Fake news. Echo chambers. Polarization. Tribalism. Outrage porn. Culture war.
During the build-up to the 2016 US presidential election, these terms were frequently highlighted in think pieces and hot takes—and for good reason. While presidential election cycles have always been acrimonious, this one was different. The tone was nastier, the strawmanning more egregious, and the appetite for genuine dialogue non-existent. The so-called culture war was a defining feature of 2016, and rages on as we enter the 2020 election cycle.
If your news intake comes from legacy media, such as CNN or Fox, you might see the culture war as a left vs. right affair, but, for close observers, a different picture is beginning to emerge: one of ideological fragmentation. It’s not just about left vs. right: there are a multitude of different ideologies—memetic tribes—competing amongst themselves.
You might be familiar with some of these tribes: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion, Antifa, Intellectual Dark Web, New Atheists, Alt-Right, Manosphere, Incels, and QAnon, to name but a few. These groups have different values, epistemologies, and worldviews, often coupled with an unshakable and unexamined knowingness: a cocksureness in their own perspectives and an eagerness to attack and destroy opposing views.
We can view this new culture war, Culture War 2.0, as philosophical battles acted out in the noosphere: the term Pierre Teilhard de Chardin chose to refer to our collective consciousness. The internet’s ability to connect a world of different minds has allowed us to witness the fragmented nature of our current collective mind, lending the noosphere a schizophrenic quality.
On the surface, this memetic warfare seems to be caused by profoundly incompatible truths, values, and ways of knowing—what philosopher Robert Fogelin calls deep disagreements. According to Fogelin, a disagreement becomes deep when it is impossible to resolve it through argumentation. As he explains in “The Logic of Deep Disagreements”:
1. Successful argument is possible only if participants share a background of beliefs, values, and resolution procedures.
2. Deep disagreements are disagreements wherein participants have no such shared background.
3. Therefore successful argument is not possible in deep disagreement cases.
4. In disagreements needing urgent resolutions that also do not admit of argumentative resolution, one should use non-argumentative means to resolve the dispute.
5. Therefore, in urgent deep disagreements, one should use non-argumentative means to resolve the dispute.[1]
While it seems apparent that the culture war involves deep disagreements, we should be wary of overextending Fogelin’s analysis. It is true that many people are not arguing with, but over and at each other. However, are the propositions themselves always the source of this? In order to understand the culture war, we should explore John Nerst’s proposed field of erisology, the study of disagreements: “Conventional understanding of disagreement is inadequate and unsatisfying. Important knowledge that would help us understand it better does exist, but is not organized nor explained in a way that facilitates its diffusion into society.”[2]
If we become students of erisology, we may soon discover that deep disagreements may merely be hard disagreements. Disagreements are not rendered impossible by competing truth claims or irreconcilable values, but are the result of a confluence of complex factors, such as the use of memetic warfare by militaries and foreign governments and the way in which the current social media ecology incentivizes outrage. Luckily, amid the embittered noise of the culture war, dovish tribes, such as Game B and the Nordic school of metamodernism, are emerging.
These tribes are attempting to address our greatest challenges—what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis—while resolving the culture war, in order to crack the code of how to source collective intelligence. The meta-crisis consists of the interlaced existential risks with which we are faced: such as ecological disaster, nuclear holocaust, and misaligned AGI. These risks are exacerbated by our collective impotence to sense-make the nature of the problem and identify the best solution. The culture war itself is therefore an existential risk.
The prevailing sense among these dovish tribes is that, in order to meet the challenge of the meta-crisis, we need to stop warring and start cohering. To achieve this, I suggest we attempt to answer the perennial riddle of the blind man and the elephant. According to the parable, a group of blind men come across an animal they have never seen before, and each of them puts his hand on one part of the beast: the trunk, the ear, the tail, and so on. Each is convinced that the part he is touching defines the entire elephant; each man adamantly insists on the accuracy of his perceptions until they all end up shouting over each other.
