The two-party system is partly to blame. Canadian politicians can certainly be as bull-headed as their American counterparts, but our multi-party system means that we are better equipped to avoid thinking about issues in strict binaries. Our politicians have no choice but to think of things from multiple perspectives. The ruling Liberal minority needs to find common ground with at least one of the other four parties in Parliament in order to accomplish anything. As a result, our political discourses are necessarily dynamic. Legislators can't get away with being unwaveringly dogmatic. They can't just sit around and wait for the next election when they might possibly have a few more seats.
Not so in the States. But the U.S. political system is not the only reason for the polarization in American society. Social media plays a big part. News and information are, of course, subject to the same fracturing into two camps that characterizes life and thought in general. When news and information came through TV, newspapers and radio, impartiality may have been an option. But now that we get most of our news and information through algorithmically predetermined online sources, it becomes more and more difficult for any source to take a balanced view. Everybody has to work harder and harder to counter the bad information you're getting from the other guys. Both sides end up prioritizing spin over truth.
But it's not even biased news that I think is the biggest problem. I think one of the biggest culprits is the general tone of online culture and, in particular, memes.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good meme as much as the next guy. But think about it. What is the purpose and effect of sharing a political meme? They are literally designed to exaggerate a point of view by mercilessly mocking the other side. Hardly conducive to productive debate—just look at the comments.
These are the first two memes that came up when I Googled "political memes." Think about what goes on in your head when you look at each of these images. Do you feel like one is right and one is wrong? Does one make you chuckle and one make you angry? Does either make you feel enlightened, or like you've better understood some point of view?
Chances are one of these memes made you mad and seemed false and the other made you chuckle and seemed true. Most people will find this to be true, but they will disagree on which is false/cruel and which is true/hilarious. This, I think, is problematic.
This is the process: I find or create a meme that cleverly ridicules some politician or point of view. I share it on social media. My friends, most of whom roughly share my political sensibilities, like and share it. With almost no effort, I've proven how witty and brilliant I am. Everybody slaps me on the back and says "great job." We all have a good laugh.
That's usually as far as it goes. I have made absolutely no impact on the discourse, except to entrench the views of my own side.
If, however, the meme breaks out of my own little echo chamber and actually makes it to the people whose point of view I'm mocking, it certainly doesn't convince them that I'm right. It actually does the opposite. If anything, it makes them defensive and ultimately more committed to their own point of view. They don't think "Maybe I'm wrong." They think "You're wrong." Worse still, they think "You're wrong, and you clearly hate me, so I hate you too." In short, malicious memes do the exact opposite of what they pretend to do.
Most people are shackled to the notion that they can't possibly be wrong. When a person is committed to an idea, no evidence will make them change their mind. This isn't new to our polarized online world. As old Ben Franklin said way back in 1787, "Most Men indeed as well as most Sects in Religion, think themselves in Possession of all Truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far Error." One would think and hope that our unprecedented access to virtually all of human knowledge would make us better able to weigh information and find the truth, but the exact opposite is true.
If we simply want to prove how witty and enlightened we are, then by all means we should keep hurling angry memes and sarcastic tweets into the void. But if we actually want to fix the world, we need to stop casually scandalizing one another and relearn out how to find common ground. We need leaders who can unite the people, a herculean task in a society that is so reflexively and maliciously partisan. We have a head-start with our multi-party system, and we should all work to protect and preserve it as essential to a dynamic political culture. But as long as we keep mainly expressing our politics through online sarcasm, we're going to be stuck in the kind of world where people attend mass political rallies in the middle of a global pandemic to prove a bad point.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good meme as much as the next guy. But think about it. What is the purpose and effect of sharing a political meme? They are literally designed to exaggerate a point of view by mercilessly mocking the other side. Hardly conducive to productive debate—just look at the comments.
These are the first two memes that came up when I Googled "political memes." Think about what goes on in your head when you look at each of these images. Do you feel like one is right and one is wrong? Does one make you chuckle and one make you angry? Does either make you feel enlightened, or like you've better understood some point of view?
Chances are one of these memes made you mad and seemed false and the other made you chuckle and seemed true. Most people will find this to be true, but they will disagree on which is false/cruel and which is true/hilarious. This, I think, is problematic.
This is the process: I find or create a meme that cleverly ridicules some politician or point of view. I share it on social media. My friends, most of whom roughly share my political sensibilities, like and share it. With almost no effort, I've proven how witty and brilliant I am. Everybody slaps me on the back and says "great job." We all have a good laugh.
That's usually as far as it goes. I have made absolutely no impact on the discourse, except to entrench the views of my own side.
If, however, the meme breaks out of my own little echo chamber and actually makes it to the people whose point of view I'm mocking, it certainly doesn't convince them that I'm right. It actually does the opposite. If anything, it makes them defensive and ultimately more committed to their own point of view. They don't think "Maybe I'm wrong." They think "You're wrong." Worse still, they think "You're wrong, and you clearly hate me, so I hate you too." In short, malicious memes do the exact opposite of what they pretend to do.
Most people are shackled to the notion that they can't possibly be wrong. When a person is committed to an idea, no evidence will make them change their mind. This isn't new to our polarized online world. As old Ben Franklin said way back in 1787, "Most Men indeed as well as most Sects in Religion, think themselves in Possession of all Truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far Error." One would think and hope that our unprecedented access to virtually all of human knowledge would make us better able to weigh information and find the truth, but the exact opposite is true.
If we simply want to prove how witty and enlightened we are, then by all means we should keep hurling angry memes and sarcastic tweets into the void. But if we actually want to fix the world, we need to stop casually scandalizing one another and relearn out how to find common ground. We need leaders who can unite the people, a herculean task in a society that is so reflexively and maliciously partisan. We have a head-start with our multi-party system, and we should all work to protect and preserve it as essential to a dynamic political culture. But as long as we keep mainly expressing our politics through online sarcasm, we're going to be stuck in the kind of world where people attend mass political rallies in the middle of a global pandemic to prove a bad point.
