For Campus Protests (and Other Polarizing Issues), Do We Often See What We Expect To Find?

“… protests on elite college campuses over Israel’s war in Gaza have boiled over, with hundreds of students arrested or suspended, and clashes between protestors and counter-protestors hitting a fever pitch.”
      — Tangle News, April 2024

Whether it’s our responses to the recent college protests or our stances on other hot-button issues, it’s clear that we often inhabit separate realities. And what’s more, we often think our perspectives are the obviously correct, “common sense” ones.

This mindset can lead us to get angry with people who disagree with us — and even to have significant contempt for them. Amidst the conflict and the resulting emotions, we forget how easy it is for rational people to arrive at different views. We miss just how common it is for people to have different views of what’s “common sense.”

To be clear: we aren’t saying that objective truth doesn’t exist. We are saying it’s important to recognize the ease with which we can disagree, as well as to engage with others with empathy and compassion. And we say this with full awareness that such a request is often difficult when it comes to contentious and emotional topics.

Can polarization be rational? 

Philosopher Kevin Dorst explores what he calls “rational polarization” — the notion that people can still reach vastly different conclusions when interpreting information rationally. 

We asked Dorst how this concept applies to people’s views on the Middle East conflict:

Polarization tends to be more extreme over topics that 1) are obviously important, 2) have committed constituencies to argue each side, and 3) are complex enough that there are lots of facts pointing in each direction. That gives people the 1) motivation, 2) audience, and 3) evidence to build opposing cases. The debate over Israel/Palestine is clearly a case in point.

On his Substack, Dorst writes: “We seem to be losing our epistemic empathy: our ability to both be convinced that someone is wrong, and yet acknowledge that there are sensible reasons that led them to their opinions.” 

Again, we’re not saying there’s no objective truth or that everyone’s views are equally valid. We’re talking about perceptions: how people interpret the world and people around them. 

For the recent campus protests, it’s possible to see how people can construct different views based on rational and defensible reasoning. There are simply so many different aspects of the Middle East conflict, or of the protests themselves, that one can focus on. (For example, it’s true that many protesters have been peaceful. It’s also true that some protesters have engaged in antisemitic and violent behaviors.) 

A loss of nuance

When our views become more polarized and judgmental, we risk losing sight of nuance. We start to see things as more black and white. Issues become more one-side-versus-the-other, even though reality is almost always quite complex. We feel pressured to pick a side. Sometimes, even the language we use (for example, “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”) can influence us to see only binary and either-or choices. 

Even as some polarization is rational, it’s also true that as we see an issue in more us-versus-them terms, we’ll tend to embrace more unreasonable and divisive views and behaviors. In other words, rational polarization can lead to irrational polarization. 

As Peter T. Coleman writes, “This is a time when we all feel pulled, in fact required, to take a clear moral stand on the situation, but often this requires us to over-simplify what are terribly messy issues.”

We can be drawn to certainty 

Taylor Dotson, the author of The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude Is Destroying Democracy, explores how our tendency to believe we’re always right can make conflicts worse. We asked Dotson about how he sees a desire for certitude playing a role in people’s stances on this topic:

Protesters search for pithy lines that seem to convey what they view to be self-evident truth. To call Israel’s invasion a genocide is to make it manifestly evil by definition. Referring to the nation as “settler-colonialist” aims to make its purported political and moral illegitimacy beyond dispute. 

But it is equally common-sensical to some Jewish people that “from the river to the sea” is an antisemitic call for their expulsion from a place they call home, even if many college protestors don’t mean it that way.

This way of talking about the Israel-Gaza conflict is suffused with the politics of fanatical certitude. We think by insisting on the “right” way to define the conflict or a concept, a complex problem can be turned into a simple one.

But simplifying our problems leads us to oversimplify disagreement. Opponents no longer see the world differently, but suffer from an “-ism.” We see their views as a result of denying common sense, refusing to see the clear reality of Israel’s inhumanity, or the evil of Hamas and widespread antisemitism.

To clarify again: we aren’t saying people shouldn’t be passionate about politics or work hard for what they believe in. We also aren’t saying it’s bad to criticize those we see as doing harm. 

But if we can do those things while also trying to see the more rational aspects of others’ views, that will help us better engage with others and find workable compromises. Being able and willing to see the more rational concerns others have — and not just the worst-case straw man versions of those concerns — helps everyone work towards solutions that consider multiple perspectives. This will move us toward peace in a way that focusing on whose position is the most “common sense” will not. 

Want to read more thoughts about the recent protests? See this piece by Peter T. Coleman, our expert-in-residence who teaches at Columbia University.  

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