To Listen and Solve

We live in an ever-more violent world.  I think we can all agree on that, and together we look with trepidation on the world around us and wonder who will be the next victims of seemingly-random violence.  And yet, when we talk about the roots of the violence we see an ever-widening gap between two distinct worldviews as to how we might address and rein in this violence.  The gap is so wide that when we representatives of the two worldviews talk to one another, they sometimes seem to be speaking entirely different languages.  Nay, what really seems to be the case is that they are situated in two parallel universes, from which the denizens of one universe can see and hear those of the other but cannot penetrate the transparent-yet-impermeable boundary between the two.  That is, when they bother to acknowledge the voices of the other worldview at all.

I was reminded of this the other day, driving home after dropping my daughter at the airport for a flight to Denver to return her to school after the Thanksgiving holiday.  While driving, I listened to a program on a public radio station.  It was a replay of a forum on gun violence that had taken place, and been broadcast live, from San Francisco some weeks back.  It was just the thoughtful kind of forum that I like; a multi-disciplinary panel consisting of prominent individuals from various professions and therefore viewpoints, discussing the various ramifications of apparently-increasing gun violence in America and ideas for ‘common sense’ measures to address it.  But as I listened, I realized that this panel, whilst representing a variety of specific viewpoints into the issue, was at one in the basic premise:  the solution for gun violence is to decrease – for some, drastically – the number of legal guns in the hands of certifiably law-abiding people.  Now that is an entirely valid viewpoint, albeit problematic from the standpoint of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and would certainly be legitimately represented on any panel whose purpose is to problem-solve for gun violence.  But it is not the only viewpoint, and the limiting of the panel in question to advocates for that viewpoint condemned what might have been a valuable discussion, to irrelevance.

 The interesting point in the program was when, in wrapping up the discussion, the panelists actually addressed this one-dimensional aspect to the session and more-or-less celebrated it!  Several of the participants talked about how wonderful it was to discuss the issue rationally, without the interference of the contrarian view that fewer guns is not the answer. “We know they’re wrong,” declared one panelist, an activist representing a public interest NGO. “If we’d included them, they would have come with the same tired old arguments based on lies and inaccurate statistics.”  And several other panelists expressed assent!

 Various debates that are raging in society today – not just that on how to address gun violence – are stymied by one side’s mania for silencing the other side as an illegitimate voice.  The idea of freedom of speech, enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, has been under attack for a long time.  The term ‘Political Correctness,’ coined sometime in the 1980’s but which came into common usage in the 1990’s, describes the tendency to make us curb our speech whenever it may offend someone else.  To those who decry the tendency, it represents a good idea – that we should guard our tongues (and quills) to avoid inadvertently offending someone whose context we cannot grasp – that went awry as people stammer and stutter to express themselves forthrightly in a society where almost anybody can be offended about anything.  And lately, the term Political Correctness is itself under attack in the wake of the campus demonstrations at the University of Missouri, where it has been asserted that to invoke the term Political Correctness out of exasperation with the stifling of Free Speech is patently offensive.

Social media – and I’m referring specifically to Facebook – could be a wonderful tool for enabling people of diverse viewpoints to converse with one another.  But increasingly, it has become a medium for people to sound off, usually in barrages of links to articles and online videos that support the poster’s viewpoint.  When scanning my newsfeed of posts by my Facebook ‘friends,’ I’ll sometimes read one of the articles in question or view one of the videos.  But this phenomenon of ‘dueling links’ is hardly a constructive way to conduct a discussion.  I’ll give an example.  On a Facebook group for Rabbis who are members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, someone posted a discussion question about gun control in the wake of the gun violence event on the Oregon small-town community college campus several weeks back.  Now this particular poster and I seldom agree on much of anything, but I respect him as a reasonable person wanting to grasp solutions to big problems, so I responded to his post with a contrarian viewpoint, presented as reasonably as I could.  Immediately, a new party to the discussion countered with a raft of links to articles that allegedly refuted what I was saying.  Now, wanting to have a true discussion where all parties try to take in all legitimate discussion points, I clicked on the first link and started to read the article.  And it turned out that the article didn’t refute my viewpoint at all, but its headline did not hint accurately to the writer’s conclusions.  In other words, the person entering the conversation and offer a counterpoint to my position, instead of thoughtfully entering the conversation, chose to fire what he thought were shots over my bow with some big guns instead of reading the article in question, citing it and digesting it for the forum.  But that’s not all.  After a couple of days of back-and-forth discussion in the thread, the original poster expressed frustration over the discussion not resulting in a coming together of the participants over one – presumably his – viewpoint.  I responded to his frustration by pointing back to his original post, asking for a measured response by others who might disagree with him so that he might begin to understand the other side of the issue.  On that he backtracked, but to me it was clear:  the aim of this person whom I still see as generally reasonable, was not understanding but convincing, as in convincing parties holding the view opposite his that they were simply wrong.

