If you were to sum up almost every major event within the past couple of months — if you were able to catch up with anything — in one word, my candidate would be chaos. Now, I don’t mean chaos in the sense of complete madness or people flailing their arms in the streets like Bacchae, but more or less because of the smudging of important events into one, unsettling timeline to the point where days or weeks blend together into different hues of importance and struggle.
I would also be lying if I said this is unique to the timeline we’ve been selected to be on, since history processes at an uneven, chaotic rate at all times and in all places. There are many times within human history where the timeline is much more raucous or jagged compared to the modern day, where event-smudging is prevalent whenever you go on social media or doomscroll for hours on end. Because of how interconnected we’ve all become with each other, we grow more empathetic of the plights of people hundreds of thousands of miles away from our comfier abodes because of our direct exposure to the happenings in places like Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia…the list always goes on.
Human interaction and connection is the sole reason why philosophy exists; practice makes not-quite-but-approximate-to-perfect results. Dialogue between people gives not only the other person we speak to humanity, but also gives us the sense that we are able to think for ourselves and we can make decisions that impact our lives. This is why trying to preserve such dialogue is critical to process ever-growing flows of information and misinformation with a critically sculpted mind, sorting out things that we don’t have time for because of our always-attentive, hypersensitive minds. Yet this can create dissasociation with others, especially if you have a life filled with priorities or assignments needing to be done. You become so overwhelmed with the issues people face around the world that you would rather concentrate your energy on what you can control and (rarely) give any attention to the needs of others. Even though this fulfills the Stoic mindset, Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus wouldn’t be thrilled at your neglect.
Undoubtedly, that people are more empathetic to each other is one of the major benefits of social media in an age of isolationist policy and social norms. How humans interact with each other and, consequently, understand the struggles another person might face is at a level of importance unprecedented compared to the rest of recorded human history. Yet with the growth of advocacy movements on all sides of the political spectrum, therein lies a problem humans are quite bad at solving: prioritization. What we put in our lives impacts how we see others. So if your friend is attuned about the horrible conditions of people living through a genocide in the Gaza strip on an almost daily basis while you only listen here and there about the Palestine-Israel conflict and focus instead on economic policy in the United States, your friend will think of you as being more ignorant than you should when an unfolding crisis is happening thousands of miles away.
Now, your friend not not paying attention to what’s going on domestically, since being a citizen of a country obliges you to be intrigued about local issues. However, they are prioritizing this issue because of the apparent ethical and moral violations committed by oligarchs on innocent people, veiled in threats of Hamas using people to shield their forces, not because they’re ignorant of what’s going on in the country. Often politics have no choice but to become international situations, where, for instance, economic problems in the United States seems to affect most of the world (with the major exception of China). So too has the issue in Gaza has become so widespread throughout the world — you’re already quite familiar of protests in the country, not even considering the cosmopolitan level of other protests — has become so culturally relevant that it extends into local politics, where the opinions of politicians on all sides use this event to drive support for themselves. Your friend, surprisingly enough, is just as based as you are, just within different contexts.
Of course, when morals are involved, there is a natural impetus to defend those more vulnerable; this isn’t bad by any means. What makes the difference, however, is how you react to something and how you take it out on others. In essence, execution takes priority over substance, which is a problem.
Another problem, however, lies in arguing that certain causes are to be prioritized no matter the context or political siding, due to a distinct harm of human dignity and ethics. Of course, when tragic events happen, people tend to team up with each other to build resilience. But it is when these events are dragged into quick discourse that things really start bubbling.
When I refer to “quick discourse,” I’m referring to debates, discussion, or dialogue that is only meant to provoke instead of making people critically think about their views and consider another side of things. All too often, when a hot-button topic (usually relating to a deep connection to the human person) is brought up in an environment where convenience and algorithmic curation is the norm, people get angry, very quickly. This anger, however, is entirely unproductive to any meaningful discussion, since 1) as I mentioned previously, it provokes and not questions, 2) it opens the opportunity to demonize or canonize certain people or ideas that could affect the outcome of your own personal beliefs in terms of bias, and 3) generalizations about entire groups are usually the end result.
Through deliberate and aggressive debating tactics that have become the norm in quick discourse there is no real consideration for the other person, or even considering their equal value to you. Aggression only breeds contempt, and if a person becomes unwilling to put the opposition in good faith, they will never learn anything more than what they already believe.
Normative biases resulting from the exposure such discourse brings harms our connections with others and even ourselves. If we are unwilling to bring ourselves to have the patience to listen to someone else, why are we talking in the first place? Further, if we only seek to become the “winning side” (which doesn’t exist in a philosophical framework, mind you) in an argument about culturally-sensitive topics, are we genuinely interested in what’s going on in the world or are we just trying to fulfill the desires of the Id and not listening to our Superego to tell us what’s going on?
Empathy for the other is currently in a grey area: we care about what other people go through if it involves how we think, and our options need to line up just so (i.e., to our personal beliefs) that we can accept the other.
Discourse, then, becomes in essence nothing but nescio quid — “something or other” — without any meaningful change. Should we settle for this then? Or is this the logical outcome of thousands of years of thousands of ideas being traded back and forth, distorting and contorting to levels never seen before? How can we better humanity and brush off this habit of “quick discussion?”
Maybe, if we’re open enough, we’ll get there eventually. ❧
