My
Uncle Richard did not need to die prematurely. He was a victim of the
most relentless killer the world has ever known: Us and Them. This
assassin can slay victims in countless ways. In my uncle’s case, it
looked like either a stroke or medical malpractice. But it really was Us
and Them.
Richard had left our Appalachian family farm at the tag
end of the Great Depression. He moved to a big city in New York, got a
job with a rising company, and soon he became management. He made a
bundle, joined a country club, had a good life, but got burned out. When
I was about ten years old, he decided to take early retirement and move
back home to the farm. He wanted out of the city, out of the rat race,
and back to nature. Soon after he returned, he went to our local small
town doctor for a physical exam. He felt fine. But the doctor told him
that he needed immediately to stop taking a medication that his family
physician in New York had prescribed. Uncle Richard derisively ignored
the advice. His New York doctor was an old friend—a member of the
country club in fact—while the small town doctor was a refugee from the
Soviet Union. This was during the Cold War, when most Americans imagined
that nothing in the Soviet Union could possibly be up to American
standards, and certainly not medical training. The last time I ever saw
my Uncle, he was fuming about the “damned Russkie.” “Can you imagine the
nerve of that damned Russkie, thinking he knows more than my doctor?”
Two weeks later Uncle Richard was dead. The coroner’s report made it clear: he should have listened to the Russkie.
My
uncle was not particularly stubborn or foolish. He was just being
human. We humans are by nature social creatures, even the most
introverted of us, and we tend to trust and follow the thinking of the
groups with which we identify. Some of these groups are small and
select, like the country club or the gals we meet at the bar every
Wednesday night. Others groups are bigger but still rather specific,
like Orlando Magic fans or the members of the ACLU. Still others are
larger yet, “imagined communities” like America or Great Britain. Others
are transnational, like Christianity or Islam (also imagined
communities). Our groups define “us” and exert powerful influence on how
we think, even how we feel, and how we behave in society.
By
definition, of course, every group creates “Them”— they are all the ones
who are not in our group. They may not be hostile to us; we may be
peacefully disposed to them. In that case we will be friendly when we
meet them; heck, we may even invite them to sit at the table with us or
join us at the bar. We may even actively seek to recruit them, to
convert them into “us.”
But most groups have some set of
outsiders—some particular slice of the vast population that is “them”
–that serves a very special symbolic function in their cosmos. These are
members of other groups that believe things or advocate things that our
group opposes. They are the enemy.
Many groups, in fact, are
formed specifically in opposition to some other group, and thus are
defined precisely by their competition or conflict with “Them.” In this
case, between “us” and “them” there can be nothing but implacable
hostility.
Conflict, often low level, but sometimes violent, is
endemic to human social life. It is built into the sociology of groups.
“Us and Them” cannot be totally eradicated without eliminating human
social groups altogether. Although conflicting social groups need not be
bitterly oppositional, they often become so. And when they are in clear
opposition, they do not necessarily turn violent, yet the violence
springs up all too easily.
We all know this. Those who have taken
courses in sociology or political science have studied it in school.
Others only need to watch TV for ten minutes or reflect thoughtfully
upon their personal experiences.
We take “us and them” for granted
and fail to reflect upon the terrible political implications for
everybody when groups are not playing nice together. Throughout history,
political elites have manipulated social groups to achieve and maintain
power. Turning “us against them” has sadly been a primary tactic
employed by rulers or would be rulers since the dawn of history. Near
the start of Europe’s colonial age, colonizers constructed “us and them”
categories called races that have become a terrible permanent part of
human culture. Throughout the industrial era, factory owners have pitted
“us against them” to divide workers so that they would not organize
unions. And in the last two generations Republicans have masterfully
used wedge politics-- pitting us against them -- to gain and keep power
and to implement policies that a clear majority of the populace
dislikes, but apparently cannot find any effective way to change.
We
cannot reverse corrupt policies that benefit only a powerful few
because our society is fragmented into rival competing groups of us and
them. Too many of us care more about the beliefs and agendas of our
particular group than the common threats to all groups. To be sure, we
are likely to say (and probably even believe) that our primary loyalty
is to humanity; that our group is not exclusive; that WE are trying to
make the world better for everybody dammit but we cannot because of
THEM. But the truth is, when we actually confront the difficult task of
finding common ground between us and them, we tend to throw in the towel
rather quickly. Sometimes it just seems easier to fight “them” than try
to break through our differences in order to build a more democratic
and humane political system for everybody. Perhaps some of us even fear
that if we sit down at the table to make peace with “them,” the very
reason for our group’s existence will dissolve and we would no longer
know who we are.
