Excerpt from Going to Extremes - How Like Minds Unite and Divide by Cass R. Sunstein
Good
Extremism
It is obvious that
extremism is not always bad. Sometimes extreme movements are good, even great.
When people shift from indifference to intense concern with local problems, such
as poverty and crime, group polarization is an achievement, not a problem.
Barry Goldwater was correct to say that “extremism in the defense of liberty is
no vice.” The American Revolution, the civil rights movement, and the fall of both
communism and apartheid had everything to do with mechanisms of the sort
sketched here. Once we acknowledge that extremism can be desirable, and that
group polarization can move people toward engagement in solving serious problems,
the analysis has to be modified. But how?
DIVERSITIES
Societies gain
from group polarization and, in particular, from deliberating enclaves,
consisting of groups of likeminded people. People need spaces where they can
assemble with others to discuss issues
on their own; consider, for example, entrepreneurs, scientists, disabled
people, economists, and the elderly. Such spaces promote learning, creativity, and
innovation. They provide comfort and solace. They are also indispensable to
both economic growth and democracy. In an important essay, law professor
Heather Gerken draws attention to “second-order diversity” the kind of
diversity that comes when society consists of many groups that do not have a
lot of internal diversity.1 First order diversity has been my emphasis here; it
refers to the degree of diversity within groups and organizations. Second order
diversity is altogether different. It refers to the degree of diversity across groups
and organizations.
The United States
gains from a situation in which Utah, California, and Massachusetts are allowed
to attempt their own experiments on marriage, welfare, and the environment. We
can all see what works and what doesn’t. If some economics departments are
conservative and others are liberal, the profession as a whole, and eventually
the nation, will learn from the ideas and theories that emerge. Gerken argues
that in many domains, what we do seek, and what we should seek, is second-order
diversity. John Stuart Mill celebrated “experiments in living,”2 and any such
experiments will ensure that like-minded types spend a lot of time together.
And when second-order diversity exists, there will be a number of echo chambers
and a lot of group polarization.
For any nation,
second-order diversity may be especially important, certainly in the long run.
If many organizations are allowed to exist, and if each of them is made up of
likeminded people, the nation will ultimately benefit from the greater range of
views and practices that emerge. Inevitably, several of those groups will be
extreme, but their very extremism will enrich society’s “argument pool” and
thus promote sensible solutions. The federal system benefits from second-order
diversity; so does the study of science, anthropology, and literature. Freedom
of association ensures the existence of a wide range of like-minded groups: Catholic
organizations, Jewish organizations, animal rights groups, the National Rifle
Association, gay rights groups, pro-Palestinian groups, Muslim organizations,
and countless more. If group polarization is occurring in some or many of those
groups, we may all gain from what emerges.
There is a further
point. If people speak to like-minded others, they are more likely to be
energized, and if they are more likely to be energized, they are more likely to
become active, politically or otherwise.3 If people hear the other side and
give serious consideration to competing arguments, they may well be more
respectful and tolerant but they are also more likely to be passive and perhaps
even indifferent. Group polarization promotes engagement; conversations with
multiple others can produce inaction and paralysis. A political process might
well depend on a situation in which many groups of like-minded types spur their
members to seek change.
ENCLAVES AND
SELF-SILENCING
Enclaves provide
many benefits for their members and for society alike. I received a powerful
lesson about those benefits twenty years ago in Beijing, when I taught a class
to a group of about forty highly educated men and women on the topic of sex
equality and feminism. In a session of about two hours, only the men spoke.
Almost all of them were hostile to feminism. No woman said a single word. After
the session, I asked some of the women why they had been silent. One of them
said, “In China, we are taught that to speak out is not beautiful.” In private
discussions, it emerged that many of the women in the room had strong feminist
commitments, believed that China did not promote sex equality, and agreed with
the basic thrust of feminist arguments as they were made in American law
schools. These positions emerged in small groups. They were not much voiced in
larger ones, at least if significant numbers of men were present. But they are
now playing a large role in Chinese society.
This is not only a
story about China. Even in the United States, Canada, and Europe, women
sometimes silence themselves, notwithstanding the success of the movement for
equality. The same is true for members of many other groups, including African
Americans and religious conservatives. Such silence does serious harm to group
members and the public at large. The silence deprives society of information that
it needs to have. In this light, a special advantage of what we might call
“enclave deliberation” is that it promotes the development of positions that
would otherwise be invisible, silenced, or squelched in general debate.
