For anyone to concede the validity of contrary arguments on many moral questions would be to do a hurt far beneath the levels at which politics can ordinarily reach. This is deeper than the level at which people merely say ‘I could never support a Tory’ or ‘My family have always been Republicans/ Democrats’ (as though hereditary voting trends are something to be proud of). On a range of deeply-felt issues it is not possible to reason somebody out of a position because mere tribalism is not the key obstacle. Instead, they double down on that error. Jonathan Swift’s immortal phrase that “you cannot reason someone out of a view they were not reasoned into” should have prepared us for this reality.Īcross so many political discussions – especially those with a strong ethics dimension – people’s minds are not only closed to new ideas, but utterly closed. As Harvard’s Cass Sunstein, among others, has shown, it is frequently the case that when a person in provable error meets the correction to their error they do not throw up their hands and say ‘Goodness me, what an idiot I have been’. While this is often the case it may be more true – to our great irritation – that minds don’t change at all. My nomination for UnHerd’s “new words for new challenges” series is not pre-ja-vu but a word that relates to the presumption in politics and ethics that people change their minds based on evidence. It is at least as possible to see an outfit, a colour, or the return of some form of facial hair and think ‘Yes, I fear I am going to be seeing a lot of more of this in the years ahead.’ The idea of pre-ja-vu could apply to almost any realm of life. But even as I watched a man like Jeremy Corbyn, forever on a soapbox at demonstrations, I never thought that I would ever see quite as much of him as we now see of him as Leader of Her Majesty’s opposition. How about ‘pre-ja-vu’? Almost a decade ago when I saw a certain type of street politics emerge I wondered if something like ‘pre-ja-vu’ might enter the political lexicon. That is, for something that you see which you just know you are going to see again. For years I have wondered whether we could popularise a term for the opposite of deja-vu. When politics changes as significantly as it is now changing, new terms can help to encapsulate what is going on. And when any highlight of a broadcast political exchange involves ‘crushing’, ‘destroying’ or (even more popular) ‘annihilating’ opponents, the performance of politics evolves in click-baitable directions. A video titled ‘Mr A mildly corrects Ms B on a matter of common interest’ might not bring either great attention or consequent advertising revenue. Soon this became the format for almost any excerpt from any political argument. It is a trend which seemed to start with online videos which were given headlines such as ‘X CRUSHES Y’, or ‘A DESTROYS B’. It is a useful term for the distinctive trend which I had previously thought of as the ‘YouTube-isation’ of politics. In his column yesterday, Tim Montgomerie coined the term “hegemonia” or (I prefer) “hegemania” to describe that desire for total, crushing victory that has grown across what used to be normal political debate.
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