A failed public sphere

Crosshatching

Since the start of the campaign season during the last elections, politics in the Philippines has never ceased to be divisive, making Filipinos fight each other in a brutal and vicious battle of opinion in the mainstream media, on the social network, at the coffee shops, and at any neighborhood’s tambayan.

And given the Filipino tendency to take everything personally, differences in political views usually become the start of bitter misunderstanding that often lead to more serious hostilities. A simple comment can spark an argument that could break friendships or family ties.

I’ve been experiencing that myself lately, how some friends and relatives could take offense at what you say online about a political issue even if there are no direct references to anyone in particular. Some of us cannot seem to distinguish between what is personal and political. Or, as what any political hard liner would say, “what is political is personal and vice versa.”

This inability to make distinctions between interests that are merely subjective or tainted with prejudices rooted in one’s personal experience and those that are inherent only to the issue at hand makes judgment or rational decisions impossible.

We may not be aware of it or perhaps we tend to deny it, but our opinions are often rooted in personal interests, biases driven subconsciously by fear or desire. Our prejudices, for instance, may be influenced by concerns for such things as preservation of privilege, the avoidance of risks, and contempt for values that we have long abandoned or rejected.

With a strong sense of certainty, we defend our political position like it’s a fortress, closing ourselves from every argument that seem to threaten or challenge our beliefs. We end up rejecting anything that does not fit our favored narrative or the story that we’d like to believe or have been telling ourselves.

We refuse to listen to any opposing view. Conversely, we are delighted at anything that seem to support or favor our position. In our haste to share or repost it, we even forget to scrutinize its veracity. But that is no longer important as we feel that it is enough that our own beliefs confirm it. Coming from outside, it makes us feel validated or vindicated.

And so we are more encouraged to dig further for anything that would buttress our fortress. Indeed, we have made up our minds, we know what to look for, and we have an answer to every question.

Thus, I find it useless to argue with some people about political issues anymore. It is obvious that some of us are not really interested in finding the truth or in letting reason be the final arbiter. No, the social network has betrayed its promise of becoming what Jurgen Habermas saw as the “public sphere”, where people with contending viewpoints come together to negotiate their positions with reason as the only guide and yet also allowing everyone to lay down their own personal account for others to consider in a mutual act of “intersubjectivity.”

So, as we bare ourselves, how our unique background may have influenced our worldview, we also expose our own prejudices to the strength of the light of reason. Not only are others now compelled take them into consideration, we ourselves are also bound by duty to reconsider them, to retrace how they have come to shape the way we see things or feel about them, all under the scrutiny of reason imposed upon ourselves.

Subjectivity is thus, not lost but is actually reclaimed, although now negotiated with other subjectivities and ultimately tested in what Habermas calls “discourse ethics.” Such is the presumption of the public sphere, that people can come together to negotiate issues with an open mind, with mutual respect, and common pursuit of reason.

Unfortunately, that is not happening with Facebook these days. In fact, on the contrary, the social network is being used to sow disinformation and hostility among the increasingly polarized population by paid propagandists or fanatical trolls who volunteer or make their own initiatives to attack their enemies—some of them resorting to actual threats and intimidation.

The worst tactics include attempts to hack or disable the accounts of their staunchest critics.

If that is not outright censorship, it certainly violates discourse ethics. Rather than facilitate rational thinking in democratic discussion, what emerges in the social network is demagoguery and the tyranny of the majority. In the meantime, the failure of the social network as public sphere is taking its toll on our private lives.