How to Echo

As disorienting as politics has been in the United States recently, I find myself equally confused by how people talk about these developments.Among the recurring warnings about the perils of partisanship, I hear a new word with ever-increasing frequency: polarization.I've heard it used by friends, teachers, journalists, and politicians-sometimes referring to the distance between the platforms of political parties, sometimes to hostility between citizens, sometimes to the development of extreme beliefs.Sometimes they evoke all these things and more.Each time someone uses the term, it is their earnestness that catches my attention.In The Atlantic, for example, Yascha Mounk suggests that the United States is caught in a "doom spiral of pernicious polarization" that might lead to civil war. 1 In a country with a long history of intense divisions and a long history of talking about those divisions, what makes the word polarization appropriate for our present moment?In my view, the concept's value has less to do with how it conceptualizes division and more to do with how it directs attention to epistemic issues affecting democracies today.At the heart of many contemporary concerns about increasing partisanship, divisiveness, and animosity is increasing reflexivity about the effects of how knowledge is acquired, developed, and disseminated."Getting affirmation instead of information has definitely exacerbated polarization," Katie Couric says in a documentary about the 2020 presidential election. 2Exemplifying this trend, she criticizes the "millions of bubbles that people live in, where they seek out or are fed information algorithmically, that reinforce their beliefs."The term polarization is rarely used in isolation.As philosopher Robert Talisse points out, 1 Mounk, "The Doom Spiral." 2 Split Screen. How to Echo Bishop