Pondering Polarization

Issue #2.12 ~ September 14th, 2023

True or False? … “What unites us is far greater than what what divides us”

Bill Clinton was particularly fond of quoting the above expression in his campaign speeches during his two terms as president in the 1990s, as well as for nearly two decades after he left office, campaigning for Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, his wife Hilary Rodham Clinton (and then Barack Obama) in 2008, and Hilary once more in 2016.

Obama famously offered his own version of that expression promoting unity over divisiveness in his break-out political speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, when he declared that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.”

I have long found both Clinton’s quoting and Obama’s oratory to be not only inspiring but also in accordance with reality. After all, each of us has the same basic physical and emotional needs - to eat when we’re hungry, drink when we’re thirsty, find shelter when we’re exposed to the elements, and seek companionship when we’re lonely. Some of the Buddhist teachings put the matter even more simply - we all want to be happy.

Until recently, I would have answered my title question above unhesitatingly, “True”.

These days, I’m not so sure.

Prompted, no doubt, by the extreme polarization currently afflicting the body politic, most perniciously here in the United States, but sprouting up in an increasing number of countries across the globe, I find myself wondering more and more whether what divides us is in fact far greater than what unites us.

To start at the very beginning, each of us starts out at our very beginning with a totally unique mix of genetic endowments from our two parents - a mix that never existed before, and will never exist again, not even in any of our siblings, should we have them.

And once nature has rendered us irrevocably unique from the very outset, nurture does more than its share to continue differentiating each of us from every other human being who has ever come into existence. First, there’s the critical early nurturing received from our parents, each with their completely individual child raising skills (or lack thereof … cf. “This Be the Verse”, Philip Larkin’s darkly insightful poem). Then, there’s the completely random selection of relatives, teachers, classmates, and neighborhood friends to which we will be exposed throughout the formative years of our childhood and adolescence. And finally, there’s the never-ending ever-expanding tsunami of real-time and online information into which we’ll be plunged as adults - only the slightest portion of which we’ll ever be able to take in at any given moment, and what we do take in and successfully process will inevitably differ to a large degree from what others around us are taking in from that same tsunami.

Given this developmental pathway we all pursue to adulthood, is it any surprise that each of us turns out to be so radically differentiated from all the rest of us? And is it any surprise that such an individualistic society - in a country that has historically elevated the ethic of individualism practically up to a “divine right” - has fragmented into such a polarized body politic?

I’m going to bring this essay to a close here, still lacking a definitive response to my true-or-false inquiry, but swaying perilously close to the edge of the cliff which I fear an answer of “false” will fling me over.

More to come on this in future issues. Meantime, curious for your comments …

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“The Big Country”

If you’re as enthusiastic a fan of the rock band Talking Heads as I am, then you’ve probably recognized that the title of this piece references the closing track from their 1978 album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food”. In this song, David Byrne imagines its first-person narrator (perhaps Byrne himself) as looking down upon some undefined rural landscape from his window seat as his plane flies over the middle of the American heartland. Here’s a sample of his reflections as he looks down upon - in both the literal and the figurative sense - its inhabitants:

I guess it's healthy
I guess the air is clean
I guess those people
Have fun with their neighbors and friends
Look at that kitchen
And all of that food
Look at them eat it
I guess it tastes real good

They grow it in those farmlands
Then they bring it to the store
They put it in the car trunk
Then they bring it back home and I say

I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live like that, no siree
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to

I'm tired of looking
Out the window of the airplane
I'm tired of traveling
I want to be somewhere
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there

There’s a lot to unpack in these verses, but before we get to that, a caution and a confession are in order. First, I would caution that, from the lyrics alone, we can’t be sure of the composer’s actual intent. Is Byrne actually judging “those people down there”, or is he instead judging the arrogant passenger in the plane who’s making those callous judgments? Or, perhaps, he’s making a point about both the people below and the passenger above.

Second, I need to confess up front that this song sprang uninvited into my head a couple of weeks ago, when my wife and I - both native New Yorkers and avid city dwellers - were visiting our daughter and her longtime boyfriend in the small rural Pennsylvania town where they’ve been living for the past two years.

Near the end of our four-day visit, as we went for a stroll along the town’s distressingly (to us) quiet main street around noon on a Monday, we were remarking upon the paucity of pedestrian and automotive traffic, the disproportionate number of shops open for business for just a few hours on only a handful of days each week, and the near-total absence of restaurants other than a McDonald’s, a Subway, a Wendy’s, and two or three pizza joints.

Towards the end of our walk, having commented on all the above observations, we each proclaimed, nearly simultaneously, “We could never live here!” And in that moment, I suddenly felt as if I were sitting right alongside David Byrne all those years ago, staring out that same airplane window, thinking those same judgmental thoughts about “those people down there”.

And yet, the discomfort I felt at this unwelcome glimpse into my own elitist attitudes, undeniable though it was, did not in any way dispel the discomfort I was feeling about the surroundings I found myself in. Both uncomfortable feelings were real, and both were warranted by the circumstances that gave rise to them. But each collided with the other, such that neither could coexist with the other.

It’s time to attempt the unpacking that I promised, but postponed, a few paragraphs ago.

To begin, my declaration “I could never live here”, as well as Byrne’s more acerbic “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to”, are simply statements of intention. The feelings that prompt such statements come from within, and simply reflect our individual preferences for the kind of living space we wish to occupy. I would argue that there’s nothing innately judgmental with such feelings.

