Outrage and culture wars

I decided to google "culture of outrage" and see what I found. I actually found more than I bargained for. It's Time for an Outrage Armistice on Slate went past the outrage itself and hit most of the political landmarks. I think all the things it said were correct. I feel like the only shortcoming was what it didn't say. It described Woke culture and listed racism as their main issue. I would say that the issue is bigger than just racism. It also has to do with sex and gender, as the #metoo movement illustrated.

But the point is, if we continue in outrage and tribalism, demonizing each other and talking past each other and never trying to listen, we are headed to a really bad place as a nation. Really. Bad.

Tribalism

For awhile now I have been talking about this mentality that I see in both political and religious circles of demonizing "the other." Somewhere I heard this described as tribalism. I searched for articles about this and found some good ones.

First I read this article by David P entitled How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous. He gives an example of religious tribalism from his youth, but explains that tribalism extends to politics, race, and gender as well. We choose tribalism, he says, to keep us safe, and it trumps morality, reason and anything else that would threaten our survival. But that's dangerous.

Amy Chua wrote about The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism in the New York Times. She ends with this statement:

But the emergence of coastal elites as an insular minority is also rooted squarely in the breakdown of national unity — in the fracturing of our country into two (or more) Americas in which people from one tribe see others not just as the political opposition, but as immoral, evil and un-American. America desperately needs leaders with the courage to break out of the tribalist cycle, but where are we going to find them?

Toby Young follows up Chua's thinking in We are being destroyed by tribalism. Let's get rid of it.  He explains how Chua makes a correlation between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump and how our political climate created an environment where working class whites were feeling disenfranchized and Trump stepped right in and gave them someone to rally behind.