Today I wanted to talk a bit about the phenomenon of polarisation. It will be a recurring theme of this blog as I suspect that the way we humans progress towards greater knowledge is not simply linear, by adding to it, collectively. Rather, I think, the forming of “tribes” around opposing views is part of it. This could be taken as a sociological phenomenon, as described for example by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn describes how sets of ideas (theories) are not infinitely capable to explain any new observations. What lies too far out of a theory’s explanatory framework is considered an anomaly. To incorporate an anomaly the theory needs to be patched, which has limits (explanations become more complicated, less elegant). At some point a rival theory emerges, championed by new group of proponents, which offers a rather different explanatory framework (a new paradigm). What’s interesting about this is how the ideas of the opposing paradigms cohere by virtue of groups of people flocking around either one of them. Apparently it is normal that one doesn’t hold both sets of ideas in one’s head. Rather one either defends the old way or one goes with the new one. The famous quip of Max Planck regarding this is that science advances one funeral at a time, meaning that eventually the old paradigm runs out of proponents. Now this, as I said, is a sociological viewpoint. Still it is a story of linear progress. But when one looks at the current situation in physics the story is more that there is one dominant paradigm (String Theory) and then some competitors (for example Loop Quantum Gravity). String Theory continues to fail to produce experimental evidence, but is still regarded by most - judging by where the funding goes - as the only game in town. Its competitors enjoy a marginal existence, economically and socially speaking, and are often subject to outright derision by adherents of the dominant paradigm. This goes on for more than a generation now, so one funeral at a time does not apply here.
What I surmise is that the sociological phenomenon of different groups holding different - opposing - sets of ideas is just a surface phenomenon. One part of it is probably explainable along the lines of evolutionary biology and hunter-gatherer anthropology. It would tell us why and how groups (instead of individuals) (cooperatively) fight for resources against (adversarially) other groups and why this may be advantageous for the species as a whole. But I think there is something still deeper involved, something which has to do with our very perceptual-conceptual apparatuses. Because we often don’t seem to fight over physical resources anymore (at least not on the face of it) but rather over ideas (and I am speaking not about scientific but about societal disputes in general here) I think our capacity for polarisation must have an epistemic component to it which requires explanation. One aspect of it is that groups of people value different categories differently. Groups end up having different, mutually incompatible, hierarchies of categories (I described this in the last issue, “Categories and Conflict”)[1]. Since societal arrangements - collective behaviour - depends on these category hierarchies, in the end it may reduce to conflicts over resources again, albeit fought in a much more sophisticated way.
But even deeper than that, on a more building blocks of cognition level, I find it interesting to look at our basic capacity for differentiation. Notice how we differentiate between high and low, loud and quite, hard and soft, left and right, up and down, etc. And it seems not quite accidental that we more often than not pit things against other things in pairs. Empiricism vs. rationalism (philosophy), nativism vs. empiricism (psychology), left vs. right (politics), analytic vs. continental philosophy. And in general we most of the time begin to obtain understanding in any area by framing our observations about the nature of things in terms of complementary halves, like mind and matter, war and peace, anlytic vs. synthetic (and then subdivisions of those). Of course some qualifications are in order here. Clearly we understand that often a spectrum of things exists. But what’s important to understand is that a spectrum, wherever it exists, is created by the opposites. Then, as far as subdivision into complementaries goes, the number of parts does not always have to be two. Nonetheless, the facility to separate one thing from others still holds. It’s always either A or not-A.
Now, the next cognitive building block which seems relevant here is our capacity to map things onto other things. For example if I ask you to map high vs. low onto loud vs. quite, I bet you map high to loud and quite to low. You can do this for all sorts of concepts. Try to map hard vs. soft to male vs. female, mind vs. matter to high vs. low. Bright vs. dark to mind vs. matter, etc. I am not saying that we’ll end up all agreeing about any one of these judgments. What I’m getting at here is merely our facility to perform these kinds of mappings. And then I want to point out that we can map everything back (or abstract them) to their very essence, which we find in the concepts of yin and yang. Yin is said to represent the female, yang the male. In Taiji, yang is advance and contraction is yin. The concept of “yin and yang” also entails that opposites give rise to their respectively opposed phenomena. That is what the little dots in the symbols represent. So while, like with the spectrum, the concept accounts for the essential non-duality of reality, nonetheless we are only capable of understanding by first “spanning” the possibilities. It is our imperfect way to bringing order into chaos, to account for the complexities of the world.
