Smiled, chuckled, and moved on, unperturbed

Three times now, I’ve tried writing something that touches on politics, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to hit the “publish” button upon finishing. I wondered why I continued to stall and stagnate over those posts, and I think I’ve finally figured it out: the motivation behind my words was not just to question or share, but to prove. Prove I’m not stupid, prove I’m informed, prove I have good reasons for believing the things I do. But trying to prove one’s self is never a very good reason for writing anything, and sharing such writing can only be done in vain. Which I do not wish to do.

Politically, I’m fairly moderate. Most of the views I have could be labeled as “liberal” or “left-leaning”, but are moderate in their intensity. Some views I hold, however, are very centrist, or even lean right. I used to think that being in this political middle ground (or no-man’s land, which is how it feels these days) let you off the hook a bit, when it came to political criticism, because I could find common ground with both sides, but recent experiences have taught me different. The opposite of finding common ground is, after all, disagreement, and disagreeing with both sides means I’m in a position to be called names and dismissed by both sides. This year alone, I’ve been called blind, brainwashed, ignorant, apologist, uninformed, delusional… by members of both political parties.

I’d be lying if I said that shit didn’t sting. It did. It feels especially painful when I consider how much time I spend reading about society and politics from not just my preferred political vantage point, but from the left, right, and center, on various issues. This takes significant effort, to really consider views that oppose my own, or try to put myself in positions I don’t understand, or to pause and ask myself: what if I’m wrong about this? What if my experience or understanding is missing something? This is a very useful question when you’re on your own or in the company of someone else who is actually willing to ask themselves the same, but in the company of most people these days, it’s mildly dangerous. You sit there trying to consider what they’re saying, but when you speak, they don’t actually listen, and when you walk away, your mind might be slightly changed or opened, but theirs is intact as it was before, and they probably still consider you to be as blind or unenlightened or brainwashed as before.

My initial reaction this sort of exchange happening multiple times this year, and only intensifying after the election, was to try to prove myself. To explain why I had the views I did, how I got them, and say “SEE? I’m not a fool, I DO know some things!” But not only is such effort in vain, it would fall on deaf ears, in most if not all instances. So I could never hit “publish.” And I’m glad. Because I actually think the wise thing to do is to lean into the criticism: you think I’m a deranged fool? Uninformed? Ah, yes, perhaps I am!

When I was young, I quite excelled at this: as an eleven-year-old, I never cared what anyone thought, and proudly wore my jodhpur pants (the horseback riding leggings with sewn in knee and butt patches) to school. At thirteen, I never shied away from voicing my strong opposition to drugs and alcohol even though it set me up for ridicule from all the “cool” kids. I never cared, because I never respected the cool kids, they weren’t very nice to people, but expected to be liked by everybody, which seemed ludicrous to me. I’ve never really cared what strangers think of me, either. But it feels different when the people calling you names or thinking you’re a fool are family and friends or acquaintances. Last week, I watched a debate between one of my favorite conservatives (Glenn Loury) and his friend and conversation partner, John McWhorter (a ‘cranky’ liberal). Glenn was, to my surprise, quite happy Trump won, and John of course was not. When John listed a few of his reasons why, when he criticized Trump, Glenn, again to my surprise, called him “delusional”. But John just smiled, chuckled, and moved on, unperturbed. That, I thought to myself, is what I need to do.

People can and will, always, call us whatever names they want. No amount of information of proof will stop them, if that’s really what they want to do, whatever their reasons may be. And much of politics is out of our hands, but how we navigate this complete and utter mess is up to us. In my writing in attempt to prove I was not a fool (MAYBE I AM!), I think I made a few (possibly) decent observations on this quandary, not in vain, which I will share below.

For now, though, and into the foreseeable future, despite whatever names I’m called or all the manners in which I’m dismissed, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: read as much as possible, from as many different perspectives as possible, ask questions, stay curious, stay open, consider the possibility that I’m wrong, live widely and consider my experiences (and where I lack experience, consider the experience of others when forming opinions), and remember my values. Stick to them, when all else fails.

First: a quote, from someone I was so fortunate to get to know and learn from, who traveled to all corners of the globe as a photographer for National Geographic:

A brief look back at history should remind us that in the name of utopias, governments have created poverty, war, starvation, or, less dramatically, inefficiency, caprice, cults of personality, a lame kind of populism that impoverishes ideas and makes us think that it’s better to divide ourselves into factions than to find identity and belonging in the great human family.

—Pablo Corral Vega, Ecuadorian Photographer

However they do it, both the left and the right often default to insult and injury, rather than trying to actually listen to how someone else thinks, considering why that might be, and making sense of how someone can think so differently then they do. I think this is fine, sometimes, with some convictions, but as NO ONE can be correct all the time, I think it’s important to be willing to listen and consider other ideas, especially where we know we lack experience.

