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Politically Split
Do we have to be polarized? In some ways, yes.
Schismogenesis is a word for polarization. It literally means the creation of a split. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in 1935 and discussed it in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), and David Breeden wrote about it here. Marcel Mauss wrote about the idea even earlier (you might find it in his Primitive Classification (1902) with Durkheim, I suspect). As explained by David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything (2021) (as quoted by Elle Beau), this was the anthropologists’ idea:
“Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal….Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.”
Schmisogenesis doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “left” and “right.” Those terms, in their political sense, come from “the seating arrangements of the [French] National Assembly in 1789,” Susan Sontag reminded us in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989, Chapter 1). But why “the startling longevity of this metaphor,” she asked? Probably because we like to refer to “the body’s orientation in space — left and right, top and bottom, forward and backward.”
