Partly, or mostly, because some people profit handsomely from the lack of civil discourse, and their audiences, to a large extent, like the demonizing of the opposition.
Monetizing the echo chamber versus persuading the opposition
To illustrate these two approaches to being a public intellectual [broadly defined], consider the difference between Carl Sagan and Person 2, both of whom were not fans of religion:
Here's how the TV series Cosmos starts:
[Vangelis music plays] Carl Sagan: The Cosmos is all there is, there ever was, or there ever will be. [...] The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond normal human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth. [...] In the last few Millennia we've made astonishing discoveries about the Cosmos and our place in it.
Person 2 [who will remain anonymous] wrote the following in a book :
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Carl Sagan welcomed all into his personal voyage (the subtitle of the Cosmos show) to explore the Cosmos. Sagan's approach was a non-confrontational way to make religious people question, for example, young-Earth creationism. Sagan was persuading the opposition.
Person 2 wrote books (and gave speeches and appeared on television programs) to make his audience feel superior to the religious, just for not being religious; this is what is called monetizing the echo chamber.
Some public intellectuals are more interested in monetizing their echo chamber than in persuading the opposition. This has dire consequences for public discourse: it aggravates divisions, demonizes positions and people, and makes cooperation difficult across party lines.
But it appeals to some of the darker parts of human nature and is easier than persuading the opposition, so a lot of people seem to prefer it (both speakers/authors and audiences). And since it tends to demonize the opposition, it also gives that opposition both incentives and material to respond in the same fashion.
In other words, it's a self-reinforcing mechanism and one that makes us all worse-off in the long term, as divisions and demonizations aren't conducive to civil and productive societies.
A simple model of this behavior
Let's define the neutral position (as in we don't badmouth anyone and stick to the science) as the zero point in some scale, and consider the evolution of the discourse by two opposing factions, $A$ and $B$. Movement away from the zero means that these factions are more and more focused on monetizing their echo chamber rather than convincing those who may be neutral or even believe in the opposite position.
We model the evolution of the discourse by a discrete stochastic process (i.e. the positions change with time but there are some random events that affect their movement). Each side has a drift $D$ in the direction of their position and also a tendency to respond to the other side's positions. To model this response, we'll use a tit-for-tat approach, in which the response at a given time is proportional to what the other side's position was in the previous time. In other words, we have the following dynamics:
$A[i+1] = A[i] + D - S \times B[i] + \epsilon_{Ai} \qquad\text{with } \epsilon_{Ai} \sim \mathrm{N}(0, \sigma)$
and
$B[i+1] = B[i] – D - S \times A[i] + \epsilon_{Bi} \qquad\text{with } \epsilon_{Bi} \sim \mathrm{N}(0, \sigma)$
With this formulation $A$ tends to drift to positive values and $B$ tends to drift to negative values, assuming that $D$ is positive. The following figure shows how the dynamics evolve for some values of these $D$ and $S$ parameters
Note how in all cases we have divergence from zero (i.e. monetizing of the echo chamber, to the exclusion of persuading the opposition) and in particular how the increase in tit-for-tat sensitivity leads to acceleration of this process.
(The point of making a model like this [a theoretical model] is to see what happens when we change the parameters. I recommend readers make their own versions to play around with; mine were made in the R programming language on Rstudio and Tuftized/prettified for display on Apple Keynote, but it's easy enough to set that model up in a spreadsheet.)
What can we do?
Since this is a systemic problem (a problem composed of large scale incentives and human nature), there's little that can be done with individual actions, but there are a few good starting points:
- Avoid giving attention (much less money) to people who are monetizing the echo chamber, that is people who are deliberately making out discourse less civil for profit.
- Focus on positives rather than negatives: despite the popularity of Person 2, there are plenty of science popularizers who focus, as Carl Sagan did, on the majesty of the Universe and the power of science and technology.
- Point out this difference, between monetizers of the echo chamber and persuaders of the opposition, to other people, so that they too can start focussing on the positive
- Reflect on what we do, ourselves: do we focus on the negative or the positive? (This led to a lot fewer tweets on my part as I either stop snarky responses before I tweet or delete them soon after realizing they aren't helping.)*
- - - -
* Note that pointing out a technical or modeling error is not covered by this: if someone says 2+2=5, the right thing is not to make fun of them for it, but rather correct them. However, ignoring the error is not positive; the error must be corrected, though the person making it need not be demonized (it's counterproductive to demonize people who are wrong, as that leads to defensiveness). Carl Sagan in the example above repeatedly undermines young-Earth creationism without ever mentioning it.
ORIGIN: This post was motivated by a video on the Covid-19 situation by a person with whom I would agree about 95% on substance. But that video was such a collection of out-group demonizing and in-group pandering that it did change one mind: mine. Not about the substantive matters, but about subscribing to or otherwise following the social media of people whose entire schtick is monetizing their echo chamber.
