Verified by 
Key points
- As herd animals, humans privilege "belonging," and thus can easily slip into tribalism.
- Today, we increasingly oversimplify, identify a larger narrative, and position others into it, rather than explore nuanced issues.
- We may interpret, re-remember, and revise our thinking about other's actions and words until we can determine if they are "for or against" us.
This Thanksgiving, comments about weight, waistlines, and fat-shaming brought to mind a conversation I overheard earlier this year (waiting in an over-long line at a local retailer).
Person 1: “Why isn’t anyone talking about the relationship between obesity and COVID? I see so many ‘coming home after weeks in ICU’ video on the news—everyone, even after days of not eating, is really overweight…”
Person 2: “Shhhhhhhhhh! You can’t say that. I can’t believe that you of all people would even think to fat shame.”
Person 1: “I am not fat-shaming. I am stating a fact—a fact we need to face head-on.”
Person 2: “I’m only saying that you can't just..."
Person 1: "So I’m not allowed to have an opinion?!”
I'm still mulling over this conversation. My thoughts splinter off on several different tangents, but they return to one key idea: that we may in fact be "the new Puritans," as an article in the Atlantic deemed it, and that every stance we take could be construed as a position from which we bully others. Our opinions often seem to be fitted into larger narratives by our respective audiences, and we are ascribed an identity on the basis of this sleight of hand. In the process, nuances and "inconvenient details" can sometimes fall between the cracks.
Consider: In the exchange, the second person positions the very noticing of weight within a fat-shaming narrative. In that narrative, "weight-blindness" seems to equal tolerance and acceptance. Therefore, noticing weight—regardless of the context/spirit in which it is done—is, at the very least, deemed to be insensitive.
Ironically, it seems to me that this position (sensitivity to fat-shaming) is being used to shut down a conversation: used to identify and signal the need for respect and tolerance by, in my view, being disrespectful and intolerant. Banishing the possibility of a legitimate alternate narrative is a hallmark of bullying (as is the implicit threat to "out" anyone who does not agree to it).
One of my Thanksgiving guests responded to my retelling of this story by inserting the dynamic itself into an alternative narrative, arguing that reductionist streamlining is unfortunate but cannot be helped. We need to negotiate a terrifying amount of input and information on a daily basis, he said (and have been doing so for over half a century—the term "information overload" was coined in 1964, and popularized by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock). In this case, "negotiate" means to digest the basics and position oneself in relation to them.
To me, his shift to an alternate narrative was telling. It illustrated the way that "nuances and inconvenient details" fall between the cracks, allowing issues (and our identities) to be fitted into a variety of social stories.
This immediate reconfiguring can be likened to the turn of a kaleidoscope: a new pattern, a new dominant color, a new way to position the pieces/their refractions. In my guest's re-framing, "fat-shaming" fell away, or became swept up and unrecognizable as it was embedded in a different narrative pattern ("information overload").
In her Atlantic article “The New Puritans,” Anne Applebaum (who is exploring modern mob justice—e.g. the "social media justice" often handed down by "cancel culture") makes this claim:
“Dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways…” (Atlantic, Oct 2021, p 62)
In the overheard exchange, the second person could have theoretically placed the observation of weight in any number of contexts: vaxxed vs. unvaxxed status, the difficulty of addressing co-morbidities with the broken healthcare system, or the link between diabetes and weight. Any of these contexts would have incorporated "weight" into its own narrative, where it could have been coded, caught up into a larger narrative, and positioned the speaker to her audience.
The Upshot
As I noted in an earlier blog, “we oversimplify our grasp of situations by ordering and processing them in terms of yes/no; good/bad; winner/loser; us/them; facts/theories; stay/go; and 0/1: the binary language of code used by computers.” We are pushed to do so by the "horizontal hostilities" we all-too-readily face from within our "tribes," hostilities that threaten rejection and positioning in the other tribe’s narrative.
Paradoxically, identifying our social position (our "tribe") has become increasingly complicated in a world patterned by binaries. Yet doing so is increasingly important. We are social animals, wired to herd; needing to belong. Re-visit Lord of the Flies. Tribalism is driven by emotions and peer pressure, rather than rational thought and dialogue.
In my view, we have become less and less able to define issues, therefore less and less able to position ourselves in relation to them. Instead, we position ourselves within narratives. Or, we allow ourselves to tumble, like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, and be positioned within them, because there is no place outside the patterns. If pushed (as was the first speaker in the exchange I overheard) there is no self-story outside “0 or 1” coding. “Door Number 3,” has been shuttered, reaching across the aisle is fraught with social, professional, and physical danger, and our kaleidoscopes rearrange themselves into increasingly black and white forms.
References
The Atlantic. October 2021 (Vol 328, No. 3)
