Introduction
A philosophical view that's long been close to my heart is that every person is of value. Perhaps it's not always the same degree of value; that is, it could very well be that certain factors, such as our actions, bear on the extent of our value as persons. Nevertheless, I like to think that, at the core of each person, there lies something worthy of at least some degree of respect, reverence, compassionate regard, willingness to befriend and to learn from. In each of us there is both good and bad, but no matter how far-reaching the bad may be in a given case, it could never blot out the glimmer of goodness entirely.
More and more, however, especially around elections, this has become a lonely view. Rather than expressions of universal kinship or value, one more often sees people demonizing vast swathes of their country—all of those who differ in their orientation to hotly contested political disputes—as beneath contempt. The unblinking, bloodshot outrage of whichever side loses in a given election appears to be matched only by the maniacal glee that many on the winning side take in beholding the other's indignant misery.1 Those who can craft the most contemptuous insults or fling the most serrated words at the other side are cheered on by the extremes of their own—the spiral of mutual fear, distrust, and revulsion growing deeper all the while.
Such political polarization raises many questions worth serious thought. Here I'll focus on the following: In light of the apparent increase in polarization over the years, is there an endpoint? What happens to the prospect of reasoned dialogue about contentious issues if polarization gets maxed out? And if indeed that happens, is there a way of returning to a less polarized environment?
I'm writing about this in large part because I feel that the answers to these questions are unsettling. I also believe, though, that they reveal something new and important about the value of philosophy, a point I'll turn to near the end.
Descent into irreconcilability
Consider the way reasoned discussion works when two persons disagree: They'll notice that they differ about some conclusion, and then one person or the other (or both) will put forth an argument for their preferred view or against the other's. Such an argument will aim to have, and often will succeed in having, premises that the other person accepts. The two will then discuss whether the premises in fact support the argument's conclusion.
To illustrate, here's a toy example of how two persons might begin a discussion of affirmative action:
"I think that affirmative action is wrong. It's unfair for job applications and college admissions to advantage or disadvantage applicants on the basis of demographic features, such as race and gender."
"It sounds as if we agree that it's important for job applications and college admissions to be fair. However, I think that the importance of fairness is exactly why affirmative action is necessary. Given the discrimination and unconscious biases that are all too present in our society, some applicants to colleges and jobs will have an easier time than others, and for reasons entirely out of their control, such as their race or gender. It's in this context that affirmative action is needed to level the playing field."
In such discussions, sometimes one person will challenge one or more of an argument's premises. (For example, if the above conversation were to continue, the first person might challenge the claims that discrimination and unconscious biases are widespread or that affirmative action is [or would be] an effective way of addressing such discrimination and biases.) When a premise is challenged in this manner, the person who put forth the premise might respond by attempting to marshal evidence for it—evidence that could itself be formulated as the premise(s) of a new argument, an argument whose conclusion is simply the premise from before, the one that's been contested.
While the participants in such a discussion might not end up agreeing on the conclusion any more than when they started, what seems clear is that having a reasoned discussion at all depends on having at least some agreement, somewhere—agreement that could, in principle, inform the premises of an argument presented to the other side.
But what if the participants in such a discussion can't find agreement about any substantive premises? What if they only encounter more disagreement at every step of the way? What if, in the example above, the two find themselves disagreeing not just about whether affirmative action is ultimately justified, but about whether it matters for college admissions and job applications to be fair, to what extent discrimination and unconscious biases exist, or even what methods we can use to determine the answers to such questions?
It's here that I believe we come face to face with the real specter that polarization presents: that someday, each side to major political and moral disputes will be so alienated from the other that reasoned debate and reconciliation will become no longer possible; more specifically, any premise that one side might appeal to as support for its position will be automatically rejected by the other—indeed, will be seen by the other as yet further confirmation of derangement and depravity.
Various examples suggest themselves. To take one, imagine a dispute about abortion. In a less polarized environment, the two discussants might view one another as having good-faith differences of opinion—differences that could very well be resolvable, at least in principle—about matters like when life begins or what our duties are to entities whose degree of consciousness is unclear. Crank up the polarization enough, though, and the discussion, if it's even worthy any longer of the name, looks very different. One side, in arguing against abortion, might appeal to religious reasons, only to be met with the charge that religion itself is a millennia-long enterprise in rationalizing the oppression of women, and that the speaker's own religious convictions are simply further proof that he's a vile misogynist. The person saying this might then claim that preserving the legality of abortion is necessary to respect women's bodily autonomy—only to be met, in turn, with the charge that the autonomy to kill one's own children is no autonomy at all, and that she is an apologist for murder. Were the two to continue arguing, they would find, in response to every new point brought up, only further recriminations and outrage. To each side, the other's conclusion seems so heinous that it infects any premise that could possibly be used to argue for it. The result is a breakdown in reasoned dialogue and the near certainty of devolving into a shouting match instead.
