This week . . . as graduation season winds down, it’s a good time to recall David Foster Wallace’s cautionary reminder in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College – that the close-mindedness of both atheist and religious dogmatists “amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.” This applies to political dogmatists as well. It’s hard enough to recognize (or at least admit) the damage polarization does to the exchange of ideas that constitutes democratic freedom—especially when you’re caught up in one side or the other of the screaming match. But it’s even harder to recognize what it does to you. It imprisons you. A quick test: Pick out the most infuriating (for you) political story from today’s paper and just try giving the “other side” the benefit of the doubt and finding some element that you can at least sympathize with. And ask yourself: how much is the difficulty in doing so a measure of how terrible the “other side” is vs. how walled off you have allowed yourself to genuinely listening to and weighing other views? The measure of how hard it is to consider an opposing view is the measure of the victory of the polarizers.
When reading these examples, check the above list and ask yourself: regardless of whether you agree or disagree, is this really advancing an intelligent resolution through the persuasive, rational arguments of advocacy…or simply fueling the fire of conflict through the divisive, emotional manipulations of polarization?
Here are just a few of the week’s polarizing headlines, from the left and right:
