I had one particular speaker in mind on this, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided it applied to many people.
What kind of mind does it take to believe that you have been challenging the status quo all your adult life, but it is your opponents who are divisive? I'm not complaining about the sloppy PR or the superficiality of such a construction, though those are true as well. I am concerned because this is an enormous arrogance, a sense of entitlement, to even conceive of the world in this way. It implies that one's rightness, even righteousness, is so profound that to forcefully disagree is to offend against society.
Pay careful attention to who is throwing this word "divisive" around.
3 comments:
an enormous arrogance, a sense of entitlement, to even conceive of the world in this way. It implies that one's rightness, even righteousness, is so profound that to forcefully disagree is to offend against society
I'm not sure it's a sense of entitlement, though I'm not sure what to call it. The mistake we were talking about last week could be summarized as "disagreement with me is sinful", and I think it's the same thing you're pointing to here... but it isn't exactly putting one's own views on a pedestal.
It might turn into that easily, but I don't think it starts out there... I think it starts with elevating the views, not the person. Certain positions, certain ideas in compliance with a certain narrative, are accepted; they are held by everyone around one [here's your "tribes" thing]; they become self-evidently righteous; so anyone honest can perceive that this is the right way to think; therefore, dissenting views become self-evidently wrong, and those who hold them must be acting and speaking from self-evidently evil motives.
(Thus, divisiveness - not in the sense of simply disturbing or dividing people, but in the sense of confusing people about what is right, out of evil motives. In other words, I think by "divisiveness", the people you are talking about mean something like "deliberately upsetting people for the sake of confusing them and thus gaining power", as opposed to what *they* do. Accuse them of being divisive and they'll quote Jesus about bringing not peace but a sword. Their divisiveness is the righteous kind because it is in the service of views that are self-evidently right. So, no contradiction.)
This is a moral mistake but I think it's not the same mistake as self-righteousness, exactly. It leads you down slightly different paths when considering the status of those who disagree. Since the views are self-evidently good, disagreement must come from evil motives, so it can never be accepted at face value, and so direct argument about the merits of the position is out; instead, you get accusations about the supposed evil motives. Rather than think of opponents as unenlightened, you tend to think of them as powerful and malign; thus, boasting that your threats are "speaking truth to power" even when you *are* the power.
This mindset rules out the possibility of honest disagreement. I think that's the core of why it's so, yes, divisive.
Excellent correction of my original.
I think jaed's right, that they don't mean what you would mean by "divisive." It's just a fashionable buzzword without a clear referent in most political blathering -- certainly it doesn't have a meaning they could explain in terms of its applying to their opponents but not to themselves. It polls well, so they use it.
Post a Comment