John Stuart Mill would say "I told you so." Support of free speech correlates with intelligence, as one would expect, because exposure to challenging ideas serves as good check on confirmation bias. The challenging ideas of others tend to cause us to reexamine our own beliefs. Here are excerpts from "Freedom of Speech: A Right for Everybody, or Only for Like-Minded People?" by Jonas De keersmaecker:
[W]e sought to explore whether higher cognitive ability was associated with more principled positions on free speech. . . . The series of studies suggest that cognitive ability is related to support for freedom of speech for groups across the ideological spectrum. . . . [I]ndividuals with higher cognitive ability are more appreciative of the free flow of divergent ideas by groups at various places on the ideological spectrum. Indeed, even when these groups voice ideas that they don’t like.
I don't follow auto racing, but I love this video. It's a metaphor for the amazing things that people can do when they work together, as a team. In this particular case, they can change four tires in 2 1/2 seconds.
A girl in my grade school was repeatedly bullied, but the teachers (Catholic nuns) failed to intervene. Several of the boys formed a mob that picked on her, both in class and on the playground. They mocked her with nicknames. They chanted at her. They made fun of the way she looked, including the thick glasses she wore. They sneered at her, sometimes causing her to look very sad. Other students would sometimes try to intervene but it was at the risk of becoming targets themselves. Several decades later, this bullied girl had grown into a very impressive woman who told me that this bullying contributed to severe depression while she was a young adult.
As I reminisced about this sad chapter of grade school, I thought about how far we haven’t come. On social media (for me, FB and Twitter), I’ve seen similar boorish online behavior by numerous people, including intelligent people who I consider friends and who are offering ideas I consider valuable. The bad behavior is usually directed to people on the “opposing political team,” but that is no excuse. There is no excuse at all. Why do people who are generally decent and thoughtful stoop to the low bar set by the President? Do they think it’s OK to be like Trump?
Why do so many people think it’s OK to engage in name-calling, slurs, ad hominem attacks, guilt by association and numerous other fallacious and malicious forms of argument? These things are the broken windows and graffiti of social media and they are also symptoms of something much deeper. Why do grown educated adults make fun of the way other people look, including ridiculing the President’s obesity, lack of hair and skin color? Trump’s behavior repulses me, but I will keep my criticisms aimed only at his behavior, not his looks. What is the justification for doing otherwise in a civil society?
Many people justify their social media loutishness by pointing to the loutish behavior of members of the other political team, as though this justifies anything. We need to rise about this temptation and with a little discipline we can do it. Others have done it in much more trying circumstances. Ben Fainer, a friend of mine, died a few years ago. He was tortured and terrorized for six years at Buchenwald and other concentration camps during WWII. In his 2012 video, I asked him whether he hated the Nazis for what they did to him and his family. He said, “If I hate, I’m going to hurt myself.” The way that Ben discusses his survival in the camps is an inspiration to me (See minute 38:20). Truly, we can stay above the fray.
As new fault lines are becoming more apparent within the two traditional political teams, I’m seeing even more of this bad behavior online. Why is this OK? We don’t hurl weaponized language at each other in person. Why aren’t we taking special care on social media, given the increased risk of treating each other as floating words rather than as fully human?
Can’t we see that we are engaged in cheapest type of virtue signaling when we use low rent language and bullying tactics? For those of you who claim to be Christian how can you possibly justify this behavior? Is that how any of us were raised? Don’t we want to be good examples for our own children? Wouldn’t it be better for us to take our inspiration from real life great communicators like Martin Luther King rather than by plummeting to the coarse ignorance of Donald Trump?
In tumultuous times like this, when mortality salience is thick in the air, we are being poisoned by the ingroup bias. It binds and blinds far more than we realize. This group bias can make a pit of venomous snakes look like soft puppies and it can make puppies look like venomous snakes. Our deeply ingrained groupish tendencies can cause the confirmation bias run rampant and most of us are completely oblivious. Until we muster the discipline to take the red pill that allows us to see this cluttered world as a complex ecosystem rather than a Manichean battlefield, we will suffer a long succession of missed opportunities. Step one is to recognize the full humanity of each other while online.
