Community Matters: The consequences of political division
For all kinds of reasons, I really did not want to write about politics this week.
First, I could not be more burned out on the topic, and I suspect that others are as well. Second, as someone who is intent on drawing people and communities together, I worry that reflecting publicly on political matters will immediately alienate half or more of the people who are kind enough to pick up and read this column. Third, and maybe most important, I do not feel wholly confident in my ability to wrap my mind around the complexity that has come to a head in this most recent presidential race.
Despite my hesitation, we all know that political discussion is nearly impossible to avoid at present. Politics pervades the news, it dominates our social media feeds, and it is likely part of many of our interpersonal relationships. Regardless of which candidate one supports, something about current political events has captivated the passions, fears, suspicions, and hopes of an unusually large number of American citizens.
If politics were an isolated exercise — if, for instance, we talked about politics in the same way we discussed a topic like accounting standards or lawn care — then it might have been easier to avoid the topic in this week’s post. But we all know that is not the case, and that political debate has become the backdrop against which most of us are currently living our collective lives. For good or for ill, there now appears to be few domains to which the reach of politics does not currently extend.
As many of us pretty clearly realize by now, there are numerous reasons why people are concerned about what we are currently living through as a nation. Some are worried that we are becoming too isolated; others fear we are too widely connected beyond our borders. Some believe we are losing individual liberty; others think that we must impose limits on society in service to public health. Some are afraid that we are too radically embracing difference; others lament that we are embracing too little. On and on I could go, with no immediate end in sight.
I remain convinced that the greatest danger America is facing has relatively little to do with explicitly political concerns, and instead has far more to do with how we understand what it means to live in community with one another.
As a nation, we are losing our capacity to communicate productively about contested matters. We are increasingly incapable of managing complexity and nuanced arguments. And, maybe most of all, the vast majority of us appear destined to align ourselves with one or another camp, thereby claiming loyalty to a series of prefabricated “arguments” about how the future should look and what humankind should find valuable.
Most of us are increasingly, and often unknowingly, being used as cogs in a machine. And, sadly, this machine appears to care extraordinarily little about the quality of our life lived in community with others. Far more important to this machine is one’s fidelity to a prepackaged, binary vision of reality, most of which relies upon the maintenance of persistent political division.
Although we regularly speak about public issues through the language of politics, the reach of such concerns extends far beyond matters of policy. Whether we realize it or not, political issues are unavoidably and inescapably community matters. And the way we choose to relate to such political matters has a direct and significant effect on the quality of the communities we inhabit. Though not always immediately evident, as our culture is drawn deeper and deeper into a state of political division and mistrust, the health and robustness of our community life suffers dramatically as a direct result.
The challenge of creating a robust community in our current political climate is not merely derived from the fact that each of us must live in proximity to those with whom we disagree. If prevailing political narratives are to be believed, the challenge is both far deeper and way more intractable than that.
If we are disposed to believe existing caricatures of those from the other party, then we are left needing to create and maintain community life with those who hate what we love, who believe what we know to be false, and who seek to elevate what is in our worst interest. One need not be a trained sociologist or psychiatrist to realize that these are not the conditions upon which a robust community is likely to be built. Consequently, as we argue and maintain division about political issues, we are simultaneously eroding the foundation on which community life has long been constructed.
Community life, when it happens well, often occurs in the margins, in those spaces where few of us are absolutely comfortable, but all of us are welcome. Healthy community life most often happens when we privilege complexity instead of certainty, relationship instead of agreement. Community life takes strongest root when we are willing to rise above rigid arguments about what ought to be the case and content ourselves with contending virtuously with what is the case.
While alignment with a political party might make us feel secure and tidy, it rarely makes room for the other. Most often, radical fidelity to a rigid vision of either political party entails hostility towards those conditions required to generate robust community.
Current political debate defaults to what is most contentious, most dramatic, and least unifying. And, perhaps most of all, our present mode of political discourse imports motive — dark and irredeemably broken motives — upon our views of the other side.
Think with me for a moment about a healthy relationship you have experienced where the goal of the relationship was to create division, to focus relentlessly on contentious issues, and continually to question the motives of the other. I suspect that few of us can lay claim to a healthy relationship characterized by such impulses. Similarly, I suspect that few among us are currently engaged in healthy debate about truly community focused concerns if we are unable to move beyond the prevailing political discourse of the day.
Given some of the matters currently at issue in public life, I wish to be entirely clear. I am not here suggesting that any one of us be asked to look the other way in the face of racism, corruption, lying, cheating, or any other such obvious disregard for civic order. Undoubtedly, many such acts abound in our day. If and whenever they occur, they should be exposed and condemned.
That being said, and despite such states of affairs, I maintain my conviction that a substantial swath of the American electorate harbors genuine and noble motivations for their firmly held beliefs. It is my earnest hope that we can once again speak to and debate such convictions rather than brokering in the kind of overcharged propaganda that has become commonplace in all manner of public life.
If we, as a nation, are to redeem community life in the face of our prevailing political climate, we must learn together a new way of relating to one another. We must once again become capable of holding firmly to our convictions while also elevating the dignity of those with whom we disagree.
Call me dramatic, antiquarian, idealistic, or lofty if you wish, but I increasingly believe that we must relearn what it means to be human, to treat others with honesty and dignity, and to privilege unity over agreement. Failure to reclaim these tools will not only doom our grand political experiment; it will destroy our capacity to maintain robust community life as well.
Daniel Rossi-Keen, PhD, is the co-owner of eQuip Books, a community bookstore on Franklin Avenue in Aliquippa. He is also the executive director of RiverWise, a nonprofit employing sustainable development practices to create a regional identity around the rivers of Beaver County. Rossi-Keen lives in Aliquippa with his wife, Pamela, and his four children. You can reach him at communitymatters@getriverwise.com.
Originally published at https://www.timesonline.com.