The Left, the Right. Black and White.
Dividing everything into neat categories is what we humans do. It makes things simple and thus easier to process. Especially if we can boil things down to only two categories.
Black and White, Red and Blue, Left and Right.
Deep down, we know that the world is more complex than our categories betray. But for pragmatic reasons, they are what we use to describe the world.
They help us to navigate complex issues, such as the question of whom to vote for. But then they also tend to get entangled with other, less innocent categories.
Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Us and Them.
These categories concern moral judgements. They evoke either positive or negative emotions, attraction or repulsion. And when they get entangled with more neutral, descriptive categories, their moral nature starts to colour the latter.
Take politics for example. Traditionally, we think of there being the Left and the Right, based on their respective focuses on certain issues, certain strategies to government, etc. That sounds innocent enough.
The problem begins when the definitions of these categories get too closely intertwined with a limited set of moral issues. For example, in some places today, the rhetoric implies that one can simply divide the Left from the Right based on their stance towards abortion.
The net effect of such a narrow definition of the Left and Right is that we then easily extend our moral judgement on abortion to a judgement of the people in the respective political camps themselves. Thus, we judge people on the Left and the Right to be either Good and Noble, or Bad and Evil, simply because of what we think their view on abortion is, regardless of what else they believe and do.
And the same logic applies to a number of other issues, such as refugees, taxes, health care and climate. The Left and Right today seem to have become complete take-it-or-leave-it package deals.
And so our societies polarize, and we become less and less able to find common ground with each other. We are reduced to seeking exclusive power for ourselves in order to impose our agenda on the rest of society, because we have come to judge the other side as irredeemably Wrong.
How can we escape this quagmire?
A huge part of the problem is that we are often so far removed from people in “the other group” that it is easy to judge them and to see them in Black and White terms. Our social media reinforce this phenomenon, by employing algorithms that seek to serve us content we are sure to like. They imprison us in an echo chamber in which we are fed our own opinions over and over again.
The antidote is as simple as it is hard: we need to break out of our isolation to meet and listen to people on the “other side”. Meeting people that we think of as our direct opposite generally has a tendency to break our categories, and helps us think in more nuanced ways — if we are willing to truly listen and go beyond the prejudices that is.
Once, a progressive friend of mine told the story of how she had randomly met an American couple in a restaurant the night before. They started talking and my friend noted how nice she thought they were, until somehow the topic of Trump came up. They turned out to be strong supporters. My friend was flabbergasted: how could such nice people support Trump?
Likely, the surprise was mutual.
I myself make a point of keeping both influential voices from the Left and the Right on my Facebook feed, to help me develop a nuanced opinion and to keep myself from the simplistic judging I know I easily fall into.
Although such encounters with the other can be deeply frustrating — and they often are for me — they do provide a crucial counterweight for our tendency to reduce people to neat categories. And they have the potential to highlight the other’s humanity, as we might for a brief moment see the world from their perspective.
In the end, we can vote Left or Right if we decide that on the balance the one or the other better represents what we care about. But let’s not assume that somebody else’s association with the Left or the Right is somehow immediately revealing of their moral stature. And let’s also not be morally lazy and allow the Left or the Right to determine for us what we should care about in the first place.
As a Christian — and here we have another category that has become so entangled with other issues that I’m afraid to use it — as a Christian, I try to let Jesus inform my moral reasoning, and this moral reasoning then determines who I vote for, not the other way around.
While Jesus often gets co-opted by one side or the other, this is often no more than a way to give an agenda the veneer of legitimacy, a way to enshrine the Black and White, Red and Blue, Left and Right.