But of course there is not only neutral mapping to yin and yang. There is also the most fundamental distinction guiding all of our behaviour, the distinction of good vs. bad (or evil). Although I don’t want to commit myself to any particular moral theory with this, I think it is educative to think about that, as concepts, good and bad already play a role for very simple lifeforms in the form of chemotaxis. Single-cellular mechanisms capable of moving (rather erratically) with the help of their flagella try to move towards a place with a more favourable chemical composition away from a place with a less favourable one. They thereby feed themselves and avoid death. Although not represented in anything we would readily agree to call minds, we have to admit the distinction of good and bad must be at least represented in their bodies, to afford this kind of behaviour. And it doesn’t depend on the chosen sillables to express “good” and “bad” either, if you don’t like any moral implications involved in this kind of example. You might want to call them “a” and “b”. But only one of them makes the lifeforms live and only one of them makes them die.
They way I came to think about it in that manner was when in around 2016 polarisation as a societal phenomenon became a rather obvious reality. I remember back then I rather suddenly became aware of it and found it horrifying. But at the same time I also found it very interesting. So I began reading up on things that I thought would explain a thing or two with regards to polarisation. I read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, for example. Thinking about what (in essence) separates the political left from the political right was fascinating. One of the biggest takeaways here for me was that in conflicts between groups there normally are deep underlying assumptions at work which inform the superficial standpoints taken by the opposing parties. So “having a rational argument” is a too simplistic a model to account for most grave disagreements. Often a belief expressed about what is right depends on another belief, which depends on another belief, and so on. And at the bottom for example lie deep-rooted intuitions, for example about whether humans are ultimately good or ultimately bad. Going from there civilization itself becomes a question of being either the thing that puts us in chains or that liberates us from them. And from there we go all the way upward to fight about all sorts of things, without understanding the root of the problem. Often without even understanding that there is a root to it. And often loosing patience when things become pressing.
At about the same time I also read on human nature. A book that impressed me notably was Behave by Robert Sapolsky. It took up the theme of “us vs. them”, which was also topical in The Righteous Mind, but here from the perspective of behavioural biology, as it is observable in chimpanzees, our close relatives. While the former book explained how deeply ingrained into our behaviour dividing up the world into an ingroup and and outgroup really is, the latter book also helped understanding of in how arbitrary forms that distinction often can appear. For example there is this study which showed that you are more likely to help a person who had fallen to the ground when it wore the shirt of your team. And we see that people can rally around basically everything. Around brands of shoes, around flags, etc. And, back to Behave, care for other human beings (your kin) seems to increase with hate for the outgroup. It seems to be that “why can’t we just be nice to each other” may not be a program built into us, rather something we aspire to. Or, tying this back to politics, in fact one camp indeed takes that we in fact can all be nice to each other for a valid assumption. And with that it is predictable that it tends to perceive the other side as evil[2] when they refuse to submit to “obvious” truths. The other side, taking human nature into account (the so-called tragic vision, to borrow from Thomas Sowell), in return perceives them as naïve, until it looses patience and then perceives them as evil.
Up until that point when I dove into that topic, my concerns - philosophically speaking - about how the world works were rather concentrated around questions of how the mind works. Although I wanted to understand how the world works, I figured that trying to understand how the mind works might be the only practical route to achieve the former. While I got a bit distracted from thinking about the mind and spend increasingly time to think about human nature, things converged in an interesting way. It happened when reading The Origin of Concepts by Susan Carey. The author argues for a nativist account of some concepts, called “core concepts”. There are certain concepts, like space, time, object, causality and intention, which are baked into the way we perceive the world and how we, well, conceptualize it. Basically this means that we cannot do anything without having these concepts. They are not derived from anything, but rather precondition for any further concept formation. Now, at one point Carey mentioned another researcher (a woman I believe; this is the only thing I remember) who at least considered the idea that us vs. them might rank as a core concept. Please just do me a favour and think about it what it would mean if us vs. them is anchored in our perceptual apparatus at the same level as the other core concepts mentioned above. Yes, it would mean that it is anchored that deep. I don’t know if there in fact has been a research program about this at some point after the book has been written, and I don’t care. For me it suffices to acknowledge that at least one smart person entertained such an (outrageous) idea.