To arrive at such perfectly walled-off worldviews—impervious to challenge, hermetically sealed against any prospect of serious engagement with the other side—is no small feat. It requires achieving maximum coherence among each side's respective set of beliefs, as any inconsistency would be a crack in the armor, a weakness into which the other side might drive a wedge. And, because people are imperfect reasoners—reasoners who have trouble realizing the full set of implications of their foundational beliefs and commitments, and who, thus, often or typically neglect to work out their views accordingly—inconsistency has hitherto been, to some degree, present in the thinking of just about everyone. Such inconsistency has, perhaps ironically, often facilitated productive engagement between conflicting worldviews. (To one with inconsistent beliefs, after all, having the inconsistency brought to mind can be an occasion to reflect on which of one's relevant beliefs might be mistaken, as well as whether an alternative worldview might, at least in the relevant respects, be more rational.) And yet, however intractable it might be for humans on their own to iron out all the inconsistencies in their views, there's another player, soon to arrive on the scene (if not already here in the requisite fullness), who would plausibly have an easier time of it: AI. AI could be used to work out, with superhuman comprehensiveness and precision, sets of beliefs that are maximally coherent, maximally protected against any challenge from outside, as well as to calculate the most effective memes for inculcating such sets of beliefs among vast swathes of the populace. Should polarization ever be maxed out, it will likely be, in no small part, due to the use of AI in this way.2
Irreconcilability realized
Were the spiral into maximal polarization complete, many further changes to society would follow (although, as will become clear in a moment, the direction of causality would ultimately go both ways). Following are what strike me as some of the most important such changes.
In a maximally polarized environment, there would no longer be any recognition of expert consensus, nor even any recognition of someone's simply, in a politically neutral way, being an expert on something. Instead, the only recognition of expertise would be for whichever experts happen to align with one's own political tribe. Any allegedly expert opinion that contradicts one's own political orthodoxy would be reflexively dismissed as a product of untrammeled bias and ideological capture. (And, given the hyper-polarized environment, such a charge would in many or most cases, perversely, have a certain plausibility.)3
Going hand in hand with the breakdown of trust in (general, politically unvalenced) expertise would be a persistent inability of those on competing sides to agree even on basic facts. How many unarmed black men were killed by police in a given year? How effective are vaccines at preventing the relevant illnesses? How much income do women earn relative to men when various factors are accounted for, such as job type, hours worked, and so on? To what extent is immigration linked with an increase in crime? Did certain luridly reported crimes, such as roving immigrants' stealing and eating people's pets, in fact happen? To what extent is climate change occurring, and, insofar as it is, to what extent are human activities causing it? In all such controversies, what we'd find would go well beyond the familiar bias of being more likely to agree with a news report if it reinforces one's own beliefs and into the territory of outright refusing to believe any report, no matter how well documented, that in any way challenges one's beliefs.
This inability to agree would likewise extend to how each side views rhetorical clashes with the other. Of any debate between experts, politicians, public intellectuals, and so on—insofar as there's even anything left worthy of the name "debate"—each side will have radically diverging perceptions, coming away thinking that its person dominated the other. (For me, such a prospect calls to mind one of the most alienating kinds of phenomena I've seen in discourse, namely cases of someone's more or less shouting an opponent down, not letting him get a word in, spewing sheer vitriol rather than arguments—and then to see many in the audience respond with applause and cheers, satisfied in the conviction that the shouter was the one who won the debate.4)
In such an environment, any concession to the other side would be seen as a betrayal of one's own, an unacceptable turning of one's back on something of civilizational importance—an importance all controversial issues would be seen to hold. The question "What is the truth of the matter?" would be, at most, an afterthought; the primary question driving people's thoughts and actions would be "Does this help my side?" (Or, perhaps better yet: "Does it hurt and enrage the other?") Motivated in this way, each side would see no rhetorical or argumentative tactics—no extremes of misinformation or propaganda—as off-limits. All the familiar rationalizations would be embraced in full-heartedness: "It's okay when we do it, since we're the good guys, the ones doing it for the side of justice"; "The other side's already doing it"; "We tried taking the high road before, and look how that didn't get us anywhere. We must fight fire with fire."
A further upshot of such hyper-polarization: Living neutrally, or even simply maintaining an appearance of neutrality, would no longer be possible. Each side's mentality would be "If you're not with us, you're against us." Purity tests and tribal markers would become more pervasive, more pronounced, as no one would be willing to tolerate uncertainty about where someone stands—be that person a neighbor, a coworker, a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a friend.
