More than three years ago, in my column, I wiped the floor with the idea that the Netherlands is deeply polarized, and what is the word of 2024 according to Van Dale? Right, polarization. You almost start to think that you don’t matter as a columnist. The concerns about polarization keep being repeated, the radio program Speech makers even dedicated a theme broadcast to it last week.
But I also disagreed with Claudia de Breij that Tuesday in Eva Jinek’s talk show Eva acted as if nothing had happened. The real world is not polarized, she said, but is like the Efteling: people line up peacefully for the Python, headscarfed women next to PVV voters, and everyone wants each other to have a nice day. It was that typical end-of-the-year sweetness that has little bearing on reality. There is indeed mutual hatred, envy and conflict: an orderly queue in an amusement park is therefore a bad metaphor for a society.
Why then do I say that polarization is not so bad? Because struggle is different from polarization. Research shows that there is relatively little affective polarization in the Netherlands: a political scientist term for mutual aversion between supporters of different political movements. This is stronger in a two-party system like the US, where being a Democrat or a Republican goes not only with a fixed set of positions, but also with a personal identity. (Incidentally, even in the US, affective polarization is less intense than is assumed, political scientist Jona de Jong recently wrote in his dissertation. This aversion is especially evident in surveys in which people judge stereotypical opponents, while in real life they often have good contacts with people who think differently.)
In a consensus democracy like ours, affective polarization is less likely to arise than in a two-party system, simply because the playing field is less clear. Polarization thrives on simplification and stereotyping, and that is more difficult with sixteen political parties. As political scientist Eelco Harteveld wrote in the collection Political polarization in the Netherlands (2022): “The Netherlands does not have two camps in which all dividing lines coincide. Deep aversion to an extreme opponent can go hand in hand with mild feelings toward the vast majority in the center.” Partly based on this bundle, the SCP warned that same year “not to immediately call everything polarization.” Clashing views are part of a democracy, and “the strong perception that there is a lot of polarization can in itself fuel affective polarization.”
This does not mean that polarization is not a danger. It is very tempting, even entertaining, to think in terms of opposites, especially when they are linked to archetypes: the wappie, the good guy. How do you resist that? By delving into the other person, into who he really is: by, as it were, focusing on the other person. That requires empathy. And I read something interesting about that this week.
I’ve been thinking about empathy for a while now, because it means so much. What do you call it when someone quickly sympathizes with suffering in their environment, but cannot understand someone who is further away from them? Is such a person empathetic or not? Maybe empathy is too broad a term, I thought: it means ‘to sympathize with’, but also ‘to empathize with’. Those are two very different actions.
This week a paper was published that helped me think about this further. Researchers Matthijs Gillissen, Matthijs Rooduijn and Gijs Schumacher distinguish two types of empathy: empathetic concernthe emotional response to other people’s experiences, and perspective takingunderstanding other people’s perspective. Surprising conclusion: the first form, compassion, can increase polarization. People easily sympathize with group members, which can lead to negative feelings about outsiders. Anyone who sympathizes with the farmers and sees how activists occupy a stable quickly starts to hate activists. (Before Gillissen, Rooduijn and Schumacher wonder how I arrived at this: yes, I came up with this example myself.)
Empathy is therefore not necessarily the ideal remedy against polarization, the researchers write. At the same time, the second form, understanding other people’s perspectives, can reduce polarization. By putting yourself in the shoes of someone from another group, you can think more mildly about that group. The farmer enthusiast in my example can try to imagine what drives the stable-occupying activists. That will probably not lead to agreement, but perhaps to recognition of the other person as a human being with legitimate motivations, instead of as an unworldly climate pusher (to name just a stereotype).
That requires a lot more work than that first form of empathy. While empathy is automatic, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is quite a job: more for the head than for the heart. Maybe a fun challenge for the new year?
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC