|
|
|
In his TED talk ‘3 Ideas for Communicating Across the Political Divide’, Isaac Saul advocates for language that appeals to the centre in order to reduce polarisation. While his intentions are laudable, I believe this approach risks distorting what the actual centre represents.
There are parallels to how the media historically covered climate change. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists about the reality of climate change, news outlets often felt compelled to present ‘both sides’ of the debate. This created a middle ground fallacy that suggested the truth about whether climate change is real lay somewhere in between.
So what does ‘meeting in the middle’ mean in a political landscape where one side openly celebrates authoritarian ideas and distributes ‘MASS DEPORTATION NOW’ signs at rallies? Has the centre shifted too far in one direction that appealing to the middle risks legitimising openly fascist ideas?
A.R. Moxon believes so and strongly critiques this notion of centrism in his recent essay:
“Maybe ‘the center’ is just whatever no man’s land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we’ve travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won’t have to do the work of opposing them.” This conception of centrism, Moxon argues, “is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal”.
True centrism shouldn’t simply find two opposing positions and place itself in the middle of them. Instead, it should anchor itself in core principles of human decency, compassion, moral integrity, etc. Moxon suggests:
“I recommend we seek a new center outside the poles we’ve inherited; one that sets its poles upon principles of basic human decency and basic governance and doesn’t stray outside that; one that cuts us free from the rough machinery of empire and colony and the instruments of punishment that are used to maintain and expand them; one that looks at supremacists and their malign intentions and then doesn’t involve them whatsoever.”
This version of centrism isn’t about always falling neatly between arbitrary sides or never taking a stand. It’s about approaching each issue with critical reasoning, personal principles and lived experiences – not party dogma or oversimplified narratives.
No individual aligns perfectly with any political party. In that sense, we’re all ‘centrists’, capable of independent thought. True centrism acknowledges that ideologies and parties can never fully capture the complexity of reality. It’s about not confusing the map for the territory, and refusing to constrain our thinking within the bounds of political tribalism.
Only by grounding centrism in unwavering core principles, rather than simply splitting the difference between two points, can we chart a more ethical and intellectually honest political course.
– Kai
|
|
Become a Friend of DD today →
With a contribution of less than $2 per month, you get access to the DD Lounge where Friends of DD discuss the weekly newsletter and meet other readers. Plus you can turn off ads, receive special discounts, get access to the DD Index (a searchable catalogue of past issues) and other perks.
Dense Discovery is a weekly newsletter with the best of the internet, thoughtfully curated, read by over 37,000 subscribers. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
|
|
The CRM That’s 100% FreeSPONSOR
|
Streamline your business with a free CRM
HubSpot offers an intuitive customer relationship management platform tailored for small businesses. Manage leads, track sales performance, and understand your customers with ease. Best of all, it’s free, with no limits on users or data, allowing you to store and manage up to 1,000,000 contacts.
|
|
|
Apps & Sites
|
Ellipsis aims to make travel planning easier by combining research and organising in one simple interface that includes a map of your itinerary, bookings you’ve made, budgeting and more. Share your trip to organise it together with others.
|
|
The Dumb Phone app puts a layer over your hectic iPhone screen and just shows you a black and white list of your most essential apps. Distractions no more! Friends of DD enjoy a 50% discount for the 1st year.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
|
|
I’m certainly not encouraging you to shop on Amazon, but if you do, use ReviewMeta to filter out fake reviews. Just add the URL of the product and the tool will run some statistical modelling on suspicious review patterns, then show you a ‘clean’ review score. (Seems to work best for Amazon in North America.)
|
|
Tracking partisan animosity
|
An interesting political science project! There are two parts to this tool: one uses AI to assess the rhetoric of all 535 legislators in the US House and Senate, pulling data from speeches, newsletters, tweets and public statements to see how much time officials spend using divisive rhetoric or doing actual policy work. The other part uses survey data to analyse the affective polarisation among voters.
|
|
|
Worthy Five: Chip Colwell
|
Five recommendations by anthropologist and founding editor-in-chief of SAPIENS Magazine, Chip Colwell
|
A word worth knowing:
A new favourite word I learned is ‘sonder’: “the feeling one has on realising that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles”.
A video worth watching:
In the seven-minute mini-documentary Peruvian Tips for Public Speaking, the writer Daniel Alarcón shares his discovery – and love – of a charming book you’ve almost certainly never read: Discursos y Brindis (Speeches and Toasts). Taking an anthropological gaze at this volume of suggested culturally-specific speeches, Alarcón delights in the book’s quirkiness while revealing its deeper aims to help Peruvians navigate their country’s labyrinthine social hierarchies.
A question worth asking:
Given how divisive politics have become in so many parts of the world, I’ve been contemplating a lot about whether a recognition of the things that make all of us human – birth, family, art, music, death – might foster a shared sense of connection. What does humanity share in common that can help bridge our differences?
