Don’t Talk About Politics
How to Change 21st-Century Minds
by Sarah Stein Lubrano (Bloomsbury USA)
The phrase “don’t talk about politics” has come under fire recently, as people question whether it is a positive thing to avoid awkwardness for the sake of goodness, where the awkwardness might get someone to reconsider their beliefs, or how their opinion hurts someone they otherwise love.
This book is not part of that. Rather it affirms the title: do not talk about politics. Talking about politics does nothing, in particular affecting people’s political views. People do not change their mind. Or rather they do, but the facts shape the position rather than the position following the facts (i.e. it is okay when we do it).
Partially a book on cognitive science, it looks at the conventional wisdom about how people form and articulate their beliefs, specifically the set of metaphors (the marketplace of ideas first and foremost) of how those beliefs work in the political sphere (itself a metaphor). It then dismembers those positions, from a position of social science in researching how political opinions work (a lot of cognitive dissonance) and the ways that the metaphors are flawed. How we talk about politics is not free of ideology itself, and often results in mistaking the map for the territory.
It is a strong, even devastating, argument. Everything you know is wrong. But the book fails to stick the landing.
The chapters operate independently of one another, which is mostly good, but it produces some oddities. It feels as if the chapter on Xitter is either the book that the author wanted to write, and the rest just foreplay, or that it belongs somewhere else entirely, probably about the role of technology in social movements, for good and for ill. Xitter comes up because the book is trying to land on a solution, and using Xitter as a negative example.
The core of the problem here has come up before. On one hand, we have what I would refer to as Enlightenment virtues. Civil society, rule of law, small-l liberal democracy, meritocratic government, free speech, equality rights: the list is not conclusive, maybe even arguable, but you get the program. This is what a certain brand of conservative would label Western democracy and a certain brand of liberal would label the good society.
Everyone likes the Enlightenment virtues. But the more science, and the more history, you pick up, the more errors and contradictions that show up. But hold on there a moment, Curtis Yarvin, this does not suggest the whole thing is worth junking. We, and by we here I mean the section of the populace whose has a sane ethics that is informed by the Enlightenment virtues – admittedly not the people in charge of the U.S. currently and their Polemarchian vibe – want to fix it. Everyone wants the Enlightenment, no one wants the Colonialism that fueled it.
This is the singular philosophical challenge of the hour, so no surprise that the author cannot resolve it. But there is the outline of a solution, which has to do with action and infrastructure, the latter of which is why Xitter becomes relevant. Doing, and chains of self-identification arising out of group identification, seem to be the most empirically-proven ways to bring about changes in political opinion. You are what you do; you are who you associate with, ergo curating that brings about new ways of thinking.
This also brings out the surprisingly strong chapter about loneliness. Like the Xitter chapter it feels a bit out of place, but the overall quality is worth it. The author treats the loneliness epidemic as a misnomer (or insufficiently evidenced) to focus on social atrophy. The danger is not the miasma of feeling alone, but the sort of lingering psychological costs of it, even when it was a temporary condition.
This is a striking idea, not one that I hear discussed often, and rings true to my own experience. It has major ramifications for the how of a solution, to look not only at people getting to belong, but focusing in on the mechanisms that provide for ways for people to belong. This gets summed up as infrastructure: how do you create the material things, that in tern lead to the social groups, that bring about the change of opinion.
The author clocks the flaw, which is that someone has to take out the garbage. Someone, somewhere, is in control, and can use that control to achieve particular ends. A nationalized project has the same flaws as a privatized one, just with alternate risks. So we start with a strong thesis that gets diffused into hedging. I think there are some secondary problems (read the opening of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and circle back to me) unaddressed, too.
I still like it as a read. It is funny, and the information and research it relays is useful. It is just too ambitious, and the author too honest.
My thanks to the author, Sarah Stein Lubrano, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 