Photo illustration by Kerry Prugh
Disagreement is not, as a general rule, a problem that needs to be solved — it is more often a sign of societal health. Reality is a large and shifting thing and is always difficult to interpret. Disagreement indicates that more than one person is paying attention, trying to understand what they see and publicly arguing on behalf of their interpretation to the rest of the group. This kind of cooperative, deliberative sensemaking is the best system yet developed for slowly, through trial and error, maneuvering a group’s ideas and actions into harmony with the world as it presents itself.
Alas, “deliberative” and “harmonious” do not characterize the kind of disagreement prevailing between the groups quaintly referred to in America as liberals and conservatives. Our political disagreements are rarely instances of cooperative sensemaking in which interpretations are offered in good faith and honestly debated, moving us closer toward a state of flourishing. They are, more often, an escalating (or now fully escalated?) exchange of invective: the other side is not merely incorrect, they are groomers, pedophiles, perverts, bugmen, creeps, fascists, bigots, Nazis. Each side, wounded by the gravest accusation the other side can think to fling at it, retaliates in kind, and everyone feels we are on the verge of social disintegration.
The morbidly unhealthy state of our present-day political discourse reflects the desperate state of the American psyche. Ours is a moment of real and felt scarcity marked by the fear that others are gobbling up all the money, status, power, respect and influence.
Both ‘sides’ agree that any successful attempt to rattle us loose from the politics of demonization and division will need to be radical.
To be as fair as possible to our political thought leaders, the world indeed contains pedophiles and Nazis, and where they are found, they should be pitied — and ruthlessly prevented from acting on their desires. But in point of blessed fact, pedophiles and Nazis are thin on the ground in 21st century America. The vast majority of us run off the rails of decency in far milder ways. We are stupid and scared. and so we are greedy, self-absorbed, uncaring, desperate for distraction, dishonest, clawing after a sense of belonging, addicted, et cetera, et cetera.
One could be forgiven for assuming that the next step in this argument is to suggest that we all drop our fists, let out a breath and recognize one another for the fallible, well-meaning creatures we all are. And of course we should do this! I am of the firm, old-fashioned opinion that any two people, if they could only speak with real candor and self-understanding, could come to see each other not only as human but as very much like themselves. The do-gooders who insist that the things we share are immeasurably greater than the things that divide us are right.
So, we should indeed sit with our neighbors, look them honestly in the eye and realize that we are all human, that life is short and we understand far less than we wish we did. But if this kind of local-level spiritual revolution is necessary, it is insufficient. In a hyperconnected, complex, utterly massive society like ours, we need bonds of unity that can apply even in the absence of eye-to-eye contact. We need the kind of glue that holds groups together. We need common projects, goals and values.
This will take some doing. For the past several decades, we’ve operated under the assumption that each of us pursuing personal interests will produce a society characterized by dynamism and broad-based opportunity, agency and prosperity. Unfortunately, things haven’t especially worked out this way. For a time, the specters of Soviet Communism and Islamic Jihadism tied us together in a shared struggle and destiny, but as those threats have receded, the sense that each of us is on our own has produced a society characterized by widespread anxiety, loneliness, stagnation, wealth-hoarding and an ambient sense of precarity that makes many Americans feel like we live a hair’s breadth from financial collapse — and with it social death. Our approach to collective life clearly is not working, and that failure is the underlying substratum from which our hysterical politics emerges. This larger social frame will need to change, or no amount of interpersonal civility and candor will save us.
If we want the demonization and name-calling to stop, we need to look for concrete ways to convert Americans from passive cogs in massive machines into active, creative, intelligent forgers of a common destiny.
For the past several months, I have been honored to serve on the Restoring the Common Good Initiative, a sort of working group convened by Chris Murphy, a Democratic U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah. We were brought together with the mission of understanding why, amid so much wealth and relative peace, Americans feel so lonely, angry and anxious, and what we might do about it.
The group is composed of seven thinkers, consciously drawn from Left and Right, but if you were a fly on the wall, you might not be able to tell who is who. This is not because we are converging on a milquetoast politics of the common denominator. Rather, both “sides” agree that any successful attempt to rattle us loose from the politics of demonization and division will need to be radical. We all see that Americans are due for a large-scale revamping of the ways we organize and understand our common life.
The initiative aims eventually to produce concrete policy proposals, but in our discussions thus far, we have zeroed in on a few central themes. One of them, near to my heart, is the notion of shared agency. Groups of humans typically bond and stay bonded when they share a sense of purpose and have ways of collaborating in pursuit of that purpose. This is the opposite of the go-it-alone ethos I have described. Agency, however, is no simple thing. Right now, a majority of young adults in the United States report a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. Agency also requires the power to work towards whatever purpose one might possess, and in a number of ways, ordinary Americans feel especially disempowered these days when confronting economic, political and corporate institutions that seem faceless and utterly unreachable.
The above is, of course, only the lightest sketch of what ails us, but it grants at least the outline of what might be required to make America a place characterized by abundance and solidarity rather than scarcity and fear. If we want the demonization and name-calling to stop, we need to focus on watering those parts of our lives — religion, education, the arts, the family, public service, to name a few — where meaning and purpose emerge, and we need to look for concrete ways to convert Americans from passive cogs in massive machines into active, creative, intelligent forgers of a common destiny. Renewing agency, purpose and power is a great deal harder than calling for greater politeness in our debates, but it also happens to be the way our disintegration can be halted and real healing can follow.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a senior fellow at the think tank Capita and a philosopher on faculty at Harvard Medical School.