“In my hometown in India, everyone talks about politics all the time. And most of us don’t agree with one another. But that’s okay. I can even tease other people about our political disagreements and it doesn’t get in the way of friendships. Why isn’t that the case here in the US?”
Because when you're in a homogenous in-group you can discuss politics and get annoyed, or heated, and shake hands and go home.
When you're not in an in-group, one side is discussing non-ideal solutions, and the other side wants to destroy you. And then you have to figure out how to convince a friend that their political ideology might kill you.
Read the rest of the post. Indian politics are not somehow lower stakes than ours, the Indian subcontinent is not less diverse, and the author's friend included a specific example of people getting literally killed over their politics.
I'm still puzzled over the article frankly. In India there's political violence and people are getting killed - but they still are happy to discuss politics with their friends and neighbors? There's a disconnect there that I'm not getting. Why are they talking to everyone about their political views if it might get them killed?
That's the question that the Indian person is asking.
Here in the US we'll refuse to interact with someone if we find out that they're part of the wrong tribe, but our political violence is pretty low on the scale of what's possible.
There, they have a lot of political violence and from what I understand quite divisive political issues that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, but apparently they don't have the culture of avoiding talking about it altogether that we do and they don't attempt to avoid associating with anyone who disagrees with them.
When reading an article like this, I think westerners get guilt tripped. We must be wrong, just look at all the troubles we have. Maybe if we talked more things would be better.
But maybe the real take way here is that people in Indian should talk less about politics!
I don't refuse to interact with people of the wrong "tribe", I make sure to ask for their political positions on, e.g., "should interracial marriage be allowed? Should we allow trans people to change their birth certificates?"
If someone is like, "Nah, those things are bad" then I'm happy to not associate with them because I find their beliefs abhorrent. It has nothing to do with tribal affiliation and everything to do with policy.
I'm sensing some sort of neurotypical/neurodiverse divide here.
I don't think it's unreasonable to live a morally comprehensive life. For example, I probably couldn't be friends with a white-supremacist even if they were kind, gentle, supportive, and caring. Some folks are able to look past those things and more power to them. I, however, couldn't sleep at night.
This is what I find as strange. Why couldn't you sleep at night?
In my mind, the moral, healthy, productive, and pro-social thing would be to continue friendship.
I dont think shunning people builds bridges or helps anyone.
Then again, my generation grew up with stories like black activists who befriended KKK members and slowly converted them with compassion and challenging their preconceived notions.
This is one of those comments that stuck with me. First because of my inability to articulate a response, but I've had some time to think.
When I think about why I'm uncomfortable with the idea, it stems from feeling like a lack the ability to push back against bigotry with tact. While some people have this skill, I do not. The consequence of this is either not engaging with bigots, or not speaking up when something bigoted is said.
I believe that not speaking up against bigoted beliefs implicitly normalizes their acceptability. What I mean by this is that I personally and deeply value tolerance and non-judgementalness with the exception of bigotry[1].
Faced with an inability to tactfully push back, I feel left with not engaging with folks who are overtly bigoted. Saying, "well you should not do that or feel that way," doesn't change the emotional response I have to that situation, it only pushes the intellectual part of me farther way from the emotional side creating a wider gap between feeling and intellect - effectively sowing greater cognitive dissonance.
More power to the people who have the skills to tactfully engage with bigots, but that's not me right now. Maybe someday.
There's definitely some things that warrant distancing. But I try to appreciate the good, even if there is bad. Moral purity is a luxury and self-righteousness can be ugly (sorry).
Not only is it a luxury, it's sheer arrogance to pretend it exists at all.
None of us get through life without complicated trade-offs, and in most cases when you disagree with ~50% of a country's population it's because you have different values of what good thing matters most.
In fact it's a privilege to not have to worry about moral purity. Being able to look past views without personal consequences is life free of that burden. Some people don't have that option.
Oh, other people have cognitive dissonance too. It's not just you. Being aware of the bad and still engaging doesn't mean that the issue is being ignored or given less weight.
