How polarization and 'fake news' feed off each other

And 'why good people are divided by politics and religion'

In the first two issues of this newsletter, we’ve dealt with information pollution (or information disorder) and the many approaches to address it. Today I want to spend some time on a connected issue—polarization, or the sharp and deep divide in society, especially over potentially controversial topics like politics, religion, caste, gender, class, sexual orientation, language and region.

This is a particularly vexing question, because polarization is not easily measured and its harmful effects are not easily quantifiable. It’s not easy, in other words, to say x (cause) has led to polarization (effect).

Used in the political or social sense, polarization is a fairly recent word. It is more commonly used in the realm of physics and optics. But we urgently needed a word to describe the deep divide in society (fueled as it is by technology), and I suppose this was the best existing word for it.

Bottomline: Polarization affects us all. Sometimes it results in situations like this:

For those of us who use WhatsApp groups daily, this is a familiar sight: there’s an argument on the group and someone decides to leave it. A version of this plays out on all social platforms including Facebook and Twitter: a disagreement ensues between friends and one of them unfriends, unfollows or blocks the other.

But more often, we avoid getting into such situations by not discussing anything at all. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people on various online forums pleading for us not to ‘talk about politics’ or ‘be political’. This is natural, because which of us has the time to dive into divisive issues, especially when we’re busy living our lives with ever dwindling resources of time, money and energy?

We need to be able to deal with this stuff though.

Because polarization makes it easier for ‘fake news’ (lies, half-truths, manipulated truths, bullshit) to spread. And ‘fake news’ in turn creates more polarization. It’s a bit like this:

In 2012, the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a book that explained the feeling well. It’s called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics.

I didn’t read it immediately after buying it. From time to time, I would glance at it on my bookshelf and feel especially good about the subtitle. What Haidt was saying—just through the subtitle of his book alone—is that good people can be divided too, especially on issues such as religion and politics. There was no need to think of people whose political views I don’t agree with as ‘bad’ or ‘evil’. The book’s presence was a reminder to me that there might be a way out of this crisis of conversation that we’re all dealing with.

So what then are Haidt’s arguments? about ‘why good people are divided by religion and politics’?

• First, he demonstrates definitively that people are not governed by reason or rationality. Rather, they first use their intuition or gut feeling to believe in something, and only then find rational reasons to support their argument.

• Second, a person’s moral worldview is governed by several considerations and not just harm and fairness as earlier thought.

• And third, liberals and conservatives are like yin and yang, and that one needs both worldviews (and other worldviews) to advance as a species.

Taken together, Haidt’s arguments show us a way out of extreme polarization. His work opens the door for anyone wanting to understand how and where to go next. I have no doubt that multiple readings of his book will yield more insights and I intend to cite his work several more times in this newsletter.

Notes:

‘Fake News’: As always, I use the term ‘fake news’ to mean misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, information disorder or information pollution.

Polarization or polarisation? The spelling nerds would have noted that I spelt polarization with a ‘z’ (American) and not with as ‘s’ (British). As an Indian journalist, I’ve mostly used British spelling as per the style guides in our newsrooms, but I’m deferring to the American spelling here because it is much more popular. Still, here’s fun graph comparing the use of the two different spellings between 1800 and 2008 in books.

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