Restoring Civility
By Nico Louw
First published in the MRC’s Watercooler newsletter. Sign up to our mailing list to receive Watercooler directly in your inbox.
Recent weeks have seen no shortage of momentous political events, none more consequential than the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The shooting in Pennsylvania occurred at the crescendo of years of built up partisan animosity which is tearing at the social fabric of the US.
US politics has become divided to the point where the median Republican and Democrat have never been further apart in their political views, and supporters of both parties generally regard members of the other as immoral, dishonest and close-minded.
The impacts of this division were clear in the immediate reaction to the shooting—within minutes social media was awash with theories and conspiracies on how the other side was clearly responsible.
These figures are from 2017 and 2022, so are likely to be even more pronounced today.
Australians are not nearly as partisan, however the seeds of social division have been sown here and across the Western world by the same forces that are shaping US politics.
Much of the population is beginning to lack not just the willingness, but even the ability to understand why others hold different views to them.
This kind of closed thinking started in earnest in our universities and has spread into our schools and workplaces.
In the US it has found its way into both sides of politics. The political correctness and cancel culture of the left has been used to shut down debate and attack people, even the working class, as privileged. The response from the right has been defiance, withdrawal from attempts to compromise with the left, and even some cancel culture of its own.
This breakdown in communication threatens the diversity of viewpoints and exchange of ideas that has been fundamental to expanding knowledge and driving the success of liberal Western societies.
Seminal pieces of work by two excellent political thinkers in recent years help explain why this has happened and, importantly, why we must stand our ground and begin to push back against division and in defence of free inquiry and civil debate.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has become well known recently for sounding the alarm on the impact of social media on children in his book The Anxious Generation. An earlier work, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, is vital to understanding the political divisions we see across the West today.
Haidt draws on psychology to explain how people become trapped in the moral understandings of their political team and become genuinely unable to see how an alternative moral view of the world could be held by someone else.
This way of thinking blinds people from believing that people from the other side are sincere in their moral beliefs. And if you don’t understand that your opponent simply has different moral priorities, then you’ll believe they have bad intentions and are blind to truth, reason, science and common sense.
People who think like this don’t just believe their opponents’ beliefs are factually wrong, but morally wrong. Such thinking makes it easy to not have to engage with your opponents’ beliefs—in fact you’re essentially obligated not to. You’ll always be looking for explanations for your opponents’ views, but not your own. In later work with Greg Lukianoff, Haidt boils this worldview down to a simple phrase—bad people only have bad opinions.
While people of all political views can fall into this way of thinking, Haidt finds that those with more progressive political views were much more likely to struggle to understand the moral perspectives of conservatives than the other way around.
This division and associated behaviour such as cancel culture has deeper consequences beyond just being unpleasant. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch lays out a powerful case for why, if left unchecked, it risks fundamentally undermining the social infrastructure that drives the success of Western Liberalism.
Rauch argues, rightly in our view, that liberalism has been so successful because of strong social rules that allow for disagreements to be turned into knowledge in an open marketplace of ideas.
We have built our society using a system where everyone agrees to convince each other of different views and, over time as evidence accumulates, ideas are proven right or wrong and impasses are resolved. Over centuries, this has led to everything from our understanding of geology to the existence of modern medicine as a profession.
This system is based on using disconfirmation and critique to correct errors and its success requires viewpoint diversity. It doesn’t matter if people are biased—what matters is that we can see each other's biases and identify mistakes. Knowledge is never permanent; it stands only so long as it can withstand checking.
Rauch puts forward two simple rules for this to work:
No final say—everything is open to consideration and challenge. You can only say something is objectively true if it’s open to being challenged and has stood up to challenge.
No personal authority—the personal authority of a person presenting an idea or the group they belong to does not make them immune from scrutiny. Anybody, irrespective of their beliefs or group they belong to, should be able to check and verify an idea put forward by others, using methods accessible to everyone, and get the same results.
This system is powerful, but fragile. It’s a social compact that supports individual rights but requires individuals to meet certain standards of behaviour. It requires that people are willing to accept legitimate criticism and hold themselves accountable to it.
The system breaks down when cancel culture takes hold and a person or group is able to use coercion or intimidation to control what others say or believe. We cannot form knowledge and agree on facts when society divides into groups that no longer interact with or learn from each other. This extends well beyond political party allegiances and applies equally to views involving issues such as gender, religion, age, sexuality, ethnicity and race.
This breakdown and the influence of cancel culture now has deep roots in both the left and right of US politics.
Those on the left will deny cancel culture is even real or claim it is not an attack on free speech, because what they’re really doing is standing up against ‘privilege’ and ‘power structures’.
Those on the right will decry this, while engaging in exactly the same behaviour. In the aftermath of the shooting of Donald Trump, the popular right wing social media account Libs of TikTok led pile-ons against individuals found to have joked about the assassination—in one instance appearing to successfully have a Home Depot checkout worker fired. Sound familiar?
Fighting cancel culture with more cancel culture can never work and will only further entrench division. ‘Free speech for me but not for thee’ doesn’t stack up.
In Australia, we have the chance to learn from the US experience and push back against the forces of division before they get their roots too deep. We must resist efforts to divide us into identity groups and strive to be united under a common identity as Australians.
Australia has unique advantages, including an egalitarian culture that means most Australians instinctively dislike divisive rhetoric and ideas.
We should commit ourselves to the belief that, in a free and fair contest of ideas, it will be the sensible ideas that triumph. You need look no further than the outcome of the Voice referendum to see this.
The first step is taking on board the ideas of Haidt and recognising that our political opponents are driven by different moral priorities, rather than bad intentions. We can agree to disagree—in fact Rauch shows us that’s the very basis of what makes for a successful civilisation.
But recognising this doesn’t mean not speaking up against poor behaviour. When people and groups engaging in cancel culture meet resistance, they tend to stop. When they don’t, they advance.
Reinforcing liberalism begins with reinforcing ourselves individually. This means not remaining silent in the face of cancel culture, because it’s silence that creates the false perception of consensus.
Stand your ground—but be ready to stand corrected.
As Jonathan Rauch aptly puts it—stay civil and speak up.