Whether it's outrage at Scott McIntyre's Anzac Day tweets or Samantha Armytage's on-air comments, camps are quickly divided into "left" and "right" and any chance of constructive discussion is lost, writes Jonathan Green.

We have nothing to fear but our fearless sense of certainty.

It might be the end of us.

What, after all is the good of a conversation that pits intractable opposites without hope of finding common ground, and, therefore, the possibility of resolution?

The simple truth is that there are precious few simple truths, a thing you would never guess from the polarised combativeness of our public conversation. This is no time for shades of grey: nuance is weakness, intellectual curiosity a tell-tale sign of absent conviction.

The alternating oppositionism of our recent politics has found a complementary echo in the amplified public sphere, the headbutting tribes of Twitter, Facebook and all the rest, the conflict-driven spittle of our populist mainstream media.

The examples keep coming.

This week the hounding, then sacking of SBS sports presenter Scott McIntyre after his aggressively pointed Anzac Day tweeting. The camps quickly divided with "the left" arguing free speech had been denied, while "the right" saw hypocrisy in the free speech claim and grievous injury in the tweets themselves.

Where were McIntyre's defenders when blogger Andrew Bolt was prosecuted for a breach of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act? Alternatively: how could you argue for individual liberty and deny that same courtesy to McIntrye?

None of this was simple, but in the week's tribal hectoring, any possibility of a constructive discussion was lost.

The possibilities were there.

We could have considered the changing nature of social media: a little understood and rarefied novelty when many media organisations drafted their codes of conduct, now an almost ubiquitous tool of constant - and arguably private - conversation.

We might have looked a little harder at the complex historic truths of the First World War, a rich vein lost in a no-man's-land between the revered creation myth of Gallipoli and the angry resentments of its conscientious objectors.

We could have thought more deeply on the notion of free speech, an issue that extends beyond whether Bolt was silenced by an interfering state (or acted in such bad faith that section 18D of the RDA could not protect him) and whether the state, in the guise of the Communications Minister, had any role to play in the silencing of McIntyre.

But we weren't much interested in any of that. We wanted to fight.

The pattern is wearingly familiar now, a point of arguable contention falls to outrage, complexity quickly overwhelmed by the quick venting of anger and heat.

Kerfuffles like the McIntyre affair, like the international pillorying of morning TV host Samantha Armytage for what was either casual racism or an innocent trip of the tongue ... they feed a rapacious daily appetite for both controversy - simple enough - and something deeper and more personal: the need to be aligned, quickly and with enthusiasm, with your tribe's chosen position on the issue of the day.

We clump like magnetised iron filings around these little points of irritation and misadventure, mistaking public missteps and fumbles as representations of some greater social evil.

To pile on Armytage for a potentially unwitting few words is to brand yourself with the righteous fervour of the global campaigner against racism. And all for the price of a tweet! To heatedly deplore McIntyre's imputations against the character of the Australian fighting man is to side with a great sweep of nationalist history, to become a combatant in the culture wars, to embrace a vision of the country that pits the most precious principles of state, society and economy against a godless and unwashed horde bent on imposing some grey socialist dystopia.

The social media spat is a proxy war, and one fuelled by that most compelling of human motivations: the thirst for identification, for ideological positioning that reinforces our fragile self-regard.

It is positioning that can substitute for a concrete response: the hashtag activism that spreads a glow disproportionate to its real world effect. It's also a jabbering racket that can eclipse quieter, more contemplative attempts to actually bring reason and considered argument to bear.

And we are all so sure. So determined. So resolute.

It's a theme that extends beyond the colour and quick movement of social media: it also taints our more significant conversations in politics and policy, conversations that have lost their centre of gravity, their sense of substance.

Like social media, much of our politics has become a place where bellicose positioning and polarised outrage substitute for the contest of opposing, but potentially constructive, ideas.

Conflict works for a political class that wants little more than to surf public feeling while avoiding commitment to any set of potentially difficult ideas ... ideas that might necessitate the sort of considered conversation that is excluded by the modern mindset that favours counterpoint over harmony.

Conflict works too for a mainstream media whose worldview is all but exclusively framed around it. Where is the tension in the story? Whose side are you on? There is precious little news that isn't based on some form of binary contest. It's hardly news without it. Opinion is tooled to incense and divide. Sober exposition is out of vogue.

Schooled by all of this, the broader public conversation retreats into the fantasy divisions of left and right, descriptions divorced from any sense of coherent belief ... but divisions entrenched all the more deeply as the stuff once held as political and moral principle evaporates in the cynical utilitarianism of modern political argument.

Paradoxically, each side flinches further from the other with every creeping loss of true belief and honest feeling. Emptied of concrete program and substantial conviction, the sides of politics turn in on themselves and away from each other, fuelled by the last remaining binding force: the blind tribalism of empty but fierce ideological conviction.

With characteristic poise, author and columnist George Megalogenis considered this moment in the most recent edition of The Monthly:

Today if one side says the nation faces a crisis, the other feels compelled to deny it. Think the Coalition on climate change and Labor on the structural hole in the budget. Everything is contested, not as a means to a policy end, but simply to annoy the other side. This politics is American in its effect - tribal and petty, fanatical and consciously dumbed down. The Australian voter has picked it for what it is, even if the two parties don't realise it yet... Today neither side wants to concede even the smallest human error for fear of losing that minute's news cycle. They are so immersed in the game of politics that they have imported the very thing the Americans hate about their own system: its partisanship. And then they wonder why the electorate has been so volatile.

To survive this instant, perhaps even to prosper, the protagonists of both social media and politics might want to consider the occasional possibility that they might be wrong. That voices routinely dismissed might have some sense to offer. That the truth might lie in uncertainty, humility and the constructive chaos of argument.

We might want to come out of our corners and actually engage.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum.