I’ve made the case that the West is facing the fact that within their societies there exist differing information networks. These differing networks are feeding, and feeding off, ideological division and they are mostly making things worse. On the one side you have right-wing conspiracy fuelled dingbats and their alt-media and on the other side you have progressive intolerants who mostly have a stranglehold in the mainstream media. Both sides believe they are no such thing of course.

This crisis of truth will, I think, prove to be a far bigger problem than this pandemic we are living through. There’s no vaccine for it. What’s more in America where the divide is deepest and widest I think the informational chasm may well be unbridgeable.

The problem is not that we have differing interpretations to the same set of facts but that we no longer have the same set of facts. I think the mainstream media both reports the news reasonably accurately while at the same time being demonstrably biased against conservative morality to give just one example. I think the alt-media mostly just makes stuff up. Just so you know where I’m coming from.

That there are huge segments of the population that occupy these increasingly strident informational realities has led to an inability to comprehend the other. It’s not just that we disagree with your conclusion but that we cannot even begin to grasp how you could even think like that. How could you be so stupid/deluded/deceived? Or all three.

Let me give you two examples.

Catherynne M. Valente has written a long essay (some bad language) on why she loves the show Ted Lasso. When it comes to the jokes, she writes:

I actually think Ted’s progressive jokes are rather desperately important, as far as TV is ever desperately important. There’s this crushing, dominant idea that real comedy, edgy comedy, modern, cutting-edge comedy is by nature regressive, offensive, in your face, dirty, snickering about women and minorities and LGBTQ folk because if those pious SJWs don’t like it, it must be hysterical. So to speak. That if you’re not offending people, you’re not doing it right. And the intersection of comedy and sports is where this attitude is likely to be EXTREMELY firmly rooted and taken for granted.

Ted Lasso Believes in You (italics added)

What? Edgy-comedy makes fun of minorities and gay people? Since when? Has she not heard of Modern Family? It seems to me every show on TV finds a way to shoehorn in as many minorities as it can into every episode to prove their credentials, no matter the setting or plot. They strain so hard to make sure that this is right and even the thought that the dominant idea is to make fun of them? I have no idea what she is thinking of or where she could even begin to form the opinion that cutting edge comedy picks on gay folks. I mean c’mon. And full disclosure my media diet consists of subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon & Disney – so I’m fairly confident I’m not missing that hilarious minority bashing comedy hit show.

As I read her words, I realise that we live in alternate informational realities. Mirror worlds. I can’t begin to understand how she could think she has accurately framed the world and I expect she would wonder how I can’t.

The second example is much more subtle. I’m a subscriber to The Economist and generally tend to agree with much of their analysis and where I don’t, I still find it helpful and often insightful. In this piece, Viktor Orban seizes control of Hungary’s universities, they repeat the view (which I think I’ve mostly gone along with) that Orban and his Fidesz party are an enemy of democracy and therefore one of the bad guys. So we read:

The fear is that Fidesz will use this control as it has used control of the media: to stifle dissenting voices and to churn out propaganda. Its hobby horses include the evils of immigration, liberalism and gay and trans rights. It also spreads loopy conspiracy theories about the European Union, and the financier George Soros’s supposed plan to flood Hungary with Muslim immigrants. The government has already forced state universities to drop gender-studies programmes. 

I’d probably repeat something similar if anyone was to ask me to opine on politics in Hungary which doesn’t happen as often I’d like. But there is another view, because I don’t just read The Economist. I also read Rod Dreher who is currently in Hungary. Dreher is much more fearful than I am about these cultural shifts. I expect that is in part due to the fact that I am an evangelical raised in Europe and not the US. I have been a member of a minority my whole life. Anyway, Dreher writes,

The Left rages at Viktor Orban for his illiberalism (e.g., pulling accreditation and funding for master’s and PhD programs in state universities), but he is acting in what he believes is the public’s interest. (And he’s right about that too: look at how the US is destroying itself with gender ideology and Critical Race Theory, and you’ll see that this stuff is like a deadly virus of the mind.) The Orban government did not ban the subjects, or writing on the subjects. He just said that the state will not pay for it, nor will they permit students to get degrees in that field of Grievance Studies. It was an illiberal move, but a far, far less important one, overall, that Jeff Bezos’s decision “not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness” (which Anderson’s book does not do, incidentally). The world’s largest bookseller, and the one with the power to control what gets published in America, has unilaterally, and within its rights, decided that the public debate over transgenderism is over, and no dissenters need ever be heard from again. Amazon is helping to send any dissent down the memory hole. The major media are too; where are the many op-eds critical of gender ideology, Black Lives Matter, and Critical Race Theory? We used to have a media that was on the Left, generally, but still at least formally dedicated to fairness and broad discussion. No more.

The Rational Reactionary

I imagine Dreher and someone from The Economist would still be capable of reasonable debate and who the real illiberals really are but the tendency is to push us one way or the other and away from debate and understanding and towards conflict. I think social media has a radicalizing tendency to it as the algorithms create echo chambers and bubbles galore.

Churches too have long had these bubbles, evangelicals don’t read liberals or progressives and vice versa. The tend is to caricature, straw-men (why is the straw always male?) and to the clean lines of doctrinal purity. Life is decidedly messier than that and I think if something new is to emerge, something better, something more resilient then it will have to find a way to love the other, to love your enemy and your neighbour.