malvasia bianca

A random observation: I sometimes see arguments between groups of people about a situation where A harms B. (Or where A does something B doesn’t like, but whether the question of whether A is harming B is contested.) One side is focusing on A doing wrong; the other side is focusing on things B could do (or could have done) to reduce the chance of the harm occurring. And neither side likes where the other side is putting their focus.

And this seems like maybe not a great thing to be arguing about? Like, both points are potentially useful things to bring up, they’re just ways to think about answering different questions. For example, in a lot of situations, you only have influence over one side or the other of the situation (heck, in a lot of situations, you don’t have influence over either side of the situation), and trying to convince somebody to think about the situation through a lens that they don’t feel they can influence doesn’t feel particularly productive to me.

Politics come into this, of course. I’m not sure whether a more accurate model for how politics interacts with this is “liberals focus more on A’s actions and conservatives focus more on B’s actions” or whether a more accurate model is “people in general are more focused on the actions of the group that they’re less aligned with”. (If I had to guess: probably both, but probably more the second than the first?)

Also, in general, focusing on A increases the chance that moral absolutism / totalizing will come into play. Which might be appropriate and/or useful? But I think, a lot of the time, it isn’t.

Maybe that last bit is what’s bugging me in ways that lead me to write this note. US society feels to me like it’s been a lot more polarized over the last decade than it was in other periods of my life. Some of what the other side is doing / believes is, from my point of view, genuinely horrible, but it feels to me like more acceptable forms of difference are getting pulled into that polarization? So I’m trying to figure out ways in which I can train myself to notice places where I’m being taught to see something as part of an eternal struggle even though other options are out there. And this pattern feels like a candidate.