Written By: Miranda Lukatch, Editor, Vincentian Studies Institute
As political and social turmoil continues to beset the U.S., I keep asking questions. How did we get here? Where will we end up? And perhaps the most pressing question of all is a variation of the Vincentian question, What must be done? What can I do? How can I respond? At a virtual town hall a few months ago, my congressperson said that the most important thing to do now is to stay engaged—and he specifically recommended trying to talk to people who hold different views.
When he said that, I immediately recalled the last time I tried to engage a friend whose opinion seriously diverged from mine. It was in December 2021, when the first Covid boosters became available. My friend said he didn’t intend to get one. This friend and I had already had many conversations in 2020 that had not gone well. We differed on many issues, and it seemed to me that he was more and more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories. His positions on climate change and the origin of Covid particularly seemed to be anti-science, but he had gotten the first Covid vaccine. When he made this declaration, I was immediately prepared to try to convince him otherwise for his own good, especially since he had several health conditions that made him high risk. We started to debate vaccine safety. I began by talking about how vaccines are developed and what diseases they had already helped eradicate. And then I said, “These vaccines are safe—”
“They’re not!” he said.
Oh, no, here we go, I thought. “Yes, they are—”
“No, they aren’t! [His brother] ended up with a heart problem from the one he got. [His other brother] got the first shot and passed out. His girlfriend thought he was dead.”
The conversation ended shortly after that, with me offering sympathy for what his family had gone through but still saying he should talk with his doctor about getting a booster, and with him still refusing. Given what had been said in our conversations before, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that I thought my friend was anti-science. But the attitude that I approached him with was that I knew better than he did and that I was going to try to save him from himself and his woefully misguided viewpoint, which also endangered others. I assumed things about myself, and I assumed things about him, and my assumptions were that I had good reasons for thinking the way I did—and that he didn’t. I offered him sympathy, but I did not offer him empathy.
I thought about this again when I read Ilana Redstone’s The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less. She writes, “The assumption that the other person is simply ignorant is easy. And it’s a way to avoid a disagreement. What’s more, dismissing someone’s opinion as being the result of not having enough or the right information gives me permission to move on, not really engaging with what they’re saying…. If I think my position is the one anyone would come to with the right information, I am free from having to interrogate or challenge my own thinking.” [1] In other words, we would do well to follow Vincent de Paul’s injunction to “practice humility and patience.” [2] Vincent based his entire community on this principle. He and his followers were well familiar with the idea of needing to fully listen to the people they encountered, both the people they were serving and the people who were their colleagues in service. It was the key to their success—but that doesn’t mean it was easy.
As heirs to Vincent here at DePaul, this principle calls us to approach disagreement with honesty and in good faith, in the sense that we must fully acknowledge both the content and feeling behind an opposing viewpoint. It is both arrogance and an error to dismiss a view we do not hold by attributing it to reasons that serve our own preconceived sense of what is true. We need to engage in dialogue with the assumption that the other person has actual reasons behind what they are saying, reasons that go beyond ignorance or hate. That is what I should have done with my friend. I thought he was ignorant, but he was actually speaking from real life experience. I worried that he was endangering himself and others, yet his motives were quite the opposite.
As I wrote before the 2024 presidential election, studies show that it’s not so much the American people who are polarized as it is their leaders. We hold similar values, but we disagree on how to put them into practice. Or we may choose officials we agree with on some issues without espousing all of their actions and rhetoric. It’s hard to believe that, given what we see in headlines and on television. It is so tempting, especially in these times, to demonize the other side, whoever the “other side” may be. But doing so is destructive. We have to keep talking to each other. Redstone says the way to do this is to articulate a value behind your position. For example, you could say, “I believe all people deserve to live in a safe environment, so I believe migration is a human right.” If you articulate the value (“all people deserve to live in a safe environment”), you avoid using some of the shorthand that gets charged, and you can help people to avoid misunderstanding the value behind your position. The same value in this example could lead to someone holding the opposite position, but if you both articulate the value, you can see where you have some common ground and work from there.
Committing to dialogue doesn’t mean abandoning our own core values. As Redstone writes, it means “learning to recognize when we think some aspect of a heated issue is simple or obvious, and that anyone who sees it differently is ignorant or evil…. Leaving certainty behind doesn’t require anyone to admit to being wrong (maybe you’re not wrong after all). It just means being a little less sure you’re right.” [3]
Reflection Questions
- Can you think of a situation in your life when your assumptions about someone else’s beliefs turned out to be wrong? What led you to those assumptions?
- Think about a position that is opposite from one you hold. What might be one valid reason (not ignorance or evil) that could lead someone to that view? What would another person be accepting as a fact to come to that conclusion? Would you and that other person agree on the same meaning of vocabulary that is key to the issue?
Reflection by: Miranda Lukatch, Editor, Vincentian Studies Institute
[1] Ilana Redstone, The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less (Pitchstone Publishing, 2024), 79. I highly recommend this book, which has exercises in it to help you challenge your thinking.
[2] Letter 1537, “To A Coadjutor Brother, in the Genoa House,” August 16, 1652, CCD, 4:442. Available online at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/vincentian_ebooks/29/.
[3] Redstone, Certainty Trap, 225.