A Few Good Words

Riot in the Galleria,  Umberto Boccioni Everyone agrees that America is becoming more and more polarized and that social media deserves some of the blame. I think it’s worth tracing out exactly why this is the case. What mechanisms on social media trigger our most tribal impulses? What are the individual actions or habits on social media platforms driving polarization?  Much has been written and said about the way social media creates echo chambers of similar opinions and insulates us from disagreement. But beyond simple groupthink, I’d like to focus on the way social media tends to convince us that opposing tribes are sinister. Consider the following sequence: The Sharks and the Jets are social groups that distrust each other and each has its own Facebook group. A Shark writes a somewhat nasty joke about a member of the Jets as part of an email that he accidentally sends to the wrong email address. Of course, it ends up forwarded to a Jet. The Jet shares the email joke

"Cicero," Cesare Maccari Christian educators are often eager to dismantle moral relativism as part of "worldview" curricula or humanities courses. This is understandable: the vast majority of Americans are (unknowing) moral relativists in 2018, long after the position was abandoned by most serious philosophers. But in my experience, many realist v. relativist arguments quickly devolve into shouting matches about Hitler . These rhetorical bloodbaths end with both parties feeling self-righteous and more entrenched in their position. I sense that these arguments aren't good for a Christian's witness. Why can't Christians be more persuasive on a topic where they clearly have the high ground? One key mistake Christians make: moral relativism deserves some credit. Most moderns who repeat sayings like "everyone has their own morality" or treat ethical debates as matters of personal preference don't do so because they've carefully refl

Tyler Cowen argues at Bloomberg that the sheer volume of "news" we must sort through to be informed modern citizens is more problematic than supposed "fake news." Readers with access to so much information about the various tragedies in our world are left jaded and cynical. Thanks to the internet, we also learn the many flaws and quirks of leaders and experts, from banal personal details on their Facebook, to their wild teenage Twitter posts, to more serious expos és about them. (Undoubtedly, Andrew Jackson's presidency would have suffered if he'd had a Twitter account). This feature of our world isn't going away anytime soon. There are loads of reasons to argue the Information Age is, on net, good for humans. Today's volume of quality reporting and available information act as a valuable check on those in power. Accountability is, generally, good.  But our oversaturated marketplace for news can clearly corrode societal trust, attention, and

L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) While reading Joseph Minich's recent  Enduring Divine Absence ,  I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door: Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere lo

There are good reasons to call economics the "dismal science." Economists, Steven Rhoads jokes, see a bittersweet quality in the groundbreaking of a new community center. They might brood: "By spending money here and not elsewhere, we give up the mobile heart units that would save four lives a year, a remedial reading program ... [etc., etc.]" (22). This may be technically true. But isn't this view of life a little ... inhuman? Rhoads approvingly quotes Kenneth Boulding: "No one would want his daughter to marry an economic man, one who counted every cost and asked for every reward, [and] was never afflicted with mad generosity or uncalculating love" (34). Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer suggests something similar when he argues "price is unholy."¹  Economists are suspicious of single-minded devotion to single goals at the expense of others. Because opportunity costs are everywhere, they will usually emphasize marginal investments in p

Good economists use simple principles to transform our decision making in profound ways. Chapter 2 of The Economist's View of the World  unpacks what is, perhaps, the key insight of economics:   "spending and regulatory decisions that use scarce resources or require their use incur costs in terms of forgone alternatives" (11).  This is the concept economists call "opportunity costs." Every time we allocate a scarce resource in one way, we lose the chance to allocate that resource in other ways. Is that really so insightful?  If you're about to stop reading because this seems blindingly obvious, Rhoads then shows that few politicians or experts in other fields have properly absorbed this lesson. Rhoads quotes a representative city administrator explaining how his town budgets: "We give primary considerations to the public welfare, but cost considerations are also important" (12). This may sound humane, but to an economist it is nonsense. Costs