David Brooks on Partisanship and Polarization

I try not to just post links here, but I heartily endorse David Brook's op-ed Circling the Wagons in todays NYT. I continue to think that, for all his errors, that guy's got something. One of the things that's important about this post is that it actually deploys data from the social sciences in a useful and informative way. I've been screwing around with some posts about similarly relevant findings in cognitive science...maybe this'll inspire me to finish those up. But for now, read it with me one more time:

"A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side,--the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right."
-- Emerson, "Self-Reliance"