The Danger of Homophily

Yesterday, I ruminated on the ever-increasing degree of modern homophily and how that might wipe away the "overexposure" argument against allowing a President a lot of face time on television. Today, I want to write about how our modern degree of homophily (or self-segregation) impacts our political discourse and culture.

One of the ugly effects of self-segregation is extremism. Harvard Prof and Obama advisor, Cass Sunstein, writes a lot about how people become extreme, and one of his most interesting findings is that surrounding yourself with like-minded people will squelch diversity of thought and push normally moderate individuals toward extreme positions. I recently read about an experiment he performed in Colorado where he recruited a group of self-identified liberals to discuss politics amongst themselves for a day and followed that with a group of self-identified conservatives to do the same. His findings: spending time with like-minded people led the group to become intolerant of diversity and increasingly extreme in their opinions. This makes sense if you've ever talked with someone who watches Lou Dobbs or listens to Rush Limbaugh every day. When we lose access to the "other side" we become intolerant and extreme. Sunstein found the same thing among our impartial and enlightened class of judges. He found that three-judge panels that were all-Republican appointments became more radical in their thinking, as did panels of three-judge Democratic appointments.

Now consider Congress for a moment. Over the last three decades the Congress has become increasingly polarized and our political debates more partisan. Each caucus increasingly ideologically homogeneous signaling a parlimentarization of Congress. This, I believe is no accident. At the same time that we have increasingly segregated ourselves in communities of like-minded people and have increasingly adhered to a smaller and smaller number of sources for new information we have also seen a move toward polarization, partisanship, intolerance, and extremism (this may be especially true of those of us that primarily use the Internet for information and are therefore potential victims of cyberbalkanization--I know that I for one have a daily new and blog loop that rarely includes more than one or two conservatives).

This may even be true of class, as we have created more and more million dollar zip codes, keeping up with the Joneses has become truly unprecedented in scale and scope. How much is too much? It's a cultural measure and when you're only surrounded by extreme wealth it redefines "extreme". All of a sudden a Ponzi-scheme or "accounting irregularities" doesn't look so bad. It's the psychology of the bubble, but maybe the bubble is bigger than we think. Maybe the bubble isn't just about housing prices or tech stocks but about the bubbles that we have all moved into where all you can hear is the echo of agreement.

Homophily and the echo chamber that you, I, and many of our fellow citizens reside in, may be one of the most dangerous aspects of our modern cultural life. I think this may be more serious for the right-wing simply because of their potential psychological predisposition toward authoritarianism (think John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience or Chris Hedges' American Fascists). Then again how soon we forget Mr. Lenin, Mr. Mao, and Mr. Castro.

We can often see the danger among other cultures in other lands, and we are all-too-eager to declare their lack of open debate dangerous, but we are not so eager to contemplate on our own polarization. And then as stories often do, everything changes, maybe. And in comes President Obama, seeing that self-segregation and calling it out as what it is, un-American. His call for a renewed spirit of shared responsibility and "bi-partisanship", and his reawakening of the common good is a repudiation of the culture wars as much as it is an indictment of homophily. The question is, will his administration back the rhetoric with policy? One good sign is that Cass Sunstein has become the regulatory czar of the Obama Administration, my only concern is that his theories of "Nudges" and "Constitutional Minimalism" suggest he may aim too low, but then again that might just prove his point.

Be Brave. Be Wise. Be Compassionate.