The above link is article number 9 in a series of articles exploring why writing about society is so "perilous" (This is the introduction to the series, very short.) I've noticed that I have...
Warning: The above article is a massive read, especially if you want the context of the previous posts that it builds upon.
Then I went to college. It was 2000. Bush-Gore year. While everyone I grew up with was obviously rooting as hard as possible for Gore to win, it began to dawn on me that I had made a very strange group of new friends in college. Some of them were rooting for Gore, but they hated certain things about his beliefs. Others disliked both candidates. And some of them were fervently rooting for Bush, even though they had previously seemed like reasonable people.
I knew exactly where I stood, of course, and made my opinion clear. When I explained that I was unquestionably voting for Gore, instead of giving me a high five, my friends asked me why. I had all kinds of explanations, but when they’d push me to talk in specifics, I’d run into a problem.
I didn’t really know the specifics.
I knew Gore was the better choice, just like I knew the Democratic Party was the better party—but when pressed about my underlying reasons for liking any specific policy of Gore’s, I’d end up in an uncomfortable place.
I've noticed that I have fallen into this sort of thinking with many different subjects (politics included) during my life. It took me reading this article to have the "curtains drawn" so-to-speak. Even with this knowledge, I'm still seeing myself falling into the pattern again and again, which is frustrating. Sometimes it's due to apathy, (don't really care about the subject, so I'll just accept what I hear at face value) and other times it's from doing the minimal amount of "research" so that I can say "yea, I have looked into it. It checks out" which I don't like either. All of this is to say, I don't like that gullible part of me but changing it takes a hella long time apparently. :|
Progressivism = concerned with helping society make forward progress—positive changes to the status quo. That progress can come from identifying what you deem to be a flaw in your nation’s systems or its culture and working to root it out, or by trying to make your nation’s strong points even stronger.
Conservatism = concerned with conserving what is already good about society—either by fighting against the erosion of what you deem to be your nation’s strong qualities, or by pushing back against well-intentioned attempts at positive progress that you believe, in reality, will prove to be changes for the worse, not for the better.
Put more simply, if a nation is a boat, high-rung Progressivism tries to make improvements to flaws in the boat and build newer, better features, while high-rung Conservatism tries to protect the existing boat against damage and deterioration.
I personally like this semi-deconstruction of the two terms, and can see how it's beneficial to view the concepts this way. In these terms, I have both Progressive beliefs (Universal Healthcare) as well as Conservative beliefs (Keep Roe v Wade).
The thing is, ever since then, I can’t get analog and digital out of my head. I see it as a metaphor for all kinds of things in the world. Here’s what I mean:
Analog is what actually goes on in the natural world. It’s a perfect representation of reality: information in its natural, messy state. Sound is a nice example. Sound is analog information that can be represented by a wave
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Digitization is a way to approximate analog information using a set of exact values. Like this:
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Back to Disney movies.
The real world is analog—gray, amorphous, and endlessly nuanced. What Disney movies do is they digitize the shit out of the real world. They go the full distance, converting all that gray into clean black-and-white 1s and 0s.
Real people are complex and flawed, full of faults but almost always worthy of compassion. Disney characters, on the other hand, are either entirely good or entirely bad.
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Political Disney World is much more fun. Everything is nice and crisp and perfectly digital. Good guys and bad guys, with good ideas and bad ideas, respectively. Good politicians and bad politicians with good policies and bad policies. Right and wrong. Smart and ignorant. Virtuous and evil. Safe and dangerous.
1s and 0s.
The title concept, is also another pretty good analogy of what is happening with people all across the spectrum. I've seen it in videos of people crying about Trump losing the 2020 election. I've seen it in people crying about Hillary losing the 2016 election. I'm sure it happened in previous elections as well, but wasn't recorded and distributed to a wide audience through a social media platform.
There's a lot more to the article, but continuously quoting it would really balloon my comment here, so I'll stop at this point and leave some space for others to comment with their thoughts feelings and ideas about it.
The above link is article number 9 in a series of articles exploring why writing about society is so "perilous" (This is the introduction to the series, very short.)
I've noticed that I have fallen into this sort of thinking with many different subjects (politics included) during my life. It took me reading this article to have the "curtains drawn" so-to-speak. Even with this knowledge, I'm still seeing myself falling into the pattern again and again, which is frustrating. Sometimes it's due to apathy, (don't really care about the subject, so I'll just accept what I hear at face value) and other times it's from doing the minimal amount of "research" so that I can say "yea, I have looked into it. It checks out" which I don't like either. All of this is to say, I don't like that gullible part of me but changing it takes a hella long time apparently. :|
I personally like this semi-deconstruction of the two terms, and can see how it's beneficial to view the concepts this way. In these terms, I have both Progressive beliefs (Universal Healthcare) as well as Conservative beliefs (Keep Roe v Wade).
The title concept, is also another pretty good analogy of what is happening with people all across the spectrum. I've seen it in videos of people crying about Trump losing the 2020 election. I've seen it in people crying about Hillary losing the 2016 election. I'm sure it happened in previous elections as well, but wasn't recorded and distributed to a wide audience through a social media platform.
There's a lot more to the article, but continuously quoting it would really balloon my comment here, so I'll stop at this point and leave some space for others to comment with their thoughts feelings and ideas about it.