Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies.
We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially acceptable in the real world. Interacting in real life significantly moderates people's behaviour and when social media and the internet facilitate segregation and amplification of extremes, spending more time in person might really do us a lot of good.
We need to put people in a context where politics is irrelevant and a shared interest has the opportunity to bond people who would otherwise not meet. It's the only way I see of countering Identity Politics that try to be all consuming.
It would also be helpful to encourage people to focus on more positive events. Outrage culture is a thing, only exacerbated by social media, where rage = clicks/views = money. We need to change the economics of this equation. We would really benefit from a culture that gave more attention to people doing good rather than just focusing on the villains in society.
Encourage people to participate in physical social gatherings that center around non-political issues, like hobbies.
I think there is a lot more to this than many people think.
If more people participated in hobbies, then they would spend less time on the internet. The time they do spend would be more targeted and focused instead of mindlessly scrolling and scrolling and getting baited and agitated.
They would also form communities, as you suggest, with common interests and get to know people better. It's basic socialization.
Part of the problem is that for some reason there is a notion that everything has to be a business today. There's a Fidelity Investments TV commercial running right now where a daughter says to her retired mother, "Did you paint this [painting]? You know you can sell these!" And a business is born. Why? Why can't she just enjoy painting for painting's sake. For her own enjoyment? Why is money what decides if something is valid or not?
I encourage people to start hobbies. And be bad at them. Be terrible at reading, stamp collecting, woodworking, gardening, model railroading, brewing, or whatever. Do it because you like it. If you happen to be good at it, great! If all of your carrots die, that's OK, too. You got to spend quality time with yourself, which is more important than all the carrot sales you could possibly make.
[warning, cynic paragraph ahead]
We don't have time to socialize, we obviously live to work. We might be stressed as we don't get to disconnect much, but you know, that would be so wasteful! Streets are not for people to socialize, they are for cars and for going somewhere else to do business. Spaces can only be there for money, otherwise they are an inefficiency which we'll have to fix. If you are good at something, you should be earning money from it. We live in a global world. We have so many hobbies! But only so many people fits in an area, so matches are unlikely. Anyway, if you are willing to go out for socialization any hobby is ok. If you are interested in finding interesting people... sorry, they are busy at the moment. That's what interesting people do. Be stressed and busy trying to fix the world from crashing by hitting harder the accelerator. Ah, the beauty of an efficient market. Perfecting time and spaces.
Damn, this is a great idea... I’m going to try woodworking and make the shoddiest set of chairs one can imagine, but they’ll be my chairs. Could take up to a year maybe of practice but who cares!
As a matter of fact, i picked up woodworking as a hobby last summer and made some really good friends. You don't have to be good at it, just the whole process of going through it is rewarding. Look up "Mr. Chickadee"s channel on YouTube, watching his videos is like a meditating experience.
Unfortunately the problem is preexisting. The local communities can and have been the most psychotically toxic places.
If something is political is only about the level of agreement and not about sanity, decency, or morality. It may be easier to (not) think about divergence of views but that doesn't solve the particular underlying issue isn't real.
A few years ago I was at a local community meeting about expanding a school (USA). Let me tell you something, online trolls have nothing on the people who were for or against the expansion.
I left totally shocked with the toxicity, outright lies and innuendo. At one point someone on the board said the school was a front for prostitution. The audience audibly gasped.
Throughout history there has always been a large majority class of people who were suppressed and controlled by the elites just like today. The difference is that today, the suppressed classes are comparatively highly educated and have access to limitless information.
Before, this knowledge was accessible mostly by the elites.
Today, the lower classes know what's going on politically and economically better than many of the elites. That's why distrust of institutions is at an all time high. That's why books which label the social order as a fiction like 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' are top sellers.
For the first time in history, the correlation between wealth and knowledge has disappeared and is even starting to reverse.
It's difficult for the elite to control a class which knows what's going on better than they do.
And BTW, fake news has a purpose. It's a political and economic weapon invented by the lower and middle classes to serve their needs.
Fake news is owned and created by elites though. It's meant to generate outrage to support specific political causes. The greatest deceptions it perpetuates are fear-and-scarcity-based appeals to a binary political system (elites have created a policy-bundled system where campaign finance reform never happens and lobbyism thrives). In reality there is abundance and deep commonality between working class people in America, and uncovering it is one of the information revolution's greatest threats to the control class's divisive attempts. Fake news is a tool of the elite to counteract that effect, as is any erosion of critical thought, any disinformation, any suppression of empirical science.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Some hobbies have become more chic because of the analog "in-person" aspect (like tabletop gaming/role-playing and adult sports leagues), but culture is still losing the fight against isolation.
