I wonder if we are hostile to those who don’t share our views because we view them as a threat to our perspective and feel that they may undermine its existence and that their perspective might eventually destroy our own. Perhaps by undermining its credibility. Perhaps no perspective has inherent merit, and perspective is mostly a function of emotion and interests and we are really fighting to ensure our current emotional architecture is allowed to survive and our interests able to be protected. And I do think emotion should be viewed as an architectural body, a complex scaffolding, where two feelings in entirely different parts of the scaffolding, and thus not ostensibly related, do actually have a structural relationship and if one feeling is undermined it may threaten the other.
Perspective is really just a matter of what actions, facts, really anything external to the mind, that you pay attention to. And from there it is just a matter of assigning normative weights to each of those things; determining what about that thing matters. And to a considerable degree, what you pay attention to is probably mostly influenced by your day to day material circumstances and probably not the result of free will/a deliberate choice. That is, what we pay attention to is largely dictated by what the demands and physical realities of our day to day life dictates we pay attention to, and our interests and emotional architecture largley dictate what normative weights we ascribe to them. For example, I can be in a town square that has a million things going on, and I choose to pay attention to the foliage, and from there I decide that vivid colors and eclectic textures are good, so I view the foliage that has vivid colors and varying textures positively. But I completely ignore the foliage that has muted colors and textures as well as the performance art going on in that town square, I completely ignore the restaurants there, I completely ignore the rain, I completely ignore the people there - and furthermore I completely ignore ascribing a normative framework to each of these things, outside of the foliage, that takes a stance on what its ideal form is. But there is no objectively valid reason the foliage should be what I pay attention to, just like there is no objectively valid reason the colors and textures should matter and adhere to a given standards. Perhaps the only reason I pay attention to that foliage is because I live in a busy city that isn’t in close proximity to any vibrant foliage with varying textures and, for whatever reason, observing those colors and those textures would bring to me some state of mind that I feel deficient in. There are an infinte amount of things I could choose to focus on at a given point in time, just like there are an infinite amount of ideal states/normative weights I could ascribe to them - and those things and normative weights are specific to me, yet not necessarily objectively valid.
But in truth you can instead 1. focus on the rain or the people and 2. ascribe different normative weights to the people and the rain (e.g. what is their ideal form, what makes them good, by what standard should they be judged) and 3. to not even be in the town square to begin with. Thus, the object, the weights, and the context in which the object exists are not things I necessarily even need to associate with. It is, of course, true that something which threatens my survival is going to almost always rise to the level of something I should pay attention to as well as something for which there is a valid normative weight (e.g. I need to do what is necessary to survive); there is, therefore, a thing that it is essentially objectively true that I should pay attention to (the threat to my survival), and there is a normative weight that is essentially objectively valid (that which will enable me to survive). But how often, in the developed world, do we encounter things that threaten our survival? Not very often. I wonder if the fact that we no longer exist in circumstances in which our survival is threatened is why there has been so much divergence in terms of what we choose to focus on and what normative weights we ascribe to it; as without this threat there is no thing that binds all of us to the same reality and there is, therefore, no compelling force that makes us all focus on the same things and ascribe the same normative weights. Perhaps the underlying problem is that we do not exist in circumstances that force us to focus on the same things and ascribe the same normative weights.
What makes a group a group is shared interests. The corollary from these interests is a decision on what things warrant being focused on (e.g. the foliage), and what normative weight ought be ascribed to them (e.g. that vibrant colors and eclectic textures are good). The more interests diverge, the more perspective diverges and the more the object of focus and normative weights diverge. If you listen to the debate on abortion, for instance, the two sides aren’t even focusing on the same thing; it’s not even a question of whether the normative weights they ascribe are the different. The left focuses on the right of the woman to choose whether or not she has an abortion and the right focuses on whether killing a fetus is wrong. Thus, the object of focus (the woman or the fetus) is different, as is the normative weight (it is good for a person to have more rights over their body or it is bad to kill a fetus). Both the object of focus as well as the normative weight are entirely different. They are, however, operating in the same circumsatnces. In other words, they are both in the town square (abortion), but one is looking at foliage (the woman) while the other is looking at the people (fetus), and they are ascribing normative weights which are, by virute of the fact that they are looking at different things, different. It’s like two people arguing over the elements of the town square; one insists that vibrant foliage is good while the other disagrees and insists that people with brown hair are good.