'What May Save Us Is Conversation'

A friend tells me he and three other men have for a decade met monthly for lunch and conversation. All work or worked in the past for the same government agency in Washington, D.C. Conversation tended toward the traditionally male – politics, sports, health. Inevitably, opinions differed but relations remained amicable until recently. One of the four failed to show up two months in a row. Why? It turns out he was boycotting the lunches because of politics. In a word, Trump. I suspect the same thing is happening all over the country, even within families. As I wrote to my friend: 

“I hate what politics does to people. Or, rather, what people do with politics, making it divisive, using it as a weapon. It could, of course, just as well be religion or baseball. It's beyond my understanding.”

 

People get angry when they want to exercise or recover a sense of power, even among friends and loved ones. Some take differences of opinion very personally. They feel snubbed or dismissed. A psychiatrist, of all people, states an immutable truth in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949):

 

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

 

My reaction to my friend’s situation is a sense of sadness that someone would sacrifice long-standing friendship on something as ultimately inconsequential as politics. People are more important than their opinions. The only way to reach a respectful equilibrium with people holding opinions unlike our own is to talk about it. In a passage from 1944, Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014, Imprint Academic):

 

“We live in an age of dogmatism, which has only to continue in the way it is going, to bring us to a new dark age of enlightenment: what may save us is conversation.”