The main point about civility is…the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.
—Zygmunt Bauman
The media constantly inform us about acts of terrorism, wars, people displaced by violence, refugees, famines, natural calamities, human and drug trafficking, mass lay-offs, corporations that sink overnight or merge to form larger and frighteningly powerful entities. All of these are symptoms and consequences of our disconnection as humanity.
In January 2018, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Teresa May, created a new position, a Ministry of Loneliness. More than nine million people in the UK suffer, either occasionally or permanently, from loneliness, according to a report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness. And loneliness seems, more than anything, the product of our inability to connect with others.
We’re not only isolating ourselves, we’re regrouping.
Armed with recent demographics, journalist Bill Bishop published The Big Sort:Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. (First Mariner Books, 2009). When he looked at the electoral results of the last thirty years, he observed that Americans have grouped by class, skin color, and beliefs in increasingly homogeneous communities. This has happened not only at the region or state level, but by city and even neighborhood. His data has been confirmed by other reporters, such as Corey Lang and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz of the UK,[1] who also predict that this tendency toward segregation will be generalized along party lines. People are choosing neighborhoods (and churches and news programs) that are compatible with their lifestyles and beliefs. This type of grouping prevents the new generations from being exposed to different opinions and views of the world. The phenomenon is happening throughout the nation. For example, in rural West Texas, a fifty-acre community development (Paulsville) was created in 2008 to provide homes exclusively for followers of then libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Bill Bishop suggests that the outcome of this trend has been a notoriously dangerous polarization of the population, a decline in tolerance, and an increase in extremism.
Facebook designs algorithms that select what’s displayed in my wall and shown to my friends and family. Other algorithms will get me to see more posts from people who think like me and fewer from those who have different opinions, or more personal comments and pictures, than any political news I’d like to share. My followers and the people who like or click on my posts back my opinions, but my posts rarely reach those who think differently. The balkanization of social media or splinternet––meant to block, filter, or redirect certain topics––causes us to live in separate microcosms, with narrower visions. It denies us the opportunity of enriching ourselves with differing ways of seeing the world. It has become a political instrument to perpetuate power in the hands of a few.
In
a sociopolitical climate of constant change, corruption in the highest spheres,
mutual distrust, and unrelenting competition, we feel easily judged,
criticized, and excluded. This also constitutes an obstacle when trying to connect
with others. I distrust others because I suspect they want what I have (my money,
my partner, my position at work, my influence). Since others have abused me in
the past, betrayed me, abandoned me, rejected me, I can’t expect otherwise. In
the midst of this mistrust, I keep my guard up. I don’t show my vulnerability.
I choose not to connect with those different from me but to group with
like-minded people. The paradox is that vulnerability actually connects us,
humanizes us. We need to change the paradigm that the intellect is what makes
us strong. True strength doesn’t come from our physical bodies and brains,
which inevitably deteriorate, but from experiences and feelings that eventually
make us capable of empathy and prompt our indignation about social injustice or
ignorance and ambition. We all have a soft side, and that’s just fine. We are
yin; we are yang.
[1] The LSE US Centre’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy (online).