A while back, I attended what’s delightfully called a “webinar,” which is like a seminar but on the web, so there’s nothing to prevent you from playing spider solitaire, dozing off, going to the bathroom or having a nosh, all while feeling that you’re involved. I hate the format, and have turned down a few requests to participate. I don’t blame anyone who enjoys, or at least tolerates, them but it’s not what I care to do.

But this wasn’t just a generic webinar, but one put on by an organization I support, that included people I respect on a subject that was of interest to me, so why not? I swiftly got my answer. The webinar opened with a warning, that anyone who used “dehumanizing” language in the scrolling comments would be ejected. Some examples of “dehumanizing” words were given.

They were the usual words that had been used in criminal law forever. They were words that clients used. They were the words that were ubiquitous. Until recently, when the new trend emerged of using five words in place of one, pretending the euphemisms somehow made life in a prison cell more tolerable because it acknowledged that an inmate was a human being by calling him an “incarcerated person” rather than prisoner.

I took this as a bad sign. Not so much because of its favoring the pseudo-humanistic charade that the guy in the cell cared a whole lot more about getting out of the cell than what he was called by those crying for his suffering at a hipster coffee house, but because the first thing this webinar raised was that anyone who didn’t use its language would get tossed out on their ass.

The subject of the webinar was an important one in the scheme of criminal law, and offered the opportunity to test the intersection of a new, progressive scheme to the more “old school” concern of maintaining a viable public defender corp. Note that I’m being deliberately vague, both because I support the organization that put on the show and admire its participants. This isn’t meant as a critique of either, per se, but rather a perspective on what the webinar turned out to be.

It was an echo chamber. A group of like-minded people whose debate was akin to prosecutors arguing whether the sentence to demand was life, life without parole or life plus cancer, where there was no one, no voice, who questioned whether it should be life at all.

Yes, I was well aware that echo chambers exist, where everyone in the room already subscribed to the same view and took for granted that their belief system was the righteous one without need to consider that maybe, just maybe, it was a bit too one-sided to either be workable, sustainable or effective. If you’re on the side of morality and justice, can any reasonable person question your underlying premises?

But actually being there, even if virtually, within a real, honest-to-god echo chamber was a bit of a revelation. Here were smart people, good people, well-intended people, who were arguing over tweaks at the fringe without any voice, any thought, that maybe the outer edge was not the place where we should want to be.

There’s a phenomenon called the “risky shift,” where decisions made by a group of like-minded people tend to be more extreme than those made by any individual.

This phenomenon was first discovered as part of a master’s thesis by Stoner in 1961 and refers to the tendency for decisions made in groups to be less conservative than the decision of the average group member (Shaw, 1976). The results were initially met with surprise in the scientific community as they contradicted some prevailing theories of the time, most notably the “normalization theory” which stated that group decisions would reflect an average of opinions and norms.

I would tweak the definition somewhat to argue that it happens when the group consists of like-minded people. When the group consists of people across the spectrum of ideas, normalization is more likely to occur, not that it means they necessarily come up with good ideas. There’s a reason it’s said that a camel is a horse designed by committee. But without any voices moderating flights of fancy, they can easily spiral out of control.

This was hardly the first time I had been in an echo chamber. Some years ago, I was asked to participate in a Cato panel about plea bargaining, in which the moderator sought to push the view that plea bargaining is an inherent evil that undermines the “democratic” right to trial, which was an inherent good. To his credit, they included me knowing that I was not on board with the simplistic side of good and evil, but that in the complex scheme of the existing legal system, a functional necessity. I was the skunk in the garden party.

At the end, my position was characterized as being pro-plea bargaining because there were only two options, for or against. If that was the takeaway, then I was terribly unclear because that wasn’t my point at all. But that was the only alternative to the “right” choice, trials are good. Still, even if I was there to be the voice of dissent, at least there was a dissent, there was a challenge to the hallelujah chorus.

In this webinar, no one questioned the foundational ideology that maybe, just maybe, the concept under debate was misguided, wrong, dangerous, ineffective, unprincipled and, in time, would end up being a disaster for the very people cheering it on without question who hadn’t considered the possibility that their fertile imagination of hegemony might not turn out as well as they most assuredly believed.

The advanced warning about language was unnecessary as anything other than informing the audience that they are all on the same ideological page. There wasn’t a person inclined to speak up in that virtual room who would have ever deliberately used a word that didn’t comport with the tribe’s chosen rhetoric. Or challenge a thought outside the approved orthodoxy. No skunks allowed anymore, and so there is no one to spoil the smell of the garden party.