The Work On The Self Is The Hardest Work Of All

How not to win hearts and mindshttps://t.co/HrwpxeBu7h

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 15, 2023

Since the time that Clinton’s words were twisted so effectively to foster resentment and deepen America’s political divide, things have gotten only more fractious. Fox-clone media and self-interested politicians own the bulk of the blame for this. But while I find right-wing postures and priorities and lying and the whole MAGA phenomenon to be horrifying, we progressives often make things worse instead of better. We pretend, when they sneer and call us woke, that they are just hating our awareness, compassion and diversity. We pretend not to know that with good reason the word woke now connotes—even among many on the left—smugness, sanctimony, an attitude of intellectual superiority, and an eagerness to impute the worst possible motive to anyone who disagrees. We pretend not to recognize that we regularly use words like white and Christian and male and straight as slurs, as ways of conveying that a person is less of a person to us, and more of a symbol, and that we aren’t really interested in their thoughts or fears or pain or dreams. We spend time in activist spaces and online forums trash-talking and othering whoever isn’t in the room. And then we say they should join our movement.

True. And what to do?

Posting snark and righteous memes on social media to an audience of folks who already think like us and denigrating those who “get it wrong,” or focusing our ire on words and symbols (which are easier to change than are conditions in the physical world), may help fend off despair temporarily. But in the long run, cynicism about the past and despair about the future are self-reinforcing. For example, some idealists see gaps in racial equality and deny that the Civil Rights movement made any real progress. One frustrated friend in college commented that things are no different now than they were under slavery. This kind of story, one that treats slow or incomplete change as inconsequential, one that erases the efforts and triumphs of past generations and flattens the moral arc of American history, also flattens the future. It beats down the hope that our own actions matter. It makes people more emphatic and absolutist in their demands for change but also less able to tap into the curiosity and empirical analysis and passion and stamina that can solve problems and improve lives in the real world. 

In a movement that is about problem solving, being able to construct a multi-dimensional map of reality including potential causes and effects and unintended consequences is key. Lived experience, what philosophers call standpoint epistemology, can be part of this, but only part. We humans have many ways of discovering, learning, analyzing, and problem-solving, and if we want the benefit of this multitude, they have to be at the table. That means they have to be welcome.

Problem. Now: solution?

Real world change takes bridge building, deep listening, and taking the risk that we might learn something from someone we think of as other. The following may sound odd coming from a critic of Christianity, but two Seattle ministers, Jim Henderson and Jim Hancock, have come up with the best three practices I’ve ever seen for broadening engagement and community: 

I’ll be unusually interested in others. 

I will stay in the room with difference. 

I will stop comparing my best with your worst. 

Their motto is curiosity trumps certainty. And their ministry, if you can call it that, is about bridging difference divides.

*record scratch*

Honestly, that’s like questioning whether Dr. King was actually a Christian minister, leading a movement based on Christian principles.

Always the log in your own eye. 

"Why do you notice the sliver in your friend's eye, but overlook the timber in your own?  How can you say to your friend 'Let me get that sliver out of your eye,' when there is  that timber in your own?  You phony, first take the timber out of your own eye and then you'll see well enough to remove the sliver from your friend's eye."--Matthew 7:3-5 (SV)

Physician, heal thyself.