Put another way: much which is labeled "irrational" is actually just proceeding rationally from differences in either (a) basic underlying facts, or (b) bedrock ethical principles.
If you want to be challenged to maintain your composure, just talk politics with someone who is proceeding from different facts and principles than you are. If you want to be challenged intellectually, talk politics with someone who is proceeding from the same facts and principles as you are yet has been led by them to draw different conclusions about some pressing political matter.
The first option above is only worthwhile if one or both of you thereby reach the conclusion that your position on a political issue is not actually consistent with fact or principle; in other words, that you had not yet thought sufficiently long or hard enough about the issue to know what you think about it. Consider how insulting it is to your opponent to simply assume this about them from the outset.
To blame the "echo chamber" for breeding political polarization is to make a panoply of false assumptions. Foremost among them is to schematize the polarities monolithically, when in reality they represent exceedingly broad (therefore also fragile) coalitions which are nonetheless not quite broad enough to include everybody. But it is also to deny the necessity of grounding any dialogue in common facts and principles. Whatever else the echo chamber does, it performs this grounding very well.
The question of how facts and principles get made in the first place should by no means be off limits. I rather enjoy asking it myself. But it is, admittedly, quite an indulgence to occupy ourselves with that question while concrete policy and legislation is being hammered out via much less intellectually stimulating capital-P Political processes; and if this preoccupation springs merely from a desire to wrest control of the influence machine for the purpose of deploying it against political opponents, then it would more profitably be ignored altogether.
2 comments:
Kenneth Anderson
"A New Class of Lawyers: The Therapeutic as Rights Talk"
(1996)
"The silence of expert elites about ends can wrongly appear to betoken indifference or a modesty about an attachment to ends. Whereas, I would suggest it may actually stem from a belief that there is no point and no moral need to convince anyone, especially those who might disagree with you, of the virtue of one's ends. The diffidence may be strategic."
(p. 1075)
(more)
from Socratific:
Why We Can't Agree about (Some) Basic Facts (revised)
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