Kyle van Oosterum: 'Confucian Harmony and the Echo Chamber'
Chair: Jen Semler
In this paper, I ask how we ought to relate to individuals in echo chambers. ‘Echo chambers’ are, roughly, environments/communities where people distrust the testimony of an outgroup and fail to communicate well with those who disagree with them. Philosophers and social scientists typically worry about how echo chambers might undermine democracy. I suggest we should also attend to the practical question of how we should structure our daily interactions with them.
Owing to their bizarre and morally problematic beliefs, some have argued that echo-chambered individuals are not entitled to civility. The value of civility resides in making social and political disagreement more manageable by constraining how we speak to one another. But attempting to be civil with people who do not trust what you have to say as an interlocutor is exhausting. Perhaps it’s not even worth it, or so some argue. Should we be moderately uncivil towards those who hold these bizarre and unreasonable beliefs?
I argue that we should not. Instead, I suggest the focus should be on trying to rebuild these social relationships in alignment with the Confucian value of harmony. Harmony is a difficult value to express precisely and it is not too far off from civility. Roughly, it is the process by which different elements are brought together into a constructive whole. The goal for Confucians is to create harmonious social relationships and that comes with certain dispositions we should cultivate in ourselves: open-mindedness, amenability, tactfulness, and courage. I argue that this ancient model for good social relations is helpful for the contemporary problems of echo chambers.
