Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
The specifics of this latest outrage flareup are less interesting to me than where social media is taking us. It has radically transformed public discourse in a couple ways:
<snip>
* Anxiety over our rapidly changing economic and social landscape has caused people to withdraw into tribes. And we increasingly define ourselves and our tribe by who we're against, rather than shared interests or activities.
So it has come to matter very much to us what hundreds or thousands of strangers think of us, and as a consequence we've become hyper-sensitive to being associated with the Other Tribe. The way we behave, and the language we use ("toxic"), show that we treat people in the Other Tribe as contagious. Like they carry some kind of taint that can be passed on simply by associating with them in any way.
<snip>
So where does that leave us going forward? How much further can this ferocious partisanship, the policing of speech and association, go before it crystalizes into something inimical to democracy?
Maybe we'll grow thicker skins and become inured to outrage culture. Maybe people will stop panicking when 400 of their 10,000 followers are upset by something. Maybe we'll manage to get our heads around how incredibly large our social networks are today, and that we can't let the angriest and least tolerant 5 per cent of people dictate our behaviour.
|
You seem to be starting with the premise that tribalism is a new phenomenon. I think there is sufficient historic and anthropological evidence that tribalism is hard-wired into our evolved humanness. Tribes have existed from the dawn of humanity. The difference we see now is the form that the tribalism takes and the means by which we can invite others into the tribe and communicate within our tribe. It seems to me that we humans always crave an enemy be it a different tribe across the valley, a different race, a different religious group or a different political philosophy. Hell, I think the reason most of us are even here discussing this is because we are part of the Flames tribe and dangnabit we hate the Oilers. Not to get too tangential but one of the positive and most powerful functions of sports teams is to provide a tribe, and in turn, to satisfy our natural need for an enemy.
That said, evolution away from this is very possible but evolution typically requires outside forces (climate, geography, terrain, predators, etc) to act on us over thousands or millions of years. So, I suspect that we're SOL in the short term in this regard.
I don't know what the answer is to the issues you've presented but I believe that tribalism must be factored in. If a common enemy (eg. Russia, Islamism, Nazis, etc.) doesn't organically present itself in a way that we can all (Western Democracies) rally against I fear that the we are headed towards a Left vs. Right conflict which will ultimately lead to a completely different political and social landscape (eg. Gilead from "Handmaids Tale").