Binary Culture
We live in a
binary culture in which we divide into groups based on our disagreements. We
label each other and assign moral value to each other based on the labels. And
the worst thing you can do—the unpardonable sin—is to disagree with me. Areas
of agreement are discounted or dismissed altogether, even when we agree about
most things. Total agreement and compliance are the only bases of community.
So, we fight with
each other.
Civil debate over
issues is replaced with juvenile name-calling and judgmental castigation over
even minor disagreements. Compromise and cooperation are dismissed and
demonized as morally weak. Only total agreement and compliance are acceptable
bases of community.
I am liberal. OK,
I’m very liberal, and it’s difficult for me to look through unbiased
lenses to evaluate ideas that don’t line up with my own. I try to be fair and
weigh the relative merits of various perspectives. But it’s difficult,
especially when those who advocate for those “other” perspectives aren’t
willing to consider any possible merit to my own perspective—when my own ideas
don’t even get a hearing.
I’m liberal.
That’s all anyone wants to know. I can be shoved into that pigeonhole and
dismissed as a valid member of society.
It works in
reverse, too.
I’ll not open the
can of worms about whether slavery was a major issue over which the Civil War
was fought. The fact remains that the anti-slavery adherents in the North
looked down on and condemned the slaveholders. What does not get equal time in
the debate is the working conditions in the North. Heather Cox Richarson
writes:
“After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North
combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more
accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high
school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college; women
made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged
young women studied social problems and the means of addressing them while they
developed friendships with like-minded classmates.
“Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull-House with Ellen
Gates Starr in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and
have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected.
“Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on
each other is reciprocal,” Addams later wrote.
“The people who lived in these “settlement houses”
dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization, with
its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along
with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education
to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to
build a larger picture of the social costs of industrialization, and lobbying
government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers,
especially women and children.”[1]
In the North,
where slavery was condemned, working and living conditions were hardly better
than in the slavery they condemned.
In our binary
culture we throw stones at each other because “we’re right and they’re wrong!”
But, what if we’re
all wrong? What if our intolerance of disagreement is the worst “wrong” of all?
That’s the way it
looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.
Together
in the Walk,
Jim
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