And so, in time, the politicization of ordinary life, ordinary things, would become all-consuming. Our speech, mannerisms, fashion, jobs, cars, social media sites we use, movies we watch, stores we buy from, video games we play, books we read, schools we send our kids to, and beyond—all would, in some way or another, be subsumed into a scheme of tribal signaling that every person must heed, on pain of ostracism from her preferred group—for a sufficiently severe or unatoned-for misstep into the other tribe's signals would be seen as an intolerable provocation.
Indeed, given the non-negotiable importance of tribal purity, perhaps the most intense rage of each side would ultimately be for those who, while having been part of the ingroup, are one day judged to be insufficiently committed to the group's orthodoxy, or, worse yet, to be flat-out heretics. With all the frothing fervor of Puritans trying to root out witches and secret sin, each side would find itself relentlessly marked by internecine shaming and disputes.5
The most apt analogy I can draw for the whole intellectual and cultural climate being described here, and particularly for the conflicting sets of beliefs involved, is that of two tight chess formations, formations in which each piece is guarded by some other piece—and in which, further, each piece is given the importance of the king piece, so that no piece can venture out and put itself in check. The two sides thus find themselves locked in a grinding stalemate.
Were society truly to find itself in such a stalemate, then I fear that we would find ourselves past an intellectual point of no return: a point at which reasoned discussion between conflicting sides will have become impossible. As with the apocalypse or the heat death of the universe, there would be no plausible prospects for going back. And this is why I see a descent into hyper-polarization as one of the main threats to our future.
Some might wonder whether there could, in such an event, still be hope for a return to saner times. If there were any hope of making reasoned dialogue possible again, I suppose such hope would, ironically, lie in nonrational factors. For example, if someone on one side were helped in an important way, such as by having his life saved, by someone on the other, perhaps that would make the first person a bit more sympathetic to the other side, or at least more willing to listen with an open mind. However, in a hyper-polarized environment, the hope of such nonrational factors playing out that way would appear low. (If you saw someone as part of a group that threatens and undermines you, all the people you care about, and even your very civilization, would you save his life?)
An alternative hope for a return to open-mindedness and rational discourse, some might argue, would lie simply in generational change: Even if we ourselves one day become past reconciliation, perhaps our children will be more willing to extend an olive branch to one another. Alas, though, given that our children would themselves be growing up in a hyper-polarized environment, it's unclear whether they'd find it in themselves to break the cycle or simply carry it on further. Even if they or their descendants someday did overcome polarization, it might well take many generations.
And, in the meantime, what would be left for us? Were the prospect of reasoned discussion trashed and buried for the time being, and with each side seeing the other as an existential threat, and with mutual outrage compounded by the day, ramping up like the whistle of a tea kettle that's on the verge of boiling over, what then? The only natural step left for engaging with the other side—would be violence. And that would be the true culmination of the descent into hyper-polarization: a point when battles over ideas are fought not with reasons and evidence, nor arguments and thought experiments, nor statistics and studies, nor even simply insults and memes—but with bullets and knives, bombs and clubs, fists and teeth.
The role of philosophy
To some, the above description of a maximally polarized world will seem like unbridled speculation, a product of a fanciful imagination left for too long to indulge in its own wonderings. I truly hope that they're right. For my part, I can only say that the world described above is one that every instance of polarization in our own—every sneering insult, every shouting match, every family fractured, every friendship severed, every moment of fiendishly gleeful, collective schadenfreude—calls me to imagine.
In a maximally polarized world, one that's past the intellectual point of no return described earlier, philosophy would, practically speaking, appear to no longer have much role to play. But it does have a role to play now. Much of the value, the urgency of philosophy, I feel, lies in stopping us from getting to such a point. By embracing the philosophical ethos—the ethos of adopting epistemic humility, being charitable to opposing views, communicating honestly, rejecting ad hominem and guilt by association and groupthink and motivated reasoning, being willing to question our own deepest beliefs, following the arguments wherever they lead—through all this, we can ensure that we do not fall into the impenetrably polarized, nightmare world described above.
This is not to suggest that we must all be philosophers. Nor is it to deny that philosophers themselves have sometimes been among polarization's most insidious exacerbators. What I do wish to express is simply that, if we are to take an effective stand against the tide of polarization, then the way each of us must follow is, at its core, the philosopher's way.
If you liked this post and want to support my writing without having to worry about yet another subscription, feel free to leave a tip on my Ko-fi page.
One recent example that comes to mind.
For a chilling sci-fi short story about polarization and AI, see Scott Alexander's "Sort by Controversial."
Contemporary phenomena that perhaps prefigure some of those mentioned in this paragraph include the division between regular Wikipedia and Conservapedia, along with disputes over presidential endorsements by hitherto (at least nominally) nonpolitical publications (e.g., here and here).
A point that, to me, calls to mind this video.