tended to moderate the parties themselves, because you had a better cross section of people in each party.
Also, at that point the individual representatives actually represented their districts, and tried to do things to benefit their districts. Instead of doing jack for their own districts and spending their entire time in office campaigning.
Now people join the parties in an attempt at ideological fit. It’s more of a basket of religious beliefs and not all particularly connected ones at this point. What abortion and low taxes have to do with each other I have no idea. Plus, with everyone in lockstep, it sets the stage for someone like Trump who is even more of a “character” than the rest of them and will just do what he wants instead of actually being a representative of, you know, the people. We’re a country of 300 million people and if Trump’s elected we will be in league with Russia because Trump is buds with Putin. Insanity. Trump’s a “businessman”, we’re supposed to run the country like a business, except that no business actually is run that way.
The structure of our democracy and our political parties is seriously outmoded and obsolete. That’s part of the problem.
Most of it is just how people consume news and opinion these days.
“Watch idiot from the other side of the political divide get DESTROYED” is great for clicks.
And it’s easier to build an entertaining opinion show if it’s just reactionary and pandering. Doing actual journalism / research, and then making a show people want to watch, even when it includes uncomfortable facts is much harder.
And obviously in the US you have MAGA…a huge political movement intrinsically based on division and hate.