Slate does it again
So, I don't know who this Bill Bishop guy is, and I am not interested in looking him up right now, but he has been writing this column called "The Big Sort" in Slate for a while now. I linked to one of the essays yesterday. Today, I noticed another good one. I don't know what the hell is going on over at Slate, because heretofore (and with the exceptions of Fred Kaplan and Dahlia Lithwick) I had assumed the sole purpose of Slate was to irritate the fuck out of me. Yet, this Bill Bishop is not irritating me. Curious.
I quote here his conclusion:
"The simple need for mixed social relations is lost to Americans, who increasingly live in homogenous communities and attend like-minded churches.
It's apparently lost to Congress, too. We're living with the result."
This is true of both sides, too--it isn't just that the rednecks are isolating themselves with their shotguns and deer hides. Democrats tend to do it, too. The Internet exacerbates matters when people only read the sites that they know they will agree with, unless they read a site they disagree with for the express purpose of being a troll. I've bitched before about how the liberal idea of "diversity" is so shallow that it is based entirely on appearance; diversity means we have friends who are different colors than we are or come from different countries, and that's great so long as we all think almost exactly alike and read the same books and see the same movies and have the same dislikes as well. Those on the right don't really claim to give a damn about diversity, although you find a surprising amount of it in Western rural towns. Most of the small Western towns I've lived in have a strange array of hardcore conservatives and hippie people trying to recreate the Nearings' good life. Or there are artists who need to retreat from the world so that they can grow their own marijuana and mushrooms or something.
Anyway.
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You know, some of my best moments with my mother involved discussions about topics on which we fundamentally disagreed. I wouldn't give those up for anything. She made sure I kept an open mind, and I made sure she listened to the opposing viewpoint. She was my favorite person to share these kinds of discourse.
Anyway, it's all too true that we tend to surround ourselves with people like us. It requires work to step outside our comfort zones. Yet, this is why I think the Internet is so appealing. I read the writings of those with opposing viewpoints; I just prefer not to comment because (a) I tend to bristle when people categorically denounce me as "wrong", "stupid" or "brainwashed by the media", (b) I never want to come across as a troll, and (c) most of the time, I don't feel like I know these people well enough to give them a piece of my mind - nor do I care about their opinions of my thoughts. (This is to say, of course, that I'm comfortable with and, in fact, appreciate the level of respect you've afforded me whenever I've commented on your blog about things with which I may happen to disagree.)
I think if people would respect everyone's fundamental right to think however they choose, whether concurring or not, the world would be a much better place. There are very few things in this world that are completely black and white, anyway.