The Better Letter: Welcome to Extremistan
As Aaron Sorkin wrote and said (often), “…more and more we’ve come to expect less and less of each other.”
He’s right. This week’s TBL will look at a big reason why.
We are all prone to overstatement. By nature, we are subject to confirmation bias, which means that we are likely to look for evidence to confirm our preconceived notions and to examine evidence in a light most favorable to our existing points of view than to analyze all the data objectively and come to a reasoned conclusion. As a consequence, we hold our own opinions too tightly and are generally too quick and too negative in our disparagement of opposing points of view.
When we see evidence that tends to confirm what we already hold to be true, we ask if it can be true, a generous standard indeed. When the evidence tends to be disconfirming, we ask if it must be true, a wholly different and more exacting standard.
These tendencies provide a pretty good basis for considering what Aristotle called the “golden mean,” what Confucius called the “doctrine of the mean” and what Buddhists call the “middle way” – the desirable middle between two extremes. Thus, courage is the golden mean between irresponsible recklessness and cowardice. As Aquinas observed in his Summa Theologica, “evil consists in discordance from their rule or measure. Now, this may happen either by their exceeding the measure or by their falling short of it…. Therefore, it is evident that moral virtue observes the mean.”
Truth often resides between extremes.* Sadly, increasingly few of us are interested in the truth. We’d rather live in Extremistan.
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Thank you for reading.
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* None of which is to say that truth can always be found on some “middle ground.” The argumentum ad temperantiam is a logical fallacy that wrongly asserts that between two extremes there must be a correct compromise between them. In practice, this fallacy often leads to false equivalencies and an overarching relativism, even when one side is clearly and demonstrably right and the other wrong. The tendency to equivocate is particularly acute in our media culture, which tends to rely upon a simple he said/she said motif instead of doing comprehensive reporting and the pithy soundbite over careful analysis.
Welcome to Extremistan
On November 24, 1951, Princeton defeated Dartmouth, 13-0, to win its 22nd consecutive football game and complete a second straight undefeated season for what legendary writer John McPhee called “Phi Beta Football.” It was the final game for Tiger tailback Dick Kazmaier, a future College Football Hall of Famer and McPhee’s roommate. “Kaz” had been pictured on the cover of Time magazine that week and would soon win the Heisman Trophy (the last Ivy League player to do so) in a landslide.
However, the game that day is not primarily remembered as having capped off a stellar season and a brilliant career.
Instead, the legacy of that brisk late autumn afternoon contest rests upon two seemingly unrelated matters: allegations of intentionally dirty play by Dartmouth and the behavioral implications of how fans viewed and responded to the game. Based upon various sources, the primary narrative of the game was that an underdog Dartmouth team set out to injure Princeton players – particularly the brilliant Kazmaier. However, that was not the only proffered narrative.
By all accounts, the contest was an extremely physical one. At least 12 players were injured and had to be helped off the field, including a Dartmouth player who suffered a broken leg. Kazmaier was knocked out of the game in the second quarter with a broken nose and a concussion. His injury came on an apparent late hit after he had completed a pass to the three-yard line to set up Princeton’s first touchdown. His teammates said he could remember nothing of the game. Princeton players alleged that Dartmouth had set out intentionally to injure Kazmaier and to knock him out of the game, a charge that Dartmouth’s coach and players all vehemently denied.
In one reporter’s words, “Throughout the often unpleasant afternoon, there was undeniable evidence that the losers’ tactics were the result of an intentional style of play….” The thrust of the allegation was, as one Princeton player put it, that “Dartmouth was out to get” Kazmaier. Another Tiger player added, “I am completely disgusted with the whole ball game and with the Dartmouth brand of football.”
The situation became ugly enough that, even after winning, Princeton coach Charley Caldwell refused to shake hands with his Dartmouth counterpart. Moreover, the claim was not a new one. The New Yorker, the magazine that would later make McPhee famous, had referred to the Big Green that season as the “Eastern Boxing Champions,” and allowed that opposition stars regularly left the field under sudden and violent circumstances when playing the boys from Hanover.
