{"id":3500474,"date":"2024-04-15T13:17:25","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T13:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3500474"},"modified":"2024-04-15T13:17:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T13:17:25","slug":"widening-the-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-04-15\/widening-the-we\/","title":{"rendered":"Widening the \u2018We\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Political polarization\u2014the inability of groups such as political parties, religious sects, and cultural identity groups to cooperate even in basic, essential matters\u2014has been a worry and a threat since American democracy began, and for many centuries before. James Madison called it \u201cfaction,\u201d and in\u00a0The Federalist<\/i>, No. 10, he\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Madison had good reason to be concerned. Seventy-four years after he wrote this, polarization turned toxic as the United States plunged into a bloody Civil War over slavery that has sent shock waves through American politics ever since. Some of those reverberations\u2014over racial and social justice\u2014have contributed to making the first half of the 21st century one of the most polarized periods in U.S. history, raising fears for the future of democracy and deeper concerns that our society could sink into tribal violence.\u00a0A 2022 poll found<\/a>\u00a0that 28 percent of Americans considered \u201cpolitical extremism or polarization\u201d to be \u201cone of the most important issues facing the country,\u00a0trailing only \u2018inflation or increasing costs\u2019 and \u2018crime or gun violence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Polarization is not simple. At the most basic level, it is produced by rigid differences of outlook and opinion that make reaching a consensus on social aims difficult. Every issue appears to crystallize into an insoluble opposition: Black versus white, market efficiency versus social justice, unemployment versus inflation, and social security versus accumulating debt. Polarization turns toxic when discussion, let alone consensus, becomes impossible and violence seems inevitable, ending with the elevation of popular movements into tyrannies and the consignment of opposing groups to prison or the guillotine. This is the outcome many fear is becoming possible today.<\/p>\n

Toxic polarization is the product of three factors in individual and social development, all of which can be traced back to the beginnings of human society: malignant bonding, the\u00a0scarcity mind, and\u00a0historical\u00a0and trans-historical trauma. Each factor develops independently, but they reinforce each other to produce a society that is prone to intractable and violent divisions.<\/p>\n

Malignant Bonding<\/h3>\n

Bonding is a fundamental aspect of human culture. We bond in intimate relationships, as families, but also, and less obviously, in the multitude of associations\u2014friendships, working partnerships, institutional and citizenship ties\u2014that form a society. This promotes understanding and cooperation in the interest of building a community that addresses individuals\u2019 and groups\u2019 needs and aspirations. At its best, bonding is built on goodwill: an inclination in favor of empathy, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground that is inclusive and widely beneficial to change.<\/p>\n

But bonding can also be malignant, solidifying communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are \u201cdifferent.\u201d The \u201clonging to belong\u201d can easily lead us to think that the only way to be \u201cin\u201d is not to be left out. The result is a narrowing of the \u201cwe\u201d\u2014the larger community\u2019s shared identity\u2014as the powerful assert themselves and the fear of being excluded makes some types of identities and associations dangerous. The narrowing of the \u201cwe\u201d reduces our ability to discuss urgent common problems such as climate change, social and economic inequality, and the upsurge in mass migration and displacement, let alone permit a consensus on policies to address these issues.<\/p>\n

The absence of goodwill marks the difference between constructive and malignant bonding, and hence, between polarization and toxic polarization. When goodwill is present, it is possible to disrupt the perceptions at the root of toxic polarization and malignant bonding and open up space for the consideration of inclusive change. When goodwill is frozen out, this alternate course is almost impossible to perceive.<\/p>\n

The Scarcity Mind<\/h3>\n

Malignant bonding is encouraged and perpetuated by a second factor: scarcity. The material condition of scarcity is very familiar to us today, given the mounting evidence regarding the effects of climate change, the race to lock up valuable natural resources, and mounting economic inequality.<\/p>\n

But scarcity can also be a psychological state, the \u201cscarcity mind\u201d: an imposition on experience that shapes it into how we observe and understand events and others. Even when essential goods and resources are not scarce, they are believed to be so. The scarcity mind operates independently and is dynamically connected to malignant bonding, deriving from history and prehistory. When lifespans were short, life itself was often perilous, and material scarcity was an ever urgent problem, bonding was a way to find security and alleviate want. Even when human societies became larger and more complex, this primal connection between bonding and scarcity remained psychologically powerful\u2014and still is.<\/p>\n

Historical and Trans-Historical Trauma<\/h3>\n

The third major factor in producing societies prone to toxic polarization is something universal to human experience: trauma. For individuals, trauma can be the result of accidents, physical, and psychological abuse in interpersonal, social, or institutional relationships, war, natural disasters, illness, or other disturbing experiences.<\/p>\n

