by Peter Wehner
OUR DISTORTED VISION OF REALITY
The theologian Andrew Davison tells about being in India and coming across a person with leprosy. As a Christian, he saw the leper and felt compassion and aided him, though much to the unease of Indians. It then struck him that those who believe in karma and reincarnation, as Hindus do, see a leper as someone atoning for past sins and doing what needs to be done for a future, and better, reincarnation. So they interpreted aiding the leper as doing something inappropriate.
Davison wrote, “We do not first see neutrally, and then interpret. The leper is seen as unfortunate, as someone upon whom to show pity, or seen as a miscreant, as someone to be reviled. Axioms operate at this very direct level as well as in more discursive reasoning.”33
This illustration is meant to show how our worldviews shape our interpretation of events and reality, to demonstrate how people can see the same situation and react to it in wholly different ways.
This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as objective truth. As I made abundantly clear in the previous chapter, I’m not a postmodernist. I don’t believe reality is something that is simply shaped by interpretation, or that just because people sincerely hold a belief—like, say, reincarnation—it makes that belief true. But Davison’s illustration does underscore a key attribute of responsible citizenship: forbearance for others and modesty toward ourselves.
Here’s what I mean: most of us assume that people see issues—abortion, same-sex marriage and transgenderism, gun control, tax policy and income inequality, entitlement reform, illegal immigration, welfare payments, climate change, Black Lives Matter, and countless others—through essentially the same prism we do. But it’s more complicated than that.
Our interpretative frame and intellectual and moral tendencies are the product of many factors. The philosopher Cornelius Van Til once said that there is no such thing as a brute fact. Our presumptions alter the way we interpret things, including justice. For example, if one views abortion entirely through the lens of a woman’s right to choose, then restricting abortions is a gratuitous offense. If one views abortion through the prism of the rights and well-being of an unborn child, on the other hand, then subsidizing abortion is a grave transgression.
Or take same-sex marriage. Some believe championing gay marriage places one on the side of equality, tolerance, and human dignity, as heirs of the civil rights struggle. On the flip side, opponents of gay marriage often root their views in their understanding of male-female complementarity, procreation, and the health of the institution of marriage. They are acting to defend what they believe are true and necessary social norms. The differences on this issue can be explained by reasons other than bigotry on the one hand or wanting to rip apart our social fabric on the other.
Too often, we tend to deny to those with whom we disagree any benefit of the doubt. We assume they see facts, events, and justice just as we do, which makes their differing conclusions very nearly inexplicable. This in turn makes it easy to characterize one’s opponents as malignant, to think that only a cretin could hold views at odds with ours.
It would help improve our political culture if we understood that every one of us has an imperfect angle on reality and that truth is refracted by our presuppositions. Our perception of justice is always distorted, even if just a little bit. All of us see through a glass darkly and know things only in part.
George Orwell expressed this point in an exquisite way. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia is a gripping account of his role in the Spanish Civil War, first as a journalist and then as a participant. Near the end of the book are these words:
I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same thing when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.34
One cannot help but be struck by the honesty and self-knowledge, the acknowledgment that we all express ourselves as partisans to one degree or another and that distortions arise because we see “only one corner of events.”
This doesn’t mean that some people aren’t much closer than others to apprehending truth, beauty, and goodness. Nor do I believe for a moment that efforts at persuasion are fruitless. I do believe, though, that greater tolerance toward the perspective of our political opponents is necessary for good citizenship; that in our hearts and minds forbearance and patience need to find a place alongside passionate convictions and persistence. If they do, our politics will be characterized by a touch more grace, a bit less anger, and a little more sympathy.
There are worse things in the world.
HOW CITIZENS CAN HEAL THE BREACH
To summarize, then: in a nation like the United States, composed of some 325 million people, there is no hope for widespread agreement, for common perspectives and easy common ground, on a vast range of issues. Democracy is not a machine that manufactures consent. The task of every generation is how to succeed given the reality of deep differences. So what practically does that mean? What can actually be done?
For one thing, Americans can support people running for public office who model what respectful, civil disagreements look like. We can also oppose those who are the antithesis of moderation, compromise, and civility. Registering opposition to those who summon forth our darkest instincts is especially important when it is directed at people you otherwise agree with. It’s easy to vote against someone whose policies and political philosophy you already disagree with; the most effective dissent is when it’s aimed at those you generally align with.