Most people are full of contradictions and often carry beliefs that might be seen as controversial (perhaps in hindsight). Maybe it's not appropriate to lump all controversial beliefs into one, but I think a small part of the problem is that we identify ourselves as being morally pure as a way to avoid having hard conversations.
I dont think it is necessarily about the hard conversations with others. I think it is just convenient for some people to cut the world into black and white binaries and reduce other humans to one dimension.
There is a human instinct resolve ambiguity, and barring that, heuristically paper over it.
The more emotionally engaging a topic is, the more galling the uncertainty and cognitive dissonance is. The more distressing the uncertainty, the more people want a simple solution, even if it isnt true.
I think questions like if someone can be a racist AND a good person are complex. They are uncomfortable. This makes a simple answer of "NO" all the more attractive. It makes life a lot easier than if the answer is "sometimes, but it depends on 1,000 other things".
Applying purity tests to others provides an easy way to go through life while minimizing the thought and consideration given to those people.
It sounds like you find moral purity to be reprehensible, but at the same time, don't have an issue with having reprehensible people in your life. Why don't you demonstrate how it's done and become friends with me?
Sure, it would suck to have some sort of very serious mental disorder that forced one to hyper fixate on things that they have no ability to control or effect, and for which it is detrimental to focus on that as opposed to one's immediate and day to day problems.
So, in some sense it is a "privilege" to not have such a rare and extreme problem.
But, mostly the privilege is in the other direction, and the people with the privilege are the ones who dont have other serious problems in their life that they can afford to spend all their time and effort focusing on something that they have little ability to effect or change and aren't directly related to their immediate problems.
Most the people with material problems are the ones with the less privilege here, even though, yes in some rare cases the inability to avoid focusing on things that are irrelevant to ones day to day and immediate problems can be an issue.
> is life free of that burden.
Quite the opposite. People with actual burdens don't have the time, effort, or luxury to focus on things that are outside of their immediate issues.
They have things to do and problems to solve that are hurting them seriously in the material world.
Its the rich and wealthy, and undiscriminated that have the privilege to be morally pure all the time.
Maybe you can give an example where you feel like you had to compromise your morals because you're not rich, wealthy, and undiscriminated? It would help to have something tangible to talk about.
Well, going back to the original hypothetical that was brought up about making friends with racists.
Befriending the racists can actually be a pretty effective way of getting the racists to stop assaulting you at school every day.
If that example is too extreme, you can go with "making friends with people to work together on homework so you can graduate".
And, you are what you pretend to be sometimes, and eventually that stuff can turn into real friendships.
I would never judge someone for doing that.
But you seem to think that making moral "compromises" must mean that one's life is free from burdens.
By all means, do what you need to do in your life.
But, it is extraordinarily insulting that you are calling people privileged for having the "luxury" of not being morally pure, and not being able to pick and choose perfect friends.
This is a great example of how communication between people with different outlooks breaks down. We'll eventually get frustrated, call it quits, and never speak again. It's the exact pattern played out in miniature.
The answer was repeating my example when I asked for one of your own. It felt like you didn't really care what my question was. Is there nothing that causes you to feel like you are compromising your morals?
The example you gave with having to make friends to get a good grade, I'm unsure how that relates to compromising your morals. Is that an experience you personally went through? What was that like for you?
I will repeat and rephase the answer which you may have misunderstood:
Circumstances, like someone preventing one's self from being assaulted every day by racists or racial supremacists, seems like a pretty clear cut example of someone who has less privilege.
You'll have to ask the other people that you initially responded to many posts up about the exact details of the tradeoffs that they made or if they were even referencing themselves, or even if they had any specific situation in mind.
Maybe those other people were talking about a friend? Maybe they were just talking about things in general and had no specific situation in mind.
I was just giving some possible situations or hypotheticals that would justify their arguments that they made.
But I am glad you were able to basically agree with me here that their arguments were justified in certain circumstances.
I'm with you. There are hard lines. But I also have hard lines in who you support. Like, if you vote for a politician who supports, e.g., the eradication of trans people, then even if you say, "I don't believe in that" you've furthered that cause by issuing your vote. I can't abide someone who is willing to compromise on some things.
