Differences

A friend of ours who is an author came to visit us last week. She is working on a book about how to bridge the current political divide in our country; how to get people from the two sides to talk to each other, and even more important, to listen to each other – a worthwhile endeavor. Our discussion got me to thinking about this issue.  

Our positions on issues – social, political, religious, etc – are shaped entirely by our world view, what our parents and peers have told us (either explicitly or unconsciously thorough body language and tone of voice and expressions), what our schools and churches or temples or mosques have taught us, and what our personal experiences have been. Within that bubble of our own individual world view, whatever views we hold on issues are obviously correct, perhaps even self-evident. How could they be otherwise?

For example, if someone is raised in a strict conservative Christian family, lectured to for years on conservative Christian dogma by authority figures like parents or pastors or priests, surrounded by a community of peers who devoutly believe the same Christian doctrine drummed into them since they were infants, OF COURSE they will believe abortion and homosexuality are terrible sins. How could they believe otherwise? If we had had the same life experiences we too would believe that.

For example, if someone is raised male in a Islamic Middle Eastern culture, is uneducated with no hope whatever of ever getting a job or a wife, living in grinding poverty, and a charismatic leader comes along and offers us a meaningful, honored, religiously-approved task that will take us directly to paradise and out of our current meaningless miserable life, IT’S NO WONDER he (it’s almost always a he) would volunteer to be a suicide bomber. Under similar life experience we too might well volunteer.

To take an example closer to home, if we were a 50-some year old working class machinist in, say, Detroit, whose job disappeared when it was outsourced overseas and who has watched the equity in his mortgaged house go negative in the same market crash that left Wall Street bankers with multi-million dollar bonuses, paid for by the taxpayer bailout, and who heard himself derided as a “deplorable” or suffering from “white privilege” by a rich Democratic candidate, I can well understand how he might vote for Trump (or at least against Clinton). In the same situation we too might have voted the same way.

The core of this is to realize that people who hold views different than our own, even ridiculous or outrageous views (from our own point of view) see those views from inside their world view and life experiences as perfectly reasonable, and may see our own views as naïve, if not equally outrageous.

It’s back to assumptions, of course. But the important thing to remember is that people’s assumptions are based on what they were taught and what their life experiences have taught them, and that is to be respected. It doesn’t mean one has to agree with them, but one has to acknowledge that their views don’t come from stupidity, or from some evil force or malignant state of mind – they come from the authentic life experiences of that other person, and if we ourselves had had the same life experiences we would almost certainly believe as they do.

Let me re-recommend Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Here is a liberal academic who has recognized this fact, and worked hard to try to understand the world view of people on the other side of the divide.  Joan Williams in her 2016 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America does much the same thing.

We need an equivalent book from a conservative trying to understand – understand, not judge -  the liberal world view, but I haven’t seen it yet.

The point is we need to get out of this endless hammering of people with other views and come to recognize that people will have differing views based on differing life experiences, and just because someone has a different view doesn’t mean they are stupid or sexist or racist or inherently evil – they are just different, and vive la difference – it is what makes our nation interesting and vital and healthy.