“The crisis of democracy is above all a crisis of listening”: why politics is becoming ever more polarized

Catalan philosopher Jaime Nubiola is concerned about the growth of polarization in our society and the loss of the sense of facts.

The polarization of politics

I’ve begun to prepare a book about polarization, an issue which affects Spanish society and so many other countries so gravely. It’s a topic that worries me seeing how aggressively it disrupts social relationships, sometimes within families.

To research the book, I have bought half a dozen recent books which study this phenomenon. One of them was Luis Miller’s Polarized: The politics that divides us (Deusto, 2023). Although the book is already three years old, its careful reading illuminates with precision the different aspects of this current problem.

Polarization is, without a doubt, ‘a polyhedric phenomenon’. But a central thesis which runs through Miller’s book is the idea that “the media is just that, media, instruments in the propagation of ideological confrontation and polarization, and not the main causes of these. The main causes are none other than the political parties themselves and their ultimate goal of conquering power. But that point made, social networks can be very effective means to develop polarizing strategies.”

Let’s repeat this in other words: for Miller the primary cause of polarization lies, most probably, in the political parties themselves which have made ideological and affective polarization their primary instrument in order to capture voters’ votes so as to gain power. One symptom which shows this is the case is the level of insults and verbal aggression by politicians, only comparable to hooligans in football stadiums:

Politics, Miller says, ‘has become one of the last contemporary bastions of insults and verbal aggression’.

In the last two chapters, Miller advocates measures to counteract polarization. “We have no choice but to rebuild spaces for non-partisan social interaction that allow us to express a broader range of identities and personal qualities outside the realm of politics. Ultimately, it is a question of freeing broad areas of our social and community life from the influence of political parties.”

I couldn’t agree more and that’s why I echo this book, because it is helping me to think through these issues.

No one is listening

Having begun my study of the phenomenon of polarization, I spoke one day with my former PhD student Ignacio Redondo, now an expert in the application of AI to education. He referred me to the research of Chris Bail on this issue: “When polarization based on identity takes precedence,” Ignacio told me, “debate is impossible.”

I read about some of that research in Ezra Klein’s fascinating 2020 book Why We Are Polarised and found it utterly compelling. Contrary to the common belief that listening to opposing views leads to a change in one’s own opinions, Christopher Bail and his colleagues found in 2017, using a group of 1,220 regular Twitter users, that exposure over the course of a month to the most popular and authoritative voices from the opposing side led to an increase in polarization.

“The key finding,” writes Klein, “is that neither group responded to exposure to the other side by moderating their own views. In both cases, hearing opposing views led supporters not only to a deeper conviction of the justice of their cause, but to more polarised political positions; that is, Republicans became more conservative rather than more progressive, and Democrats, if anything, became more progressive rather than more conservative.”

I do not know what would happen if the same experiment were carried out here in Spain with supporters of Vox and Podemos. I imagine the result would be even more overwhelming: no one would convince anyone else, and everyone would become even more entrenched in their own position.

I often think that in politics, nobody really listens. “The crisis of democracy is above all a crisis of listening,” writes Byung-Chul Han in Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy (Polity, 2022).

The crisis of facts

But let’s speak more about Byung-Chul Han and his Infocracy book, which I have read with keen interest. This is easily done as it is a short book (80 pages) accessible to an educated non-specialist readership. In it the renowned South Korean-German philosopher tackles a subject which affects us all: how digitalization has profoundly transformed our society.

In particular, my attention was drawn to something which, once stated, seems obvious — such is the nature of philosophy — but which one does not realise until someone points it out:

in our world of digital information and virtual reality, facts have disappeared.

I don’t know what Byung-Chul Han wrote in his original version but in the Spanish translation he uses the word: ‘desfactificación’, ‘defactualization’, that is, the loss of connection with facts.

I quote a passage: “A new nihilism is spreading in our day. […] Information now circulates completely disconnected from reality in a hyperreal space. Belief in facticity is lost. We live in a de-factualized universe. Along with factual truths, the shared world to which we might refer in our actions also disappears.”

He points out that digital photography ‘destroys factuality as truth. It produces a new reality that does not exist by eliminating reality as a point of reference’. We could say something similar about the AI-generated videos that have proliferated in recent times.

Facts constitute a shared space, the common world of which Byung-Chul Han speaks. That is why we must switch off our screens — especially mobile phones, which isolate us so much — to live alongside others and thus reclaim facts. Because facts are, to a large extent, the things we do together.

Authenticity and rituals

Perhaps a factor contributing to the loss of the sense of facts is the growth of subjectivity. We no longer care how things are, what matters is how we feel. Authenticity is the great quality, but an authenticity which is psychologically unhealthy for its obsession with the self.

Authenticity is often regarded as a virtue. However, authenticity can be understood as mere spontaneity or as the work one does on oneself to be consistent. Only this second meaning can be considered virtuous.

This came to mind whilst reading another Byung-Chul Han book The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Polity 2020). I have copied two quotes from this book which invite reflection on this topic (and which I translate from the Spanish version I read):

“The pressure to be authentic leads to narcissistic introspection, to a constant preoccupation with one’s own psychology.”

“The narcissistic cult of authenticity is partly responsible for the progressive coarsening of society. Today we live in a culture of passions. When ritual gestures disappear and manners are lost, passions and emotions prevail. On social media, too, the performative distance that is constitutive of the public sphere is eliminated. Passionate communication takes place without distance.”

I very much agree with Han on this point. A significant part of education consists of acquiring what used to be called ‘good manners’, which allow us to integrate gracefully into a community.

Many of these rituals are highly conventional, yet they are capable of giving meaning to our communal life. One need only think of our festivals and their remarkable annual recurrence.

“Repetition is the essential feature of rituals. It differs from routine in its capacity to generate intensity,” adds Byung-Chul Han. Routine wears us down; ritual, on the other hand, renews us.

The deepest authenticity is almost always found in the loving observance of rituals. Rituals are simply forms which help us to structure important personal and community needs: the need to worship, to celebrate major events in our society’s or family’s life, or to unite a people. Families can have their own rituals which help build up their life in common.  

Rituals can be good or bad, depending on what we actually do in them and the intention with which we do it. But some of them can certainly help us to be better people and citizens. If we carry them out authentically.

The above article is based on various recent Facebook posts by Jaime and is published in Adamah Media with his permission. For some other Adamah articles by Jaime, see here and here.