In numerous
contexts, this is a great advantage.Many social movements have been made
possible through this route; consider the civil rights movement, Reaganism, the
disability rights movement, environmentalism, the movement for gay and lesbian
rights, and both gun control and opposition to gun control. The efforts of
marginalized groups to exclude outsiders, and even the efforts of political
parties to limit their primaries to party members, can be understood and
sometimes justified in similar terms. Even if group polarization is at work
perhaps because group polarization is at work enclaves can provide a wide range
of social benefits, especially to the extent that they enrich the number of
available facts and arguments. And when members of such groups eventually speak
in more heterogeneous groups, they often do so with greater clarity and
confidence. Society ends up knowing a lot more than it knew before.
A central
empirical point is that in deliberating bodies, high-status members tend to
initiate communication more than others, and their ideas are more influential,
partly because low-status members lack confidence in their own abilities, and
partly because they fear retribution.4 For example, women’s ideas are often
less influential and sometimes “suppressed altogether in mixed-gender groups.”5
In ordinary circumstances, cultural minorities have disproportionately little
influence on decisions by culturally mixed groups.6 In these circumstances, it
makes sense to promote deliberating enclaves in which members of multiple groups
may speak with one another and develop their views.
But there is a
serious danger in such enclaves. The danger is that through group polarization,
members will move to positions that lack merit but are predictable consequences
of the particular circumstances of enclave deliberation. We have seen that in
extreme cases, enclave deliberation may end up in violence and put social
stability at risk. And it is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who
sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable
for society at large or even for themselves. It is easy to think of examples to
the contrary; consider the rise of Nazism, hate groups, conspiracy theorists,
terrorist cells, and numerous cults of various sorts.
Sometimes the
threat to social stability is desirable. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, turbulence
can be “productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes
a general attention to . . . public affairs. I hold . . . that a little
rebellion now and then is a good thing.”7 Turbulence to one side, any judgments
about enclave deliberation are hard to make without a sense of the underlying
substance of what it is that divides the enclave from the rest of society. Note
once more that nothing is wrong with group polarization by itself: If people
become more outraged after talking, if punitive damage awards go up, or if
people end up with a stronger commitment to the position with which they began,
nothing need be amiss. We cannot condemn movements toward new points of view
without knowing whether the new points of view are better or worse.
From the
standpoint of designing our institutions and even living our daily lives, one
problem is that enclave deliberation will ensure group polarization among a
wide range of groups some necessary to the pursuit of justice, others likely to
promote injustice, and still others potentially quite dangerous. And even when
enclaves lead in good directions, enclave deliberation is unlikely to produce
change unless its members are eventually brought into contact with others. In
democratic societies, the best approach, and the way to benefit from second-order
diversity, is to ensure that any such enclaves are not walled off from
competing views and that at many points, there is an exchange of views between
enclave members and those who disagree with them.
It is total or
near-total self-insulation, rather than group deliberation as such, that
carries with it the most serious dangers often in the highly unfortunate (and
sometimes literally deadly) combination of extremism with marginality. One of
the most important lessons is among the most general: It is crucial to create
spaces for enclave deliberation without insulating enclave members from those
with opposing views and without insulating those outside the enclave from the
views of those within it. But how might we go beyond these abstractions?
FREE SPEECH,
PUBLIC FORUMS, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SERENDIPITY
In a common
understanding, the free speech principle forbids government from “censoring”
speech of which it disapproves. In the standard cases, the government attempts to
impose penalties, whether civil or criminal, on political dissent, libelous
speech, commercial advertising, or sexually explicit speech. The question is
whether the government is allowed to restrict the speech that it seeks to
control; in free societies, usually it isn’t.
This is indeed
what most of the law of free speech is about. But in many free nations, an
important part of free speech law takes a quite different form; it has a
positive dimension. In the United States, for example, the Supreme Court has
ruled that streets and parks must be kept open to the public for expressive activity.
In the leading case, from the first half of the twentieth century, the Court
said, “Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially
been held in trust for the use of the public and time out of mind, have been
used for the purposes of assembly, communicating thought between citizens, and
discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has,
from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties
of citizens.”8 Hence governments are obliged to allow speech to occur freely on
public streets and in public parks even if many citizens would prefer to have
peace and quiet, and even if it seems irritating to come across protestors and
dissidents when you are simply walking home or to the local grocery store.
To understand the
relationship between the public forum doctrine and unjustified extremism, we
should notice that the public forum doctrine promotes some important social goals.9
First, it ensures that speakers can have access to a wide array of people who
might otherwise live in their own enclaves. If you want to claim that taxes are
too high or that police brutality against African Americans is widespread, you
are able to press this argument on many people who would otherwise not hear the
message. The diverse people who walk the streets and use the parks are likely
to hear speakers’ arguments about taxes or the police; they might also learn
about the nature and intensity of views held by their fellow citizens. Perhaps
some people’s views change because of what they learn; perhaps they will become
curious enough to investigate the question on their own. On the speakers’ side,
the public forum doctrine thus creates a right of general access to
heterogeneous citizens.
