The Errors of Liberalism

via Rod Dreher - Amanda Ripley, Complicating the Narratives:

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all kinds of places, and I did not know these lessons. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s.

For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a rational world. When people made mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was assumed, generally prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all manner of biases and illusions.

So even though all human beings are rational, it does not mean that they exercise rationality equally or in the same way. And we should not ignore the role that emotion, both in good and bad ways, can affect our judgment and reasoning.

Researchers have a name for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They call this an “intractable conflict,” as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman describes in his book The Five Percent, and it’s very similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge in about one out of every 20 conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people’s encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.

In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.

Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.”

Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S.

Can journalism be salvaged with the lessons/strategies that Ripley puts forward? Not the MSM, I don't think, and it shouldn't. The press is an instrument for shaping opinion, not just reporting fact, and an instrument that the few or the elites would rather have under their control, and if they mean to produce conflict, they will produce conflict. Would there still be promotion of conflict in a small-scale political community? First, information would not be through someone making a living reporting the news, though it may be second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand rather than first-hand. But in the case of serious disputes, this would not be addressed by "public opinion" or the swaying of "public opinion" to one side or the other, but by the community, either through a designated authority or some other recognized intermediary. The modern press is parasitical on oversized population centers and rarely fulfill the task that they claim to be serving.