March Newsbyte

Polarisation is now widespread in democracies both in Europe and in the Americas. It manifests the deep dissatisfaction many people now feel about the society they live in. It centres around such areas as woke, immigration, job security and income inequality. I have made use of ChatGPT and YouTube to get a broad picture of what is happening. I shall go through what I have gleaned, what the solutions might be and look at the situation from a Dhamma perspective.

Polarisation develops in times of change, uncertain times. Inevitably, people take positions. This would be fine save for identity. The primary cause for the hardening of polarisation is identity. Of course, that is at the root of suffering according to the Buddha’s not-self doctrine. Each party thinks itself morally superior, hence more virtuous, more intelligent, more patriotic. This is the working of the self that thrives on comparison rather than the various definitions of, say, virtue. Instead, the self personalises and then criticises what is ‘other’. Hence the three conceits: I am better or worse than you; and the more subtle one, I am equal to you. The last is what supports group identity. You find your companions and your little group now compares itself to other groups. When it comes to immigration, we have those who accept it and say we need even more of it; and an opposing group that says it is a conspiracy to replace the white race. Each of these self-opinionated selves sees the others as an existential threat. Disagreements are no longer about policy as such, but about the sort of people we are.

So we, as Dhammika (the Buddha’s original followers called themselves ‘one who follows the True Law, the Dhamma’) need to be aware when we identify ourselves with a pressure group.  We mustn’t lose the objective perspective, the one that can critique their stance, or indeed any particular position a group might take. So if someone agrees generally that immigration has now gone too far, especially since Covid, then they also need to know about the change mooted for the European Convention on Human Rights   (Council of Europe 1950). The ECHR is not simply a declaration of principles, but is also legally binding and the source of laws that protect our own freedoms. It isn’t only others that will be affected by tampering with it.

Collective identity can lead to fixed or even extreme positions and the moralising of areas such as public health, climate crisis and wealth. Issues become moral absolutes to the extent that any compromise is experienced as betrayal by its defenders .  We see this when Maga devotees threaten the lives of any Maga Congressman who defies Trump.  Because from the distortion of conceit, such positions fail to see interconnectedness, interrelatedness and interdependence. For instance, withdrawing aid, in other words refusing to share our country’s wealth, leads to greater global poverty so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the number of people wanting to escape that very poverty and destitution is growing.

That wealthier countries are cutting their aid budgets tells us a lot about the neoliberal order and its economic system that has allowed the market to rule without any social responsibility, without any heart. And, all these decades later, follows Gordon Gekko’s 1987 dictum that greed is good. This system has produced such uncertainty that few of us feel our jobs are truly secure anymore, causing anxiety about loss of status and standard of living . Such unhealthy and unwholesome mental states drive people to believe anyone who claims to have the answer.

All these fears around such areas as unemployment, rising living costs, immigration and climate are coupled with the growing despair that the institutions we used to rely on – today losing their influence as the world order changes – are now incapable of bettering the situation. This leads to a loss of confidence in the political parties, unions, religious organisations and other civic institutions that once mediated to bring about much needed change. Small wonder that people have started to join mass movements, emotionally manipulated by demagogues and led by populists who deceive them into believing they are working for the common people.
What has made everything exponentially worse is, of course, social media. From the heady days when the internet was predicted to bring a harmonious world community, we are descending into a global verbal brawl, at the moment limited to words but perhaps soon enough in violent action. Witness the storming by MAGA devotees of the US Capitol in Washington DC to disrupt Congress as it convened on January 6th, 2021 to validate Joe Biden’s 2020 election.

The algorithms feed on our natural bent to attend to threat and opposition rather than welcome and cooperation. They herd people into epistemic silos, ‘echo chambers’ isolated groups of like-minded people, that go on to intensify a situation even to the point of conspiracy. This, of course, has happened many times in history and has led to civil war.

Such a situation happened here in our tiny village of White Grit. A neighbour, working for the Shropshire Council in England to bring more wealth to the area, won a grant of a £1 million from the Lottery Fund. A local eco warrior saw this as a danger to the area, feared it might become a holiday resort. The meetings that followed culminated in a confrontation with the person who received the grant. Young men used foul language happily stamped out by a retired magistrate. Eventually everything and everybody calmed down. In the meantime, an email was circulated full of expletives calling for resistance! Frankly, the whole fracas was beyond pathetic. To this day, I’ve seen nothing change and still wonder what happened to the money! But all the markers of polarisation were there: moral outrage (What right has the Shropshire Council to do this? We are in Powys!); simplified narrative (It’s going to ruin the area!); conspiracy theories (What else is the Council going to do?) and group validation.

I was told the meeting at the pub went very well. It is a wonder they didn’t turn up at the meeting armed with picks, shovels and trowels – the local population being farmers and retired well-to-do. What stays with me is the amount of anger it generated.

The consequence of silos is that groups arise creating realities that cannot co-exist with competing realities. Postmodernism is partly responsible. It questioned objective truth, declaring we all have our own realities rendering everything subjective, socially constructed, hence relative – there is no single discoverable reality. And so on till we reach post-truth and outright lying!