If we have the better facts and persuasion, then let us educate and persuade each other. If our ideas are so undeniably correct, why not offer our ideas fairly and, yes, forcefully, after giving our opponents their best foot forward? Let’s make social media a place where we want to be both inspired and challenged. Let’s clean up all of this broken glass and graffiti. When we disagree with others, let us have the courage to work together to find out why we disagree. When we can’t seem to resolve our differences, let’s make sure that we always recognize the humanity in each other in the process. That is the only way we will stop this insanity.
I love this podcast. Daryl Davis set out on a personal mission to melt the hate residing within members of the Ku Klux Klan. He did it with kindness, curiosity and a superhuman amount of patience and courage. I suspect that his gentle nature and his love of music also played helped to pave the way. Here's an excerpt from the related article from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education):
"Daryl Davis, a 58-year-old black man, grew up attending international schools and traveling the world with his parents who worked in the foreign service. ... “When I was overseas, I was multicultural. But when I would return home to the states, I was either in all black schools or black and white schools, depending on whether I was going to the newly integrated school or the still segregated one.”
Davis’ experience with segregation and racism in the United States led him to ask the question, “How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?” To find his answer, Davis began interviewing members of the Ku Klux Klan in the early ‘90s for a book he planned to write, ultimately titled “Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.” What he found in the course of researching his book was that while he was actively learning about Klan members, they were passively learning about him.
“If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy, you will find you have something in common,” said Davis. “If you spend 10 minutes, you’ll find you even have more in common. And the more you find that you have in common and build upon those things, the less the things that you have in contrast will begin to matter, like skin color.”
This open dialogue resulted in many of Davis’ interview subjects ultimately becoming his friends and giving up their prejudices. Today, he has dozens of Klan robes at his home that were given to him by former Klan members who shed their racist beliefs after meeting him.
According to this article by Hyrum Lewis ("Our Big Fight Over Nothing: The Political Spectrum Does Not Exist"), the political "spectrum" is primarily tribal. Lewis states that many of the respective policy positions in the platforms of each of the two main political parties are not glued together by overarching consistently applied principles. These conclusions of Lewis run counter to the writings of George Lakoff, who (in his book, Moral Politics) argues that Republican positions derive from the metaphor of a "stern father," whereas the Democrat positions derive from the metaphor of the "nurturant parent." To the extent that Lewis is correct and that Lakoff has overstated his case, this is an inconvenient fact for those of us who claim that our political stances are completely principled, not adopted as the result of social pressure. Here are a few excerpts from Lewis' article:
In the essentialist theory, ideologies are unchanging, transcendent principles, while parties are evolving social organizations that can be “captured” by the ideologies. In the social theory, by contrast, ideologies don’t capture parties; parties capture ideologies—that is, they redefine them. Once again, research supports the latter: what is considered “right-wing” or “left-wing” is simply whatever the Republican and Democratic Parties happen to stand for at a given moment. Left-right ideologies are tools of self-delusion—they let us indulge the fantasy that our partisanship is principled rather than tribal, i.e., that there is some noble ideal connecting all the distinct and unrelated issues that our party happens to support. But essentialist predictions do not hold up to reality. . .
An alternative to this essentialist theory is the “social theory” of ideology, which says that distinct political positions correlate because they are bound by a unifying tribe. If the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.
... Public opinion polls further reinforce the point, showing that left-right ideologues often switch their beliefs to conform to the tribe. In the past decade alone we’ve seen self-described conservatives go from being anti-Russia to more pro-Russia, strongly pro-trade to strongly anti-trade, believing that personal character matters a great deal in politicians to believing that it matters hardly at all, staunchly interventionist in foreign policy to staunchly isolationist. Where is the “essence” behind all of this variation? It doesn’t exist. The views associated with left and right are constantly shifting for social reasons that have nothing to do with essential principles.
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