Last week I started in on the topic of Truth and Reconciliation by examining the truth. Now it’s time for more thoughts on reconciliation than you ever cared to read! In order to reach reconciliation, we must first have a common truth, a common history. After all, what is history but the story we tell to explain our present? The dead don’t care what we say.
But first, the matter at hand: what does it mean to reconcile? Can we?
Right now we have a common conception that there are two halves of society, inextricably interconnected, diametrically opposed. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, because humans naturally struggle with complexity (more on this later). However, we do indeed have one part of our society that is determinedly sprinting towards an idealized past and hell bent on taking the rest of Us with Them.
Why Reconciliation?
There is a branch of religiosity — in the US it appears as right-wing Evangelicalism — that is profoundly authoritarian. This is the religion that takes the view that letting people think for themselves is dangerous, that the only way to keep people in the faith is to keep them afraid and unable to form their own interpretations of the religion or of the world. This by definition requires a rigid and narrow interpretation of the Bible (for example) provided by People Who Know More Than You — i.e., the authoritative authorities. The people involved in these branches of religion are then naturally more susceptible to authoritarianism when it crops up in other circumstances.
The Foundations
As I vaguely alluded to earlier, we have facing us an Us-Them paradigm. It is built on several factors. One of them is what I’ll call the Traditional American Psyche. This is partly derived from the Puritan roots of the country, which has contributed to the Evangelicalism as described above, but it is also based on ideals of Individualism and Freedom.
The story we like to tell ourselves of the founding of the United States is one of brave people fleeing persecution and founding a beautiful free society in which people could live as they chose. Setting aside for the moment the many, many flaws in that history, let’s first ask the obvious question: Why is it such a seductive idea to be solely reliant on yourself?
This ideal of individualism is deeply woven into the fabric of this country. It exists not only on the personal level, like that iconically described by Thoreau, but also at the societal level. Today we are a big strong superpower that don’t need no man sorry appreciates the generous assistance of our less powerful allies, but even before we leveled up, the country had a similar-outlook-but-different-effect execution of isolationism. Same self-reliance, fewer overthrown foreign governments.
Individualism
One angle from which to examine this individualism is from the parochial lens, as featured in Evangelicalism. In the fly parlance of the youths, we might also call this parochialism ~toxic masculinity~. It’s where you’re the big strong country who can and does take care of everyone else, because everyone else is too weak to do it for themselves. One might even say it’s the Manifest Destiny of caring. Obviously this is because relying on someone or something else is a sign that you can’t take care of yourself, that you’re weak (implication: like a woman), that you need some sort of parental figure (implication: like a child), that you’re just not manly enough.
And just in case you might be confused, this isn’t like a loving kind of caring, because that’s also emasculating. This is the condescending pat-on-the-head kind of caring. Because, of course, everyone loves to be condescended to, so it makes for an excellent way to conduct social interactions!
Is This My Blog If I Don’t Talk About Fear?
Another angle is, of course, fear. This isn’t wholly separate from the first angle. Really it’s more of a distillation of it: why do people struggle so hard to be tough and manly? Is it because that’s the most fun way to live, or is it a fear of the perceived alternatives? Do people want to run away from things because that’s the logical thing to do, or is it easier than facing the fears that come with them? If you only have to worry about yourself and yourself alone, then whatever happens is under your control, and you don’t have to worry about what might happen outside of your control.
However, this rugged individualism ignores the profoundly social structure of the human organism. Humans are at our best when we work together and delegate responsibilities — without condescension! — especially in such a complex society as we have today.
Freedom
As far as freedom goes, well. Ignoring the facts when the country was founded, women were considered property and there were, you know, actual slaves, even the white man had some limits to his freedom. Laws curtail some actions. Responsibilities also curtail individual freedoms in a way, in limits imposed by family, work, friends, neighbors. The friction here crops up often in the perceived difference between personal responsibilities and imposed responsibilities. In other words, people don’t like being told what to do; they prefer to be able to do it of their own volition.
