Calls for unity and healing have become increasingly common among those in the media, political sphere, and other influential positions who have spent the better part of the past five years demonizing President Trump and his supporters as “deplorables”, “credulous boomer rubes”, and “white supremacists”. Notably, the rhetoric used against conservatives and the broader non-liberal population has been and continues to be so hateful that a large population of Americans is at best hesitant to condemn the wide swaths of violence that resulted in dozens of murders of innocent civilians and police officers and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage across the country that have come to be associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. At worst, tens of millions of Americans appear to support it.
Following media projections of a Joe Biden Presidential election victory, one New York House member even made a public call via Twitter to “archiv[e] these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity [with President Trump] in the future”--effectively advocating for the creation of a political enemies list. Given the undeserved benefit of the doubt that there is genuine interest of this subset of people in healing the country and uniting with conservatives, what would be required?
The first step to unifying is a desire to engage in civil discourse with someone of an opposing view, an increasingly rare ability by many who cannot hear the name Trump or socialism without reverting to ad hominem attacks of a friend, colleague, or random internet user. Furthermore, healing and unity must occur voluntarily and with mutual understanding of one another’s positions to the extent that common ground can be identified and minds can change. That is, reconciliation of two opposing views is one of persuasion and not subjection. For this to occur necessarily requires two or more opposing individuals to enter discussions in good faith and with humility.
Good Faith
Good faith has nothing to do with religion; rather, it is the sincere intention to be honest and presume the same of the opposing individual. Simply put, good faith means being able to have a conversation with someone who disagrees without assuming the other person is stupid, evil, racist, or presuming other malicious intent on behalf of the person. To have a meaningful conversation, the underlying assumption of the opposing point of view cannot be one of the individual intentionally lying, intentionally misleading others through cherry-picked facts or masquerading opinion as fact, or that the person is so biased or stupid to perform adequate research. This is not to say that someone may not exhibit these characteristics or employ such tactics, but they cannot be presumed at the outset of a legitimate attempt to find understanding with someone else.
Believing the opposing individual to be genuinely interested in the general welfare of the United States will naturally lead to a more honest, calm, and open conversation where individuals can probe into evidence and facts presented, identify the explicit motives and values of the other individual, and feel comfortable acknowledging a lack of knowledge about certain topics. Most importantly it provides a foundation upon which individuals can learn about the fundamental belief systems that underlie an individual’s allegedly “incorrect” views.
Humility
Exhibiting genuine interest and desire to learn about an opposing view is indicative of an individual’s possession of the second factor required to find healing and unity with others: humility. Individuals must be willing to entertain the possibly that they could be wrong, no matter how closely tied their beliefs are to their personal identity.
There are several tactics used by individuals to avoid coming to terms with the possibility that they could be wrong such as reverting to ad hominem attacks when other arguments have been exhausted, dismissing objective facts and evidence as biased, shifting the discussion away from arguments to topics such as the use of a particular debating tactic, or in many cases, accepting intellectual inconsistency as a preferable outcome to admitting an incorrectly held point of view, or as is often the case, completing shutting down.
Humility is also combined with an aspect of grace insofar as it provides an environment where an opposing individual can acknowledge where areas of misinformation or lack of knowledge without receiving ridicule or feeling ashamed. Humility is crucial to the process of intellectual growth and curiosity. Without humility, an individual cannot adequately entertain newly presented facts, whether by an individual with an opposing point of view or even in his/her personal research of the topic.
While these two virtues are necessary for civil discourse, it should never be the case that individuals find common ground and understanding, i.e. “agreeing to disagree”, on topics where such agreement is illogical. This means that people should never agree to disagree on basic facts as doing so would imply that an individual can believe as true two, mutually contradictory facts pertaining to the same topic—a concept famously coined “Doublethink” by George Orwell in his novel 1984. In this event, the discussion should be suspended until additional research is performed or the facts accepted as they are; it is irrational to agree to disagree on basic facts.
Additionally, individuals should not concede intellectual ground to appear “unbiased” or “objective” if they are in fact correct. The only time an individual should cede ground is when he or she has exhibited humility and good faith in entertaining new evidence and the intellect to consider such evidence and subsequently formed a different conclusion.
If American society is to return to a state of mutual values and understanding, citizens need to be able to talk to and, more importantly, understand one another. Through simply acknowledging that others do not have an unsavory motive and have a genuine desire to understand why others believe the way they do, America can begin to return to a time of shared values and a mutual reality, critical factors to the continued success of the United States of America.
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