Recommended Reading

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 20:38:39 -0500, Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com> said:

> lot-- the host sets up one group as representative of evil, and proceeds to 
> beat up on that group relentlessly.   If that's your example of playing to 
> all sides of the political spectrum, Dan, we as a nation are all in serious 
> trouble.   

It is a human failing (pointed out by Gould, Levi-Strauss, and
others), so common as to be possibly innate, that we often prefer to
view our experiences as the intersection of dichotomous Platonic
essences, rather than points in an irreducible continuum.  So our
natural mental toolkit gives us "us" versus "them", "good" versus
"evil", "fat" versus "thin", "short" versus "tall", "black" versus
"white", "left" versus "right", "Jew" versus "Gentile", and so on --
we just naturally fall into it.  It takes an intellectual effort to
escape this mode of thinking -- a challenge -- and many in the talk
radio audience are looking for confirmation, not challenge.

In fact, we treasure these labels so much that their meanings
frequently drift far away from the original essence, as witness the
radicalism of many modern "conservatives" whose agenda would a century
ago have been considered "liberal", versus modern "liberals" with
their conservative emphasis on preserving the status quo in labor, the
environment, social programs, and so on.  Society didn't just "flip a
bit" one day and suddenly liberals were conservative and vice versa;
we passed through many points along a continuum of views (many such
continua, actually) to get from one point to the other.

-GAWollman