Welcome to The Third Rail.
The Third Rail is a weekly series that will run here on this blog as an experiment of sorts. The inspiration for this series was our observation that nowadays it’s become very popular to bandwagon onto a particular majority position that’s in vogue. While this behavior is certainly fashionable –who after all doesn’t enjoy being on the winning side of an argument?– we’ve discovered some disturbing trends in the public discourse that concern us greatly. As David French pointed out to Ezra Klein recently: There is a thoroughly studied, well-understood psychological group-think polarization phenomena: When two people who have the same opinions converse, they will tend to affirm and validate each other in a way that leads to a strengthening, “amplifying effect,” of whatever positions they already previously held. So let’s take for example Joe and Sally who both already believe in affirmative action, say, on a scale of 1-10, they both sat at 7. Simply by conversing with each other over that topic, by the end of their conversation, Joe and Sally will very much have increased their conviction in affirmative action up to an 8. Repeated countless times across a population of likeminded individuals, this groupthink effect becomes a dangerous sociological phenomena. Without the minority viewpoint reigning in the snowballing of conviction, we become enamored with a particular perspective and narrow our field of what we believe to be right, moral, or just. And if we are increasingly trapped inside “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers” nowadays of our own creation, this on the stage writ large is a recipe of disaster and eventual, inevitable conflict.
To confront and counteract this increasingly alarming trend, we looked to a text and faith tradition over 2,000 years old: The Jewish Talmud. The Talmud, written between 2nd and 5th centuries CE, is the compilation of historic rabbis discussing and debating the Torah (what others call the Old Testament or the Five Books of Moses). In total, the Talmud consists of 63 tractates and is over 6,200 pages long when printed in book form.
Continue reading “Railing Against a Black-&-White World: The Merits of Minority Opinions”