We are living out this parable—the noosphere is the elephant we are shouting over. If we are indeed faced with the meta-crisis, the cost of this is existentially catastrophic. How can we encourage these blind men to start talking to each other? Enter memetic mediation. In “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0,” a white paper I co-wrote with Conor Barnes, we introduced the idea of the memetic mediator:
A new role might be required in the Culture War, that of the Memetic Mediator. This mediator would be a pan-tribalist participant, who has the ability to communicate across tribes in a way that seems fair and reasonable to each tribe. They would have the mental agility, empathy, and wisdom needed to shift between a multitude of perspectives.[3]
Perhaps such a role is impossible, or—if possible—not scalable to the degree needed to nudge the culture war in a positive direction. It may also be too late: our self-terminating path may already be fixed, and playing nicer may not make a difference. However, we introduced the term in the spirit of speculative optimism, and believe that it is worth exploring, given our contentious and precarious times.
Determining the feasibility of memetic mediation is not about advocating for what philosophers C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams playfully call civility porn: the self-righteous high that a call for civil discourse can provide. A good memetic mediator, if there ever is such a person, may advocate for more civility in dialogue, but she would not commit the false equivalence fallacy known in media circles as bothsidesing (or allsidesing in the case of the fragmented Culture War 2.0). Yes, there may be two or more sides to a story, but that does not mean they are equal or should be treated as such.
Even so, before we start punching nazis, cancelling celebrities, or deplatforming the problematic, it would be useful to pause and make room for perspectives we think are wicked or benighted. As Ken Wilber has pointed out, “no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.”[4] To solve the meta-crisis, we will need all the truths we can find—and a critical truth may come from the least expected source. It could very well arise from the interaction of two memetic tribes, who unexpectedly arrive at insights to which they would otherwise be blinded.
How does one actually begin to mediate between memetic tribes? No clear answer springs to mind—memetic mediation may very well be the hard problem of the culture war—but recent developments in the mediation of conflicting perspectives have been bubbling up.
First, to address the elephant in the room, which we can sense but cannot see, mediation is not just about engaging in perspectival pluralism. While this may be an important first step, it is not the last step. In order to get people to the table to adjudicate what is good, beautiful, and true, they need to have the capacity and desire to go to the table.
The role of the mediator is not to arrive at the truth, or the definition of the truth, but their job is to get people to the table, so they can talk, genuinely talk. The conditions for this will be different each time, as there has to be a sensitivity to each reality tunnel visiting the table. Luckily for us, methods, tools, and platforms are being developed to serve this purpose.
Edwin Rutsch’s Empathy Circles—a clever way to gamify Carl Rogers’ concept of reflective listening—allows participants to deeply understand other perspectives. Letter, a digital platform that encourages good faith epistolary exchanges between pairs of interlocutors, leverages humane tech principles in order to slow down our thinking and encourage us to engage critically with those with whom we disagree. Meta news sites, such as Allsides, reveal the biased perspectives of all news media, without judging who is right and who is wrong. OpenMind, an online program and in-person workshop backed by the latest psychological research, aims to depolarize our communities.
While these tools are promising, more work is needed to determine whether memetic mediation is possible, and—if so—could prove effective. But the moment has come to try to figure it out. The blind men’s vocal cords are straining, and soon they may no longer even have the opportunity to shout.
For my part, along with Jason Synder and Jared Janes from the Both/And podcast, we are hosting Mediation Campfires, outside of The Stoa. We will be co-discovering, with whoever else is called towards the strange attractor of memetic mediation, to determine the what and how of memetic mediation. Maybe, all what is needed amongst warring ideological combatants, is to feel warm together around the campfire. If you are called to join us, here is an invitation to our Slack channel.[5]
Notes
[1] Robert Fogelin, “The Logic of Deep Disagreements,” Informal Logic, 7 no. 1: 3–11. Retrieved online https://philpapers.org/rec/FOGTLO-2
[2] John Nerst, “What Is Erisology,” Everything Studies, retrieved online https://everythingstudies.com/what-is-erisology/
[3] Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes, The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0, “Memetic Mediators,” para. 1.
[4] Quote retrieved online https://citaty.net/citaty/1930920-ken-wilber-an-integral-approach-is-based-on-one-basic-idea-n/
[5] Memetic Mediator Group: An Open Invitation, retrieved online https://medium.com/@intellectualexplorersclub/memetic-mediator-invitation-1a2ee2e341cb