In this week’s Saturday Night Live skit, “Dinner Discussion,” Will Ferrell slams his face into some saucy meatballs while Kenan Thompson stabs his hand with a steak knife, just to avoid talking about the increasingly delicate and polarizing Aziz Ansari case.
Why are we so bad at disagreeing?
In our heads, disagreements are stark, line-in-sand, ideological and moral distinctions.
This affects political, academic and even social conversations: we are constantly on the defense against those we consider morally repugnant because their views contradict our own moral compass.
But less obviously and more destructively — we auto-censor ourselves, so we never stray from the orthodoxy of thought on whichever side we have crowned morally superior. Political conversation becomes, then, both tribally predictable and intellectually stale.
It exists as a deafening echo-chamber primarily defined by the other “bad” deafening echo-chamber.
The risk of falling out of line from your team’s narrative and revealing your thoughts to be different than prescribed is as good as social suicide or, as Kenan Thompson instructs us, stabbing yourself with a steak knife.
This moral standoff is about as representative of the complexity of our modern reality as is Game of Thrones, which is a good thing if you want the next election to be a reenactment of the “Red Wedding,” but, in reality, it is an awful — and dangerous — misconception.
As convenient as it is to believe that the political left and right are monolithic, static, impenetrable walls of normative narratives, they are, in reality, amorphous yelling blobs, where the loudest yellers (generally with the most extreme and offensive versions of their team opinion) are the only ones to be heard.
