By Promod Puri
We’re living in a polarized world.
It’s not about the north and south poles of the globe, or the negative and positive poles of a magnet.
The polarization I’m talking about is a defining and hard-set feature of our nature and behaviour in the society we live in.
It shapes and represents our social relationships, political loyalties, religious beliefs, and economic thinking.
Polarization even interprets our understanding of truth.
We drift toward opposite ends of every argument.
Where disagreement is no longer a starting point for dialogue but a reason to shut the door.
Polarization creates partitioned societies that seldom cross the floor, especially on political platforms.
EXTREMES OF LEFT AND RIGHT
The Left and the Right of the political spectrum often move toward the extremes of their respective sides, creating a narrative of conspicuous, firm convictions.
In these opposite chambers, the dialogue in between seldom echoes. The Left disdains the Right and vice versa.
Relationships, friendships and communities are torn apart and isolated.
An entire nation can become psychologically split into opposing camps.
The familiar red-and-blue map of the United States illustrates how Democrats and Republicans often see the same nation and its people through radically different lenses.
CONSEQUENCES OF SELECTIVE CHOICES
In the polarized society, we think, talk, and walk along selective pathways that run parallel to one another but rarely intersect.
Selective reading. Selective knowledge. Selective information. Selective YouTubing.
These are the narrow channels that deliver their messages but also brainwash and segregate us.
The digital age has given us an extraordinary abundance of information. But algorithms have also made it remarkably easy to hear only what we want or already believe.
Before: Views were formed based on information.
Now: Information is selected based on views.
We enter information bubbles and emerge believing that our bubble is the world.
As the saying goes, “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
A community is formed of like-minded people, in which knowledge circulates and is recirculated among its members.
But it seldom sneaks into the opposite field.
Take, for example, award-winning and internationally acclaimed Arundhati Roy’s thought-provoking essays.
For sure, these pierce the fog of India’s ruling propaganda but rarely land where they’re most needed, among the diehard followers of Prime Minister Modi.
How many rank-and-file members of the Sangh Parivar have ever laid eyes on her deeply researched, razor-sharp critiques?
And the reverse question is equally important: how many critics of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party seriously engage with arguments that challenge their own assumptions?
FAILURE OF COMMUNICATION
Here, communication fails where it is meant to, because it is just blocked by walls of polarized enclosures.
The reality is that even when information crosses from one ideological community to another, it is often dismissed instantly as false or “propaganda.”
The label comes before the examination. The verdict arrives before the evidence.
No matter how rationally we present our viewpoint, it hardly makes an incision in the thinking and behaviour of someone shielded by their own rationale and argumentation.
Polarization leads to fanaticism. And that becomes a political habit.
Cuba offers one example of this ideological fanaticism or rigidity, a sort of temperament.
Left-thinking people across the globe never step out of their blind and firm faith in the Communist regimes, from Fidel Castro to Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Cubans have been suffering from food shortages, frequent power outages, and shortages of other essentials for several decades.
Cuba’s economic difficulties have multiple causes: domestic policy choices, economic inefficiencies, corrupt political leadership and bureaucracy, and curbs on dissent and protest.
Of course, US sanctions play a significant role in the dire situation the nation faces.
But reducing the entire story to a single villain is to replace analysis with ideology.
The same goes for Venezuela under the dictatorial rule of first Hugo Chavez, and then Nicolas Maduro till his kidnapping by US armed forces early this year and putting him in jail.
POLARIZED RIGIDITY
Polarized rigidity exists on the right side of political ideology as well.
Modi offers a particularly powerful example of how political loyalty can become intertwined with nationalism, religion and identity.
Millions of passionate supporters see Modi as a strong leader and a symbol of a resurgent India.
His critics, meanwhile, see the same political project as contributing to democratic erosion, majoritarianism and deeper social divisions.
Political loyalty can influence social and religious practices, while social and religious identity determines political loyalty.
The relationship works both ways.
SOCIAL POLARIZATION
The world, and South Asia in particular, have lived with social polarization for centuries.
Caste, religion, language and community have often created invisible walls between people.
Political polarization may be modern in its vocabulary. But the human tendency to divide ourselves into “us” and “them” is ancient.
Rituals and caste systems have polarized societies on the South Asian continent for ages and are firmly rooted.
POLARIZATION: THE COMFORT OF OUR OWN SIDE
We have always had differences.
Democracy, too, depends upon the freedom to disagree.
Civilization itself is built on disagreement, debate and dissent.
However, polarization, in that sense, can be viewed as an extreme form of dissent.
The cliché “difference of opinion” is acceptable and sustainable.
But somewhere along the way, “difference of opinion” has begun to harden into carved division.
We no longer seem interested in understanding the other side because we have become too comfortable inside our own.
These comfort zones are fortified where we feel safe and undisturbed in our commitment to our beliefs.
However, the polarized comfort zones segregate humanity into opposing camps, narrow our thinking and, at their worst, breed intolerance and extremism.
The real danger is not that we disagree. It is that we stop listening.
A healthy society does not require everyone to think alike; it requires us to disagree without losing our ability to see the humanity in those who think differently.
After all, diversity of thought may divide our opinions, but it should never divide humanity.
And this is where polarization in all its aspects, from political to social and religious, as well as from community to national levels, poses threats to understanding and harmony.
Polarization, left unchecked, becomes more than a political or social condition.
It becomes a virus of the human spirit, infecting our relationships, discouraging and even poisoning public discourse, deepening economic and social divides, and weakening the very bonds that hold communities, societies, nations and the world together.
-Promodpuri.com
Promod Puri.com 