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But we are living in a world of binary sensibilities: one side or the other, black or white. Shades of grey are forbidden.

Condemn the Israeli government for the catastrophe in Gaza, and you’re antisemitic. Don’t condemn it, and you’re Islamophobic. Our capacity to understand nuance, make distinctions and accept complexity seems increasingly like a dying intellectual art.

Those of us who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s recall a different sociocultural sensibility, and we know where to point the finger: the internet, which did not exist then.

Today’s internet has fostered a kind of reductive tribalism, taking what used to be a vast choir of different voices and reducing it to a vast global duet singing only the songs of Tribe A or Tribe B. If you don’t want to be kicked out of the tribe, you sing only its prescribed tunes.

You self-censor. You avoid saying aloud the things you privately believe, knowing that certain areas are minefields no sane person would ever attempt to navigate publicly.

If you identify as liberal today, you’ll stuff your mouth with steel wool before publicly questioning gender pronouns (even strictly for grammatical reasons!) or suggesting that some residential schools, at least pedagogically, might not have been all evil all the time. If you identify as conservative today, you’ll gag yourself with dirty socks before admitting aloud that dismissing people as “woke” is lazy and creepy or that “drill, baby, drill” is a truly terrible idea.

I may be inviting generational blowback here, but it’s worth pointing out that things weren’t always like this. True, factionalism and partisan cohorts are not new. Tribal loyalties are as old as life on Earth.

But there used to be room for more tribes and more intermingling. You could subscribe to a school of thought yet still hold independent ideas. You could be drawn to a particular style yet still appreciate wildly different alternatives. That’s because, in that pre-internet age, trending occurred in smaller chunks — by word of mouth, by a TV network here or popular magazine there — and at slower and irregular rates. Billions of people didn’t all start singing Tribe A’s or Tribe B’s latest hits all at once.

Those who deviated from positions generally held by peers never worried about the Thought Police breaking down their doors.

Before the internet threw a blanket across the globe, discussions were richer and tastes broader (and this is not selective geriatric recall, I promise). We read more, listened to more kinds of music, consumed different media in different places. As a result, our discussions reflected greater intellectual diversity — and, inevitably, more tolerance of such diversity.

I would never call for the obliteration of the internet, which I cherish. A miracle creation, it has opened up myriad brave new worlds: rich sources of instant information, transatlantic face-to-face time with old friends, bountiful streaming entertainment, easy shopping, banking and trip planning. Not even boomers want to do without that.

Still, it would be marvellous to clean up some of the detritus. We could silence the malicious conspiracy theorists; sweep the manosphere out the door, along with its hatred, violence and crude misogyny; start clear-cutting the jungle of greedy influencers spreading ignorance to hundreds of millions of followers all at once.

Granted, those genies have long been out of the bottle. But maybe, just for our own private well-being, we could try to dial down the volume a bit; reduce screen time fractionally; opt out of doomscrolling, YouTubing and social media. Think a little more for ourselves. No more reflexive allegiance to Tribe A or Tribe B.

Who knows? In time, as the miasma gradually dissipates, our pinched little worlds of black and white might even start hinting at soft splashes of colour.