However. Democracy is not the same as everyone deciding for themselves: that’s anarchy. Democracy is everyone having an equal say in what the decision is.
But wouldn’t it be great if none of those responsibilities existed and we could all run about naked in the woods owing nothing to each other??
Bad faith arguments say that once you start imposing limits on freedom, then there is no stopping point. Once you limit one thing, what’s to stop you from limiting everything? This is the “paradox” of tolerance: you can tolerate everything except intolerance. One quick litmus test though: are your actions harming someone else? If yes, then you are curtailing their freedom to live their lives. If your pursuit of boundless freedom leaves other people with less freedom, then that’s the limit point.
The Powers That Be
This brings us to the people in power. To help simplify life, we elect people to represent our interests in government (or we allow the formulation of organizations tasked with our care and protection). Crucially, these representatives are not outside of the normal structure; rather, they are profoundly a part of it. The representation of your interests does not become some oThEr once it is invested in a person — it’s still your interests, still part and parcel of your live in your society. This means that they — your representatives — are emphatically not outside of the law that governs your actions (and their actions in their non-representative form), and in fact by virtue of the powers invested in them, they are held to even a higher standard.
Think of a concentrate of the powers and limitations of each of the people that they represent coalescing in them. In a way they become an avatar for the people they represent. This is constraining, and rightfully so. They are become the focal point of people’s belief, which is a powerful force.
Most of us have at some time in our lives experienced the feeling of power that comes from having other people believe in us. This is to an extent a hardwired social cue: the more people agree that something is a good idea, the safer it probably is to pursue. Thus, many people believing in us imparts more power than a single person.
I Want To Believe
Additionally, we have wired social cues to believe in people who have gained power. If they have successfully attained power, there’s probably a reason for that, right? That means that we have to be able to hold the circular idea that power imparts belief imparts power, and the implications of that for leaders of society.
One of the implications that I want to highlight is the leaders’ beliefs about the beliefs of the people they represent. Naturally, leaders representing a multitude of people will have to reconcile a multitude of opinions and beliefs if they are to effectively represent everyone. However, our system is currently set up in such a way that if a leader fails to uphold that ideal of fair representation of their constituents, there is no quick or easy vote of no confidence; there is basically only the actual elections. Anything within a term limit is left to the trust in the norm that people will vote in their interests the next time. This however does rely on things like the people being actually able to vote.
The Truths We Avoid
Let’s now circle back to the flaws that we set aside in our glowing portrait of the founding of this country. In the beautiful US of A, any deviation from “the norm” that you may have becomes your primary identity. And, excitingly, this is a really fun way that people outside of “the norm” have been targeted for persecution.
But wait! You may shout. Didn’t I say that the founders were “brave people fleeing persecution? Why yes, yes I did. Strange, that. Who could have guessed that the society of The Scarlet Letter could be intolerant?
One feature that we often take for granted is how predictive our identities — our degrees towards or away from “the norm” — are of our political views. Why should this be the case? If each person were truly free to decide for themselves what kind of society they wish to participate in, it would make sense that demographic distributions within ideologies would be fairly equitable. However, as we all know, this is manifestly not at all the case. Therefore we face the proposal that certain political ideologies must be an anathema to certain demographics and identities.
Personal Reconciliation
The majority of people would say that they’re good people. People don’t generally believe, or like to think, that they’re otherwise.
We also don’t like to be told that we’re wrong about things. We like even less actually being wrong. Then, internalizing that you’re wrong about something takes time and space to acknowledge and more to address it. All too often, we are not afforded this space of development.
Instead, people become so afraid of being wrong (and of not getting that space to reevaluate) that they retrench into their established misbeliefs. This feels to them safer than trying to change — because change is scary — and most likely, everyone around them also has the same misbelief. As social creatures, going against the grain is extremely difficult.
Language As An Out?
