It’s bad out there and it’s only going to get worse as we get closer to the election. Politics works a kind of Jekyll-Hyde or werewolf at full moon transformation on many people, Catholics as much as anyone else.
The nicest people grow claws and fangs when the talk turns to politics. They break friendships as easily and happily as a werewolf eats his best friend. It’s creepy and a little scary.
It is something I see in my work as a newspaper editor who reads lots of other publications and gets lots of submissions. The ease with which people condemn people they disagree with in the most comprehensive ways still surprises me, and the divisions only grow greater. Even just two years ago, when I started, almost everyone wrote as if the people they disagreed with were wrong (obviously), and maybe kind of bad. Now many write as if they dealt with evil.
As a columnist who often writes about how we live together in such a pluralistic society, I’ve found that speaking as if people on each side were average people whose thoughts and feelings should be respected enrages the partisans. And there are a lot of partisans.
Even just trying, as neutrally as possible, to figure out what the sides are enrages them. They allow only complete denunciation.
‘Unfair, but understandable’
The obvious Catholic answer is: Don’t be like that. But how can we not be at least a little like that, when politics feels so urgent and not to denounce the other side feels like refusing to stand up for the good? I know the werewolf in myself, and that a full moon rises in almost every political article I read.
Here’s an example and a counter-example. A Catholic political scientist of decidedly conservative views wrote that he’s reading Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography, “My Beloved World.” “Hard not to like her,” he wrote. “She’s smart, spirited … And even more so I’m beginning to understand why she hates people like me so much. Unfair, but understandable.”
Cheers for him, you would think, to try to understand someone with whom he differed on so much and in so many ways. A Catholic theologian responded: “However admirable it is to understand the enemy, this sort of empathy strikes me as fundamentally misplaced.”
I would have thought that empathy can never be misplaced. I couldn’t, until I got to the comment, imagine a learned Catholic saying it could be. To empathize in the way the professor does is to apply Jesus’ command to love our enemies, and in the way Jesus commands when he tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
Everyone, including the theologian, wants to be read the way the political scientist read the justice. Everyone wants others to assume he’s doing his best and promoting the good as he sees it. We want them to believe that, if we’re wrong, we’re not wrong because we hate God or the truth or other people.
In other words, we all, including the theologian, want empathy done unto us. And because we want empathy, we have to empathize. The Christian conception of justice requires that we give to others what we demand for ourselves.
He who doesn’t hesitate is lost
I like the way the French philosopher Simone Weil spoke about the way we should see others, which she called “hesitation.” In it “lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity.” As a philosopher friend explains it, “she says that our most profound and reverent posture toward another human being is ‘hesitation,’ of pausing before we judge or exclude or feign we can fully understand another person.” It means, as I understand it, not so much paying attention to others but being present with them.
The social scientist hesitated in his reading of the justice. The theologian didn’t. Which way of relating to someone very different from you is more likely to bear fruit?
If both found themselves stuck in an elevator alone for an hour with Sonia Sotomayor, which would have a better chance of being heard by her in a way that might encourage her to change her mind? And — this is not insignificant — learn from her?
Which way of thinking is more politically useful? Which helps more in getting what we want in the political world, in doing the greatest good there we can?
At the simplest level, how can we counter ideas we disagree with without understanding them — not just understanding the explicit arguments, but the desires, hopes, ideals, mistakes, pain, moral imagination behind them? That is, without knowing something about the people who hold the ideas. And how can we possibly understand the people without empathy, without hesitation?
