Finding Common Ground

My wife Judith and I used to attend an annual retreat for school leaders at which some classic text was the focus of each year's discussion. One year the assignment was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Not long into the seminar, Judith revealed that she had only read as far as page 9 and then put the book down when she encountered the sentences: “You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material.” The other participants - like me mostly white, mostly male - could probably be excused for not having had the same visceral reaction to those words that she did. They could certainly be excused for having written them: they hadn't; Huxley’s book, not theirs. But they could not be excused for refusing to hear her horror and revulsion. Yet this is precisely what they did. And they insisted that Brave New World was something that should be treated as ironic literature and that must be “discussed.”

When Sylvia was a senior in high school, her humanities teacher had the class read a couple of coming-of-age memoirs by immigrants and then discuss US immigration policy. One day one of her classmates announced that she believed no new immigrants should be allowed in the country, then added that current residents who had been born elsewhere and their children should also be deported. Then she gave Sylvia a long smile. The teacher insisted that this was an opinion (instead of an intentional and very personal provocation) and that it should be “discussed.” 

Jessy was a college freshman in a writing seminar when the professor prompted the class to describe a scene that was scary. She wrote a few paragraphs about a cloudy night in the woods with unidentifiable rustling noises in the brush and mysterious animal calls. One of her classmates complained that it was utterly unfrightening and would have been better if it described an urban nighttime scene with street lights and lots of “diverse” people. Nobody objected. Jessy was the only person of color in that class. She heard this to mean that her family was more frightening than wild animals. The professor saw that Jessy’s feelings were hurt, but felt that Jessy should have “discussed” it.

I choose these examples because they are about feelings and identity. In the case of Jessy and Sylvia, good instructors, with the trust of the class, may have been able to get people to look at why these comments were direct insults, intentional in both cases, instead of “differences of opinion” but their own points of view prevented them even from seeing this. In the case of Judith, nobody set out to insult her intentionally. Instead, the erasure came when educated, mostly-liberal people insisted on treating her reaction as a failure to engage intellectually, as if her reaction proved that she, too, was nothing more than a “negro ovary.” Again, an attentive facilitator might have directed participants to examine their own responses to Judith. Instead, and again, that facilitator was only interested in what he already understood about the book. 

What about a person who tells me, “It’s too bad Hitler didn’t kill your parents”? Or a teacher, assigned to my faculty, telling me, “I didn’t go to Harvard to become a zookeeper caring for your animals”? Those aren’t differences of opinion. I have no interest in discussing them. 

I believe in good and I believe in evil. I don’t think Sylvia or Jessy’s classmates, or the people in Judith’s seminar (or even the Nazi or the teacher I fired) are themselves evil. But they choose to serve evil. 

I am well aware of the danger of confusing my own views with “the good” and of demonizing people who disagree with me. But I see a danger as well in valuing civility above empathy and in failing to see that words harm.

Last week we saw a white extremist send bombs to multiple prominent Democrats, including the former President of the United States and the former Secretary of State, and to a mainstream news outlet. He was apparently motivated by our current President's "opinions" about them. We saw a gunman enter a synagogue and slaughter 11 worshippers, apparently motivated by his "opinions" about Jews and immigration. We saw another gunman attempt to enter a Black church, and -- failing that -- murder two African American shoppers in a supermarket, apparently motivated by his "opinions" about Black people. Much of the commercial press (cough-New York Times-cough) seems to think that the problem is "incivility."

All of this is just to say that I don't believe in finding "common ground" with those who would annihilate me... or anybody else.