The Big Sort

By Kurtis with a K.

Based on a recent comment, I have decided to write a post about the recent book The Big Sort.  The book claims that, of late, America has been segregating itself into communities on a micro level.  Furthermore, it claims that the nature of recent developments such as television and the internet allow people to craft themselves social spheres that include only like-minded people.  Using the example of churches in the late 20^th Century, it shows how people increasingly are able to segregate themselves by mental characteristics.

I don’t see, however, how this is necessarily very different from how America was organized in the past.  It is easy to see, through the development of “Little Italies” or “Chinatowns,” how people self-segregated by background or ethnicity, and, often times, people were forced to self-segregate by geography due to the lack of travel capacity.  I understand that the book’s argument is that in the present day the segregating process is driven by different factors, but I’m not sold by this either; things such as ethnicities often served as proxies for like-mindedness, and geography often was self-selecting to a degree because only a certain type of person would wish to live in a city, or a suburb, or move to the Midwest and establish a homestead, or migrate to California in search of gold.

Regardless, though, I find the most interesting aspect of the book to be its assumption that sorting is somehow bad for the country.  Presenting statistics like the percentage of people who live in areas where candidates win by landslide margins in presidential elections is fine, but I’m not necessarily sure that that’s such a huge negative.  If people didn’t want to be around other like-minded people, than we wouldn’t see the type of selection that the book describes.  Furthermore, I think it’s a very dangerous attitude to take that somehow “we” know what is best for the country, or for society, better than the people who comprise the country.  It’s a similar concept to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, except applied to sociology rather than economics.

The other interesting question that I think that the book poses is where the future is headed.  With the onset of the internet age, will people seek to further self-segregate by using social networking sites?  Eventually, maybe all we’ll be able to see of each other is a profile, and, by manipulating our profiles, we’ll be able to perfectly self-segregate.  Maybe the “enemy” of self-segregating within society is geography, and, as the world comes closer together, we actually grow further apart from the majority of our fellow people.  At the very least, it’s scary to think about.