I optimistically think people are appreciating face-to-face time more, and I hope we think of a lot of new excuses to meet up over the next decade.
I would honestly struggle to do that. When one side of the argument is effectively arguing for my own removal / loss of rights / loss of dignity, I don’t see how I can have a dialogue with them about anything, since they clearly see me as inferior / unworthy.
Brexit effectively ruined a few experiences for me, like pycon UK, and I’m really not looking forward to picking them back up or risk being in that position again, sorry. I respect everyone’s opinion until it starts making me an unperson, there I draw a line.
It wasn't just "choosing not to participate." It was activism seeking to exclude religion from public life. The most important of those being the elimination of religion from public schools in the 1960s. (I should caveat the following by pointing out that the below is not an attempt to convince anybody about what policy would be better. Instead, it's an attempt to describe what I see as a fundamental tension in the approach that we have, for better or worse, adopted.)
A key function of most religions is providing people with a specific moral framework. Fundamental to that is almost always the process of socializing children in that moral framework. (Indeed, the UN recognizes that as a fundamental human right.) At the same time, a key function of schools also is socializing children in the values and morals of their community. For most of American history, there was no conflict between these two institutions--America's overwhelmingly Christian communities socialized their children in their religion through public schools.
The Warren Court's decisions in the 1960s broke that process. Parents had to socialize children in their religion "on their own time." Meanwhile, because teaching morality is an indispensable aspect of socializing children, public schools created an alternative, secular moral framework to impart onto children. Under those precedents, even in communities that were overwhelmingly Christian, and where Christian parents wanted their children raised with a Christian moral framework, public schools were required to teach them something else, in competition with whatever religious instruction they might receive on their own time. It's a unique scenario where attempts to vindicate the individual right of being free from unwanted exposure to religion in schools, has the side effect of dramatically curtailing the ability of the majority in the larger community to impose their religious values into their children.
Taxing people, then using that money to create public schools, and then requiring people to send their kids to those schools, and then prohibiting those schools from teaching kids the religion of their parents, very much has the effect of undermining the propagation of religion. It gives the secular teachings of teachers primacy over whatever religious teachings parents may be able to impart during the waking hours when children aren't in school.
Whether this that approach is nonetheless necessary in a multi-cultural society is a different question. I would point out that countries like Sweden seem to be doing fine allowing religious parents to choose to send their kids to publicly funded religious schools. But I think the effect of promoting secularism and undermining religion is hard to deny.
No offense or anything (or maybe offense, I don't know) but it wasn't "The Liberals" who systematically destroyed religion. A whole lot of the downfall of religion (which hasn't fallen, by the way) was predicated on religious institutions eating themselves from the inside out. Think about the excesses of the Christian churches of the west, based on the teachings of a man who taught forgiveness and the moral wrongs of excess. Think about the Bhuddist monasteries in the east who have fallen to, what can only be described as gang wars over the best tithing lands. The Shia and the Suffi try to kill each other over supposed differences in Muhammad's teachings. Churches did a fine job of destroying religion, long before people started blaming Liberals.
While I'm not sure I agree with your point about liberals "destroying" organized religion, I agree that churches (and other place of worship) unite local communities and the members look after one another.
We should really be putting far more effort into building similar non-religious communities. Things like book clubs, hiking clubs, or anything that involves shared interests.
Does it not seem somewhat disingenuous to lay the blame for the dip in religious affiliation and the rise of secularism entirely on liberals? Could the internet and increased access to conflicting information have played a role?
Not to mention the irony of addressing the toxicity and polarization of the internet by adding yet more toxicity and polarization.
We need to start emphasizing what we have in common, help people see that ultimately we're really not all that different from each other. The internet lets people hide behind this isolating veneer that makes it too easy to just shout at each other and behave in extreme ways that would never be socially acceptable in the real world. Interacting in real life significantly moderates people's behaviour and when social media and the internet facilitate segregation and amplification of extremes, spending more time in person might really do us a lot of good.
We need to put people in a context where politics is irrelevant and a shared interest has the opportunity to bond people who would otherwise not meet. It's the only way I see of countering Identity Politics that try to be all consuming.
It would also be helpful to encourage people to focus on more positive events. Outrage culture is a thing, only exacerbated by social media, where rage = clicks/views = money. We need to change the economics of this equation. We would really benefit from a culture that gave more attention to people doing good rather than just focusing on the villains in society.