Recently, I made a comment that being against uncontrolled migration is a sensible stance. My comment was a response to an article reporting that Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, is against uncontrolled migration and thinks that Vance had a point in his speech in Munich.
As soon as I made the comment, another person, a professor of sociology, quickly remarked: “That’s clarifying. So you and Frederiksen are in alignment to Vance. Good to know.”
Us versus Them
As a social scientist, I would be among the first people to acknowledge that, in a society, especially a capitalist society, there are opposing interests. Those advocating to abandon seeing the world as “Us versus Them” — that we should try not to take sides — are highly mistaken in my view. However, there is indeed a kind of mindset today that we would be better off if we tried to get rid of it; it is the mindset that looks for enemies, for sides, for opposing camps. This mindset has various causes.
The modern era that we live in is, for many people, unfortunately, quite stressful and tiring. Nuanced thinking, on the other hand, demands time and energy. Because of those two facts together, people often end up making simplistic thoughts. The tendency of some people to immediately put others into the “right” camp (that is to say, deciding if someone is with us or with them; them being, of course, always the bad guys) is a symptom of those two aforementioned facts; a manifestation of a simplistic way of thinking. Convenient as it may be, though, I do not think that this way of thinking is necessary to the degree that it happens today. People can do better and we should all strive for that. People are able to cultivate, slowly, a more nuanced way of thinking. And that would result, among other things, to resist putting people immediately into sides. Because, when one develops that nuanced way of thinking, one realises that no matter how many commonalities there may be among people, people still remain individuals. You will never find two identical people. As I like to put it: each person is a whole different world.
In the case of migration, for example, one would realise that between the two extreme stances on migration (namely, being in favour of completely open borders and being against migration entirely), there is a third option called controlled migration. Now, this third option is a general option and can take multiple specific forms. Two people who are in favour of controlled migration may still differ vastly in the specifics of its implementation. Moreover, even if they do not differ at all regarding the specifics, migration is still only one of the many things in life. Put simply, even if someone’s preferred migration policy was identical to the one that Vance prefers, that would not make the person to be in alignment to Vance in general but only in alignment to Vance regarding that specific issue…
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There are already opposing interests in the world, with vast consequences. In other words, the world is already polarized enough. It would be for the benefit of us all to resist perceiving things in a simplistic way and rather try, to the degree that is possible, to develop a more nuanced way of thinking. That would not only make our world less polarised but, at the same time, it would give space for more communication —something that is highly important for a polity, a city, a society in general to function well.
The lack of nuanced thinking is not the only thing that makes our world more polarised than it has to be, though. There are two more things that also contribute to today’s polarisation. About those things, however, I will write next time, in part two.