That a mere 400 individuals in this
constitutional republic could possess as much wealth as 150,000,000
fellow citizens, and that the government would protect their right to
keep it, would be unimaginable in any other context. Our fragmentation
is an almost insurmountable barrier to effective political action that
would move us toward a significantly more democratic reality. There are
so many different contending groups—so many different varieties of us
and them—that forging a cohesive majority seems all but a hopeless pipe
dream.
Although we live in an irreducibly pluralistic world, we
have yet to learn how to function as a pluralistic democracy. Sadly,
even those of us who belong to groups that are pledged to tolerance and
inclusiveness can drop the ball as readily as those who are
self-consciously exclusive. Many commentators of various ideological
stripes have lately been sounding the alarm about the apparent erosion
of civil discourse in our society, about the toxic negativity of our
media and our elections. The level of social polarization -- and the
shrillness of our rhetorical warfare -- seems to be escalating. We all
feel it. Many of us worry about it. Most of us say that we want it to
stop. But too often we ourselves contribute to it--including me.
To
restore civil discourse and bring down the level of polarization, we
need to learn new ways of relating together as us and them. If we want
to preserve any vestige of democracy, we will need a fast learning
curve.
I recently posted an article suggesting that secular
progressives hurt the cause of progressive social change by stereotyping
religious believers and using needlessly offensive language when they
write about “them.” I knew that I was challenging perhaps the most
volatile example of the “us and them” dynamic (and the one that
Republicans have exploited most profitably), so I fully expected the
kind of response that the article elicited. I received many grateful
emails from other readers who shared at least part of my point of view,
but of course I also drew many negative criticisms.
Using the
comment thread as a primary source document -- evidence of where our
society stands at this moment in history—is sadly instructive. It
demonstrates that people who belong to groups that are committed to
rational analysis and social tolerance are nonetheless capable of
verbally abusing others in language that can reasonably be defined as
bullying or even “hate speech” when they imagine that they are
addressing some hated “them” and when they are shielded by the cloak of
anonymity.
But the Web by its very nature is public, global, and
open to all of the countless social groups in the world (unless our
corporate elite manage to gain control of the Web too). Unless you have
privacy filters in place (which would defeat the whole purpose of a
political site like AlterNet), even a website that is owned by your “own
kind” and dedicated to your own agenda will still be accessed by people
who are “them.” Others will check you out and what they find on your
site will influence their opinion of the cause that is so dear to your
heart. What you post on the Web, and the language that you employ, has
inescapable political consequences. This is true not only of bloggers
and writers who publicly sign their names, but equally the case with the
countless nameless folk who contribute comments.
In Atheism: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), Julian Baggini makes this very
pertinent point. “I am not convinced,” Baggini writes,
that a strong case can be made that religion is essentially and especially harmful. Nor do I
believe that a firm belief in the falsity of religion is enough to justify militant opposition to it.
At root . . . my opposition to militant atheism is based on a commitment to the very values
that
I think inspire atheism: an open-minded commitment to the truth and
rational enquiry. These are rightly called values because they express
not only claims about what is true but about what we feel to be most
important. Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with a
dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is . . .
antithetical to such values. Reason and argument are not just tools to
be used to win over converts. They are processes that need to be engaged
with, and to engage in them with other people one needs to be open to
their alternative viewpoints.
Baggini concludes with the
warning that reason and argument cannot be engaged properly “if they are
seen as battering rams to destroy the edifice of religious belief.” (p.
106)
There are too many battering rams in the blogosphere. I am
not pointing my finger at every militant Atheist. I am not pointing my
finger at every Progressive. I am certainly not denying that “they”
(whoever they may be) are also guilty. But given the commitment to
democracy that progressives typically profess, it is disappointing that
we do not do a better job at keeping our discourse civil.
A couple
of years ago I was teaching a college class on American Democracy. I
sent my students to various political sites, including AlterNet, to get a
range of viewpoints on the issues that we were discussing in class. I
encouraged my students to share their own opinions online, to leave
comments on any articles that hit a chord. One of my students, an
eighteen year old from a small Nebraska town who was raised in the
Catholic Church and a member of the Catholic student group on campus,
responded to a post on AlterNet. The particulars of the article and the
nature of her views are not relevant; her comment was thoughtful, polite
and (unlike many thread comments) actually focused on an important
point raised by the original article. Although I did not share her
opinion, I thought that she had successfully raised legitimate
questions, and of course I believe that she was engaging in a process
that is fundamental to democracy.
In response to her thoughtful
comment, she received a stream of terribly hurtful messages, including
“Catholics can fuck themselves.” In any moral universe, this is not
rational discourse. It is simply intolerant meanness. To try to justify
it by an appeal to freedom of speech is absurd. I am a member of the
ACLU, and I will defend to my last breath the right of a fool to speak
foolish things, just as the ACLU has defended the right of the Klan to
spout hatred. But let’s not kid ourselves. It IS hatred, it is not
moral, and I repeat my caution that such remarks do indeed harm the
cause of progressive social change.