Another issue crops up here wherein our language doesn’t often differentiate between terms that are systemic versus those that are personal. Most notably here are the terms “sexist” and “racist”. A singe person can be racist, and the society in which they participate can also be racist. A singe person can not be personally sexist, while still participating in a sexist society.
A person who believes that they are a good person will not see themselves as sexist or racist — those (at least for most of us) don’t fit in with the ideal of a good person. Participating in a system that is sexist or racist also does not make one a good person, so acknowledging that is similarly painful and frankly better off avoided.
Additionally, big systemic problems are much harder to conceptualize than personal problems are. For one, they lie outside of the direct control of any one person. You can’t just go flip the racism switch and turn it off for the whole of society. Two, they typically span much more than we can hold in our minds at one time. They start to close in on the chaos beyond our comfort, beyond the order that we have imposed on our lives.
The Size Problem
That chaos is the big and scary realms of monsters and madness. The whole story of our lives is finding ways to impose order on that madness: we categorize, we organize, we create neat narratives to explain events and to explain what happens after we shrug off this mortal coil. As the world has gotten bigger and more connected, we have had to create additional ways and means to undergird our sanity.
The average person can keep track of a social circle of about 150 people. [Expand on this?] However, many people in online social media circles have exponentially more contacts than that. How can they possibly keep track of all those people? Do they have a superhuman ability?
Maybe. But probably definitely not. One explanation is that they take advantage of categorizing and grouping people. Instead of just your traditional family, coworkers, friends, neighbors, you also have your knitting circle, plant people, fitness gurus, cat ladies, and whoever else. More importantly, though, the quality of interaction takes a massive hit. They aren’t interacting deeply with all 2,000+ of their online friends.
Is the Us-Them Paradigm a Paradox?
People love connecting with other people. Introverts and extroverts might go about it differently, but both do indeed enjoy human contact. And not only with friends and family: research has shown that people are happier after connecting with total strangers.
The Us-Them paradigm places a big fat wedge in that. Something is apparently holding that wedge in place — or multiple somethings — because the natural gravity of humanity’s love for humanity would seem to imply that the natural state would be for no wedge.
$$$
One finger on the wedge scale is money. It has become profitable to sow discord: if you can make one group of people afraid of another, you can sell that fear. It has long been profitable to lie and to act selfishly.
Some people and media companies have found that you can make money by selling people an alternate truth. They find success and profit by keeping the world a divided place using these false truths. They abuse the trust that other people place in them, have imbued them with the power of their belief. Then people don’t want to admit that they were duped, that they were wrong. It’s easier to go on believing the lie that white people are inherently superior than to face the fact that your ancestors, that you yourself, have contributed to — and profited off of — the profound suffering of other people in the service of a lie.
Because the biggest finger on the wedge scale is demographic in-groups, is tribalism, is the fear of The Other, the Us-Them paradigm itself.
Reconciliation in Truth
So, this is the reconciliation that we face. We have to find a common truth that links us across the Us-Them paradigm, that can bring us together in it. If this sounds basically impossible to you, well, you’re not wrong.
Part of the difficulty will stem from the fact that it won’t be a fair and equitable shift of truth. If one side says the Earth is a sphere and the other side says the Earth is flat, the point of common truth isn’t to say that the Earth is a cylinder. Just because there are two sides to the paradigm doesn’t mean that both sides are equally far from the truth. It isn’t a compromise to chop the baby in half. This may not seem fair to those who have to move farther from their chosen haunts of misbelief, but their sense of fairness does not outweigh the needs of the people.
Because make no mistake, there are dire needs at play. These are the needs of everyone — no matter race, sex, gender, religion, whatever — to be able to access their human rights. These are the needs of everyone to be able to live on a planet that isn’t dying.
Further Reading/Listening:
- Mistakenly Seeking Solitude (Abstract)
- Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr
- Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
- Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
- The Happiness Lab podcast
- All My Relations podcast
- Pod Save the People podcast
