Growing up as a closeted queer kid in a deeply conservative faith tradition and community, I found myself frequently performing behaviors that went against my personally held values. Hindsight is 20/20, but I still remember even as a teenager doing and saying things that I didn't personally find acceptable, but felt like were required so as not to jeopardize my social safety in a group.
I was frequently offended by discussions about gay people and homosexual behavior, enough to elicit a self-righteous comment about how that was wrong or weird. And for an introvert who rarely spoke in full sentences all throughout middle school and high school, the fact that I would comment on this at all with my peers seems staggering to me now.
Over time, my desperation to be "passed over" by the destroying angel of group belonging, I did and said things that disturb me to this day. One of the worst was in college. I was still feeding myself hateful rhetoric from Ann Coulter (I know, I know) by listening to her audiobook when I was bored. I was in a special, low-credit class that was ultimately just taking turns sitting in an art exhibition room and writing a few blog posts for class assignments. One assignment was to go to a special collection that was briefly featured in my university art museum. This exhibit was about the horrors of the Japanese-American internment camps that the U.S. set up during World War II.
I was ripped to shreds with the assignment to write a response to this exhibit. Ann Coulter was telling me that the camps were a necessary protection in war time—possibly even a benefit to the imprisoned Japanese-Americans themselves (lots of mental gymnastics for that one). My humanity and the exhibit were telling me that this was inexcusable. My conservative community told me to look the other way when it came to things like this; to celebrate war because we were God’s people, and therefore war—any war—we participate in is sanctioned by God, otherwise it wouldn’t happen. We weren't racist, we were doing what was necessary for the greater good. My community also told me that if I stuck out, I would be hammered back down.
So to my deep shame, even then, I wrote a piece that derided this art exhibit. I downplayed the emotional turmoil that any person could feel for looking through the heartfelt pieces. I parroted the arguments that Coulter spoke through my earbuds so often. Patriotism, national security, war-time excuses.
I was disgusted with myself when I published the post.
Hiding from Ourselves
It's so obvious to me now, but back then, I couldn't explain my cognitive dissonance for writing that racist piece. All I see from where I am now is a scared person who was really good at hiding from myself. I put all of my identity, all of my worth, into identity markers which had been determined by a group to be the correct ones. Knowing the consequence of being too much of myself, I hid myself and instead performed and pretended in ways that escalated over time. The more I realized that I, myself, was one of the enemies that my group hated, the more I had to distance myself from myself.
"If we do debate, we tend to fall prey to what legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls the "law of group polarization," which says that groups who form because of shared attitudes tend to become more adamant and polarized over time. This is because when we wish to see ourselves as centrists but learn that others in our group take a much more extreme position, we realize that to take the middle position, we must shift our attitude in the direction of the extreme. In response, people who wish to take extreme positions must shift further in that direction to distance themselves from the center. This comparison-to-others feedback loop causes the group as a whole to become more polarized over time, and as consensus builds, individuals become less likely to contradict it." —How Minds Change, by David McRaney, page 198
If that's not exactly what we're seeing in global politics (but especially in the U.S.) right now, I don't know of a simpler way to state it. McRaney makes a case throughout his book that as humans, we change our minds all of the time, and we have evolutionarily selected behaviors, biases, and other psycho-social tools to support our collective journeys of change. If that's the case, then how do we wrap our minds around these groups that seem unchanging and rigid? How do we make sure that we're not being trapped in echo chambers or led to incorrect conclusions, when we're in this polarization motion?
First, I think it's helpful to take a look at his explanation of the science from an evolutionary standpoint. He starts by showing how we as social, yet territorial, creatures, needed a way to protect and defend our territory and social group from other competing groups. Eventually, we ended up with complex communication systems that would help us to protect ourselves, make discoveries, coordinate with each other, notice warning signs of danger, and make other observations. Note that this is my extremely simplified summary of what probably took hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. But McRaney comes to this interesting point about how our communication is ultimately supposed to work: through argumentation.
"All those individual sources of information weren't passive observers objectively recording and reporting on reality. And in such a rich information pool, with so many individuals with their own personal goals, even a trusted peer might want to deceive or mislead so they might gain at another's expense. Genes are selfish that way. Even when the intentions of a peer were good, each brain could only add to the pool what it could observe. Confounding the process further, brains are prone to making errors and may misinterpret what they attempt to pass along. Communication, no matter how useful, was bound to be imperfect." —McRaney, page 188
Since communication is imperfect, since we have to account for bad actors or at least selfish intentions, how do we ever land on some sort of truth or path forward when solving a problem? If arguments are so critical, why do they seem unproductive?
"If people just endlessly exchanged arguments with no side ever gaining any ground, no one admitting they were wrong or accepting the proposition of others, then argumentation would have long ago been tossed into the evolutionary dustbin. ... "Arguing online can seem like deliberation, but if people are insulated from essential group dynamics, from outside perspectives, then individuals will essentially argue with themselves." —McRaney, page 198
Cyborg
These little insights into the original “technology” of communication tell me that despite the seeming hopelessness of the current political situation we’ve found ourselves in, it is at least possible for things to change—for our minds to change. It also highlights how our current digital technology seems to be confusing us. Almost all "arguments" I can think of happen in fiery comment threads on social media—but this isn't the kind of argumentation we developed evolutionarily. It's a modern (probably accidental) trick. This is why our offline social groups are even more critical now, but if we're all being trained to think of argumentation as the same thing we see online for the majority of the day, our offline habits will be impacted as well.
This leads me to think that perhaps we can draw out some frameworks to evaluate our groups; some way to know if the community or ideology is worth investing in or trusting. The greatest indicator to me of how much we can trust a group is whether the group is willing to change or if they overtly proclaim to be unchanging.
The reality is that we—individually and collectively—do and will change. There are groups out there that claim to be unchanging (perhaps because their God is unchanging, or because there is some kind of unalterable Truth that their group has claimed to know). This is an illusion at best, and, to me, indicates an immaturity or even an intentional deception, because it is disingenuous. These are the kinds of groups that seem to have great influence over their adherents, but they can interrupt the processes we need to get to good, informed consensus or resolution. Or, in my case, interrupt my access to my own humanity and the humanity of others.
This isn’t exclusive to religious or political groups. I see it in the tech industry, in business, in elitist groups. That’s why I think we should be wary when we notice dogmatic insistence in any group. When we get carried away in the current of change, I hope to eventually recognize that I am changing, but the group(s) I’ve clung to in the process may or may not allow me to see that.
How terrifying to wake up one day, realizing you are nowhere near where you thought you were and who you thought you were becoming?
It’s not bad to be a part of a community or other group; it’s natural and essential. That doesn’t mean we have to accept a way of thinking that constantly interrupts our ability to change. You can also help to change your groups to be more aligned with this natural process. We don’t have to treat our groups as an immutable mold into which we force ourselves to fit; we can change the mold of the group itself by inserting ourselves as we are into the group.
If being a member of a group means that argumentation and questions are not allowed except by a few special leaders or people, that should be a red flag. If you have to behave in ways opposite of your values to prove that you belong, that's a red flag. If you are discouraged (or more often, distracted) from making changes, that is a red flag. Groups designed to interrupt our humanity are change breakers, so tread carefully within them.