So last Friday afternoon, whilst driving from place to place, I heard the news report from Colorado Springs; a ‘gunman’ (I really don’t like that term, terrorist is far more accurate for most usages) had shot several people at the city’s Planned Parenthood clinic and was in a protracted standoff with police.  If you follow my writings, you know that I have a connection to Colorado Springs, where Clara and I created a domicile after I retired from the US Air Force; this event unfolding in Colorado then was, for me, personal.

The standoff ended after some five hours after it began.  The perpetrator was identified as a sort of Ted Kaczynski type, a wild-eyed hermit with a tendency for incoherent ravings that don’t seem to identify him with a particular political position, just with a generalised rage at society.  The only connection between anything he’d said, to an opposition to abortion, rational or otherwise, was his alleged muttering to one of the police officers taking him into custody: “no more baby parts.”  And even that was unattributed, the lack of attribution explained by the reporter’s stating that the source had no permission to speak for the police department.  That alleged comment aside, nothing was reported from a search of Robert Louis Dear’s three residences, or his online presence – if any existed – to indicate a political orientation and affiliation with the Pro-life Movement.

And yet, already on Saturday morning we began to hear – first from the CEO of Colorado’s Planned Parenthood organisation – that the killer was firmly in the camp of the anti-abortion crowd and was acting out of the ‘hate’ of members of that group for Planned Parenthood, and that this sort of thing is the natural result when groups try to limit women’s access to abortion-on-demand.  I read this article in Saturday’s Washington Post, meaning that the article had already been written Friday night.  The article went on to state that the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidency have been silent on the issue.

Well, duh!  Why respond, except perhaps a brief tribute to the three individuals – only one of which, a police officer from the nearby university campus who had joined the city police in responding, had been identified at that point – who had died in the gunfire.  Since little was known about Mr. Dear, and even less about his motivation for the attack, wouldn’t it make sense that a rational person would withhold judgement?  But again, that’s far too rational for many of the voices in the ongoing kulturkampf in American life, where some participants are entirely intent on illegitimising, and therefore stifling, any voice that expresses a viewpoint counter to their own.

In Jewish life generally, when discussing the need to discuss issues at length rationally, we point to the opposing schools in antiquity of Hillel and Shammai.  The two sages, and their respective followers, had very different approaches to the application of law passed on the Torah’s prescriptions and proscriptions.  A sage of a later generation proclaimed that ‘both represent the voice of the Living God, but the law holds with Hillel.’  And why was that?  The answer was given:  because the sages of the School of Hillel were more humble, and respectful of the other side, listening to their arguments before presenting their own.  We find this enshrined in the Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13b.

The principle we learn from the passage is that a healthy and respectful debate is a good thing.  And that one side’s tendency to shut down the other side results in, their own arguments ultimately being over-ridden.  And I think the reason is clear; those whose debating tactic is to shut down the other side, clearly recognise that they haven’t got a winning argument to present.  My hope is that society will not be fooled by this tactic of delegitimising the other side.  That instead they will look at the delegitimisers with skepticism.  Perhaps that is far too optimistic on my part.  Time will tell.  A good week, all!