Hate thine enemy: Our fundamentalisms are pulling us apart | Opinion

Stop the presses — Americans actually agree on something! Survey after survey show that from the right to the left, from the young to the old, in a nation divided there is a remarkable consensus: we are losing the right to speak our minds.

Our most recent book traces a rise in fundamentalist thinking that we believe is stifling the type of informed discussion that underpins democracy. It leads to a radical simplification of complex questions and an unwillingness to learn from experience or opposing views. There is little hope of compromise. It has fueled cancel culture and given rise to dueling monologues of abuse between those who are certain that they can’t be wrong, that truth and justice are exclusively on their side, and that their opponents must be evil or delusional.

As longtime faculty members, it is especially disconcerting to witness it in the classroom. A large majority of our nation’s college students say that they self-censor. One survey reported that college students are reluctant to speak out on politics, race, sexual orientation, or gender. What’s left?

Another study traces 40 years of survey results tracking the strength of positive feelings toward one’s own political party. Between 1975 and around 2010, in-party love was a stronger force than out-party hate. But respect for the other party has plummeted over time. It is now the case that hatred of the opposing party is considerably stronger than affection for one’s own.

Is this because there has been a divergence in what political opponents actually believe, or because of the beliefs attributed to them? A third study shows that people systematically overestimate the ideological extremity of their rivals. Have real differences in views diverged over time? Yes. But nowhere as much as is commonly thought. And nowhere near as much as hatred of the other side has increased.

What explains this disconnect? We argue that many of us live in echo chambers, hearing our words and the words of those like us played back. Whenever one is in a group of like-minded people, opinion drifts to more extreme positions because they are seldom challenged. By contrast, when we speak and listen to those with whom we differ, the opposite dynamic takes place. Echo chambers incubate fundamentalisms; mixed communities foster tolerance.

We didn’t always live that way. Remember the days when we got our news from network television, newspapers, and magazines? Whether we favored Dan Rather on CBS, Tom Brokaw on NBC or Peter Jennings on ABC, there was little discernible political slant. While Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report might have had more pronounced political agendas, compare that with MSNBC versus Fox News, with the New York Times versus the Washington Times, with Don Lemon versus Tucker Carlson.

So what can be done? First of all, it is important to identify the fundamentalism in each of us – that there are certain areas where we unequivocally know that we are right, and it is therefore impossible to convince us otherwise. As one of the prepublication reviewers of our book put it, “We want to keep our minds wide open, but not so wide open that our brains fall out.” Yet, when we look in the mirror and discover that the majority – or even a significant minority – of our views are not open to refutation, we must face the fact that we may be part of the problem. Perhaps liberals can learn something from watching Fox News and taking seriously articles, books, and op-eds written by thoughtful conservatives in Commentary, National Review, and First Things. Conservatives can do similarly with CNN, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the like. And we believe that literature can inspire and inform us, moving us beyond fundamentalism into true understanding. Great fiction, in particular, offers a master class in empathy with those unlike ourselves.

What does the future hold? One of us, Schapiro, cites the election of Joe Biden, a self-described moderate, in support of the notion that we are on a pendulum, swinging back toward mutual respect and meaningful engagement, although the spectacle of the recent State of the Union address gives him pause. Morson, as a specialist in Russia’s lugubrious history, sees matters differently. Instead of a pendulum, he prefers the metaphor of a rolling snowball of intolerance, gaining size and momentum. When conditions are worse than they have been before, they are not guaranteed to swing back but may, as in the French and Russian revolutions, lead to still greater intolerance.

It might seem strange to have an optimistic economist foreseeing a more respectful world, while the pessimistic humanist shops for winter clothes in anticipation of the gulag. But we agree on one thing – what is at stake is nothing less than the future of democracy.

This story was originally published February 10, 2023 at 7:37 AM.