Religion and Politics #4: Identity Factor

The venture capitalist, Paul Graham, made some very interesting points about why anything related to religion and politics quickly turns into, er, a religious argument. For one, he says:

“Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.”

 

But why is that the case?

“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.”

That’s a possibility, but then Graham points out the reverse isn’t true:

“It's a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer.”

 

The key, he says, could be something else:

“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.”

That certainly make a lot of sense – engineers often do this (Linux v/s Windows); even laymen do it (Android v/s iOS; or BMW v/s Mercedes). Once you identify yourself in one camp, well, any discussions on that topic do tend to spiral out of control. The difference, of course, is that religion and politics become part of more people’s identity than almost any other topic.

 

Graham ends with a very wise-but-hard-to-execute piece of advice:

“There is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x.”