Maybe they'd have less political violence if they didn't associate with people who disagree with them. I'm not sure I'm convinced that dying for your political views is a fair price to pay for conversations with your neighbors.
I'm not convinced that the two are correlated. We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, ~~without the violence~~. [Scratching this part out because it's drawing plenty of justified criticism. I stand by the rest, and this part was generally true—with small exceptions—from at least 1990-2008.]
The complete refusal to interact with someone who disagrees with you is a relatively new phenomenon that seems to have risen alongside social media.
> We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives...
We most certainly did not. Point to an era where there wasn't political violence in the US.
Jim Crow? Civil rights era? WTO Protests? Vietnam war protests? Rodney King? Stonewall? Like... this country has been violent about politics since this country was a country.
Growing up I was afraid to be even remotely "non-manly" because I was so worried I'd be dragged behind someone's truck.
> We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, without the violence.
No, we didn't. Look up what happened in the 1960s. And even that was mild compared to what went on in election campaigns in the 19th century in the US.
>We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, without the violence.
You must have forgotten the US Civil War, plus all the turbulence of the 1960s.
The big difference there was that, for the most part, the two sides were geographically separated from each other.
>The complete refusal to interact with someone who disagrees with you is a relatively new phenomenon that seems to have risen alongside social media.
If you're thinking of the early-to-mid 20th century, things have changed. America has become much more diverse, and co-mingled (in the past, immigrant and other minority groups tended to keep to themselves and not socially interact so much with other groups). White European-descended people are no longer the overwhelming majority (remember, immigrants in the past mostly came from Europe), religion has lost much of its power and many of its believers, homosexuality has become far more accepted, basically one side feels existentially threatened, and the other side oppressed.
There’s literally no way the nation of India is more diverse than the United States- we have the biggest spread of racial, and religious diversity on the planet, by far.
With all due respect, please do some research on India before asserting something like this.
We're taking about a country with ~4x the population of the US where no single language has the majority of native speakers (the closest is Hindi at 26% [0]). 12 different languages are spoken natively by >1% of the population. India has diversity that someone born in the US can't even begin to comprehend.
I think it's hard for Westerners to understand because we view diversity through such a skin color and organized religion lens. 'Everyone' in India is dark-skinned and most are Hindu, so that means they're not diverse, right?
The trouble is that that's a very Western perspective on both ethnicity and on religion, one that doesn't carry over at all.
Actually there's a very easy empirical way to test this claim: look at the amount of subsampling pollsters do. In the US samples are typically weighted after the raw data is collected, by:
gender
age
white college, white non-college, Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian
party registration
For 1000 samples you get the standard MoE of 3ish percent.
In India you start by dividing up the electorate into hundreds of strata, sample independently from each stratum, then piece it together. This results in Indian polling sample sizes being over 100k for the same 3% MoE.
This is pretty objective evidence of India's diversity.
(I am curious though if 2024 is going to cause pollsters to re-examine polling basics in the US. There are several major warning signs this year that polling is broken, even if it produces the right result in the end.)
The conclusion of this viewpoint is that you either turn everyone into the in-group or one group comes out on top of the others. Either way, diversity won't survive long under that.
Diversity has historically been used to keep populations divided allowing a smaller group to rule over them. Plenty of historical examples (Italy, Ottoman Empire, etc) as well as literature. I think this is described in Machiavelli’s “The Prince”.
And both current US candidates are pushing for immigration/diversity (albeit from different groups, but the end result is the same). The real reason we can’t discuss politics is because our elites want us divided, and they have the means to accomplish that.
“In my hometown in India, everyone talks about politics all the time. And most of us don’t agree with one another. But that’s okay. I can even tease other people about our political disagreements and it doesn’t get in the way of friendships. Why isn’t that the case here in the US?”
Because when you're in a homogenous in-group you can discuss politics and get annoyed, or heated, and shake hands and go home.
When you're not in an in-group, one side is discussing non-ideal solutions, and the other side wants to destroy you. And then you have to figure out how to convince a friend that their political ideology might kill you.