The Tim Hunt affair is destroying our community from within. We need to not let that happen.

So much ink has been – and continues to be – spilt over the Tim Hunt affair that I have nothing to add to it. The only thing that’s clear by this point is that the episode is more complicated than what it appeared at first. And it's also clear that both sides could have done things differently. Beyond that you look at the evidence and make up your mind.

I am writing this post for a very different reason. As someone who can call himself at least a semi-veteran of the blogosphere (for about 11 years), I can truthfully say that I have never seen the community so bitterly divided against itself. I reach this conclusion based on observations of arguments on Twitter, Facebook and other sources. Although I have occasionally posted about the episode on these sources I have largely been an observer. And what I observe is definitely disturbing. Many of the people involved in these arguments have been prominent members of the blogging and journalism community, and some of them are my friends and colleagues. And in all the years that I have blogged and seen these leading members of the community in action, I have never seen people who once stood as allies in a common cause fight with each other with the ardor that we historically associate with Protestants and Catholics, or with Sunnis and Shiites. And just like these groups, what is most remarkable and disconcerting is to see these people be at each others’ throats in spite of supposedly having so much in common.

To put it simply: I think that as a community we are destroying ourselves in profoundly anti-intellectual and divisive ways.

To be sure, the signs have been there for a few years. People either in favor of or against a particular argument have often adopted a take-no-prisoners attitude, especially on Twitter which has turned into a veritable Frankensteinian nightmare at times. Whether you call it public shaming or something else, the tendency to band together, rain down on people with indignation, discard them and then move on to the next outrage has turned into a regular Thursday morning occurrence. It’s not even a novelty anymore.

And yet I am seeing something qualitatively new with the Tim Hunt episode. A maelstrom of words that reaches new levels of divisiveness and vitriol. I am seeing fights break out between people who I would never have expected to fight with each other. I am seeing people simply refuse to agree with each other, even if the general agreement might be broad and they might be arguing about interpretations or about subtleties. I am seeing very reasonable people engage in ad hominem attacks in an endless fury of cyclical gyrations.

All this is disturbing for several reasons. The most important one is simply that this debate threatens to fragment the community into factions, each one of which refuses to give way and hear the other side of the debate. Meanwhile the moderates, the ones who are afraid to descend into the shouting matches for good reason, will continue to stay on the sidelines and their voices will continue to be largely silent. What you will end up with is a divided community of absolutist and polarized factions. What are the chances then that these factions with their history of bitterness and personal attacks will actually come together when something truly worthy of righteous indignation happens? To me these chances appear slim.

The second serious reason why this couldn’t possibly be good for the community or for anyone else for that matter is because it sends a very wrong message to the world at large, the vast community of ‘third party’ observers who don’t have a dog in the hunt but who simply want to know the truth (shouldn’t we all?). Simply put, this wider community will start ignoring us when something genuinely important or disturbing happens because they will rightly think that we have cried wolf all too often. They will start to think that we are neither good journalists nor good activists and all we are interested in doing is pointing fingers without effecting real progress. It’s worth thinking about this in a very practical way: if we raise hell at every single episode, no matter what its significance or lack thereof in the bigger scheme of things, how will people who want to learn from us be able to distinguish between all these episodes? If we decide to get outraged to the same extent at every single perceived injustice, trip-up, sin and faux pas, then not only are we not optimally allocating our outrage, but we also run the risk of not having enough left for the things that really matter. In addition we only end up equating outrage with actual action. This helps neither us, nor the true victims, nor the broader community. All it does is create smoke without fire and engender suspicion about our goals.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, all this simply stops us from learning from each other. Words about surrounding ourselves with echo chambers have become clichés, but they are clichés because they are true. If we decide that we are going to banish – if not from physical sight then at least from our Twitter feeds – everyone who disagrees with even parts of what we believe, if we passionately subscribe to that old chestnut that those who aren’t with us must automatically be against us, if we divide people into black and white categories of friends vs enemies based on some arbitrary ruler of at least 95% agreement, if we stop believing that someone can even vehemently disagree with parts of our worldview and still be aligned with our broader causes, then we will very rapidly get to a stage when the only people we converse with most of the times are largely intellectual clones of ourselves. At the very least our learning process will then become starkly impoverished.