The right, in my experience, tends toward bullying, they’ll laugh or smile as they shoot you down, usually with insults that are rather broad, such as “stupid” or “blind” or “ignorant” or “brainwashed”. There isn’t much specificity. They tend to believe that they have access to some greater truth that the liberal elite cannot see because their heads are too far up their own asses and/or they’re the sheep of mainstream media, and they pull no punches in telling you so. Of course, discussion can’t really progress after you’ve been called stupid and been laughed at, and so you back down, realizing the discussion is pointless, and they take that as a win, as proof that they’re right.

The left, by contrast, in my experience, tends to be far more incisive in their attacks, using terms like “racist”, “sexist”, “transphobe”, or whatever “-ist” or “-phobe” is best suited to the moment (and they will toss out “brainwashed” too, just not as often as the right). Some also police your words as soon as they leave your mouth, making you feel very worried about accidentally saying the wrong thing, and then being banished forever. They can make you feel like a poor, unfortunate, unenlightened fool who simply hasn’t read all the right books, yet. Even if they don’t call you a name, they refuse to actually listen to someone who supposedly knows “less” than they do, so the conversation dwindles, and they count it as a win.

But neither of these scenarios presents an actual win, rather: a death. A death of dialogue, of sharing, listening, considering, and, worst of all, it’s the death of seeking to understand something or someone different from ourselves. Too, it’s the death of humility, of considering the possibility that we’re wrong about something, that we still have more to learn, that there’s something out there beyond our current level of experience, knowledge, or understanding.

Here’s a good example, I think, and I’ll indict my own “side” so no one can say I’m taking easy shots: someone recently told me that while she believed people had the right to marry whomever they wanted, because she was Catholic, she still felt a little weird about it from a moral standpoint. She accepted it, but she didn’t agree with it. I nodded. I don’t agree with her viewpoint, but she has every right to think that way; she isn’t harming anyone, and she still advocates for equal rights, even if she doesn’t agree with every arrangement of marital equality. Many liberals might lash out at her for being close-minded, or declare her stance as THE problem with religion, but I guess I disagree with the first point: I think she’s actually very open minded, being that she can accept something and recognize it as a right, and stand for that right, even though she doesn’t agree with it. This woman I was talking to told me that, while she didn’t like Trump, she voted for him anyways, because she was tired of liberals making her feel bad about having religious values, especially because she felt she was accepting of a lot of things that didn’t jive with her faith. That, to me, is the essence of liberals’ failure. We need to make more room for people like this woman, who might not pass a liberal purity test, but who hold many other liberal/democratic values.

To be clear, I think this has happened on the right, too, with all the “never-Trumpers” who were edged out of the party for their “disloyalty” or supposedly being “RHINOs” (for merely disagreeing with certain ideas of Trump’s). But… do we really want to end up like that? As a cult of personality that demands complete and utter loyalty to its leader and is intolerant of disagreement or dissent, viewing any instance of such behaviors as an attack, as intolerable criticism, or as undermining of leadership? Disagreement isn’t attack, isn’t undermining, isn’t even disloyalty, it’s just disagreement.

We must stop envisioning the world as a black-and-white place that can be remedied by black-and-white policies. We must stop believing that we’ve figured it all out, or that we clutch some pearl of truth the other side is too stupid to see. If we think “our side” is right all the time, or that “our side” or “our candidate” is immune to criticism or dissent, if we cannot pause to consider whether we’re wrong about something, then we cannot say that we (or our party) are honest, nor in pursuit of the truth.

In writing this, I’ve purposefully avoided criticizing or advocating for specific policies or ideologies. I’ve also avoided discussing the things that party officials and candidates and pundits say and do that exacerbate our divide problem. I can’t do anything about all that, and I guess I think it’s also possible for regular people like you and me to rise above the noise and find our shared humanity, despite our differences. How we think about ourselves (are we infallible? All knowing? or flawed and with much left to learn?) directly correlates with how we think about others. And how we think about others informs how we see them, which influences how we behave towards them, what we say or don’t say. This too influences how we divide ourselves up, and whether or not we keep ourselves apart. Such self-division, like Pablo Corral Vega is quoted stating above, impoverishes ideas: to me this means that ideas, which should be flexible and fluid, become hard, brittle, predictable, garishly simple. We are a complicated species living in complicated times, finding solutions to our problems will not be simple, nor easy, nor will it always go our way: maybe sometimes, the other “side” has the right idea, or maybe someone on your “side”, who you’ve previously dismissed, has the answer to that question. The success of our path forward, I believe, relies on careful discussion, consideration, trial-and-error, honesty, and humility. If we cannot do this, and perhaps, as a species, we cannot, we will fail ourselves, ruin ourselves, we will not make things better, we will not help anyone. And maybe, as humans, as Americans, that is our fate. I do not yet know.