Those in public life will conform their behavior to what their constituents demand and reward. If enough people are fed up with the politics of intemperance and incivility, they need to make it a priority to vote for men and women who offer an alternative. It may seem banal, but core truths often are; and the quickest route to changing our political culture is by voting into office people who conduct themselves with decency and class.
But to merely say we need to vote better people into office is simplistic and insufficient. Our politics is venomous because some large number of Americans want it to be that way. What we’re seeing is one manifestation of civic rot. How to reverse that is a more complicated, longer-term task.
For starters, we need to shut down the sophisticated disinformation operations run by foreign governments, in particular Russia. Their purpose is to sow discord as a means of undermining the United States. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were built in a way that easily allowed for mass manipulation. Russian operatives from the Kremlin-linked group Internet Research Agency (IRA) flooded them with bots and fake accounts to spread divisive narratives, especially during elections and in order to elect Donald Trump. According to a December 2018 report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Russia’s IRA activities were designed to polarize the US public and interfere in elections by
campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to distrust US institutions;
encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and
spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and misinformation to voters across the political spectrum.35
The journalist Sara Fischer summarized things this way: the news about “Russia’s online disinformation efforts suggest that all of the major social media platforms, ranging from Facebook and Google’s empires to Reddit and Tumblr, were weaponized over the past two years.”36
Social media platforms are hurting democracy; they need to be held accountable, and they need to be
fixed. There should be a much greater public outcry about this, and Americans of both parties should pressure Congress to do more to regulate these industries. There is enough acrimony in American politics today without having foreign adversaries stirring up more.
At a more fundamental level, education is surely part of the answer. This starts with more emphasis on civic literacy as a way to improve civic knowledge and shape democratic attitudes. As the education scholar Robert Pondiscio reminds us, “The founding purpose of public education in America was not to advance the private end of college and career preparation, but the public purpose of ensuring that the nation’s children would be able to participate fully and knowledgeably in civic life as adults.”37
Part of civics education is knowing American history, which helps us to better understand our times, offers us clues on how to confront the problems we face, and reminds us that difficult times aren’t unprecedented or impossible to overcome. It counteracts despair. History also provides us with flesh-and-blood examples of people who, in the face of great challenges, embodied qualities like moderation and compromise. And that’s not all: a greater knowledge of history will revive our identity as Americans, connecting us to the past, to our founding principles and our failures, and to one another.
Unfortunately civics education today is in sorry shape and has been for some time; it has become “little more than a rote study of the structures of government.”38 Ignorance of history and the basics of government is rather astounding. For example, one quarter of Americans can name the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judiciary); if you’re unfamiliar with that, it makes it impossible to understand the importance of checks and balances and the separation of powers.39 When asked in what century the American Revolution took place, more than a third did not know; and half of respondents believed that either the Civil War, the War of 1812, or the Emancipation Proclamation occurred before the American Revolution.40 Less than a third of American students in grades four, eight, and twelve are “proficient” in civics, meaning in “the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and experiences to prepare someone to be an active, informed participant in democratic life.”41
In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas Leszek Kolakowski spoke about what he termed the “erosion of historical consciousness” and our “historical self-understanding sinking into irrelevance or oblivion.” Kolakowski said that we learn history not just to know who we are but to learn what we are responsible for and how this responsibility should play itself out. History connects us with the past, with tradition, with community. The loss of knowledge of history, he warned, “plays havoc” with the lives of the young and “threatens their ability to withstand possible trials in the future.”42 A sense of history, then, prepares us for democratic citizenship—and not knowing history means we are failing in our duties as citizens.
Fortunately there are groups like the Civics Renewal Network, a consortium of nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations committed to strengthening civic life in the US.43 One of those organizations is iCivics, founded in 2009 by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It teaches students about government through online, interactive games and supporting classroom resources, and the result is more active and informed citizens. The overwhelming number of teachers who use it report that it fosters civil conversations about current events in their classrooms. (iCivics is now the largest provider of civics curricula in the nation, reaching nearly 200,000 teachers and more than 5 million students, in all fifty states.)
The leverage here is parents, who can encourage and insist that state and local policy makers put a renewed focus on citizenship education. It’s not as if the material doesn’t exist; it’s a matter of insisting that the material be taught.
