Category Archives: Polarization

Reducing Life

Beauty, Extremism, Polarization, Truth and Beauty, Truth Seeking

 

The Irish poet and former Catholic priest, John O’Donohue said, “I always think that contradiction is what makes a person interesting.” This was a bit like Nietzsche, another brilliant philosopher, who said that if you want to make a person interested in you at a party, you should blush or get embarrassed. Now that is interesting. Perfection is dull. As a person who has always been quick to get red, much to my dismay, I can appreciate the wisdom of these words, though in my case it is likely just wishful thinking. Perhaps it was the same with Nietzsche, but I really doubt that.

 

O’Donohue also said, “In the world of the soul, contradiction is the presence which makes the complexity of the person visible in some way.”

 

O’Donohue says “one of the problems with our western thought patterns and models is that we have been very unfair to contradiction. We constantly want to reduce the complexity of contradiction to one of its sides or dimensions.” This is what polarization is all about in modern society.  Polarization banishes complexity.

 

This is where O’Donohue drags us back to the problems of polarization, without mentioning that nasty word. He says complexity is a good. A fundamental good. Concentrating on only one side, like left or right, good or bad, life or death, is to suck the blood out of life. I have always thought it sucked the blood out of truth, but now I must consider does it also do that to life?

 

O’Donoghue pointed this out, “In a certain sense what western thought has dreamed of, and its rationalism has tried to create, is a kind of one-dimensional kind of painting.” That of course is a pretty thin life, or art. Picasso was the first person to really drive this idea home. It was the basis of his Cubism. He wanted life as a cube not a square.   He actively sought the complex and was repelled by the simple. That of course is a difficult thing to achieve on a canvas with paint, but he manfully worked at it.

 

O’Donohue went on:

 

“If we agree that in our personalities and in our presence, the shoreline of a great immensity, we are just the stencil line, the external visage of an incredible eternal interiority, then naturally there will be many dimensions of us coming awake at the same time. And if we decide that contradiction is undesirable and has to be either hammered out or rooted out or flattened then we will do immense damage to the mystery of our own inner landscape.”

 

I know this is a bit hard to grasp, but I think the effort it worth it.

Aristotle was not the only Greek philosopher who considered the idea of contradiction. Parmenides also has things to say about contradiction. He said that “something cannot be and not be.”  No doubt this comes from Aristotle too. In saying this he had an inner kind of criterion of truth, according to O’Donoghue. Something that has inner contradictions then cannot actually be. This of course is what Aristotle said. He said A is A and not A is not A. sounds simple. But is it?  Ayn Rand the American author and ultra-right-wing provocateur, long before the time of the neo-liberals made this the theoretical basis of her philosophy. But she like things to be simple. A is A.

 

In the world of A is A, complexity is banished. And with it goes a lot of truth. And beauty too.

John O’Donohue: The importance of Contradictions

Extremism, Philosophy/Ideas, Polarization

 

Will Braun asked Christiane and I to consider the poetry of John O’Donohue when he was teaching us to dissolve the extremes. I loved the poetry and his glorious voice, but it took me awhile to figure out this fit into the concept of polarizations and how to neutralize them. He did not spell it out for us. He mainly sent a link to a glorious interview with him and some even better poetry.

 

John O’Donohue was a brilliant Irish poet and modern-day mystic. Please note O’Donohue also does not see awakening of life as a bad thing. He does not use the word “awakening” as a pejorative.  It is a good thing. To be awake, or to come out of a slumber is blessed. It is good to be alert. There is a time and place for sleep, but to deal with important ethical questions, for example, being asleep is not an advantage. This is contrary to MAGA right who have been adamant—and not just adamant, but fanatical—about the evils of wokeness.

 

Donald Trump has even tried to make it contrary to law. American Universities are now required to renounce wokeness in order to get millions of dollars in federal grants. Needless to say, they are all scrambling to get as far away from woke as they can possibly get and as fast as possible.

 

John O’Donohue took a different approach which was founded by an unusual idea.

 

O’Donohue thought contradictions were important and could be very useful. He said this:

 

 “Part of the awakening of any life, is the arrival of contradiction within that life. There is no sense of the other deep sides of ourselves. One of the sad aspects of the modern exploration of the self, is that it lacks all irony, that smile at us as we explore the miniscule explorations. It is sometimes in the most unusual places that you discover the gift of the beautiful.”

 

Contradiction is “a precious arrival” he says. That is counter intuitive, at least to me, a student of Aristotle who found non-contradiction as the philosophical foundation of the rational life.  If you arrived at a contradiction, Aristotle asserted, you have arrived at a falsehood.

 

But O’Donoghue said “we have demonized negativity, paradox and contradiction”. In this way we have removed irony from our lives at great personal cost. He felt that did not expand life, it  reduced life.

 

It took me a while to figure out how this related to extremism?  It is impossible to be extreme when you admit the opposite of your position—i.e. the contradiction—is part of the good.

 

To embrace contradictions you must give up the extremes!

 

Looking down on Others

Moral Humility, Polarization

 

In our CMU course with Will Braun, he said that in the spirit of expanding our capacity to see a wide range of people as the beloved of God, he asked us this question: “Have we ever enjoyed looking down on others?”   This question bit. Thankfully I could not remember a specific occasion but I had to admit to myself I probably had done that. Not one of my finer moments. People who can do that, Braun suggested were “confident in their own righteousness.”  That is what enables us to look down on others. Again, I must admit I have done that too. My bad.

Shamefully, I must acknowledge I have felt that satisfaction. But thanks to Will Braun, I won’t ever again have that easy confidence in my own righteousness. I am sure I will still have too much of it, but at least, I hope, a little less than I would have had before.  I will have to back off a bit. I will have to keep my hubris in check and release my humility instead. I hope I can do it.  Not sure I can.

 

Are The Democrats as bad as the Republicans?

Extremism, Polarization

 

Democrats recently have been demonstrating that in many ways they are just as bad as the Republicans. This should hardly be surprising. Tribalism runs deep, particularly in the USA.

 

In the US the Democratic party has found itself in a moral quandary.  As we all know they want to win the upcoming mid-term elections badly. To do that most commentators believe they have to win the Senate race in Maine to defeat the Republican Lisa Collins the incumbent who is seeking a 6th term. Her seat is considered shaky because Democrats were strong in Maine.

 

At least until recently, the leader in the race to gain the primary in Maine was harbor master Graham Platner who has more than a chequered record. Apparently he has a Nazi tattoo. He has faced a lot of claims of sexual harassment and now even an accusation of rape.  Platner was leading in the race with 72% support until after a long delay he was forced by the party elite and others to withdraw.  Until then the Democrats had a choice to support a much less than ideal candidate or lose the election to Collins   Many Democrats were showing they were fully prepared to hold their noses and vote for Platner despite their long history of virtue signalling.

 

In November 2017, during his election campaign for U.S. Senate in Alabama as a Republican several public allegations of sexual misconduct were made against Roy Moore. 3 women stated that he sexually assaulted them when they were aged 14, 16, and 28. 6 other women reported that when he was in his thirties, he pursued sexual relations with them even though some were as young as 16. He denied assaulting them but acknowledged he had approached them.  None of this was sufficient to stop Donald Trump from endorsing him and that encouraged some Republicans to endorse him as well, but fortunately he lost the election to a Democrat. Democrats of course were quick to mock Republicans for their deplorable behaviour.

 

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Many Democrats were making it clear that they were quite prepared to ditch their morality in the hopes of defeating Collins but the damage to the Democrats’ reputations   has been done. They have demonstrated clearly that they are not much better in this respect than Republicans.

 

On both sides, this is how tribalism works and it stinks to high heaven. Tribalism is the mother of extremism.

 

 

 

Even Hitler was Loved by his Mother

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

 

Mark Edmonson pointed out in a New York Times articles something that is actually quite obvious. He said, “Our culture is amok with binaries.” I have called it ‘My way or the highway’ thinking. This is particularly true in politics but this attitude has seeped into many aspects of modern life. For example, in can still be seen among some religious communities where each thinks they have a monopoly on truth and the “other religions” wallow in ignorance.  Sadly, many Mennonites think that way, though not as many as before.  There is some improvement. For example, my teacher Will Braun, did not think that way. He always worked hard to avoid such binary thinking. He was a Christian but admitted that there is truth to be found in other religions.

 

Sports is one field where binaries still rule and the glaring ugliness of it can be seen there.  At hockey games or football games as soon as the referee makes a call adverse to “our side”, we tend to leap up in with venomous disgust. We can’t stand it.  I have even seen parents jumping and screaming at very young refs of games in which their children are participating. It is ugly enough to tarnish the sport.

 

And really, we must admit that these games and these perceived injustices are really pretty insignificant. Why do I love the North Carolina Tar Heels and hate the Duke Blue Devils? They are both great basketball teams and live about 7 miles apart in North Carolina. But there is a lot of hatred between those teams, and sadly, not all of it is good natured. Some of it is vile and really the differences between the two sides are puny.

