Thursday, October 1, 2020
Recently an acquaintance of mine and a facebook friend shared a statement of a number of Christian leaders in the US who declared their opposition against President Trump. Obviously, other Facebook contacts shared before that their statements of Christian leaders in support of President Trump. So I asked my acquaintance whether he thought if anyone who did not yet agree with him would be convinced to change his or her opinion on this contentious issue. He was honest enough to admit that nobody would change his or her mind because of this statement but he saw the statement he shared more as a testimony that not all Christians in the US support President Trump. It shows how entrenched so many people are on many issues and policies. This type of entrenchment is not unique to our time, but it is deepened and expanded through the social media. Later on, I had a conversation with a party official on the impact of our timelines on social media. We both concluded that it is more and more important that we do not blindly follow our social media bubbles. However as that is more and more difficult it is more and more important to ensure that our social media represent a wide variety of opinions. The party official rightly said that he was getting suspicious at the end of a day if his whole timeline agreed with him. My own timeline of facebook (arguably the social media I use most) is in that sense a-typical thanks to the fact that I was so lucky to get involved in a wide spectrum of issues. Automatically I ended up with a friends list that covers almost the whole political spectrum (without the real extremes). There are issues over which my whole timeline would ‘explode’ (in terms of heated debate) if I shared them. However, I have no inclination to do so as it would not deliver anything good at the moment. My facebook friends however allow me to understand a wild and wide variety of opinions and I am grateful that they offer me this opportunity. For policy makers and for those who influence policy makers it is more important than ever in the current plethora of corona crisis and geopolitical upheaval to stay informed and continue to understand this wide spectrum of opinions. We all meet much less people in-person and our zoom meetings are the ones we have chosen to attend. So, there is a risk there that we are getting more influenced by our social media as we have less social encounters. At the same time policy decisions are much more consequential and have much deeper impact in people’s lives. This is particularly visible during the corona crisis. So it is more important for policy makers and policy influencers to have a clear understanding of the width in diversity of the respective populations who will experience the policies in their daily life. And there is already a serious challenge in that regard even without the effects of the corona situation. At least here in The Netherlands there is already a clear gap between the well-educated (mostly left-liberal or neo-liberal) people who work in the various ministries and departments and large parts of the population. From what I have seen this is the same elsewhere in Europe. The same pattern can be seen in Parliament where assistants of MP’s do not reflect the same diversity of the electorate. At the EU level this is an even bigger gap between the international minded staffers, interns, civil servants and lobbyists on the one side and the vast majority of Europe’s population on the other side. Partially this is unavoidable. The issues we are facing at both domestic and international level demand a thought-through approach and often academic level of understanding. The failure to deliver populist promises are by and large rooted in the fact that the reality is too complex for simplistic or one-dimensional attempts of policy making. Nevertheless, policy makers and influencers themselves must increase their awareness of the fact that their own immediate environment does not reflect the population and electorate as a whole. One way to increase that awareness is keeping those who have vastly different opinions in your social media environment. One other way is to keep your extended family as well in your social media environment, especially when they really disagree fundamentally with you (and vice versa). Don’t be offended or angry over different opinions even if it touches on issues you consider fundamental. Ideas you reject as ignorant may very well reflect the opinion of a serious part of the population. It is perhaps often better to observe and try to understand these opinions instead of debating them. Ultimately it is not our opinions that matter most but the dignity of every human being. Many of our opinions will become irrelevant at some point. Who is right in terms of opinions is less important than the question whether and how we preserve and uplift human dignity. We can only do so if we try to reach out to and understand each other. With sincere Christian greetings, Johannes de Jong