All this and more has already happened, but the Tim Hunt has really taken the gloves off and exposed the cracks in the whole structure in my opinion, and nothing about it says good things about the future existence of a vibrant community where people respectfully disagree with and learn from each other.

How did we get to this stage? Everyone will offer their own views and there are undoubtedly very many responsible factors, but I continue to believe that the single overriding factor is the following: We have made almost every argument one about identity and ideology rather than about ideas. This is a general observation that has been shored up by other people, and Twitter is merely its most virulent manifestation. These days it has become almost impossible to say something without people regarding you not as an independent living and breathing human being with individual ideas but as part of some ideology or background. You cannot simply be John Doe saying something, something whose validity has to be evaluated on its own intrinsic merits; instead you have to be John Doe – feminist, John Doe – sexist, John Doe – libertarian, John Doe – person with white/black/brown/male/female privilege.

Now I understand that our opinions are undoubtedly dictated by our background, our community and yes, our privilege. But they are also dictated as much by our existence as independent thinking entities. To assume in the absence of evidence to the contrary that our identity must be the only thing shaping our opinions is at the very least unscientific (you are simply assuming one causal factor among several) and at worst an attitude that insults our unique existence as independent thinkers. My opinions on any matter are a function of both my background and of the logical chain of thinking that proliferates through my mind. To automatically assume that only my background is responsible for my opinions, or that the logical chain cannot exist without my background, is frankly an insult to the wonderful workings of the human mind and the history of human thought.

This constant, knee-jerk appeal to someone’s background and identity introduces a bias that can very much color your opinion about that person, and this bias is inherent in the simplest cases. It damningly breeds precisely the divisiveness that we claim to be against. For instance when two people are having an argument, the moment you start criticizing one person by stating their skin color in your opening argument becomes the moment when you are inevitably going to analyze their behavior through those particular tinted glasses. Is their skin color relevant to the debate and your disagreement with them? Maybe, and maybe not, but it’s both unscientific as well as profoundly unobjective to assume that it is without further scrutiny or reasonable cause. Assuming this ironically pastes the same label of discrimination on us that we often seek to abolish. Similarly when we assume that someone is saying something because of their ‘privilege’ (which is a very real thing), we shift the focus of the conversation from what’s being said to who’s saying it. It is time that we started evaluating people’s words and ideas on their own merits and not only as necessarily linked to their identity and ideological underpinnings (which may not even exist in their own mind).

What is even more disturbing is that this behavior is increasingly prevalent among those who identify themselves as liberals (although it’s also not absent among conservatives). For instance I have often observed this bizarre bias among people who say they are committed to diversity; what is confounding to me is that these people often appear to be committed to every other kind of diversity (gender, skin color, political affiliation) except diversity of ideas. Ideas have been at the forefront of human civilization for ten thousand years. Since when did they become secondary? What exactly makes them occupy a rung lower on the ladder from identity? It is downright weird for me to see this anti-intellectual behavior especially among liberals, some of whom are scientists or science journalists and who more than most members of the general public cherish the value of ideas.

I could go on with even more details, but they will add little to the general point. This elevation of identity above ideas and the alienation of people with different ideas who might still share a common core is hugely detrimental to the present and future of a community ostensibly engaged in sharing viewpoints and growing by learning from each other. The only result of this divisive attitude will be the fragmentation of people who heartbreakingly are far more similar to each other than what they think. 

I am neither so naïve nor do I consider myself so enlightened as to propose any solution for this disturbing trend. And yet I cannot help but observe that in a sense part of the solution is even now bleedingly simple, and I propose this solution - more a guideline than a solution, really - in the form of a plea. Find middle ground. Constantly seek the places where you agree rather than disagree, and you will find that there are more of those around than you think. Do not banish people even with divergent ideas from sight and mind, because these are really the only ones who can teach you something new; allowing these people to speak their minds is not easy, but the rewards are important. Respect diversity of ideas as much as diversity of identity, and stop automatically pigeonholing people into categories of identity and examining their arguments through these lenses. If you feel offended by something first try to understand it; it's hard, but it's worth the trouble. Finally, just stop equating every perceived and real act of dissension, of contrary opinion and thought as disloyalty to some real or fictitious ‘cause’ or ideology, as a less than perfect fit to a conviction. We are more similar than we think, we are more complex than we think, and we are much more than the sum of our identities. And that realization is really the only one that can bring us together at the end of the day.