Knowledge silos and the balkanization of society
Never join a club that will have you as a member
I like pithy quotes, so here’s one I came across recently:
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain
Which is neatly echoed by Groucho Marx, when he quipped:
“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”
Sage advice indeed, but what does it mean in today’s divided social media landscape?
Even though I have recently made the leap to actually creating a moderately active Twitter account (timing, I know), I have always been opposed to the format for two principal reasons:
It makes it far too easy to block or follow people with views you oppose or agree with, and
It reinforces the idea that simple arguments are more likely to be right or are inherently superior
I will leave the second point to a future post and address only the first one here, abiding by my self-imposed rule of one topic per post.
Society is fractal construct. We interact at several levels with people who embody different levels of society. The basic structure of the first three levels can be thought of as “Bob”, “Bob the police officer”, “the police officer, Bob”.
The first level, the truly personal interactions are surprisingly rare and restricted to only our closest and most intimate friends and relations. It is the person qua person, the person as a person.
These kind of interactions very easily spill over into the second level, such as those of familial relations. Here I include things like the way one interacts with a spouse as a spouse in household, or with a family friend as the father or mother of a child, for example. It is a particular person in a general role.
The third level increases the separation even further, and allows us to treat a grocery store clerk as an avatar of the grocery store as a physical entity. A similar type of relationship is involved in many kinds of prejudicial interactions (positive and negative) even when no formal structure exists, such as when an itinerant beggar becomes an representative of all itinerant beggars. Crucially, interactions at this level are still personal, but the person in question loses their individual characteristics completely and defaults to an archetype. It is a role inhabited by a person.
At the fourth level we find those interaction where a person actively becomes a representative of a construct. This is different from the previous level to the extent that the person has active, though impersonal, agency. We often think of politicians or branch managers acting in this role, though “Yes, Minister” may have taught us to be wary of such assumptions. Actors at this level may seem to be independent, but their power, and therefore the nature of the interaction, is strongly mediated by the partially hidden corporate entity. Unlike a mere mouthpiece, they act and behave as if they are not merely following an already disclosed script, even if they are governed in whole or in part by their role within a larger body.
Just as the fourth level borrows elements of the first, so every subsequent level above recycles earlier styles of engagement. In this way the fifth level would be when a bureaucrat or judge prepares to settles on a decision that becomes automatically enacted in their manner and actions at the sixth level.
Once we allow the process of personification of abstract and inanimate objects the process can be extrapolated to still higher and lower levels. This happens when we start to think of society as doing things like helping the needy, or when we conceive of bacteria as attacking us. It is only when we take a step back from such ideas and realize that neither societies nor viruses intend to anything and so cannot hope to harm or help that it becomes clear that this is style of reasoning is simply a transplantation of one of the three personal levels of interaction onto things which are decidedly not personal.
These levels of social analysis are useful to bear in mind, because it allows to see where unhelpful habits of mind creep into our engagements. We get angry at a computer for failing to respond to our reasonable requests. We expect fairness from a company executive whose role it is to enhance shareholder value. We find it hard to believe that a politician could consider their family’s financial position before that of our own…
All these are instances of a mismatch of our understanding of the social level that an interaction is inhabiting and the understanding of the person (or nature of the thing) we are interacting with. Sometimes that mismatch is the result of purposeful deception, and at other times it is our own unhelpful reasonings that interfere with a proper reckoning.
Where this connects to social media landscapes is in the way that blocking people or manages our news-feeds allows us to create our own avatars of society. These are the good guys over here who do and say this and that, and these are the bad guys who do and say such and such. Basically, it allows us to form our own club where we are part of the majority by default and where we can be the curators of the interface.
This is not inherently a bad thing. It is perfectly natural. Where it becomes problematic is when these clubs start to become subsumed into our conception of society at large. A recurring theme that I will return to again and again is that reality is reality, regardless of our beliefs about it, and in this case the reality is the society. While it is true that many concepts can be considered to be socially constructed, society itself cannot be. Society is constructed by individuals acting in concert with some unity of purpose, whether that be in the form of a goal, and language or a shared but unspoken cultural understanding. No bootstrapping allowed.
The question is whether we can consider confabulations of individuals by real presumed shared traits by other individuals to be societies as well. I would argue not, largely because of the lack of actual unity of purpose in such constructs. People have purpose and intention, artificial islands of people selected on the basis of highly peculiar sets of traits that can be formed and disbanded on the whim of other people do not have purpose or intention.
The societies we join online are not real societies because, following on from my previous post, there is no real risky transactions and no real trust relationships. They are simulated cultures that belie the unspoken relationships of the people who inhabit them. But they are no more clubs capable of being spurned by Groucho Marx than rocks really have faces that express their feelings.
Again, this is not to say they are not valuable, or that such false societies could be alchemically transmogrified into real ones. But it is important to make the distinction, and not many people do. The result is the following aphorism:
We should be wary of thinking we are winning any argument when we find ourselves in the majority of a team we put together by our own hand.
The more involved question that this line of reasoning raises and which I will eventually try to get around to addressing is why the personal level is somehow different and whether there is actually ever a good basis for classification that can fully avoid the charge of pareidolia (spoiler alert, the answer is: “No”).
I had to look up what it means to take the hemlock. It’s a very fitting analogy given the times.
(I’m not a student of philosophy but my son is- one of his favourite words is eudaimonia 😊) I’ve never been one to trust anything on the face of it, have always resorted to research to get closer to the truth, but even that’s challenging theses days when so much of the world is willing to lie for whatever the gain is, be it financial, fear, or power. I love what you say about ‘challenging one’s own ideas in as many different contexts as possible.’
I know your article goes a little deeper than what I’m getting out of it, but when I read these deep philosophical thoughts, seeds get planted, and I start seeing the world through the eyes of these growing seedlings. It makes me more thoughtful and conscientious, which is exactly what the world needs more of. So thanks 🙏
Even though we can’t avoid falling in to the trap of believing our thoughts to be on the side of the majority, it’s a great point, to be aware of how this belief comes about. Subconsciously surrounding ourselves mostly with those whose thoughts align, (confirmation bias) only serves to reinforce our own beliefs. This is something I keep wondering about. I feel, in light of the deep divisiveness of the current climate, that I am on the “right” side, but I can’t help wonder if that’s true, given that the other 50% believe the same thing. So how can we ever really be sure? One argument I heard recently to answer that question, is “do your beliefs stand up to the rest of time” (ie do they eventually get ‘proven’) But even that is subjective. I guess we just need to be able to let go of the need to be right.