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Willful Blindness
Zainab Dhanani
11-14-2018
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The recent US mid-term election highlighted the growing polarization of Western society. Democrats painted Republicans as harbingers of evil and Republicans decried the wantonness of the Democrats. The political divide was wide and uncrossable—a river of animosity separated the ideologies and their followers. In her 2001 book “Willful Blindness” Margaret Heffernan talks about how this type of group influence and social conformity pushes each group into positions of greater extremism to the determent of everyone.
Heffernan explains that the areas of our brains responsible for perception are altered by social interactions. What we see depends on what others see and say. When we are part of a group, we change our focus and goals. She claims that this social support makes it easier to do things, or believe in ideas, that would feel a lot more uncomfortable if we were on our own. Identifying with a group gives structure and hierarchy. This shift of focus from the individual to the collective is fundamental. It blinds us both to the alternatives we have to obedience and to our moral responsibility for our actions. There is a tension between obedience and doing the right thing. For Heffernan, this is why “a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, even though it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. His moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him. In wartime, a soldier doesn’t experience shame or guilt in the destruction of a village, rather he feels pride or shame depending on how well he has performed the mission assigned to him.” We conform to the expectations of the group, be it a political party, charity, friendship circle, soccer club, family, workplace, profession, religion, or nation.
While group membership can be healthy and give a sense of belonging, Heffernan urges us not to be seduced by this comfort. She believes we lose as much as we gain when we adopt the habits, routines, jargon, and beliefs of our peers. She warns that it is easy to “not see the things that are too far away, that are too distant from our own experience, too separate from our own concerns, or simply too complicated to assemble. We also don’t see things that are too far away in time, be it in the past or future. And we are blind to the blindness complex structures necessarily confer. So we forget all about them. Our brains like things that are familiar to us. When we find what we like, part of our pleasure is the joy of recognition. But the flip side of satisfaction is that we are rejecting a lot along the way. We are narrow in our choices.”
Heffernan asks us to “imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random—there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek is formed, water is more likely to follow this newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens, and a river develops. The longer we live, and the more we accumulate similar experiences, friends and ideas, the faster and more easily the water flows. There’s less and less resistance. That absence of resistance produces a sense of ease, of comfort, of certainty. Yet, at the same time, the sides of the riverbed grow higher. The sides become steeper. It feels good; the flow is efficient and unimpeded. You just can’t see anything. This is how willful blindness begins, not in conscious, deliberate choices to be blind, but in a skein of decisions that slowly but surely restrict our view. We don’t sense our perspective closing in and most would prefer that it stay broad and rich. But our blindness grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more snugly inside our affirming thoughts and values. And what’s most frightening about this process is that we see less and less, we feel more comfort and greater certainty. We think we see more—even as the landscape shrinks.”
Although the rivers of animosity that divide Canada don’t seem as wide or turbulent as those in America, we too can be willfully blind (Indigenous relations come to mind). Heffernan reminds us, we cannot fix problems that we refuse to see. She asks us to reach out to others who appear different, to endure the uncomfortableness of leaving your comfort zone, and to open your eyes to see all of humanity.
Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
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