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.
I am writing this reflection in September 2024, well before Election Day, but still in the thick of American political passion. Regardless of the election’s outcome, it’s unlikely that the result will end the sense of overall polarization in our country caused by a myriad of issues, polarization that has been evident even in our own DePaul community over the past year. No matter which candidate people support, it sometimes seems difficult to believe that those who support the opposing candidate might share a similar sense of justice or morality. And yet this very feeling makes it all the more important for us to believe that they do. But why is this?
One reason is because it seems to be true. In an article for Time, journalist Karl Vick reports the results of several studies of American attitudes and how those translate into politics. He writes that in January 2021, a study surveying 2,000 people across the political spectrum asked them to consider fifty-five separate goals that the nation should have, and to rank them according to what was important to them personally and according to how important they believed other people thought they were. The results were surprising. For instance, the goal to “successfully address climate change,” was the third highest priority for the survey participants themselves, but these respondents ranked it thirty-third in their perception of its importance for other people. As Vick writes, “no one thought their fellow Americans saw climate as the high-priority item nearly everyone actually considered it to be.” This study, the American Aspirations Index, “found ‘stunning agreement’ on national goals across every segment of the U.S. population, including, to a significant extent, among those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden.” The polarization we have been hearing about on the news is something one scholar calls “learned divisiveness,” which is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: people believe there’s more division than actually exists, and that, in turn, fuels further division. We would do well to keep this in mind before we vilify those who we believe think differently from us. [1]
Goodness transcends opposing viewpoints; justice is more than politics. We don’t have to look far into our Vincentian heritage to find reinforcement for this lesson. For example, Frédéric Ozanam, the key founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, knew it well. The nineteenth-century France he lived in was also bitterly divided into partisan groups. But he never lost sight of what this conflict was really about. He wrote:
“For, if the question which disturbs the world around us today is neither a question of political modalities, but a social question; if it is the struggle between those who have nothing and those who have too much … our duty to ourselves as Christians is to throw ourselves between these two irreconcilable enemies … to make equality as operative as is possible among men; to make voluntary community replace imposition and brute force; to make charity accomplish what justice alone cannot do.” [2]
If we are to work together to better our society, we must be prepared to approach each other with tolerance, at least. Vincent de Paul would go one step further: he would have us approach one another with love, looking for the goodness—and, indeed, the God—that exists in all of us. As he once said, “I have to love my neighbor as the image of God and the object of His Love.” [3] He pointed out that it’s easy to show respect to people we love and who think like us. But he asked,
“Have we felt less esteem and affection for certain persons? Do we not, from time to time, allow thoughts of this more or less? If that’s the case, we don’t have that charity which dismisses the first feelings of contempt and the seed of aversion; for, if we had that divine virtue, which is a participation of the Sun of Justice, it would dispel the mists of our corruption and make us see what’s good and beautiful in our neighbor in order to honor and cherish him for them.” [4]
So, as our future unfolds, let us follow one more of Vincent’s injunctions and “continue to offer one another to God and to love each other in Our Lord, as He has loved us.” [5]
Reflection Questions:
Has the polarization that seemingly permeates our society affected your view of others? How so? What are some ways you could look for the good in those with opposing viewpoints?
Reflection by: Miranda Lukatch, Editor, Vincentian Studies Institute
[2] Quoted in Craig B. Mousin, “Frédéric Ozanam―Beneficent Deserter: Mediating the Chasm of Income Inequality through Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” Vincentian Heritage 30:1 (2010): 62. Available online at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol30/iss1/4/.
