I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup

[Wraith]

I strongly disagree that it's irrelevant to his article. His basic thesis is that America is segregating into tribes - perhaps not geographically (though that as well), but socially. This leads to seeing other tribes as 'other' and poisons our political dialogue. I dispute the postulate that these discrete tribes exist, and that people fit into them in any meaningful way.

Self-segregating; that distinction is important. That these tribes are discrete is irrelevant to whether or not they exist. Of course it's more of a spectrum and not discrete, things involving people always are, and it shouldn't need to be explicitly stated (even though the author spent a few paragraphs detailing the spectrum). Can you really look at all the evidence of politics becoming increasing polarized and say that sides aren't being chosen?

Taking issue with the specifics of the tribe setup is irrelevant to the points made in the article, which seemed to me to be mainly about how criticism of others is being disguised as self-criticism, groups are more likely to antagonize those close to them on the spectrum than far away, and a plea for actual tolerance.

Identity is a complex thing, and I don't think most people can be easily categorized. Yes, it's true that along some axes we are seeing increasing polarization in the US, but I strongly disagree that this in any way results in the neat segregation he yammers about. This 1 in a bajillion chance he spends so much time talking about is false - either because he isn't evaluating the identity of his social circle critically enough, or because he has an unusually homogeneous group of friends.

It can't be too unusual - part of his evidence were places with tens of thousands of participants, and it's true for me as well - I don't know a single creationist. The last one I met was more than 20 years ago. I also don't know anyone against gay marriage (I'm pretty sure even Lewk supports it). Things like this happen.

If this categorization and subsequent self-segregation is not actually happening as he posits, then it's awfully hard for us to view opposing 'tribes' as 'other'. I have plenty of demagogues in my social circle, as he does, and I have heard some of the same ridiculous stuff - whether it's absurd hyperbole about Barack Obama, Margaret Thatcher, rape culture, or the evils of climate change science. But it's telling that all of these exist in my social circle, and the vast majority of my crowd ignore such hyperbole, on both sides. People more or less treat others as, well, people, not as political opponents in some massive identity war.

Did you notice you're committing the same sin you're accusing the author of?

In short, I question his tone in arguing that the existence of demagogues and stereotypes is in any way new or worrisome. Most people have identities so much more complex than a 'red tribe' or 'blue tribe' that the distinction is irrelevant. If you gave a computer a vast amount of data about people - their shopping, travel, voting, emails, social networks, etc. - and ran a naive classifier against the data, there is no way you'd get only 2 or 3 groupings. You'd instead get dozens, or hundreds of overlapping groups - for proof, just look at the more and more sophisticated market segments that advertisers are targeting. In such a world, do we really have widespread convictions that some defined group is the 'other'? I don't think so.

I didn't get that he was claiming that the existence was new; the historical evidence he includes seems to negate this view. You're latching onto the groupings which were clearly meant to be a simplification for the sake of discussion, and not an ultimate truth behind reality. The groupings made here were not intended to be precise or all-encompassing. It's just an abstraction for the sake of discussion.

[GGT]

Out-group is the group of which you're not a member; it's the group you define yourself against. It's the opposite of an in-group, which is the group of which you are a member and feel close ties to.

Thanks, but that's not what I meant when saying I didn't "understand" the OP title.

[Loki]

This isn't an academic or news article. It's effectively a blog post. Your standards seem a bit high.

[GGT]

This isn't an academic or news article. It's effectively a blog post. Your standards seem a bit high.

According to you, I either have no standards, or too high standards. How convenient for you, professor Loki.

[wiggin]

Self-segregating; that distinction is important. That these tribes are discrete is irrelevant to whether or not they exist. Of course it's more of a spectrum and not discrete, things involving people always are, and it shouldn't need to be explicitly stated (even though the author spent a few paragraphs detailing the spectrum). Can you really look at all the evidence of politics becoming increasing polarized and say that sides aren't being chosen?