But it also has a millennial impact, having gathered over thousands of years of our species\u2019 often harsh and violent development. The fears and compensating behaviors that accumulate as a result of the physical and emotional violence, become coded into our collective behavior as societies.<\/p>\n

Because its effects are so profound and persistent, trauma\u2014from social pecking orders, predators, material rivalries, sexual selection, wars, precarious systems of sustenance, climate, and geographic shifts\u2014has been and continues to be a critical ingredient in human development. We are always pushing back against the effects of various kinds of trauma, which tend to throw the positive aspects of bonding out of balance in favor of the malignant.<\/p>\n

How and with whom we bond\u2014individually and in communities\u2014is driven by our desire not to experience either trauma or this imagined scarcity, even if it means drawing boundaries that leave many of us outside.<\/p>\n

Institutional Scarcity<\/h3>\n

Trauma plays a critical role in generating and reinforcing the scarcity mind and then building it into the institutions\u2014such as the government, commerce, household, and family\u2014that make up our social infrastructure. The way those institutions function\u2014and have functioned over time\u2014produces what we experience as \u201ccommon sense\u201d: our assumptions about how to make intelligent decisions. This common sense is therefore informed at least in part by malignant bonding, the scarcity mind, and historical and trans-historical trauma.<\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu, in\u00a0Outline of a Theory of Practice<\/i>, called this \u201cdisposition\u201d or \u201csense of the game\u201d: a partly rational but partly intuitive understanding of fields and of social order in general, giving rise to opinions, tastes, tones of voice, typical body movements and mannerisms, and other ingrained habits and assumptions. These help to reproduce\u00a0prejudices and other social forms of domination, which eventually seem natural.<\/p>\n

This \u201cdisposition\u201d is then baked into our social, political, and economic institutions to produce a society typified by what we call \u201cinstitutional scarcity\u201d: an acceptance of the scarcity mind and an accompanying set of assumptions about the limits to what\u2019s possible. The process begins as communities and cultures build distinctive technologies and ways of life and come into more frequent direct contact with each other, developing often exclusive territorial identities. Our institutions, in turn, ensure that these assumptions are kept wired into us as members of society, producing a \u201ccollective common sense\u201d that frames our behavioral and political affinities.<\/p>\n

This dynamic\u2014of bonding over perceived scarcity\u2014has persisted and still shapes our institutions, too often keeping goodwill approaches and solutions out of reach. Often, institutional actors\u2014influential figures in politics, business, religious, or cultural life\u2014build popular support by turning scarcity\u2014real or presumed\u2014into a critical yardstick for judging value: elevating the market against the common good, the possession of ideas (\u201cintellectual property\u201d) against collaboration and sharing, and exploiting threats of insufficiency to exclude the foreigner and promoting malignant bonding.<\/p>\n

The emotional and physical violence that inevitably results from institutional scarcity generates new waves of trauma among non-dominant, outsider groups. This, in turn, encourages all groups to shut themselves off and push back against change for fear of losing cohesion, having to share resources, or exposing themselves to further trauma. The result is a further narrowing of the \u201cwe\u201d\u2014for example, those who can be regarded as part of our nationality, as respectable, as worthy of consideration or assistance by society as a whole\u2014and a fierce attachment to that shrinking \u201cwe\u201d by the people who feel entitled to claim membership in it. Often, these people hold more material wealth and feel a correspondingly greater desire to protect and preserve it; frequently, they are joined by people with far less material wealth but a shred of social capital\u2014whiteness, maleness, and property\u2014that they are just as fiercely determined to hold on to.<\/p>\n

Institutional scarcity and the shrinking of the \u201cwe\u201d affect our ability to communicate, inducing us to scrap the rules of engagement we normally apply to people we bond with. Powerful emotions like resentment make the listener less patient with the respectful, methodical discussion that characterizes good faith argument, and more welcoming of the sudden emotional outbursts and hyperbole\u2014the catharsis\u2014that a party in bad faith will indulge in when they feel they are losing the case. Catharsis, in turn, strengthens the pattern of toxic polarization, making it ever harder to break.<\/p>\n

How We Learn and Change<\/h3>\n

Polarization and the elements that cause it are not going away. \u201cThe latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,\u201d Madison\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cand we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are not destined to experience a future riven by toxic polarization and straitjacketed by institutional scarcity, however. We have a choice.<\/p>\n

While malignant bonding, the scarcity mind, and historical trauma are powerful shapers of human society, there have always been powerful and, often, very effective counterbalancing factors. Three in particular have driven personal, social, and political changes at significant scales throughout human history:<\/p>\n