I heard something interesting today on a podcast interview between Jonathan Haidt and Robert Wright. Haidt noted that the biblical story of the tower of babel is something akin to what is happening today. It seems like different political sides can no longer speak the same language. It’s hard to know how deeply this runs. At times, it can seem like it’s genuinely true. There are things that I can understand the left is saying on a head level, but at the same time I just genuinely can’t understand how they come to that. And I know, from discussions with others on the opposite end of the spectrum from me, that they feel the same about me. I know them well enough to know there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with them; they certainly aren’t stupid or uninformed or incapable of grasping information. But yet we seem to have this almost unbridgeable gap in the way we see things.

I’m not naïve enough to think this is a brand new phenomenon. Reading history has informed me that people have disagreed over important questions, and at times much more stridently and violently, since as long as there have been at least two people gathered in the same place. So I’m not given to pronouncements that what we are living through is unprecedented. All I can say is that it does at times feel like we are at an essential impasse. I like getting along. I want to see other people’s sides. So I get frustrated when it seems like that can’t happen. I’ve long been a sort of optimistic (maybe even quixotic) personality that feels if I could just get in and explain things, the other side will see it. Sadly, I’ve seen some dynamics play out in my own personal relationships in the last few years that have led me to believe it may be too unlikely. I never want to say impossible, but I’ve seen some behaviors that showed me the other person just wasn’t interested at all in what I had to say. They had made up their mind about not only what happened, but why it happened and what my own motivations were. Nothing I could say would dissuade them and to this day they persist in the belief. I know, at least in this instance, that there are long-standing issues and grudges that color the events, but still… it just went to demonstrate that there didn’t seem to be any path to mutual understanding or consideration.

From my part, I’m trying to do what I can to not let that judgment color the way I see things. It’s very hard. When this person says something, it’s easy to think- Oh, I’ve seen THIS before… I KNOW what is going to happen. Well, OK, maybe, but that’s the sort of thinking that got her thinking all scrambled. I don’t want to reciprocate. This isn’t easy, but I’m trying to handle things as they are, not as I imagine them to be with a lifetime of history coloring the reality.  

This is what I do from my end to avoid the trap. All I can do is handle things as best as I can from my end. As for others, maybe we do end up in our personal tower of babel, unable to understand each other and having to separate ways.