03/07/2006
Taking sides
People love taking sides - it's what they do. If it is an argument, fight, celebrity media cat fight or war, from the serious to the downright stupid there will be division, and you will have opposing factions.
Factions are a Darwinian response to potential threat situations. If there is danger and the tribe is in trouble, it makes sense to face that threat with the backing of a supporting group rather than alone.
The snap decision to go along with any given group is a reflex action, and is a remnant of a defence mechanism that prevents individuals from becoming outsiders during conflict.
It is dangerous to be unquantifiable and alone when the tribe is in dispute. Standing alone can make you appear weak - a potential victim. But if you take sides and have backing, then that threat is greatly diminished.
Assessing which side to support can have rational elements to it - political, moral and ethical ones - but the desire to give that support in the first place often does not. Before any reason, there comes an urge to get stuck in. The safety of a pack holds a strong allure. However, this allure can make fools of us all.
Take the Israel Palestine situation - the ongoing hell in the Holy Land - the most divisive issue of all. There has been a recent escalation; an Israeli soldier was abducted by armed Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid, and this was followed by retaliatory strikes by Israeli armour.
The respective sides fall into place almost reflexively. Right-wing press outlets point to the unconscionable actions of Hamas-backed Palestinian kidnappers who broke into an army base and carried out the latest in a long line of indefensible crimes.
They are murderers, terrorists and kidnappers, and purveyors of the most insidious and poisonous anti-Semitism. Their aim - the annihilation of Israel. This right wing view forms in an instant and is unshakeable.
The left-wing view is equally inflexible. The incursion into Gaza is a brutal and disproportionate strike against a disenfranchised people with no means of defence other than terror tactics. Israel is a puppet state of the US and the only way for it to stop Palestinian bombs is to negotiate a peace settlement with the people from which it stole lands after the 1967 war.
Aggressive strikes like this will only add to the sufferings of the Palestinian people and lead to more loss on both sides. Like the opposing view, this attitude is formed in a moment.
The urge to take sides is strong and the lines it forms are rigid. But this is an example of a situtation where the correct attitude is not to take sides. Here the only correct attitude is blanket condemnation.
For both sides have committed disgusting acts. Both sides have killed indiscriminately, both have been led by bellicose self-interested power-hungry autocrats.
Both have maintained hard-line stances that are as unrealistic as they are nihilistic and aggressive, and both have sought to drive a dispute to the verge of civil war rather than seek an alternative to the stupid, brutal animalist cycle of violence.
Neither side is in the right, neither side is worthy of support and so neither tribe is worth joining. Both sides act disgracefully, and yet in spite of this shared culpability media outlets, politicians, religious leaders and members of the commentariat leap to support either one or the other.
This is a manifestation of the instinctive and irrational urge to chose sides. Individuals give in to this urge.
Spinoff, however, will not.
Yours etc.,
Spinoff.
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