I have had a theory for awhile as to why we are more tribal now and it will never change.
Just as the invention of written language completely changed human society by enabling information to be passed on from one generation to the next exactly, which caused a huge decrease in myths and huge increase in logic and facts, according to Ornstein and Burke, so the internet changed how we "KNOW "each other. Because we can know each other exactly.
When people just talk to each other they can't get a good feel for what a person really believes, what one's philosophy is, but when it is written down, day after day, it can be scrutinized, exactly.
When I started on SI almost 20 years ago everyone posted on the same threads, but as we got to know each others thinking we started separating ourselves. Now liberals and conservatives post on their own threads.
And the threads are much different. If you visit a conservative thread you will notice the post are usually simple phrases, very few complex posts that are logical, and there is very little accurate information, but if you go to a liberal thread like this one, people post in paragraphs with an introduction, body and conclusion and the information is almost always accurate.
And so liberals are banned from conservative threads as they cannot defend their ideology and are intimidated, and conservatives are often banned from the few liberal threads because they are so disruptive.
Never the twain shall meet, IMO.
And so our present body politic.
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In my view there are two big differences between, say, the 70s and now. The first is that the very low level tribalism that was around then has hardened. My own, idiosyncratic, evidence is dealing with my high school classmates. We could talk politics then with the feeling there were several assumptions we shared. Very hard to do now.
The second is that we have a president who governs as a tribalist. Makes it much, much worse. |
