Group Uber Alles

There's no "us" without a "them."

Lately, I've been reading (listening to) The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it and I'm not sure I'll finish it, but it's got some really good things to say.

For this post, the salient point is how humans are hard-wired to form groups and identify with them. The authors cite numerous studies where people are assigned into arbitrary groups, such as by coin flips or other random events, after which they quickly form bonds of defense with that group. Since the grouping is arbitrary, it means that grouping itself is a natural response. Further, when they feel threatened, even members of arbitrary groups jump into their bunkers and prepare to fight.

As long as we emphasize groups and not individuals, we'll get irrational conflicts based on groups.

The Brett Kavanaugh circus is a great example of it. The progs are driving the country apart again, this time with groups based on sex. You can see people in the media and ordinary individuals on Twitter screaming at members of the other group. It's madness.

How far will we pixelate? Will we get to the point where slender, middle-aged, agnostic, progressive, hetero women with college degrees have their own hashtag and fight it out with everyone else, screaming about how they've always been marginalized?

Or maybe we can't handle complex classifications like that and the most we can do is sex and race and maybe sexual orientation. Hispanic lesbians, for example. Even that sounds a bit ridiculous. I'll bet we stop at binary classifications, but on several dimensions with your alliances constantly shifting, based on which outrage is getting the most play at the moment.

One minute, you, a Hispanic lesbian will find yourself railing at a Hispanic hetero man because he's homophobic and misogynistic and the next minute, the two of you will be allies against the Asian hetero woman because she's racist. That sounds about right.

Yay.

Oh, this won't make men jump into their bunkers and load their machine guns. Nope, not at all.