Emerson once said, “People can forgive anything except a difference of opinion, and this has never been truer or more obvious than in this election year. I have never seen so many of my friends unable to bear to hear the opposing view, whether the subject is the Iraq war or global warming or the Patriot Act or anything else. I myself have never had to work so hard to avoid falling into anger, even hatred.
I am blessed with a variety of friends, some liberal, some conservative, some Republican, some Democrat, some (like me) sort of dissident. They mostly say, “I vote for the man, but in practice, nearly always they find their “best man (or woman) in the same political party.” And few of them have much patience for the “other side.”
Politics is inherently dualistic, because elections have winners and losers. One side will gain power and the other won’t. This makes it hard for anything political to be crafted as a win-win.. But in a healthy nation’s politics, dualism coexists with a larger sense of oneness, an active remembrance that though we might differ in our opinions, we were all fellow citizens of one common country. When dualism overwhelms the sense of oneness, a nation’s politics goes toxic.
For at least the past 70 years, political polarization has been increasing year by year, as ideologues of right and left have taken terms “getting even for the past, starting with Democrats vilifying Herbert Hoover and Republicans then accusing Franklin Roosevelt of treason. Year by year it has gotten worse, and now we have George W. Bush, who can’t seem to help polarizing everything he touches. If the Democrats were to regain control of the presidency this year, or of Congress, you know that they would have a long agenda of things to overturn, and perhaps to avenge.
How do we reverse the trend?
I suspect that few of us on our deathbeds will see our political stance in quite the same black-and-white way we do now. As our point of view changes, we see that there were things to be said for the other side. In our deepest levels of being, we are more than Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives or whatever. It would be well for us to spend more time remembering it – particularly when “the other side is making us crazy.
Years ago psychologist Charles Hampden-Turner (in a book titled Radical Man) pointed out that after too long a time of seeing things in adversarial terms, people lose the ability to see common ground. Politicians, spurred by the continual necessity of winning elections, see things more and more in partisan terms. Politics was once defined as “the art of the possible, and politicians quickly learn how to compromise to get things done. But today’s climate makes such cooperation ever more politically dangerous. The electronic news and entertainment media, particularly, with its insatiable appetite for dramatic sound bites, has been a terribly corrupting influence. What polarizes people more than sound-bites?
But hatred is hatred. Hatred is rooted in fear, and fear is rooted in the perception of duality, which sees the world as a conflict of forces. To the extent that we see the world as all one thing, we don’t worry about things “going wrong, however little we may approve of what is happening.
It is true that the world is one thing, but it is also true that we, being in bodies, can’t help experience it as duality. And that’s the problem that life sets out for us to solve. How can we, living in the real world whose perceived duality contains real dangers and real horrors, nonetheless remember that we know that at a deeper level all is one?
I don’t know the answer, but I do know some of the questions, and I pose them here in the hope that better minds may come up with a practical approach to bringing us back from fear and division into faith and a sense, not merely that we are fellow citizens but that, as they used to say in the Middle Ages, we are all children of God.
My fellow citizens, some questions.
1) How do we bridge political, ideological divisions in our personal lives?
2) How do we make it possible for politicians to do so without political suicide?
3) How do we avoid succumbing to fear and hatred of our fellow citizens?
4) Given that conspiracy theories aren’t always wrong, how do we avoid living in fear and hatred?
5) How do we love our adversaries when our adversaries do not respond?
Anyone who can come up with answers to any of these questions will do more good for the country–and therefore for the world and for the future–than any political or ideological platform.