Naturally, various partisans had dramatically different accounts of what transpired. The Daily Princetonian said, “It was a rough game — it was a brutal game. It was a game that left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth. It was the kind of football exhibition which discredits the game of football. For many persons the name Dartmouth sank to an all-time low — they just couldn’t stomach the Indians’ brand of football.” Not surprisingly, the Dartmouth student paper took the opposite viewpoint.
Dartmouth coach Tuss McLaughrey offered his own counter: “We have never by word, inference, or innuendo ever made any plans to win a football game by illegal play or by an attempt to put a key player out of the game. The charges from Princeton that Dartmouth made a deliberate attempt to injure Kazmaier or any other member of the team are outrageous and almost too ridiculous to be commented upon.” Carefully parsed, however, McLaughrey’s rejoinder may be passionate, but it is not quite a denial.
The second part of that afternoon’s legacy comes from the work of psychologists Albert H. Hastorf (who had earned his Ph.D. at Princeton but taught at Dartmouth) and Hadley Cantril (who had done his undergraduate work at Dartmouth but taught at Princeton). Both were fascinated by the differing perceptions of the game and set out to explore them. Their subsequent paper is now a classic study in tribalism, selective perception, and cognitive bias.
To perform their research, Hastorf and Cantril administered a questionnaire to groups of students at each school a week after the game that was “designed to get reactions to the game and to learn something of the climate of opinion in each institution.” They then showed a film of the game to undergraduates from each school and had the students record on a second questionnaire, as they watched the game, whenever they thought there had been rules infractions by the teams and whether these infractions were “mild” or “flagrant.” As it turned out, the surveyed students were as divided about the game as their newspapers had been.
Nearly all the Princeton students characterized the game as “rough and dirty,” one of the response options provided by the psychologists. None of the Princeton students characterized it as “clean and fair” and nearly all of them viewed Dartmouth as the instigator of the dirty play. Princeton students further thought that Dartmouth had committed twice as many penalties as did the Dartmouth students, who thought both teams had committed about the same number of infractions.
Although a plurality of Dartmouth students thought the game had been “rough and dirty,” more than 10 percent characterized it as “clean and fair” and more than one-third inserted their own terminology into the mix, seeing the game as having been “rough and fair.” As to blame, over half of the Dartmouth students saw both sides as being in the wrong while only about one-third of them put the blame primarily on their team. These variations in perception were so large that Hastorf and Cantril insightfully described the students from each school as having seen a “different” game.
In a fascinating bit of detail, the psychologists reported that after the Dartmouth alumni office sent a copy of that day’s game film for showing at an alumni function in the Midwest that winter, one of the organizers previewed the film and sent an alarmed telegram back to Dartmouth for additional film. He couldn’t see what all the fuss in the press had been about. He didn’t see where the Dartmouth players had done anything wrong at all. He was certain that much of the film had to be missing.
“Preview of Princeton movies indicates considerable cutting of important part please wire explanation and possibly air mail missing part before showing scheduled for January 25 we have splicing equipment.”
History changes depending upon who is telling it or observing it. In that sense, it cannot be trusted. As Hastorf and Cantril noted, “We behave according to what we bring to the occasion, and what each of us brings to the occasion is more or less unique.”
What partisans noticed and remembered was largely based upon which school they were affiliated with and which team they wanted to win. Accordingly, “the data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ The game ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only insofar as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose.”
George Orwell famously defined the tribal mindset as extreme identification with one’s tribe, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” In today’s world, that sounds like what passes for normal.
As George Johnson wrote in The New York Times: “Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives. In this epistemological warfare, those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality — the ‘dominant paradigm’ — on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version” – what Robin Ince calls a “reality tunnel. As Andrew Sullivan has reminded us, tribalism is not just “one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience.”
It is no surprise to anybody that America is deeply divided. Just before the 2020 presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters said their differences with the other side were about core American values and roughly nine in ten worried that a victory by the other would do “lasting harm” to the United States. America is more polarized and getting there faster than any other developed country. A “powerful alignment of ideology, race, and religion” renders America’s divisions unusually encompassing, intense, profound, and unique.
Americans with different views increasingly live apart and self-select. When Democrats and Republicans live in the same city or same neighborhood, they tend to bunch up like-to-like.**
Partisan media doesn’t help, pretending that we can all have our own opinions *and* our own facts. We increasingly see “news” delivery as Burger King – we want total crap but we want it our way. Obviously, social media exacerbates the problem. No matter how crazy an idea one might subscribe to, it’s easy to find plenty of other crazies.
There are other divides, too. For example, whites are far more likely than Blacks and men are far more likely than women to think that obstacles to advancement for women and minorities “are largely gone.”
These divides have become increasingly contentious and violent.
We have rejected Abraham Lincoln’s call – from his Second Inaugural Address – that we have “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Hate isn’t too strong a word for what many feel toward their political opponents.
To make matters worse, homogeneous groups tend to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members.
Examples of this polarization are legion. I’ll offer just one broad example.
While hardly monolithic, many on the left no longer attack racism and sexism – they oppose whiteness and toxic masculinity. It features many who would eliminate due process in favor of “righting wrongs,” reject even an attempt at objectivity, believe in aggressive race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, cancel ideological diversity, and replace liberal education with indoctrination. Meanwhile, many nihilists on the right deny the current reality of racism and sexism altogether. A few pitch full-blown patriarchy.
The key element here is that extreme partisans see “their side” as not just true, but obviously true. Therefore, we deem our strongly held positions as not really debatable — they’re objectively true. After all, if we didn’t think our positions were true, we wouldn’t hold them. And (our thinking goes), since they are objectively true, anyone who makes the effort to try should be able to ascertain that truth. Our opponents are thus without excuse. If they disagree, they must be stupid, delusional, or evil and thus less than fully human. All of which makes cooperation all but impossible. Why make common cause with evil?
Walter Lippmann made this case a century ago.
“Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty. If the pattern fits their experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it as ‘reality.’”
We increasingly couch political and policy arguments in moral terms. As cognitive psychologist Robert Siegler has argued, we now tend to see elections as more crusade than choice. Everything is permitted but nothing is forgiven.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – who surely had more reason to hate than any of us – wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
We all like to think that we see the world and its component parts as they truly are. We do not. Instead, we tend to see the world and its component parts as we really are. That means that our tribal instincts and inclinations are a constant threat even though they are often obscure or opaque to us. Fixing or even ameliorating the problem requires that we think different.
Harder still, fixing or even ameliorating the problem requires that we be different. It should come as no surprise to anyone that working to be different is excruciatingly hard. Grace is required.
We might start with getting to know our neighbors a bit better, even (especially!) those with whom we disagree. Perhaps, just perhaps, we may end up loving those neighbors.
Who knows what might happen then?
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** Interestingly, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to segregate themselves. Moreover, Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization demonstrates that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy and cultural issues. That may be because Democrats care more about politics, are more willing to shun opponents, and are more willing to take low-paying activist jobs than Republicans, too.
Totally Worth It
C.S. Lewis wrote this more than 75 years ago. It’s still true.
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
I made an appearance on the Mindful Money podcast with Terrie Schauer and Jonathan DeYoe. Listen here.
It’s not new, but take a couple of minutes and read this right now; it’s wonderful.
This is the best thing I read or saw this week; it is amazing. This is also incredibly good. This, too. The most interesting. The most entertaining. The most biting. The most disgusting. The coolest. The stupidest. The smoothest. The saddest. The most jubilant. The best counter-protest. The best crime story.
Please contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Don’t forget to subscribe and share.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.
Benediction
“Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. . . . If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” (Frederick Buechner).
For those of us “prone to wander” – which is every last, lost one of us – Grace offers the way home. May it be so for each of us.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 74 (August 13, 2021)