By DOUG SHAVER
August 27, 2020
Much has been said over the past several years about everyone's tendency to stay within their tribal bubbles, listening to no one, be it news sources or social media groups, except those that tell us nothing but whatever reinforces our existing ideological commitments. Right-wingers go only to right-wing websites, progressives go only to progressive websites, and so on down the line for racists, sexists, what-have-you.
We all do have this tendency, because we are tribal by nature. It's part of our evolutionary heritage. Our ancestors, with exceptions too rare to make a difference, would not have survived without it. But evolution has also given us the ability to discern situations in which it is in our best interest to reconsider our tribal loyalties. "My tribe, right or wrong" is usually a good survival strategy, but sometimes it isn't, and we need to alert for the exceptions.
Being alert for the exceptions means, among other things, being willing to question what our tribe tells us about the other tribes. And the best way to do that is to listen, with good faith, to what the other tribes have to say about themselves. John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, gave several reasons for doing this. His arguments did not involve survival as such, but only personal intellectual integrity. The survival of our society, though, depends on enough of its members, some critical mass, having enough intellectual integrity to make reality-based decisions. Even during a literal war, victory requires knowing your enemy—which means knowing the truth about your enemy, even when it flatly contradicts everything your side has been telling you and the rest of the world about your enemy.
It's not so different during a metaphorical war, though it can get a little more complicated. Our last civil war might have ended much sooner, and consequently with much less battlefield carnage, if McClellan had had more reliable information about Confederate troop strengths. And, nobody who tried to get that information—or who actually had it and tried to give it to McClellan—would have been accused of disloyalty to the Union or of harboring Confederate sympathies. During the present conflict, though, anyone who says, "Actually, that isn't what those people are trying to do" gets called a traitor.
McClellan's would-be benefactor at least had the theoretical option of going to wherever the Confederate forces were located and actually counting how many soldiers there were. The only current analogue, we're supposed to think, would be like a Union spy going into some Confederate camp and asking the commanding officer, "Sir, could I trouble you to tell me how many troops you have and how you're planning to deploy them?" The modern spy would not have to worry about getting shot, but he could certainly expect to be lied to.
Or so we're told. As in, "Those people are racists, and anything they say to the contrary is a lie." And if the spy says, "I don't think so," the response is, "If you believe them, then you must be one of them."
At which point the spy analogy gets so weak as to be practically useless. Anybody from one tribe can learn almost anything about another tribe without being surreptitious. (That is, unless somebody's conspiracy theory is true, but we don't have time for that.) But the issue of honesty is still there. How much of what the other side says about itself can we believe?
I made some remarks in my last essay about maintaining the distinction between errors and lies. I have spent a lot of my adult life studying religious, political, and philosophical controversies of many kinds. So far as I have been able to discover, no tribe within any of those categories always speaks truthfully. All are mistaken at least occasionally. But to a first approximation, all of them believe everything they say. And that means they are not lying—by the only useful definition of "lying."
I'm not claiming to be non-tribal myself. There are some tribes I identify with, but I don't think any of them is infallible. They're all composed of ordinary people, and no person is infallible. Not even me. I know I'm wrong about some things. I just don't know which things, because if I did know, then I wouldn't believe them any more and I would no longer be wrong about them. That is a boat that we're all in and cannot get out of.
One thing I could be, and hope I am, wrong about is the severity of our current conflict. I remember the riots of the 1960s, and they were worse, in terms of both human casualties and property damage, than what has happened so far. However, the negative consequences are still with us, and any compensatory good consequences were either negligible or nonexistent. Indeed, just as Bleeding Kansas was arguably the real beginning of the first American Civil War, our current war might have begun with the 60s riots. The ideological warfare that fueled them has only gotten more intense, and the voices of reason that could dampen it seem both fewer and less influential, especially within the dominant mass media.
Some of the larger factions among the current belligerents claim to be committed to a kind of pacifism. In any dispute, they say, negotiation is always to be preferred over violence. And so it is, in a way. If someone is threatening me with a lethal weapon, I would prefer to talk my way out of the situation than to use whatever lethal weapon I might happen to have available. Real life, however, just will not always accommodate itself to our preferences. In the real world, there are plenty of thugs who, believing they have the means of forcing, with threats of violence, compliance with any demands they make, will not negotiate with their adversaries.
And in the modern world, the thugs don't have to threaten physical violence. Those in positions of corporate or political power can threaten subordinates with unemployment and even future unemployability. And there are others who, while not within a corporate or political hierarchy, have ways of threatening those who do have such positions with nasty consequences. In the current social climate, an accusation of certain offenses, regardless of actual guilt, is as damaging to one's reputation as a courtroom conviction, and few people are both wealthy enough and courageous enough live well with a bad reputation.
I get it that this does not happen as often as some conservatives on YouTube would have their listeners think it does. Very well. Not all progressives are witch-hunters. I'm prepared to attribute as much relevance to that observation as progressives will attribute to the observation that not all conservatives are patriarchal rape apologists or the observation that not all cops are racist pigs.
Not that it matters to anyone what I think is relevant. I am in no position of any power. I am a wage slave at the bottom of my employer's corporate ladder and virtually no prospect of promotion. Being a bit of a recluse, I have practically no social life, and this website attracts almost no traffic. I'm keeping this journal because I'm a writer, and writers have to write, and the apparent imminent demise of our republic is what happens to be on my mind these days.
Next: More on political semantics
(This page last updated on August 27, 2020.)