Midterms are Coming Up...Let’s Talk About it
This weekend, I’m doing a keynote address at another virtual summit that is the follow-on to the one I did this summer. It’s called Threading the Needle Between Good and Evil: Finding a Path Through Our Polarized World. We’ll be talking about how to reduce polarization in our actions, speech, and politics. Below is an article I wrote for SOOPMedia about my talk; they won’t get it until Thursday, but you’re getting it right now.
Join me at the summit; general admission is free! You can sign up right now at summit.soopmedia.net
Now onto my talk:
On the Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives, and What Lies Beneath It
With the election upcoming, I have been thinking about the difference between liberals and conservatives. And the distinction may be as simple as this: broadly speaking, liberalism tends to want to be responsible for everyone, whereas conservatism tends to rely much more on the individual. Again, that is a broad-sweeping generalization, and like all broad-sweeping generalizations, the closer you get to actual people, the less neatly it holds. But as a general orientation, I think there is something to it.
What matters more to me, though, is that both sides are usually trying, however imperfectly, to pursue what they believe is The Good; that, of course, however, does not mean that such a pursuit always lands them on the correct path. Nor does it mean that every action, policy, or movement is justified. But I do think most human action stems from a place that, in its own mind at least, is trying to do its level best; and if we forget that, then politics becomes very quickly not a conversation, but a caricature.
The deeper problem is that we become captured by ideas about reality instead of reality itself. We become captured by party, by narrative, by ideology, by the need to make the world line up with some banner we have chosen. But reality is almost always more gray, more specific, more human than the slogans we use to describe it. Two things can be true at the same time: a side can be right in one respect and badly mistaken in another. A movement can arise from compassion and still lose its grounding. Another can arise from a concern for order and still become too rigid to respond to life as it actually is.
That is why I keep coming back to the fact that polarity is necessary. We need the two. We need the side that wants to move and the side that wants to ground. We need the side that challenges the structure and the side that asks what must be preserved. Ideas are meant to be opposed. If they are not challenged, they do not evolve.
But none of this works if we forget something even more basic — which is that we have to be human beings first. It is never, ever the human that we condemn; it is always the action. Politics, like religion, can become a codified system that tells us what to think rather than allowing us to see what is. And once that happens, we stop encountering one another directly. We stop listening. We stop seeing. We stop engaging reality and start defending concepts.
I suppose that is why I am less interested in who is winning the argument than in whether we still know how to have one. Discourse is sustainable in a way violence is not. Communication is. If there is any hope for us, it is probably there — in the difficult and often uncomfortable work of remaining in conversation long enough to discover that reality binds where ideas so often segregate us.
