Political Absolutism is an Invitation to Moral Relativism

I Know...That's a Mouthful of Title...But Please Give it a Read Anyway

There is a great deal that is aggravating about social media. Even before you get to the trolls and bots and throttling and algorithmic hanky panky, there’s the fact that most social media platforms reward strong opinions above nuanced ones.

Virality is the product of emotion. Posts that trigger emotion, regardless of the other merits or defects of the post, do best. As a consequence, the proponents of strong views rather than correct ones or thoughtful ones tend to do better, have more followers and thereby gain more influence. It is akin to the formula for having a successful TV cable news show. Getting viewers wound up produces better ratings than providing them with necessary perspective. Heat is more valued than light.

At the same time, television shows and social media communities tend to serve discrete audiences. They become echo chambers. That is a by-product of rewarding simplistic views and those that tend to generate emotional reactions. Purity police emerge in these settings, zeroing in on views that diverge from the norm within the group like leucocytes attacking a virus. There is a big penalty for going against the grain. You get “ratio-ed” and unfollowed. Not exactly a healthy environment for real discourse.

In fact, there is a paradox at the core of it. While political absolutism and absolutists are rewarded, they also undermine any kind of principled adherence to real absolutes like good and evil, right and wrong, etc. Why? Because any fair assessment of real humans will reveal them to be flawed and/or to stray from virtue or even their publicly stated values.

This is on my mind today because of the debate around Joe Biden’s pardoning his son Hunter. (Although to be fair, it’s pretty much on my mind all the time because this tension is a constant in the media world in which we live.)