But I would also have to admit that we become judgmental with the subsequent feelings that often attach to those original feelings, which in my case goes something like “I could never live here … like these people do”, and which in Byrne’s lyric goes to the more emphatic judgment that “It's not even worth talking / About those people down there”.

Let me repeat that I’m in no way casting aspersions on David Byrne or his song. “The Big Country” is an artistic expression depicting real life and real feelings, and as such it’s a contribution to our collective cultural wisdom. I’m citing it in this essay to amplify the lesson I want to draw from my own personal experience while walking through that small rural town.

And that lesson, while easy enough to articulate, is quite difficult to incorporate into our daily behavior. It requires a great deal of self-awareness, a continuous effort to be mindful of our thoughts and our emotions. Here’s how I’m trying to internalize it for myself …

It’s natural to perceive the ways in which I’m different from others or they’re different from me, but I need to guard against allowing such perceptions to morph into judgments that falsely elevate me above “those people down there.”

It is indeed a “big country” that we all inhabit. And with the 2024 presidential election season already upon us, and with the many issues that already divide us about to become even more polarizing, it might be a very good time to lighten up a little on the judgments we will inevitably feel about “those people” who will vote differently than we do.

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For Your Consideration

A good friend recently forwarded this appeal from the Global Compassion Network, which I am happy to share with you …

Help us call for an era of compassion.

The United Nations has admitted that the Sustainable Development Goals - targets for reducing poverty, tackling climate change, and improving education and healthcare - are in “grave danger.”

This is not due to a lack of resources. The 100 richest people in the world could end poverty four-times over. We have the technology and know-how to address climate change.

What we need is a total shift in mindset.

Sign the Petition to the UN

We need leaders who have the motivation and courage necessary to tackle the causes of suffering, promote cultures of care and kindness, and face-down vested interests who may stand in the way of change. 

That is why we are calling on the heads of state gathering for a major summit at the United Nations this September to do one simple thing: choose compassion.

Support our call for more compassion

Specifically, we are calling on them to publicly acknowledge the need for more compassion, to take the steps necessary to put compassion at the heart of global politics, and to support civil society in promoting the value, practice, and benefits of compassion throughout the world.

If you too believe that we need our leaders to lead with compassion, pleasesign our petition.

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Interesting reading from the past few weeks:

• New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik took a critical look at the widely-accepted view of Trump as a champion of the people being persecuted by the “elites” … “An effort is under way, not all of it from nakedly self-interested sources, to treat Trump’s criminal indictments (in which he denies all charges) as one more act in a kind of ongoing masquerade, or political pantomime. The indictments, in this view, do not simply submit him to the scrutiny of the law. They’re a strike of one discrete class against another, with ‘elite’ Americans bent on settling a score with Trump and, through him, with his long-neglected supporters. The educated elite is out to get [them]. Yet the empirical evidence does not support the idea that Trump and Trumpism are principally moved by those disposed by planetary capitalism or meritocratic displacement, and the vision of Trump as the voice of the economically anxious has been exploded as many times as it has been offered. If there is a pattern to Trumpite support, it seems to be that it is strongest among people—white, for the most part—who are among the wealthiest in their own communities, and fear a loss of status in the world at large. It is absurd to break down the pro- and anti-Trump divisions into that of an elite class against an overlooked one. Trump is a billionaire supported by billionaires. One can find other fractures and divides on the issue, but the idea that they fall along neat class or meritocratic lines, or represent some confrontation of educated and entrepreneurial kinds, is false. At this most critical moment since [the] Civil War, the question is not whether elites are condescending to the people, or whether those people and their country are somehow irrevocably or structurally racist. It’s a conflict between coalitions, each of which envelops the privileged and the underprivileged, the high-status and the status-threatened, the wealthy and the poor. It’s a conflict about values and beliefs, in which both sides—and, more important, each person—determine their own views and are responsible for their own choices.”

• New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert took note of the many “unnatural” contributing causes to the catastrophic fires on Maui last month … “As the death toll from the fires in West Maui continued to mount, it became clear that the same ‘factors’ that have decimated Hawaii’s wildlife also contributed to the deadliness of the blazes. The worst-hit locality, the town of Lahaina, which lies in ruins, was built on what was once a wetland. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, much of the vegetation surrounding the town was cleared to make way for sugar plantations. Then, when these went out of business, in the late twentieth century, the formerly cultivated acres were taken over by introduced grasses. In contrast to Hawaii’s native plants, the imported grasses have evolved to reseed after fires and, in dry times, they become highly flammable. Also contributing to the devastation was climate change. Since the nineteen-fifties, average temperatures in Hawaii have risen by about two degrees, and there has been a sharp uptick in warming in just the past decade. This has made the state more fire-prone and, at the same time, it has fostered the spread of the sorts of plants that provide wildfires with fuel. Hotter summers help invasive shrubs and grasses ‘outgrow our native tree species,’ the state’s official Climate Change Portal notes. After visiting the wreckage of Lahaina, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, called the Maui fires the ‘largest natural disaster Hawaii has ever experienced.’ In fact, the fires would more accurately be labelled an ‘unnatural disaster.’ As David Beilman, a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, recently pointed out, for most of Hawaii’s history fire simply wasn’t part of the islands’ ecology. ‘This Maui situation is an Anthropocene phenomenon,’ he [said].

• The Atlantic contributing writer David Brooks offered this Buddhist-like explanation for “how America got mean” in this wide-ranging historical survey of America’s changing moral educational standards … “The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me.The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy. If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society.

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Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Please look for the next one in three weeks, posting on Thursday, October 5th.