I’m just expanding a bit on an idea that I had in my last gemlog, but I’m starting to recognize that my tolerance for “different views and opinions”, in general, scales with proximity. In other words, I have a lot of patience for (e.g.) a neighbor or cousin who might occasionally vote Republican, but in a purely virtual space I don’t want to deal with centrists anymore — hell, I barely want to deal with the wrong kind of leftist sometimes.
This feels like it could be counterintuitive to some?
Viz: one might assume that it would be easier to tolerate disagreeable views across the comfortable distance of cyberspace. This is basically the theory behind the “social network as a town square” thesis. But when I’m actually using the internet to connect with strangers (which I’ve been doing for nearly 30 years now), I am using it to talk with people who think and feel — if not exactly like me — in ways that I can relate to, or respect, or learn from.
I’ve come to believe that, out in meat space, it’s easier to find a shared context that can bind people together across different viewpoints. The family who live in the house behind mine don’t share my politics, but we generally want the same things for this patch of the world that we share. And when our politics tell us that different approaches will solve some problem, at least we agree on which things are problems and what a good solution would look like.
These are just disorganized thoughts that I’m still working through. If I have a thesis here, I guess it’s that a “shared context” can bind people loosely or tightly, and tighter bonds are more resilient to (and in some cases, may even benefit from) different outlooks¹.
One of the theories of liberal democracy is that a notion like nationality — and, if we’re being honest about the history of liberal democracy, “race” — can provide that context. We could argue about whether or not this was ever a good idea in theory, but I won’t bother because all of the empirical evidence makes it clear that this just is not true. In fact, the very people who supposedly share my nationality and race are the people who are the most hostile and represent the greatest threat to my well-being. And so it goes for “the English-speaking internet”, or even, “the English-speaking internet doing the same kinds of computer-work that I do”. I’m happy to share a workplace with those folks but I don’t want to interact with them online anymore, certainly not in my precious free time.
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¹: “Different outlooks” is a broader category than “different values” and even “different political beliefs.” I want to be crystal clear here: you don’t need to spend any time interacting with any fascist motherfucker who wants you and your friends dead. This is more about my beef with centrists and other liberals (who are often hostile to my ideas even when they claim to care about the same things that I do).