blighttown

More on Mundane Extremism

I've wanted to talk about mundane extremism for a while. Having finally put some words down, I think I rambled a lot and buried my main points, and overall didn't present my argument very effectively. So, I want to revisit some topics and make some points a bit more plainly. Whether or not you agree with me, I'd at least like it to be clear what you're disagreeing with.

Mundane extremism

I believe that it's most accurate to think of extremism in the following ways:

I'll try to discuss both of these to pain a clear picture of what I mean.

Statistical rarity of a belief or interest

I want to propose a bit more of an academic definition of extremism. Imagine it's 1990 or earlier: a time when we really had a unified popular culture, and a more unified set of beliefs. What would it mean to lie outside the median of popular culture? There are a LOT of potential answers to this: identitarian stuff such as being an uncommon race, religion, or sexual orientation; believing in unusual things such as the moon landing being faked; having unusual interests such as playing obscure computer RPGs rather than enjoying baseball, etc.

I don't want to dive into the identitarian stuff too much since it's a bit of a political powder keg and is a distraction from the point I'm trying to make, but I do want to acknowledge that it clearly fits the case I'm trying to define here.

Core to my claim is the idea that a person's strange beliefs are maybe not strange in the objective sense; they're merely strange when comparing those beliefs to those around them. For example:

Imagine that you live in a small American town in the 1960s and you believe you can talk to your dead relatives. Once people find out, people eye you with suspicion, they avoid you. Rumors are spread. Now, is that belief strictly strange? Arguably not: in many cultures, ancestor worship is quite common. And if you think about it, most of the town likely believes they can talk to at least one dead person: Jesus Christ. Is talking to Jesus any more or less plausible than talking to your dead grandfather? In my opinion, no, but you can imagine the clear social difference between those two sets of beliefs; one is risky and unusual, while the other may be a minimum requirement for being an upstanding member of the town.

Cultural distance

The other part of our definition is strongly related to the first, but is worth expanding on in its own right. By its very nature, a locally-statistically-uncommon belief was likely not acquired locally, however this is not merely a rephrasing of the first part of the definition.

As in our previous example, whether or not speaking with your dead ancestors is considered unusual depends on which culture you are presently a part of. As a consequence, part of your extremist belief therefore is related to how distant the original source of the belief is. Put another way: how many beliefs do you have which either help you relate with the people around, or else distance you from the people around you?

Again, if we rely on our Fox News Grandpa example, I'd argue that one of the most important aspects which alienate the father and son in this article is actually the newly-acquired cultural distance. It's not merely that the father (in this case, the "Fox News Grandpa") now holds beliefs that the son does not agree with. It's something more insidious than that; the beliefs are culturally distant enough that when the father rants, the son doesn't even have context for what the father is outraged by. They no longer have a shared reality, a shared set of terms, and so just talk past each other. This is far worse than mere disagreement: this is social distance!

As another example, I was speaking to a friend of mine. I don't recall the original conversation very well, but I said to him something like "well I think in general people are sick of identity politics." His response was something like "all politics is identity politics." My friend was not necessarily directly refuting me. Rather for him and I, "identity politics" did not even have the same definition. (I'm not just speculating, I checked with him!) I had unknowingly spoken a cultural shibboleth, and we had uncovered our lack of shared reality. My friend may have ultimately disagreed with me, but in that initial moment we did not posses enough shared context to really have a disagreement; instead we had cultural distance and a confusion of terms.

We're all radicalized now

I find myself relating less and less with people. I'm certain I'm not alone. I don't go to people's houses and bring up contentious political or religious issues. But even when discussing the boring stuff, there is more cultural distance than there would have been 20-30 years ago. We don't read the same books, watch the same media. We don't hold the same mental constructs in our heads. There is very little shared between us. When I visit a friend, we are both (mundane) extremists to each other. When someone asks me what I do with my free time, I can answer honestly, but very little of what I read or think has much relevance to the people around me. It's not that I'm reading really intelligent or complex stuff; it's just socially-distant. More and more, this is true for all of us.

We rightly recoil when we know someone who has fallen prey to a conspiracy theory. A friend of mine told me that he visited an old fiend he hadn't seen in a while. An intelligent, sensible person, whom he respected. Part of the conversation ended up drifting towards the topic of "the evil bankers who run the world." I'm sure you can fill in the rest. This was an extremist belief on the friend's part. But so was everything else: the music they didn't share together, the news sources they didn't have in common, the books or media one or the other of them would never consume, the cultural beliefs with little context.

Per capita, most of our extremism is boring. And we don't really notice or care about the boring extremism. However both the boring and scary (or violent) extremism have the exact same root cause. You cannot fight extremism by leaving Facebook intact, but making sure they censor the "really bad" ideas. The root cause of both mundane and scary extremism is the extreme personalization of a platform like Facebook. The lack of shared reality. This is what generates cultural distance.