A book worth reading:
Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León is a breathtaking and heartbreaking book that pulls the curtain from the human smuggling industry in Central America. Written by an extraordinary anthropologist and MacArthur ‘genius’ awardee, De León goes deep into the lives of smugglers to understand their crimes and humanity.
An activity worth doing:
Not only is Pickleball a profoundly fun game, it’s also a game that can profoundly bring people together (apropos of the question worth asking). The general ethic of pickleball is inclusiveness. So you find the young and old, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, and many more kinds of opposites, all sharing a space of joy.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Chip Colwell in one click.)
|
|
|
Books & Accessories
|
Our place in the sixth extinction
Poet, translator and author David Hinton explores the profound connection between human consciousness and the natural world amid the ongoing environmental crisis. The book delves into how embracing ecological awareness can help address the challenges of the sixth mass extinction and foster a deeper sense of belonging to the earth. “Preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual and philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it.”
|
|
Why asset managers own the world
A new book that critically examines the growing concentration of wealth among a small group of asset managers, raising the alarm about their increasing ownership of housing and other essential public infrastructure with a sole focus on profit. “Asset managers are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them. In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.”
|
|
|
Overheard on Mastodon
|
My love language is removing tracking parameters from urls before sharing.
|
|
Food for Thought
|
A strongly worded critique of how we should talk about centrism in the highly polarised political landscape in the US (but it applies equally to many other countries). A.R. Moxon argues that ‘the centre’ in politics often ignores the harmful intentions of extremist groups, allowing them to influence mainstream discourse. He calls for a new political centre based on basic human decency and governance. “So maybe ‘the center’ isn’t a position. Maybe it’s an alignment, one that sees unity as a constant and never-changing agreement with supremacists, a certification that supremacists and only supremacists are part of ‘us’, and any attempt to make common cause with unwanted groups that supremacists consider to be their enemies represents polarization and disunity, in a way that supremacist violence itself never will.”
|
|
A lot of us regularly engage in ‘fear games’, be it a horror movie or a roller coaster ride. In this piece Kristian Hammerstad explores what drives us towards this kind of simulated danger and why we force ourselves to confront fear in a controlled way. “Games are ‘morally transformative technologies’, in that they alter the valence of struggle. Obstacles become opportunities for acts of creativity, of strength, of grace and beauty. The struggle is now aesthetic. In a game’s magic circle, we develop new skills to help us overcome the arbitrary, necessary obstacles that make the goal elusive, and therefore attractive.”
|
|
I’m not usually one to share ‘life hacking’ listicles, but I enjoyed this clear framing of 12 life-affirming priorities that Scott H. Young wants to focus on over a 12-month period. I especially appreciate the book recommendations, some of which I will include in future issues of DD.
|
|
|
Aesthetically Pleasing
|
Kikin is a digital finance platform that helps businesses to make environmentally conscious decisions and its branding draws inspiration from brands that “put the outdoors first and make you want to be a part of the community”. The result is something more akin to an outdoor clothing brand than a dry and boring finance industry look. Well done on trying something different!
|
|
The newest series Old Growth by photographer Mitch Epstein “celebrates the majesty and resilience of primeval wilderness unaltered by humans. It explores ancient forests in remote regions of the US, where ninety-five percent of old growth forests have been destroyed.” The series is captured in a forthcoming book you can pre-order here. (via)
|
|
I absolutely adore the dreamy, earthy feel-good art by French painter Quentin Monge.
|
|
Inspired by the charming letterforms of a hand-painted sign at Kandy’s Botanic Garden in Sri Lanka, Botanic Grotesque is a single style, high-contrast, all-caps display sans-serif in beta and it’s free for personal use!
|
|
|
Notable Numbers
|
Shortly after Humane released its $699 AI Pin in April, the returns started flowing in. Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned.
|
|
In 2006, the 23-story office tower at 135 West 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan sold for $332 million. Earlier this month, it changed hands again, in an online auction, for $8.5 million. It’s yet another sign of how the pandemic has upended the state of office buildings in New York City.
|
|
The average pay for a CEO of a S&P 500 company increased 6% in 2023 from the previous year, according to a report released by the AFL-CIO, a US trade union. The average CEO pay for S&P 500 companies was $17.7 million, that’s about 268 times the average $66,000 paid to workers at those companies.
|
|
|
Classifieds
|
Unwind is a refreshing, delightful, and distraction-free mindful breathing app to help you relax, improve focus, sleep better, and more.
Discover the Mettā View: Weekly essays exploring brand development, conscious communication, and the future of work through a mindful lens. Also available in audio format.
Keep everyone in your organisation informed, connected, and up to date with GroupNews. It’s the simple intranet for internal news, updates, events & deadlines, all in one place.
New way to travel. Vacation With An Artist offers learning vacations with master artists in 34+ countries – pottery in Japan, dyeing in Mexico, or restoring furniture in Italy.
|
Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by our 37,000 subscribers each week.
Book yours →
|
|
|
The Week in a GIF
|
Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
|
|
|
DD is supported by Friends and the modern family office of .
|
|