Today I’ve had a brief glance of a table of contents of the Writings of Saint John Of Damascus and it showed a list of chapters devoted to various heresies, in fact, a lot of them, and I thought, man, isn’t that the history of humankind? Isn’t this completely business as usual? Group A forms and then around some innocent difference people begin to chose sides, for whatever reason and based on whatever (arbitrary in principle, it seems) criteria. The group polarises to the point of fracture and it splits of in a schism, like between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches, or later when the Protestants split off from the Roman Catholics during the Reformation. What’s interesting about the heresies is that it is always nestling schools of thought of wrong-think, as seen from the current orthodoxy (right-think, literally). A heresy is a cult or sect and best to be snuffed out as long as it is small. If it becomes big, a competitor, it becomes a religion (same principle with the competitors to String Theory, for example). And right-think is what “we the people” do. That was also one of the most enlightening findings from either Behave or The Righteous Mind, I don’t remember which one, namely that anthropological studies show that all of the remaining native tribes on earth have always a word for themselves which basically means “the people”. So it’s always either the people, or the barbarians, basically. That is what it comes down to.
But the whole process is so neatly organized. At some point in perfect harmony, some thing becomes the bone of contention (Stein des Anstoßes) for a group of people. It becomes the tiny but crucial difference. And then the choosing of sides (and later the entrenchment) begins. People assign themselves to one of the sides (an association I had: the German kids TV program “1, 2 oder 3”, apparently based on an American program called “Runaround”). And it would be presumptuous to assume that for any one of us most of the time this happens on the merits of particular arguments. No. It is based on already existing loyalties, on established trust. The symbols of the sides, like the team t-shirts with their specific colors and patterns, or certain flags, represent the sides. But what’s more significant, I think: the arguments themselves are put on like t-shirts. Most of the time both sides are logically consistent in themselves (up to a certain degree, but the degree to which that is the case is not decisive as to which side wins, nor necessarily as to which side is more right) but are founded each on different assumptions which cannot be justified further other than by intuition (they act like axioms in that regard).
The gravitational pull of both sides does not leave anyone nor any idea unaffected. Everyone is pulled to one side, the “sheep” in the same manner as the contrarian. And each “position” is eventually found clustered together with other positions,[3] which works like this: You can map high to yang by finding a suitable (seemingly arbitrary) criterion by which you say they are similar (tertium comparationis). And you can do it transitively. That is, you can map high to yang to loud, and from there clusters of concepts form.[4] And then somehow either the sun or the moon end up being female in your language, and the other one male, respectively (compare o sol e a lua and die Sonne und der Mond). And most importantly, the good ideas end up going together with all the other good ideas (“the good”), which is obvious to the good people (“the people”), and then of course the bad ideas are grouped with other bad ideas (“the bad”; held by the Others), which is (“evil” and) equally obvious to the good people. In the end it is always the goodies vs. the baddies.[5]
In the beginning there was the word. Adam was tasked to name things. Let’s next remind ourselves about the story of the Tower of Babel in which the peoples scattered as soon as they didn’t speak the same language anymore. It’s not about the words, though. Its about the concepts and categories behind the words and the clusters and hierarchies people form with them to make sense of and act in the world. And the division that comes with them when the other side is accused of being untruthful (dishonest) or perceived of as seeing things not in the right way.[6] I still don’t know what to make of all of it. Is polarisation necessary? I’m not saying it is unnessesary, although I’m no different than probably everyone else in wishing that it was. I am being serious. Is it necessary, in a technical sense? It it part of how rational beings work? Is it part of the structure of reality? My best guess is that it’s baked in. Maybe it serves some purpose. Maybe we can change it. I have no clue. For the time being I assume it’s just the way of the world, baby. And we gotta live with it.
Footnotes
See here.
I remember having seen some link a couple of days ago which I’m unable to dig up anymore. It showed with the help of AI, I believe (although I don’t remember how anymore), how liberals literally interpret facial expressions by conservatives differently than the other way around. Liberals would perceive conservatives’ faces on average as more unfriendly than conservatives would judge liberals’ faces on average. A bit like the thing where judging only by the looks women rate men on average a 5 and men rate women on average a 7. Also, I’m not talking about the studies which political side’s people are more attractive and also not about how AI can recognize political affiliation by looking at faces.
I think there’s also a study about this. But this is I think common sense. After hearing a couple of opinions on hot-button topics one is usually able to predict all of the other opinions a person holds. Or most. At least most of the important ones.
To read more about how this works, read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Informed much of my thinking about how concepts work. Highly recommended reading.
On that note, a famous sketch: “Mitchell and Webb: Are we the baddies?”
I just recently learned about something called “The Rectification of Names,” a Confucian doctrine concerned with the (re-)establishment of proper names for things, in order to ensure social harmony. Of course, bending the language out of alignment with the truth is always the domain of the Other (in which case it’s Orwellian), while restoring truth by bringing it into alignment with reality is the privilege of the Good Ones (although when state power is involved there is also a top down axis to the issue, in addition to “simple” polarisation as discussed here).