Firstly, it's not a matter of discrete vs. continuous. It's not even a question of being a spectrum. It's the fact that we're talking about far more than a one or two dimensional evaluation of people's beliefs and identities. You're familiar with the political compass that gets posted here every now and again. We all complain that summing up political views in two axes is absurd and leaves out all nuance, and we're right. You need to evaluate people on an n-dimensional level (with high n) to gain any sort of understanding of their actual beliefs and identity. I'm sure that you would see clustering, then, in your n-dimensional space, though there would be plenty of overlap as well. But those clusters would be so many and so diverse that to talk about them as 'tribes' and to suggest that those tribes segregate in any meaningful way would be silly.

Secondly, there's a difference between polarization in public politics and polarization in normal social circles. The reason why our public discourse has gotten so shrill has a lot to do with flaws in our electoral system that favor extremes rather than moderates. Ditto for media. Yet that has little bearing on whether our society as a whole is irretrievably polarized. Yes, you can find opinion polling that will support that contention, but they are pretty blunt instruments that suffer from all sorts of drawbacks. I do not think that our society is polarized, even if our politics is.

Taking issue with the specifics of the tribe setup is irrelevant to the points made in the article, which seemed to me to be mainly about how criticism of others is being disguised as self-criticism, groups are more likely to antagonize those close to them on the spectrum than far away, and a plea for actual tolerance.

I don't have issues with his basic message - I have issues with his believing that the polarization and segregation in our society have made us into people who routinely engage in such veiled criticism of the 'out-group'. Maybe his social circle is remarkably vitriolic, but I just don't see it happening. Drawing a distinction between what gets lots of clicks on Facebook and what people actually think and do is pretty important here.

It can't be too unusual - part of his evidence were places with tens of thousands of participants, and it's true for me as well - I don't know a single creationist. The last one I met was more than 20 years ago. I also don't know anyone against gay marriage (I'm pretty sure even Lewk supports it). Things like this happen.

Okay, that's two examples. I'd be hard pressed to think of people in my circle who own a gun (though a few might). I'm sure that for some small number m dimensions out of that entire n-dimensional space, you'll definitely get some cases of segregation. That's irrelevant to the question of whether there's really this deep divide in play that's poisoning discourse.

Did you notice you're committing the same sin you're accusing the author of?

If you mean generalizing from an example of one, yup! Said it in my first post. Kinda the point. (Oh, I could argue that I'm trying to disprove an assertion rather than prove one, so proof of a counterfactual - my social circle - is somewhat stronger than his argument, but honestly that's pretty weak.) My broader point is not tied to my specific social circle, though, but to the complexity of identity.

One of the OP's main historical examples involves Nazi Germany, where German Jews were so much closer to the rest of Germans compared to, say, Japanese, yet they were still singled out as the 'near outgroup' to persecute. And he's right that German Jews and Germans were by and large indistinguishable in the 1920s. What's telling, though, is that they were not separated into 'tribes' at all prior to the rise of Nazism; German Jews were among the most assimilated and integrated of any Jewish community in the world. Rather, this tribalism had to be created by a pervasive propaganda campaign, especially one that preyed on fears of non-German Jews - so called Ostjuden - to tar all Jews with the same brush. So, they took their 'near outgroup' - that wasn't really a separate tribe at all - and had to subsume them into a true outgroup - Ostjuden - in order to make them scapegoats for all of Germany's problems.

Isn't this telling? You really need perceived difference - taught or not - in order to drive persecution of an 'outgroup'. I just don't see this happening in today's society.

I didn't get that he was claiming that the existence was new; the historical evidence he includes seems to negate this view. You're latching onto the groupings which were clearly meant to be a simplification for the sake of discussion, and not an ultimate truth behind reality. The groupings made here were not intended to be precise or all-encompassing. It's just an abstraction for the sake of discussion.

See above.


Look, I want to be clear here - the piece was entertaining, well meaning, and thoughtful. He made some reasonable points. I just question his implicit assertion that our society is as sick as he suggests it is. I think most people are reasonable and just want to get on with their lives.