 

This is what Freud called the “the narcissism of minor differences.”  And their sole purpose is to keep insignificant binaries alive. Yet, even though I know this is true, when I watch the next basketball game between Duke and North Carolina is will be dying every time Duke makes an unlikely basket or North Carolina misses an easy shot. These small differences to me are very important. My bad.

 

We should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour.

 

Will Braun’s attitude which he got from his interpretation of the Bible was that we are all God’s children.  My wife Christiane says something similar, also wisely, “Even Hitler was loved by his mother.”

 

 

Why do we hate so much?

Polarization

 

Will Braun who taught the course that Christiane and I took at Canadian Mennonite University 2 years ago said that “we are all God’s Children.”  He is a Christian and to him that is a fundamental principle. God loves all of us. Not just the Christians who go to church. Not just Christians. He also loves Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and people who don’t love him back or even believe he exists. I suspect a lot of modern Christians don’t agree with Braun. I find it easier to believe that many of them hate Muslims for example. At least that is what their actions suggest. They don’t even treat Muslims with respect let alone love. Some claim to love them but I just don’t believe them because their words and actions suggest otherwise.

 

In fact, it seems to me many Americans hate Muslims. Many hate Jews or blacks or indigenous people. Again, they might claim to love them, but to me it seems more likely that they hate them. Perhaps even more obviously, many Americans hate Democrats. And Many Americans hate Republicans.  They hate them because they are on the “other side”.  And they can’t stand the other side in many cultural disputes. They hate gays or lesbians, or heterosexuals. They hate whites or blacks. They hate, often with surprising viciousness, those on the other side of their important cultural and political debates.

 

About a year ago or so, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was loved on the right, but not so much on the left.  In fact, it seemed if the right loved him the left would have to hate him. He was immediately attacked on the left and defended on the right. People took sides. And those sides were sacred. No one gives up on what they think is sacred.  At least it is very difficult, if it is not impossible.

 

Some have called this “binary thinking.”  Mark Edmundson said this in an article in the New York Times: “Look around: Binary thinking (often informing binary rage) is everywhere in our country.”

 

One person who resisted binary thinking was Van Jones an occasional commentator on CNN. This is what he said about Kirk: “I was very frustrated with people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.” According to Edmundson, “Mr. Kirk was on the other team, and in binary-thinking America, that meant he was a foe.”

 

I think he was right. Not all teams work that way, but increasingly political teams do. You are almost required to hate the other team to stay on your team. You risk shunning if you don’t hate enough. Religious groups used to work that way too, but thankfully, many of them are moving in the other direction.

 

At Charlie Kirk’s funeral service his widow said, demonstrating Christian principles in action, that she did not hate the man who killed her husband. She said she forgave him. That is uncommon. Donald Trump was very different. This is what Trump said,

 

“Mr. Kirk did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”

 

Kirk and his wife were followers of Trump, but they did not follow him down this path. When leaders do the wrong thing we should not follow them. That is unusual in modern politics, particularly politics that are as polarized as American politics, and increasingly, Canadian politics which is going down the same path as Trump, not Kirk.

 

I recently attended a conference that was attended by many religious people of various religions and they all got along  respectfully. It was great to see. Pluralism in action. This is a big improvement over the “good old days”, that were really not always so good. I hope we don’t start back-sliding. Extremism is really not often attractive. Often its ugly. Just watch Trump. Or the extremists on the left for that matter.

There is a better way.

Blame and Divide

Polarization, Right-wing Extremism

 

As Jen Senko the producer of the film The Brainwashing of my Dad, said in that film:

 

“The goal is to get people so mad at each other that, (a) they don’t notice who is really causing their problem and (b) they won’t join together to oust the truly guilty parties and (c) they are then capable of feeling nothing towards the group that’s blamed.”

 

Much earlier, back in the sixties Bob Haldeman, Chief of Staff to Richard Nixon went on the Today Show and said, “all politics is the politics of division.”  That may be an overstatement but it sure has a strong dash of truth to it. Haldeman was shrewd.

 

It is a brilliant strategy and American companies with their professional advisors, including, media firms, lawyers, public relations firms, and others have proved adept at using this strategy over and over again. It has been astoundingly successful. Many liberals in America were unable to understand how Americans could vote for Trump who seemed to manifestly unqualified for the job of the presidency.  The liberals failed to understand how the strategy of blame and divide worked.

 

Rick Perlstein summed it up well: “The team that manages to divide the country and ends up with the bigger side wins.”

 

Senko’s father who was originally a liberal, and a “nice guy”, soaked up right wing propaganda for many years and concluded that American people, particularly of course, black Americans, were getting so much on the dole and social assistance that they were no longer interested in working. It didn’t matter that this was simply not true. It didn’t even matter that this was absurd. It could rile their side and divide them from their foes.