What kind of democracy do we
who call ourselves “progressives” imagine? We know that we are a diverse
constellation of groups (and we also know that many of our fellow
citizens would never call themselves progressives at all). Some of us
are especially committed to racial justice, and others more deeply
involved in the struggle for gender equality. Some of us exhaust
ourselves in the fight for a cleaner environment, and others are more
involved with LGBT issues. Nobody has the time and energy to be deeply
invested in everything, and we each choose our own place to fight. The
only common denominator is that all of us are in some sense dissenters
from the current power system, and we dare to imagine that our world
could be more peaceful, more just, and healthier if we could change the
system.
But change it to what? Have we really dared to imagine
what a new system would look like, or are we so intently focused on the
advancement of our particular agendas that we do not have time or
inclination to ask fundamental questions?
The fundamental
questions need to be raised, because what we imagine—no matter how
inchoate it may be—influences the way that we act and the choices that
we make every day. Nothing is more immediately practical and political
than imagination.
What sort of society do we imagine? Have you
ever wondered what we might do if we ever managed to get enough votes to
control the White House, the Senate and the House, change the Supreme
Court and keep power long enough to implement fundamental changes? Do we
even have the foggiest notion what sort of society we could
realistically expect to create?
Here is part of my imagined
progressive future: a community of communities. I have to confess that I
did not come up with this myself. The term was suggested to me by Diane
Eck, a marvelous scholar of religion at Harvard who has written much
about the nature of religious pluralism and democracy. If readers are
not familiar with Eck’s work, I urge them to run (not walk) to their
library or bookstore and get reading. In her beautiful meditation
entitled Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras
(Beacon Press, 1993), Eck writes the following:
“In developing a
sense of we that is wider than the we of culture, religion or clan, it
will be important to have an image of what kind of human relatedness we
wish to bring into being. People of each religious tradition have dreams
of what the world should ideally be and how we should all be related to
one another even though we are not all the same. Glimpsing one
another’s dreams is an important step in beginning to reimagine the we.
Do we imagine ourselves to be separate but equal communities, concerned
primarily with guarding one another’s rights in a purely civic
construction of relatedness? Do we imagine ourselves to be related as
parts of an extended family, or as many families of faith? Do we imagine
ourselves to be religious communities competing in goodness and in
righteousness, as the Qur’an puts it? Imagining a we does not mean
leaving our separate communities behind, but finding increasingly
generative ways of living together as a community of communities. To do
this, we all must imagine together who we are.”
To imagine
together who we are will require us to loosen the boundaries between Us
and Them, to take seriously the need to move past diatribes and to
engage in genuine dialogue with people who are truly different from us
and who are not about to relinquish their convictions simply because we
wish they would. After two thousand years of evangelism, Christians have
still not converted the entire world to faith in Jesus, and they are
probably not going to do so in another two thousand. And Atheism, which
has been around longer than Christianity, is not likely going to win the
world over either. But Christians and Atheists, along with members of
many, many other social groups, must have confidence that we will
welcome them and fight to protect their secure place in the community of
communities that would constitute any authentically democratic we.
Is
genuine dialogue between groups with deeply opposed beliefs possible
and can some sort of common ground come out of such dialogue? Yes and
yes, but not easily. Anthropologist Jack David Eller, who is an Atheist,
has written the most comprehensive study of religious violence yet
published: Cruel Deeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence across
Culture and History (Prometheus, 2010). Like Baggini, Eller rejects as
“ultimately unhelpful” the proposed eradication of religious belief:
“Religion is nowhere near disappearing in the modern world, and attacks
on it only tend to strengthen and mobilize it.” Despite their
philosophical differences Eller suggests a future that is remarkably
similar to Methodist Diane Eck’s, one in which the presence of many
groups with conflicting worldviews is respected and people work
cooperatively to minimize the “group effect” by intentionally seeking to
establish more “porous” boundaries between “Us and Them.” It is crucial
that members of every group come to see that what we hold in common is
far more vital than what differentiates us. Warring groups who have
caused each other pain will especially have a difficult time learning to
“rehumanize” each other.
Reconciliation and Trust will not be achieved
without much effort, struggle and mutual commitment to one another.
Ironically, perhaps, Eller the atheist admits that promoting such an
enlarged vision “is something that religion can do better than any other
human thought system.” (p. 363)
We have a lot of rehumanizing to
do. There are powerful political and economic interests that want to
keep us fragmented and at one another’s throats rather than working
together to establish a more inclusive democracy. They will do all they
can to stir continued discord between groups and to use wedge politics
to defeat our aspirations for meaningful change. Can progressives of all
persuasions, no matter what our primary interest groups may be, at
least agree that we will stop doing their job for them?
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