There’s more that can be done. We can revitalize summer leadership and citizenship programs like Boys State and Girls State, which are sponsored by the American Legion and the American Legion Auxiliary. They are basically weeklong simulations of state and local government for high school students. They show teenagers how challenging and exciting it can be to try to work together to formulate and generate support for “policies” that address a common problem. Those who participate are expected to debate ideas while staying civil; all participants are immersed in the ideals of a democracy while also getting a taste of the frustrations. In their heyday, Boys State and Girls State were some of the best programs in helping young people understand the worth, effort, and challenges of citizenship.
Another area that offers some hope is voluntary national service. National service, in addition to helping repair broken communities and broken lives through the service itself, also instills a sense of purpose and patriotism and connects people of different classes, ethnicities, races, and life experiences. When people work together side by side for a common purpose, political differences are deintensified. According to a study by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, “Participants of all races and backgrounds describe how their service has taught them new perspectives and approaches, and exposed them to groups of people with whom they would not have identified in the past.”44
In his 1990 book Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, one of the founders of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., who was introduced earlier, called for a year of voluntary national service for young people eighteen and over, in areas such as health, day care, and the environment, to strengthen their feeling and appreciation for their nation. “Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight,” Buckley wrote.45 Service to one’s country calls forth “the better angels within our nature” and can “ever so slightly elevate us from the trough of self-concern and self-devotion.” Harkening back to his experience in World War II, Buckley refers to the close affinity that united the “Laramie cowboy” and the “college-campus litterateur in Greenwich Village.”46
SUPPORT CIVILITY PROJECTS
In a different realm, one of the encouraging developments in recent years is the creation of programs whose explicit mission is to model how people who disagree can do so responsibly and without rancor.
One such organization is Better Angels, a national citizens’ movement to reduce political polarization by bringing liberals and conservatives together, face-to-face, to understand each other beyond stereotypes, forming red/blue community alliances and teaching practical skills for communicating across political differences. (More than a thousand people have participated in the workshops in more than thirty states.)47 They build “zones of depolarization” in the form of workshops that allow people of different political viewpoints to listen to each other’s opinions, values, and experiences. The result is that hard edges are sanded off and opportunities to compromise open up.
The founder of Better Angels, David Blankenhorn, says that the group’s goal is “achieving disagreement.” The goal is not to get people to change their views; it is to get people to listen well to one another. “If you listen,” according to Blankenhorn, “and if you try to understand—and if you’re confident that people are going to then listen to you—you become a human being, friendship develops despite the political differences, and the rancor goes down.”
It sounds simplistic, Blankenhorn acknowledges, but “it’s like magic.” Their commitment is to bring people together “to talk across these differences as fellow citizens.”48
“What we are trying to change,” Blankenhorn says, “is how they think about each other as citizens.” The goal is for people to return to their communities and put what they learned into practice. If enough people abide by these principles, the people associated with Better Angels believe, they can transform the country from the bottom up.
A similar program, Speak Your Peace: The Civility Project, was launched in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2003. The program was developed by the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation in response to increasing political tensions caused by economic d
ecline, plants closing, and rising anxiety. Agreement seemed out of reach on an array of issues; the mood was hot and contentious. “Rather than working on solutions we started fighting with each other,” says Rob Karwath, former executive editor of the Duluth News Tribune.49
Holly Sampson, president of the foundation, said she was hearing from younger people in particular that they were hesitant to get involved in the public debate because it was so contentious. (A headline in the Duluth News Tribune read, “Divisiveness Stalls Projects and Keeps Some from Running for Office.”)
The Speak Your Peace initiative connected older and younger generations in Duluth, and it was eagerly embraced across sectors, from government forums to middle school classrooms. Ms. Sampson said the foundation was “totally overwhelmed” by the community’s response to the public campaign.50
“This is not a campaign to end disagreements,” according to the website. “It is a campaign to improve public discourse by simply reminding ourselves of the very basic principles of respect.”51
The nine rules for practicing civility that were adopted were taken from P. M. Forni’s book Choosing Civility.
Pay attention. Be aware and attend to the world and the people around you.
Listen. Focus on others to better understand their points of view.
Be inclusive. Welcome all groups of citizens working for the greater good of the community.
Don’t gossip. And don’t accept when others choose to do so.
Show respect. Honor other people and their opinions, especially in the midst of disagreement.
Be agreeable. Look for opportunities to agree; don’t contradict just to do so.
Apologize. Be sincere and repair damaged relationships.
Give constructive criticism. When disagreeing, stick to the issues and don’t make a personal attack.
Take responsibility. Don’t shift responsibility and blame onto others; share disagreements publicly.
