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.”
4 comments:
Have a look at Albert Jay Nock’s article on the decline of conversation, https://iwpbooks.me/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/conversation.pdf.
I do not initiate political discussions with people; I consider it bad manners to do so. If they want to be the initiators, I will share my opinions (of which I have just as many as everyone else, of course) but only if they understand that they should not ask me what I think unless they REALLY want to know.
As for our current president, eight years ago, I made a decision, one that I recently renewed (In fact, I renew it after every election, no matter who wins), to wit: I WILL NOT let that man dominate my life. I will not let him dominate what I write, what I read, what I watch, what I say; I will not let him be the lord of my thoughts. I will not let him degrade, damage, or destroy my family relationships or friendships. There are places in my life - the majority of them, in fact - that he is simply not permitted to enter.
The constitution gives him a lot of power, but it does not give him the power to break and enter my mind, my heart, my soul, my relationships. The only person who can give him that power is - me. And I WILL NOT.
As I've commented before, my involvement in politics began as a result of service in the Vietnam War. Politics IS divisive and I see it as a duty to take a stand for what is right, so am involved in protests against the immoral actions of the Trump administration. Israeli citizens are doing the same against the Netanyahu government. Make of this what you will.
It's been said that the last decent president was Eisenhower. Since him, except for one (maybe two) exceptions, it's been grifters and morons ever since.
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