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February 2009  
  
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless
discussions.  
  
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a
religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with
Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?  
  
What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have
any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly
held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow
as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some
threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's
an expert.  
  
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like
religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an
opinion. All you need is strong convictions.  
  
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this
similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that
have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions.
Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing
this, everyone lets fly with theirs.  
  
But this isn't true. There are certainly some political questions that have
definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the
more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.  
  
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of
people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about
something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.  
  
Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic.
For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more
of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument.
But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age
probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics
that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion
has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has
started to be driven mostly by people's identities.   
  
Because the point at which this happens depends on the people rather than the
topic, it's a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke
religious wars, it must have no answer. For example, the question of the
relative merits of programming languages often degenerates into a religious
war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers.
This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that
all languages are equally good. Obviously that's false: anything else people
make can be well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible for
programming languages? And indeed, you can have a fruitful discussion about
the relative merits of programming languages, so long as you exclude people
who respond from identity.  
  
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it
doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics
and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities.
But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some
people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative
merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about
with others.  
  
The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it
explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have
better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become
part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to
let as few things into your identity as possible.   
  
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step
beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider
yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make
you.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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