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It's easy to indulge in derision, so it's important to remind ourselves that the people on the other side are deserving of respect.
(Wisconsin Timber Ratllers team photographer)
By Lorri Nandrea, Leader Community Writer
Like bartenders and hair dressers, bookstore owners get to listen a lot without sharing as much. It's a privilege to get to know people in this open-ended way, where the relationship is incidental to the transaction and no one has particular expectations.
There's something special about the kinds of conversations that happen in a public space away from home and work, where the rules of polite civility apply but the atmosphere is relaxed and accepting. It's that warm, fuzzy, "where everybody knows your name" feeling immortalized in "Cheers."
Lorri Nandrea
If I didn't have Facebook, I wouldn't know that some of my warm, fuzzy bookstore regulars — a few on the political right, a few on the left — constantly and gleefully post the most vicious satirical attacks on the other side. The contrast between the tone of my Facebook news feed and that of the conversations in my store — it's the same people, mind you, talking — could hardly be more dramatic.
I can't imagine these kind people speaking this way to each other in person, or even — knowingly — online. They seem to share the widespread assumption that if we like someone, they must agree with our politics, because those who don't are idiots, and we wouldn't like an idiot. Would we?
As Adam Waytz explains in a recent Washington Post article ("We think our enemies are idiots, and that's a problem"), we humans tend to believe other people's minds are simpler and less rational than our own. We witness the complexity of our own reasoning processes, but we cannot witness another's thoughts in that way.
Since we know that we have reasoned things through, we conclude that others who disagree have not reasoned at all. We are much less likely to suspect that the other person started with a different set of facts, values, beliefs and assumptions, and reasoned their way to an alternate picture of what is and what should be.
Ironically, when the voices from the left and right are at their most derogatory, they sound exactly alike. It's a shrill, self-righteous note that repulses the 40 percent of Americans who do not identify strongly with either side, and have pretty much stopped participating in the political realm.
We use the word "polarization" to describe this situation, but the problem is not just the dwindling middle ground between two opposed positions. It's also the tone of derision ("contemptuous mirth") that pervades today's political discourse, making comedians a major news source for many. Mirthful or not, contempt — the sense that the other is less human, more idiot — ultimately sanctions our most frightening, most violent desires to end disagreement by blowing the other to smithereens.
Today's web, radio and cable TV choices make it so easy to indulge in derision. No one is standing in front of us looking hurt or appalled. Thus, it's terribly important to keep reminding ourselves that the people on the other side are just as deep, complex, and subtle, just as adult, just as unique, just as rich and scattered, whole and riven as we.
I can acknowledge that their minds are reasonable and their views have basis without accepting those views as right or true. I can, and must, honor the other as a human being who deserves respect, just as I do, whether or not we disagree.
Lorri Nandrea is the proprietor of Periscope Books & Tutoring LLC in Forest Grove.