Thoughts after reading THE BIG SORT

I just finished reading The Big Sort by Bill Bishop
and it has been running around my head like some kind of ball bouncing off the
walls. Occasionally this ball seems to hit me in the head, knocking me down,
which only serves to give the ball of my thoughts more momentum and begin the
process all over again.

 

I learned all kinds of interesting little facts that
were new to me although some of them were obvious once I started thinking about
lifestyles and people and the mobility of modern society.  Some of them, like the information
about child rearing  priorities,
which Grace posted, make perfect sense, but wouldn’t have occurred to me
before.

 

But it is not these facts that cause my
discomfort.   I am
uncomfortable about this whole process of social segregation, which also
becomes a political and ideological segregation even as I myself see myself
easily slipping into a particular part of the divide.  Even as I read the statistics and accept
that the more educated people are the more liberal they tend to become, even as
I lean toward those liberal enclaves and would be very happy with certain
aspects of the lifestyle that draws and attracts many of the bright,
interesting, open-minded people, even as I know that once one finds oneself in
a group of likeminded people one becomes more extreme as the group become a
little more extreme (liberal or conservative), even as I agree with people’s
choices and why they make them and think that I would and might still make some
of the same choices,  I find myself
quite uneasy with the very idea of segregating ourselves into like-minded
communities.

 

Somewhere in the book Bishop notes that the more
educated people are the LESS likely they are to be able to tolerate discussing
politics with someone with opposing beliefs.

 

Herein lies the root of my discomfort.

 

Perhaps a little history is in order:

Once upon a time there was a young girl who left a
small town in Texas to go “East” to school.  She came from a fairly conservative place, although there
were both Democrats and Republicans in her family’s immediate circle of friends.  But there was a barrier in the town
between the politics of the local university and the politics of the town
itself. 

 

This girl was already chafing at the boundaries of
thought and acceptance at home, and although she realized that her thoughts and
beliefs were highly influenced by her upbringing, she was eager to begin seeing
and learning more.  Already she was
appalled at how comfortable people were in their narrow set of beliefs, and how
closed they were to new ideas or different views of the world. She wanted to go
to a place where she believed that people would look at all the information,
discuss ideas openly and rationally and perhaps come to some kind of reasoned
belief that perhaps stemmed from equal consideration of opposing views.  The woman I have become sees that this
girl who was once myself was incredibly naive.

 

This young girl went to her liberal-arts college,
which is indeed quite liberal, and although she became more liberal herself (which
would have happened anyway) she was quite shocked and disillusioned to learn
that liberals could be just as closed minded as conservatives.  She learned that truly impartial
inquiry with the desire to learn the truth is an exceedingly rare thing in this
life.  She learned that most people
gravitate to tribes, and having chosen their group they embrace its tenets
wholesale and whole-heartedly, without necessary questioning the
transition.  Of course she
recognized that true open-mindedness was difficult, and that all people develop
biases and assumptions based on their upbringing, biases which are often
unrecognized, but she still hoped that she, and others like her, would try, at
least occasionally, to cross the divide of difference and reach some understanding.

 

This book reminds me of an episode from the end of my
college years.  That liberal arts
college was Vassar College and my senior year there was a bit of an uproar over
the commencement speaker. 
Apparently a questionnaire had been sent out asking the class to
vote.  Not many students responded,
and of those that had, more had voted for William F. Buckley Jr. than any other
prospective speaker.  When it came
to light, much later in the year, that Mr. Buckley would be our speaker my
class revolted.  A petition was
signed with the intention of un-inviting the commencement speaker.  Many were outraged.  They were appalled that their liberal
ears might have to hear words spoken by a pillar of conservatism.

 

I too was appalled.  I did not sign the petition.  I was shocked that a group of highly intelligent people,
people who supposedly had been educated to read and listen critically, to
cipher-out and discern truth, could be so afraid of what one conservative man
might say that they were unwilling to listen to him.   Even if most of the class had not voted for Mr.
Buckley, I felt they should accept the responsibility and listen to what he had
to say.  After all those who did
not vote were equally as responsible as those who did, by abdicating their role
in the selection process they were accepting the choice of those who did vote.

 

In the end, Mr. Buckley did not speak.  He withdrew; making a comment that my
classmates (myself included by association) were “ferocious illiterates”, once
again proving that childish partisanship was the norm.  To my mind that epithet was a slap in
the face, symbolizing as it did the failure of rational intelligent human
beings to behave in a rational, intelligent and civil manner.  To many of my classmates it was a badge
of honor.

 

The segregation of society makes the extremes all the
more powerful.  I consider myself
fortunate to live in a place that is pretty equally divided between Democrat
and Republican, where the differences between “sides” in any election is a
matter of a few percentage points. 
The battles seem to be becoming increasingly bloody, but it is still
possible to find many people along the long fence that is the middle.   I consider myself fortunate to
have friends on both sides of that line, although I recognize that many of my Republican
friends are truly moderates in many ways and are dinosaurs in their own
party.   There is no place for the pro-choice Republican who drives a
Prius in this world.  And the world
is a smaller place because of this.

 

This is what truly saddens me, the loss of the
middle, the idea that life and culture has to be lived in black and white, with
even divisions between us and them, right and wrong, good and evil, liberal and
conservative.  I mourn the loss of
the independent thinker.  I mourn
the loss of the idea that there is a commonality that binds people.  Even as I know that I would fall on the
clearly educated, liberal side of this divide, and even as I know that I don’t
really want to live with bible-thumping, child-spanking, close-minded
neighbors, I mourn the fact that we are pushing ourselves further and further
apart.

 

Extremes of any sort have always made me
nervous.  They still do.  They make me nervous even as I see that
my own inclinations make me a part of the divide.  But the divide here isn’t about politics; politics are
merely a symptom.  Are we becoming
a nation of haves and have-nots, of the educated upwardly mobile and the less educated
and downwardly mobile?  Is this
what we want?  Do the educated have
some responsibility to the rest of the population of the country?   There will always be variations
in intelligence, wealth, and standing in any society.  But are we replacing a society of nobility and serfdom with a
society of paternalistic intellectual elite who peer down upon those on the
“less-enlightened” side of the divide?

 

I enjoy the fruits of living in a society and an age
where I can chose where I live and the kind of people I live with.  But I fear the psychology of groups and
I fear that even a society of educated, thoughtful people, can forget to
question their assumptions.