Humility: the road to better political dialogue, to truth, and to national healing

The road to healing and achieving better political dialogue in our country begins with humility.

This last year has been a hard one. Conventional wisdom would tell us that a year so filled with difficulty would give birth to solidarity. However, if anything, 2020 has proved that the ideological divisions in America have grown so wide that nothing can bridge them, not even a world-wide pandemic.

As the ideological polarization in our country has become more extreme, the animosity felt between people on different ends of the political spectrum has increased. This tension can be seen in a grid-locked congress and can be felt in homes around the country. Discussing politics has become an increasingly risky undertaking, whether it’s done online or at the dinner table. Many avoid sharing their political opinions out of fear that they will encounter a red-faced and belligerent relative or a derisive and ridiculing message on social media.

However, in our country overly emotional reactions like these have become the social norm. Allowing political conversations to “trigger” you is now seen as the proper and virtuous response. It is becoming customary for people, when confronted with dissenting or different opinions, to react with intense emotion and attack other people’s character instead of engaging in mature conversation.

This avoidance of difficult discussion—which is really an avoidance of critical thinking—is a result of pride, the belief that what you know now is all you will ever need to know. Pride causes individuals to see themselves as possessors of the complete truth, as opposed to seekers still in truth’s pursuit. Because prideful individuals feel like their search for truth has ended sharing ideas with them is impossible. They are incapable of listening to someone with whom they disagree without responding in anger, outrage, or disgust.

It’s not difficult to identify this attitude in yourself, or in others. Someone who pridefully identifies as a possessor of absolute political truth spends their time justifying their decisions (and the decisions of politicians) instead of recognizing their errors. They exert all their effort attempting to silence or discredit the opposition instead of engaging in real discussion with them. This prideful attitude towards discussing politics has catastrophic effects because when we stop having difficult (i.e., productive) discussions about politics, religion, and philosophy we become unable to update and improve our understanding of the world. We become blind.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented how ideological pride blinded the people of Russia in the wake of the communist revolution. Religious devotion to party doctrine produced individuals who were unable to “renounce a single one of their former values or accept a single new one.” Instead of allowing for open dialogue between those of different political persuasions, variation in opinion was outlawed. The country became blind to reality as their prideful identification with man-made truth replaced their humble pursual of transcendent truth. A similar attitude of pride has engulfed our political atmosphere here in the U.S., discouraging open dialogue between people of competing ideologies and threatening our country’s future.

The road to healing and achieving better political dialogue in our country begins with humility, the acceptance of there being forces, purposes and truths greater than one’s own capacity to understand. Humility causes individuals to view their primary identity as someone who is still seeking ultimate truth, not as someone who has already found it. Humility enables us to avoid prideful close-mindedness and engage in more intellectually demanding and less emotionally charged conversations.

To develop humility, we must come to see truth as a transcendent ideal that we are always working towards and not as a comprehensive theory taught at universities. Humble devotion to such an ideal of truth helps us to recognize our near infinite ignorance as human beings and helps us to avoid the trap of ideological pride. A humble individual perceives the complexity and nuance of reality and realizes that no political party, ideology or philosophy contains the complete solution to humanity’s problems.

As we walk the line between ignorance and knowledge, remaining open to new ideas and resisting the temptation to insult those we disagree with, we will become more willing to change our mind about assumptions we once held. We will be able to listen to others with an attitude of sincere curiosity, believing that there is something we can learn from them.

As we enter this new year, let us make a more serious, and a more humble, effort to engage in genuine conversation with those on “the other side,” for it is only through the constant exchange of ideas that the political polarization in America can be made less extreme and our society more free.

If we fail to do so we will become more vulnerable to the cheap ideological solutions of man and the grandiose, unrealistic promises of politicians. Just as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn witnessed in Russia, we could end up losing the freedoms and rights we now take for granted. If this were to happen, we would have no one to blame but ourselves. For slavery “is the price a man pays,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.”

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