In one of my earliest posts here at The Glittering Eye, lo! those many years ago, I remarked on how being centrist or, as I am, non-ideological is a tremendous advantage from the standpoint of perspective. I find that the more right-wing someone becomes in his or her thinking, the more she or he is likely to identify the views of others incorrectly. They start calling people with very moderate or even conservative views “lefties” or “leftists” or “commies” or what-not. I could produce a long list of policy ideas floated by the leading lights of American conservatism at one point or another that would horrify today’s “conservatives”. I doubt that many of them have ever actually met a genuine communist.
And the same thing goes for those on the left. The increase in identifying even those with very quotidian views as Nazis or racists is quite astonishing.
There is a tremendous tendency for us to view our own views as being reasonable, even centrist where they may in fact be pretty left-wing. Or right-wing as the case may be. Patterns in residence, profession, education, news consumption, and entertainment consumption reinforce that tendency. And social media create the illusion of numbers among people whose views may well be out of the mainstream.
I think that Jonathan Chait’s piece at the New Yorker on the groupthink that led those on the left to reject the lab-leak hypothesis out-of-hand is an interesting case in point. He steps right up to the edge of a very important observation but then shies back. Consider this snippet:
This asymmetry between the mainstream news media and the conservative media that was created to oppose it has long been a source of satisfaction for we liberals. Modern journalism, like think tanks and the bureaucracy, grew out of a Progressive Era belief in disinterested expertise. Guided by the principles of scientific inquiry, these institutions would follow the truth wherever it led.
The conservative movement built a counter-Establishment to oppose this network, but the alt-institutions of the right mimicked the hallowed liberal Establishment only in form. The Heritage Institution, the Washington Times, and Fox News were not mirror images of Brookings, the New York Times, and CBS News — they were parodies of them. Liberals had a phrase to describe this imbalance: the hack gap. The Republican Party had an army of partisans at its disposal, unburdened by any fealty to any scientific or professional norms save the advancement of the conservative movement. The liberal media might make mistakes, and bureaucracies may produce wrong conclusions, but at least they aspire to norms of fairness and impartiality that the right-wing counterparts merely sneer at.
Openness to evidence is the historical strength of American liberalism.
I think he’s confusing causes with effects and engaging in a version of availability bias, recency bias. Is the observable leftward drift of the New York Times and CBS News self-defense in the of post-truth Washington Times and Fox News or did the latter spring from a marketing niche formed by the pre-existing biased coverage of the former? Keep in mind that modern conservatism largely springs from God and Man at Yale (written in 1951). The observable bias in media and education goes back at least that far.
For my part I do my level best to eschew both naked partisanship and ideology and remain as empirically-based in my views as is possible. It’s pretty lonely. You can hardly turn to a news or entertainment program these days without being subjected to a torrent of non-empirical even counter-intuitive propaganda.
I don’t think we will ever be able to neutralize the different opinions and ideologies that persist here and world-wide. However, what buffers the more extreme ill effects of left/right ideologies is the usage of “free speech,†uninhibited by a big brother censorship model removing anyone’s efforts to explain, prove/disprove a POV or “truth.†By keeping alive such a constitutional right, to speak openly and freely, we also enliven the possibility to penetrate and perhaps even diversify tightly held mindsets of others, which indeed often leads to some kind of middle ground.
However, the intolerant eradication of free speech that sucker-punches someone into silence, like we are seeing in today’s academic and social media environments – stirred mostly by democrat party influencers – is only deepening the divisions witnessed in our 2-party system, where “divided we fall†seems more prescient than the more positive counter point of “united we stand.â€
Finally, emphasizing a news perspective for the purpose of validating a certain political narrative, may give an advantage to one party, in the short run, but does long term damage down the road to everyone. An evolving story, for instance, about Fauci’s Wuhan lab funding, dishonest appraisal of so many facets/facts surrounding COVID, is making much of what was earlier claimed as indisputable about this virus more a stack of falsehoods – it’s etiology, potency, the guidance publicly spoon-fed to people, the questionable high case numbers derived through inaccurate PCR tests, death certificate changes made in 3/20 giving more credence to COVID being the cause of death, even lowering the cycle thresholds of the PCR (in January of this year) creating fewer case numbers and bolstering the supposed efficacy of vaccines. Unfortunately, the MSM has little interest to explore these issues, and social media either derides or simply suspends any dialogues outside the perimeters of acceptable democrat party narratives, aka political propaganda.
The anonymous nature of social media makes it difficult to impossible to figure out who is zooming who.
Zealots, bots, trolls, click chasers,
Ignorant, angry old men, foreign influencers, race baiters, ecological panhandlers, and professional social media influencers.
These are dangerous ideological seas in which to swim.
Roll your eyes at everything you read and think, yeah, maybe.
Don’t add to the toxic brew but do hold media to the same standard when you can.