It has become a bit of a truism
that the left and the right can’t fathom each other’s reasons for their
respective positions: that someone on the left can’t imagine why any person of
good will would oppose a higher minimum wage, while someone on the right can’t
understand why a clear-sighted individual can’t grasp the value of the free
market. Arthur Brooks even has a TED
talk devoted to solving this conversational impasse, one of many pieces
of commentary the problem has spawned over the last few years.
In this situation, the Renaissance
scholar has the moderate relief of knowing that the problem is not new. The divide between papists or would-be papists
in sixteenth-century England and between those Protestants who leaned towards
Calvinism was a deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The difference was indeed so great that (not
for the first or last time in history) people died over the issues; in a best
case scenario, neighbors who chose not to report on nonconformity might
ostracize the nonconforming family—itself a kind of slow death for anyone
living in a small town or agrarian region.
We can take comfort, then, in the
fact that the divisive nature of our modern intellectual differences is not
unique, and that only our modern American distaste for bloodshed (and indeed for
corporal punishment) prevents any stakes or ear-and-nose-loppings from cropping
up (pardon the expression) in the near future. Martyrdom has been replaced by Twitter assassination; and
while the personal effects of such snowball-from-the-hilltop slaughter can be
quite nearly as damaging now as then (Brendan Eich and the woman who tweeted about
not catching AIDS in Africa come to mind), one does not simply starve these
days (at least, not as far as I know).
And in any case, such cases of
dramatic and headline-making social ostracism will probably remain relatively
rare, because we live and interact chiefly with like-minded people: family,
Facebook friends, and even coworkers are likely to share our beliefs … or else
we keep silent about them, since social norms practically demand any response
to doings of the other side involve an “I can’t even.”
“She feeds her
children GMO cereal.” “I can’t even.”
“Last I heard, they
were using Timeouts on Emma.
That poor child is only
two-and-a-half!” “I can’t even!”
“You haven’t finished
your free-range, cage-free,
organic, vegan Cobb
salad.” “I can’t even …”
This sort of response to people
who are ideologically “other” has existed for some time. But over the past month or so I’ve been
struck by how common it is to treat people on one’s own side of the fence with a
degree of disbelieving disdain. My
Facebook feed is littered with posts whose opening sentences, the very reverse
of click-bait, urge me to scroll on as fast as possible in embarrassed
frustration. On the right Trump and
Hiroshima have become bête noires: either one is a numbskull for accepting that
Trump might be better than Hillary, or a nitwit for not seeing that he’s far
worse than she is; one is either a dastardly knave for saying that the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombings were or might have been justified, or else one is practically
a quisling for suggesting that they weren’t.
I naturally have opinions on
these topics—moderately informed ones, albeit ones that could be changed by
more persuasive arguments or facts of which I am currently in ignorance. But why in heaven’s name would I bother to
read an article which condemns my reasoned position in the first few lines as
the fruit of either stupidity or moral decrepitude?
I wouldn’t!
On the left, there are comparable
issues: the nest of problems that include microaggressions (a word my spell
check does not even recognize, so new is its coinage), cultural appropriation, trigger
warnings, and campus free speech is one example of a situation where liberals form
two mutually incomprehensible sides; the emerging focus on transgenderism,
and the opposition of certain feminists and gays to this new emphasis, is
another.
But these divisions within
parties or ideological coalitions are themselves nothing new. Once again, the Renaissance affords an
instructive comparison, inasmuch as it presents readers of history with heated
debates between English Catholics about recusancy or conformity, and among
English Protestants about just how far towards Calvinism or Puritanism the
established Anglican Church ought to go.
Once again, history tells us that there’s nothing fresh or ingenious about
dubbing one’s allies of yesterday the heretics today. But it remains disquieting that we so often
insist on pretending that not only the other side, but also certain subgroups
within our own, are intellectually and morally decrepit.
I have a theory about why this
happens. It’s not a pretty one, and I
myself may occasionally be guilty of the sin involved in it: namely, the sin of
quietly selling a few of one’s own friends to purchase credence with the
enemy. The process goes something like
this:
ENEMY: All you people
are totally unreasonable, driven by your hatred of yellow grapefruits.
YOU: But wait! I sort of agree with you that yellow
grapefruits can be edible at times. At
least, I have an aunt who used to put them in fruit salad, and I really liked
her fruit salads.
ENEMY: That’s
nice. But most people on your side …
YOU [quickly]: Yeah, I
know. Really dumb, huh? [Addressing your own people:] You
salad-hating idiots!
And then, of course, one can
compliment oneself on having brought the world closer to peace, because this is
how coalition building works. And besides,
it does make one very superior not to
fit the stereotype of liberal or conservative or what-have-you on all counts. It’s almost as if one made up one’s mind on
one’s own …
There’s also a
whole Catholic stereotype of
I’m-Too-Catholic-to-Be-Conservative-or-Liberal,
which carries its
own flavor of righteousness.
In any case, regardless of the unconscious
motives which may taint shouts of heresy against one’s own party, such shouts
are profoundly unproductive, for the same reason that it is unproductive to
assume that everyone on the enemy’s side is a fool or a knave. I am reminded, for the third time, of the
Renaissance. Littered with polemics, it
was also littered with dialogues purporting by the nature of their genre to
give a fair hearing to two sides. In
point of fact, that was rarely the case; the enemy within a dialogue, if
initially resistant, was generally reduced in short order to a “Surely, O
Socrates,” stance. Spenser’s diatribe
against the Irish is a fine case in point.
UNENLIGHTENED
SPENSER PROP: But surely the
Irish have some sort of
local civilization worth preserving?
ENLIGHTENED SPENSER
PROP: Are you
kidding? THEY HAVE
MOUSTACHE LAWS!!!
UNENLIGHTENED SPENSER
PROP: I see I
was wrong! Death to all their leaders!!!
The nervous reader will be relieved
to learn that I don’t anticipate any movement today comparable to the English
attempts at Irish genocide. Perhaps some
portion of the losers in out modern debates may find themselves, like Huxley’s
savages, living life on a happy reservation in the Midwest—an extreme form of the
Benedict option, mutually agreeable to all parties concerned. Or perhaps, unable to deintegrate from
mainstream society, the losers may find themselves increasingly in the position
of recusants, forced to equivocate about religion, politics, the raising of
children, and other such minor details of life.
Or perhaps (since I’ve never
liked dystopian endings, only reconciling myself to Hamlet when I decided that it hadn’t got one after all) we may
manage to actually reach some sort of understanding amongst ourselves on each
side, and each side with the other: converts will be made, not forcibly but
intellectually, and we will live, as some sixties ballad whose name I can’t
recall promised, in perfect harmony.
But there’s a snowball’s chance
in hell of that happening as long as we continue pretending to ourselves that
all these debates are as simple as they look, and as long as we persist in
treating enemies and friends alike with equal indignity, as numbskulls, nitwits, and dastardly knaves, with the occasional nincompoop thrown in for good measure.
