The current state of the country and intellectual conversation depresses me in a way that it never has before. You have to understand: I'm never happy with the state of the country. That's the inevitable fate of holding an ideological position that rarely gets any traction; I'm a classical liberal who'd like government to be dramatically smaller than it is now.
But the world today feels different. Everything feels angrier. I think of Yeats' masterpiece, The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
I sense a thinness to the veneer of civilization. The fabric of society seems awfully frayed. The main way I've been dealing with this feeling of despair is to stop paying close attention. I don't know what depresses me more--the stupidities and dishonesty and tolerance of darkness that come out of the president's mouth or the response from those that oppose him.
Given that I don't like the president, you'd think I find the response of his enemies inspiring or important. But the responses scare me too--the naked hatred of Trump or anyone who supports or likes him. And it goes way beyond Trump and politics. The same level of vitriol and anger and unreason is happening on college campuses and at the dinner table when families gather to talk about the hot-button issues of the day. Everything seems magnified.
It feels as if we're in a very dangerous moment. Not because I think that Donald Trump is going to declare himself emperor or that we are going to see riots in the streets until he's impeached. I think we're in a dangerous moment because of what we've learned from the response
to the Trump candidacy and presidency. I feel as if a giant flat rock has been lifted up, and what is suddenly made visible crawling around underneath has lots of legs and plenty of venom.
I'm not naive. I know there's a lot of hatred in the human heart. It's nothing new. But suddenly in America there's a willingness to vocalize that hatred and to act on it. The only parallel in my lifetime is the 1960s, but once the Vietnam war ended things appeared to settle down. I'm not sure the divisions and lack of respect we're seeing now are going to fade away.
A part of me wants to exit the public square and take up the flute, or French, or football. But the serious part of me thinks that standing idly by is the wrong thing to do. Running away, while appealing, is the wrong thing to do. But what is the right thing to do? To figure that out, we have to have some diagnosis of the disease we're trying to cure. At the end I'll suggest some steps individuals might take to improve matters.
The underlying problem is very old. Most of us know very little. The world is a complex place and it's hard to know what is going on. So we grope around in the dark trying to make sense of what is happening and what explains what we observe. We manage to convince ourselves that we are seeking the truth and we have found it. Trump is evil, or Hillary is evil. Black people are the victims of a conspiracy by white people to oppress them, or white people are being marginalized as their majority status dwindles. The country is on the wrong track. (Everyone believes this one). And subtlety is not our strong suit as human beings. We like simple stories without too much nuance.
So we manage to convince ourselves that the evidence speaks so loudly, so emphatically, that we have no choice but to declare our allegiance to a particular tribe as a result of that evidence. The red tribe. Or the blue one. Or the white one. Or the black one. It rarely crosses our minds to notice that causation is probably going the opposite direction--the tribe we are in determines the evidence we notice and accept.
This is also very old. What is new is the confidence people have in the righteousness of their tribe. Certainly some of this is due to the echo chambers we frequently inhabit on the Internet. We tend to visit websites and follow people on Twitter and Facebook who think the way we do and reinforce the narratives we tell ourselves.
The media is part of the problem. Many first-rate journalists at first-rate publications have decided Trump is dangerous and a liar, and they write about it openly on Twitter. They mock him in a way they didn't mock previous presidents who they didn't particularly like. They may be right about the dangers posed by a Trump presidency. But their stance violates long-standing norms of their profession and amplifies the feelings of Trump supporters that they are under attack from mainstream American culture.
I'm not saying the press shouldn't fact-check the president or point out his inconsistencies. But when it's done with disdain, disrespect, and dismissal, it feeds Trump's narrative that he's an embattled victim and amplifies the resentment of his supporters who feel marginalized by the mainstream culture.
Jordan Peterson, a psychologist from the University of Toronto, has pointed out that there's a destructive positive feedback loop operating these days--my outrage doesn't convince you to rethink your position; it only encourages you to ratchet up your own. He is on to something. If you criticize my tribe, then I feel obligated to see your criticism and raise you one. Or two. My tribe? Perfect. Your tribe? Evil.
For reasons I don't fully understand, deviationism from the tribal party line is increasingly unacceptable. The extreme version of this is so-called intersectionality: If you're a feminist, you're told you also have to oppose Zionism. These kinds of litmus tests may be useful for political power. They aren't good for nuance or independent thinking. But increasingly it seems people are uncomfortable failing these tests of ideological purity. They don't want to lose their membership in the right tribe, the tribe that gives them a sense of identity.
The result is an unjustified confidence in one's own side of the debate, whatever that debate is. Consider religion. I live a religious life as a Jew and have for about 30 years. Being a religious Jew or Christian in the academy was once merely a novelty. Now it's a badge of shame. There's a hostility to religion that goes beyond non-belief. People write me asking how I can be religious given that I'm so smart. Not sure there is a more back-handed compliment than that. I wonder if many of those who are surprised or outraged at my leading a religious life could begin to explain why it appeals to me. It is simply unimaginable to them that an educated person could be religious.
This lack of imagination is a common problem across most issues. People don't just disagree with each other. They can't imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They're not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise.
This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of. We all have some understanding of the dangers of self-righteousness. The left can point to the religious crusader who murders innocents in God's name. The right can point to the millions murdered by Communists convinced they could remake humankind and bring heaven on earth. But somehow we think the problems are all on the other side.
One answer comes from Jordan Peterson, who I mentioned above. Here is how I would summarize what he has been suggesting: You want to improve the world? Improve yourself. Read history and understand the dangers of self-righteousness. Read literature and understand the human condition. Know who you are and the strengths and weaknesses of being a human being. Learn the limitations of reason. Be an exemplar of personal virtue.
This is good advice. It's good for you. But it's also good for the world even if you believe it oversells the possibility of individual action to ripple outward.
Unconvinced? Sure. I don't blame you. It's pretty unfashionable these days. So here are a few practical things I'd suggest for how to behave on Twitter, Facebook, and at social gatherings that are threatening to end in shouting matches or worse.
When the world is increasingly uncivilized, take a step toward civility.
Don't be part of the positive feedback problem. When someone yells at you on the Internet or in an email or across the dinner table, turn the volume down rather than up. Don't respond in kind to the troll. Stay calm. It's not as much fun as yelling or humiliating your opponent with a clever insult, but that takes a toll on you, and it's bad for the state of debate. And you might actually change someone's mind.
Be humble. Shakespeare had it right: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You're inevitably a cherry-picker, ignoring the facts and evidence that might challenge the certainty of your views. The world's a complex place. Truth is elusive. Don't be so confident. You shouldn't be.
Imagine the possibility not just that you are wrong, but that the person you disagree with could be right. Try to imagine the best version of their views and not the straw man your side is constantly portraying. Imagine that it's possible that there is some virtue on the other side. We are all human beings, flawed, a mix of good and bad.
Maybe I am over-reacting to the state of things. But it doesn't matter. The virtues of humility and decency are timeless. They are out of fashion. Through our actions, maybe they can be fashionable once again.
Russ Roberts is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the host of the weekly podcast EconTalk. His most recent book is How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Happiness and Human Nature. A longer version of this essay first appeared at his site at Medium.com.
Editorial on 09/24/2017