 

Manitoba learned this in the 1970s with their experiments with a guaranteed basic income in Dauphin under the Schreyer government. That study found that most people kept working except people like single moms who took the opportunity to improve their circumstances and get better job. Not no jobs as Conservatives constantly and wrongly allege.

 

As Bill O’Reilly said on Fox, “one side, president Obama and the Democratic Party want America to become an entitlement state versus a self-reliant one.” That of course is a convenient point of view for American business interests who don’t want to pay taxes for government programs to help needy people.  Because of the divide and blame tactics practiced so well by American conservatives, people who are poor, such as Senko’s dad, uncritically accept such claims as that made by O’Reilly and his cronies.

 

Please note I do not say liberals never use such tactics.  I just say the right proved very adept at using them.

 

John Williams, a professor of Sociology said this is in the film: “With African Americans the assumption is that we’re all on welfare and that we can’t get there without taking from somebody else, and that’s simply not true.” So white American working men and women are taught to hate African American workers. This strategy of painting African Americans as lazy people who don’t really want to work and prefer being on welfare has been very effective at convincing Americans that they are out to game the system. The strategy has been so effective that people like Senko’s father won’t vote for Democrats who would bring in Obama care, even if it would greatly benefit themselves, because they just don’t want black welfare queens to get the benefits too.

 

Instead of looking at the facts, Americans prefer to believe lies on Fox News such as that of Bill O’Reilly and Stuart Varney from Fox News who tells them that “welfare is very, very, generous.” Or Bill Reilly again who said, “you are not motivated to succeed because you are getting free stuff from the government. You are surrounded by goodies that are put onto you.”

 

Senkow’s father bought this line—hook, line and sinker. This is what he told her,

 

“As long as the government is supplying him the money that he needs to live on, he’s not interested in getting a job so he’ll go on year after year on the government dole and not bother getting a job.”

 

This ignores the fact that in America, as in Canada, people’s self-esteemed is based on their jobs, not on the dole they receive. I don’t believe people would take the dole and lose their self-esteem. They take the dole because they need it.

 

Blame and Divide Works! That’s why politicians do it.

 

There is a lot of hate out there

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

At least one thing is clear in this topsy-turvy insecure world. That is that there is a lot of hate out there. Really there is more than enough to feed a dozen worlds.

 

This is how Mark Edmondson put in the New York Times awhile back:

 

“I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate ’em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants. People hate the media. They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president. There is love out there to be sure — for Beyoncé, for Pedro Pascal and, yes, even for this president, but hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me.”

 

 

I am a college basketball fan. I prefer it to professional basketball. My favorite teams are the University of Manitoba Bisons and North Carolina Tarheels. In North Carolina they take their basketball very seriously. The fans basically get insane about their times and even more their rivals. The hated rival of North Carolina is Duke University only 8 miles away. Those teams, and particularly their fans, hate each other with extreme passion. I remember once on a trip through the deep south of the US, in North Carolina where both of those Universities are located and we stopped somewhere and I started chatting with a woman who was a rabid basketball fan. Like me she was a Tarheels fan. I mentioned to her that it was too bad North Carolina had bad season last year. She was outraged at this comment. How could I say that?  It was true that by their standards they had not won many games, but they had beat Duke. Nothing else mattered. It was a great season because of that one win.  Her fandom was defined by her hatred of Duke.

 

Edmondson mentioned something similar in his article:

 

“One may define oneself — one may define the self — through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I hate the church. I hate my school. I hate my parents, hate the administration, hate the president, hate the fascists, hate the communists. And maybe you begin to hate the Red Sox, too. I know any number of people who define themselves at least in part by hating a sports team. Take a bow, Duke University basketball.

Suddenly, you have stabilized the self. Do you want to be somebody? Well, now you are. You are the person with a stunning palette of hatreds. You don’t need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear, and you become Someone, with all of whose energies flowing in the same direction.”

 

 

Rene Descartes a famous French philosopher wanted to find certainty in the world.  That was tough to do.  He had an interesting way of doing it. He decided he would not take anything for granted. He would doubt absolutely everything he possibly could.  The one thing he found that really must be true and could not be doubted was that he existed.  Even if a malicious super-being was trying to fool him he must exist because he was being fooled. He was thinking, so he existed.   As a result, he concluded, I think therefore I am.

 

Edmundson suggested that perhaps there was something just as certain in the modern age and that was that hate existed. I Hate, therefor I am.

All if know is that I don’t want to be such a person. I don’t want to be defined by hate. Even hatred of Duke. Or Trumpism. There is much more to life than that.