The Buddha taught that the whole of the spiritual life was good companionship. We are interdependent beings. But the obverse is also true: a den of thieves. ‘Good companionship’ is also necessary to invent false narratives and conspiracies. The disturbing fact is that feedback loops intensify since thoughts feed on thoughts and emotions on emotions with ready support from social media. And the benefit of finding such friends is a feeling of safety, emotional support and ideological fantasising.

The Buddha tells us how the inner process clearly produces this papañca, proliferation. How consciousness arises dependent on an object sensed by the eye, ear, nose, tongue body or mind. This point of ‘Contact’ is a requirement for Feelings both physical and mental. ‘‘What you feel, you perceive. What you perceive, you think about. What you think about, you proliferate. What you proliferate is the source from which judgments driven by proliferating perceptions beset a person.’ Sutta Central The Honey Ball Discourse M18.)

This same process is magnified between people so that moral outrage, rewarded by the group, leads to certainty; the group reinforces itself by denigrating opposing groups, leading to a loss of empathy and so a loss of communication; this distrust simply leads to entrenched positions, especially where the others are seen as existential threats, for example MAGA devotees, The English Defence League and Germany’s PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) and many other far right groups that need not centre on Islam as such. And again there is the emotional rewards of like-minded friends.

So how can this process be reversed or at least undermined?

We have seen the basic cause lies in identity. How people define themselves. This identity narrows into a particular cause, creating a barrier that expels anyone who disagrees. And then places verbal and other weapons on that barrier to destroy those who are now described as enemies. For such alienated groups, one way out is to point to a higher identity that embraces to some extent the views of opposing parties. This is the work of politics, of course. So when it comes to immigration, both sides of the argument need to be lifted into a greater overall view of the situation. This can be done through the very media that supports the polarisation by bringing opposing groups to dispute in the open arena. No matter how distasteful we may find Tommy Robinson and his anti-Islam crusade, The English Defence League, he needs to be engaged in open debate and with Muslims. There is also the benefit of Citizen Assemblies that have been used to great effect in Ireland.

When we identify with a cause, everything becomes saturated with ‘me’. And ‘me’ is always right. We might refer to this as ego, but I prefer the old word, pride. It finds it hard to compromise and any giving in to the differing view is a shaming treachery. But once we soften the grip and admit no one has total exclusive truth and open up to another’s views, compromise allows wise solutions. There are perspectives that can accommodate different views. Enemies might become people we can discuss and argue with.

And there is our Dhamma practice. As ordinary citizens we need to make our views known to our politicians. Whenever possible, we might encourage the government to control the media content. We also need to be sensitive to journalists and make sure we know the ones who are non-partisan and independent. We need to be able to distinguish fact from comment. And when it comes to media to limit the amount and type of it we allow into our minds and hearts.

We have to admit to our own biases. These can be explicit – we are aware of them – or implicit – we are not aware of them. Prejudices, meanwhile, are those biases we are actively developing. Acknowledging them allows us to counteract their effect. It’s virtually impossible not to have racial, religious, gender and class bias. It is in all our culture’s DNA. We may find it difficult to accept this, but unless we are aware of that fact and attendant biases, they will affect our behaviour and we may be embarrassed by Freudian slips, or suddenly becoming self-defensive or aggressive when accused. So practising Metta is not just a contemplative practice, but involves approaching people or media we are strongly against with a heart open to understanding where they are coming from. And it would really help to find discussion groups online, better in person, set up to bring people of differing views into dialogue.

And this leads us to realise how destructive it is to shame our opponents by saying, for instance, they are ignorant. This happened a lot after the Brexit referendum. And facts have little use in debate if the other side of the table doesn’t trust us. The wisest way is to follow the Buddha’s own approach which was to understand the other’s position and explore it well before launching into our own views and opinions on it.

Polarisation, then, is not something new. And it can still lead to civil war as has been the case in many countries in the past. It is our task to be sure we are not fuelling a malignancy in danger of metastasising into a general conflict of no benefit to anyone.
So what do we do when a racist, sexist, religious, gender or any biased thought comes to the mind? We might find ourselves feeling guilty and push the thought away without really accepting it. So that conditioning has not been allowed to manifest and continues to fester. If we allow the bias to manifest in our minds and hearts, then we can begin to undermine it. First there is acceptance: this is bias in my heart. Once accepted we can now recognise it as unwholesome. Now usually biases  arise because we have seen or heard someone whom this bias hates. We can bring that person to mind. See the situation from their point of view and apologise. We remind ourselves that this is cultural conditioning. I am not personally to blame. Hold the person in a caring embrace. You can’t hate and care at the same time! We have to be creative in our approach to bigotry.

If you are sitting in vipassana, you may find it enough just to sit with that aversion until it completely passes away. This means the energy fuelling the bias is being exhausted. Then you might experience the transformation of that energy into its opposite and find your heart flooded with love or some other positive mental state.
Any given society at any given time will have many competing positions and even ideologies. That is not an unwholesome situation in itself. We have always had opposing political parties. It is when society becomes deeply divided as over Brexit in the UK and present day immigration, that polarisation becomes dangerous. It can only be hoped that the present day democratic institutions, although weakened, can bring about much needed change. If they fail, there will be a search for alternatives and that probably means some form of authoritarianism. It is salutary to look at other countries where the ‘the strong man’ reigns.

And it may be time to take Winston Churchill’s reflection to heart: ‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time …’ Winston Churchill, November 11 ^th , 1947