Welcome to the start of a new school year!
That's what I would say if I was in school, which I'm still giving some serious thought. But I'm not, so we can move on.
Today I want to talk about what I will continue to refer to as
dreaded politics. I'm not trying to undermine the importance of politics and the civic duty of being politically informed. The title is more of a statement on where social interaction goes when topics under the heading of 'political' get brought up. And that place is approximately into the toilet, due to the Backfire Effect. I'm not going to go over the particulars for you.
The Oatmeal does a particularly good job of that
here.
The point is that because of this, and because of the deeply divided nature of politics, and other issues. It inevitably leads a political conversation to be less of an exchange of facts to establish an agreed statement, but instead to an informational snowball fight, where we chuck our best soundbytes regardless of actual validity or context.
Situational Example: Two young men are at a party. And they strike up a conversation about common ancestry and about the bible. One man,(Lets call him 'Dave'), is a devout Christian and while not taking a completely literal interpretation of the bible, he believes in the idea that there was an Adam and Eve, that were common ancestors of all modern humans. The other, (Lets call him 'Buster'), is a staunch Atheist, and with that, has no truck with what he calls 'Biblical nonsense'. And believes in no sense that there is single common ancestor, believing instead that we grew as a species, but there was no 'Adam and Eve' pair at all. At first the conversation is informative for both sides. They learned things about pair bonding, and migration patterns. It was great until they came up to the core of the discussion:
"There absolutely was no Adam and Eve." says Buster. "Species are large malleable groups that evolve and don't bottleneck to single reproductive pairings"
Dave is a fairly reasonable person. He believes in a sort of Proto-Evolution, and he tempers his Christian beliefs enough to allow for it as a more complex version of 'The Creators Plan'. But between Buster's tone, and making a statement in direct contradiction of the biblical text, Dave officially falls of the 'Reasonable' cliff and starts trying to protect his belief's. And his first volley in this conflict is one of my least favorite: The Cliche Misconception.
If I had to list out the top 10 weapons in the death of discourse, coming in at around #5 would be the use of the 'Cliche Misconception' Which is the use of a fact or set of facts, which sound perfect for your viewpoint, but are either factually accurate, but misleading, or factually inaccurate entirely, having often been wholesale disproven long ago. They nonetheless find their way into the Zeitgeist and come back again and again, robbing people of their ability to rationally discuss any topic.
Some wonderful examples of this in the modern era:
- Vaccines causing Autism
- Eating fat alone makes you fat
- Mother birds abandon chicks who are touched
- Flat Earth
So Dave responds, "Well they had to start somewhere, and animals of different species can't interbreed, so there had to be a single point of origin and speciation." Quoting the common misconception that the defining characteristic of the species classification is that two species cannot reproduce together, which is only about half true*. The defining idea here is that he has already read otherwise, but his brain is selecting the best information to defend with, not necessarily the most accurate. **
And this becomes a stepping stone for both sides that eventually completely obscures the discussed topic, and has both hurling insults. I'll summarize for the sake of time:
"You're in a cult for a murderous imaginary friend!"
"You think we evolved from monkeys!"
And now paraphrasing(for even BETTER time savings):
"You now represent the opposite of everything I find to be Good"
"(repeat)"
And hopefully the conversation ends when their partners take away their wine and scold them for 'Making a scene'
The point here, and the question I am always asking, both of my own interactions, and of others is: How do we stop this cycle? How do we have a conversation about topics like this without letting our emotions turn it into a verbal(or physical) fight. I don't have the answer, but I came up with some guidelines, which are kind of outlined by the Oatmeal comic above, but I'll make my own statement.
- Am I disagreeing with the statement or with the person? (Has this debate already gotten personal?). This usually requires backing up the discussion with the other person and getting it back on track if possible.
- Don't be too neutral. Utilitarianism is a particularly cold line of thought organization built around efficiency and is often the tagline of people who believe that the nature of the universe is to be ordered and fair, therefore less regulation of systems*** will always cause them to be more balanced. This is kind of true in a physics sense(Things become more chaotic, but more evenly balanced), but not in sense that is appropriate to life and consciousness****. Life is not efficient, and in fact struggles under too much efficiency because as organisms, we need energy to use on enjoying the fruits of our labor. A viewpoint predicated on the idea that people should be able to keep living already has a non neutral stance because it implies that we should expend at least a minimum effort towards keeping others alive. If your argument reduces someone to a number to their detriment, or depends on not acknowledging their needs as humans*****, then re-check that you're even on the right side.
- If you can't stop yourself from getting heated and personal, at least find the right venue and don't ruin everyone's day unless its really important to do so.******
Will -
Editors Notes:
-You probably notice that editors notes and footnotes are interchangeable. That's because I go through the post and add context to some of the more unclear, or, frankly, dull moments. I'm lucky Will remembers punctuation.
*I spent 2 hours looking up a cohesive definition of species, but there just isn't one. The definition changes dramatically, depending on which subset of biology or zoology(or taxonomy) is doing the defining. The most commonly accepted definition in terms of biology and evolution is a stage at which two groups cannot produce viable offspring. So making a mule still counts as inter-species erotica.
** The weirdest part about this fictional argument is that they are both sort of right. We can genetically trace our lineage to a mitochondrial x chromosome ancestor and an originating y chromosome ancestor. However, note two things:
- Mitochondrial Eve actually changes to someone else as certain sub lineages of humans die off, meaning that the common x chromosome ancestor of all humans becomes someone more recent.
- The currently accepted Mitochondrial Eve died an estimated 50,000 years before Chromosomal 'Adam' was born, they likely didn't live on the same continent, and he is her distant grandson. Take that Fry.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve (Yes its a Wikipedia article, but the bibliography section is longer than this whole blog post. We're ok)
*** Fun fact: There are two groups who most closely align with the Utilitarian ideals(though often
highly distorted for personal gain): Libertarians, and Nazis. Just putting that out there. I'm not saying that Utilitarianism is inherently bad, but it is a malleable enough concept to be twisted to some super shitty ideologies.
**** I have had the 'Deregulation will fix everything' argument with so many people I may just distill it down to asking them to get into a room with a boiling pressure cooker and saying 'Don't worry, I removed the pressure regulation valve!'
***** "Food? If you needed food you shouldn't be starving in the first place. Thinking ahead is all you need to do to avoid these situations."
****** I'm saving Will from himself and the collective wrath of the internet by saying that visibility for vocalizing issues is important. Kneel during the game, make people understand that bad things are happening; just don't angrily knock over a bottle of Rose' because 'Jerry is a shill who doesn't understand the regulatory importance of the capitol gains tax.' We want to be invited back over.