On the listeners’
side, the public forum creates not exactly a right but an opportunity, if
perhaps an unwelcome one: shared exposure to diverse speakers with diverse views
and complaints. It is important to emphasize that the exposure is shared. Many
people will be simultaneously exposed to the same views and complaints, and
they will encounter views and complaints that some of them might have refused to
seek out in the first instance. Indeed, the exposure might well be considered,
much of the time, irritating or worse.
Second, the public
forum doctrine allows speakers to have general access not only to heterogeneous
people but also to specific people and specific institutions with whom they
have a complaint and who might otherwise be insulated from that complaint.
Suppose, for example, that you believe that the state legislature has behaved
irresponsibly with respect to health care for children. The public forum
ensures that you can make your views heard by legislators, simply by protesting
in front of the state legislature itself.
The point applies
to private as well as public institutions. If a clothing store is believed to
have cheated customers or to have acted in a racist manner, protestors are
allowed a form of access to the store itself. This is not because they have a right
to trespass on private property no one has such a right but because a public
street is highly likely to be close by, and a strategically located protest
will undoubtedly catch the attention of the store and its customers. Under the
public forum doctrine, speakers are thus permitted to have access to
particular audiences, and particular listeners cannot easily avoid hearing
complaints that are directed against them. In other words, listeners have a
sharply limited power of self-insulation.
Third, and most
important, the public forum doctrine increases the likelihood that people
generally will be exposed to a wide variety of people and views. When you go to
work or visit a park, it is possible that you will have a range of unexpected
encounters, however fleeting or seemingly inconsequential. On your way to the
office or when eating lunch in the park, you cannot easily wall yourself off from
contentions or conditions that you would not have sought out in advance or that
you would avoided if you could. Here, too, the public forum doctrine tends to
ensure a range of experiences that are widely shared streets and parks are
public property and also a set of exposures to diverse views and conditions.
The public forum
doctrine reflects a kind of social architecture, meant in the literal sense. It
works to counteract a situation in which members of deliberating groups are engaged
in a high degree of self-segregation. I have referred to the architecture of
serendipity and opposed it to the architecture of control. The public forum
doctrine opposes control and promotes serendipity. It ensures a range of unplanned,
unanticipated, unchosen encounters. In that way, it promotes cognitive
diversity. It makes it difficult for like-minded people to insulate themselves
from those who think differently. Indeed, the architecture of serendipity is
part of a well-functioning system of checks and balances; it helps to check the
effects of echo chambers and ensure that those with blinders, or those who prefer
information cocoons, occasionally see elsewhere. What they see may change their
minds, even their lives.
CHECKS AND
BALANCES EVERYWHERE
Is it possible to
generalize from the public forum doctrine? We might be able to think of other
domains in which people might benefit from serendipity and in which social
architecture can ensure that people who spend a lot of time in enclaves are
also exposed to competing views. Daily newspapers, weekly news magazines, and
radio and television broadcasters can do a great deal of good on this count. When
they are operating well, they combat unjustified extremism by ensuring that
like-minded people will occasionally see things that seem jarring and that
might make them rethink. To the extent that private institutions are aware of
the risks that I have discussed, they assume a civic or democratic function
precisely in the sense that they see themselves as a key part of the system of
checks and balances. In the 1980s, Mark Fowler, the head of the Federal
Communications Commission, said, “Television is just another appliance. . . .
It’s a toaster with pictures.” If the mass media sees itself in these terms, it
may well promote, rather than reduce, the difficulties I have explored here.10 A
central task, in democratic societies, is for the print and broadcast media,
and those who run and participate in Web sites, to combat self-segregation
along political or other lines.
It would also be
most valuable to take a fresh look at other institutions that either promote or
combat self-insulation. I have referred to the fact that bipartisan membership
is required for some of the most important institutions in the United States:
the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the
Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the goal
is to undermine (false) conspiracy theories, a good means is to ensure that
those who hold such theories are exposed to credible counterarguments and are
not living in an echo chamber of their own design.11 In the private sector, economic
disasters, for individuals and large groups, are often a product of
conversations among like-minded people, in which some investment or project
seems to be a sure winner. The economic crisis that began in 2008 was a
product, in significant part, of a form of group polarization, in which skeptics
about the real estate bubble, armed with statistical evidence, did not receive
a fair hearing or were in a sense silenced. The best companies, and the best
investors, benefit from internal checks and balances.12
I have emphasized
that extreme movements may be desirable, even when they result from mechanisms
of the sort traced here. And even when they are not desirable, extreme
positions can do a great deal of good. Societies gain from second-order
diversity, not least because of the range of experiments, and the vast array of
competing positions, produced by that form of diversity. Nothing said here is
meant to deny these claims. But if extreme movements are to occur, it should be
because they are sensible and right and not because of the predictable effects
of interactions among the like-minded.