Why it's so hard to write about polarization

Engaging in polarized discourse is accursedly easy. Discussing it without engaging in it is...almost impossible.

What would it take to write meaningfully about polarization without engaging in polarization?

The answer isn’t obvious. 

One approach would be to try to erase your own viewpoint, to take on the voice of a 19th century style omniscient narrator, like putting George Eliot on MSNBC.

It doesn’t really work, because it fails the test of authenticity. We come at political questions from a given set of values and positions, pretending otherwise is lying, and there’s no sense lying to a reader. 

Can you write meaningfully about polarization without betraying your beliefs, without hiding them or soft-balling them, without engaging in polarization? 

That’s the hard question. 

Answering yes requires you to do a strange two-step with your own beliefs.

You have to believe them and —while you keep believing them— create enough distance from them to see them from the outside, as they might look to somebody doesn’t share them.

Even this much is enormously challenging because, to you, your beliefs feel like you. Like they define you. Introducing distance between you and them —even just for a thought exercise— is incredibly aversive. It feels like a betrayal.

But that’s not enough. Now that you’ve stepped far enough away from your beliefs to see them from the outside, you have to try to empathize with the emotional reaction they might set off in your adversaries. To feel, just provisionally, the aversion your belief provoke in others. 

This is much hard. Too hard, probably, for most people.

How many committed activists on, say, the abortion debate have taken five minutes to close their eyes, breathe, and try to imagine the emotional experience of their opponents when they hear they own arguments. 

It’s an alien procedure for most of us. We recoil from it. It stretches our capacity for fellow-feeling the way an ultramarathon stretches your body’s endurance. It’s almost inhuman. It certainly won’t scale.

But to write about polarization without engaging in polarization, it’s what’s required.