Love Your Neighbor Of Opposite Politics
I hear there was some famous guy who was big on the whole loving your neighbor thing
Politics, particularly around election night, engenders a unique degree of hatred and vitriol. Each half of the country concludes the other half is entirely filled with ignorant morons, too stupid to recognize the obvious truth that their candidate is better. When one side wins, hundreds of millions of people on the other side fear that the U.S. will descend into totalitarian dictatorship. People become gloomy about the state of their country and spiteful towards the other side.
I think this is pretty unjustified. While I’ve talked at length about my view that Harris is better, many non-crazy people disagree with me about that. I have an absurdly smart friend who is supporting Trump who I could never in a million years win an argument with on the subject.
Our political views are shaped by a multitude of interlocking bits of information that we gathered over the course of our lives—blog articles, TV episodes, books, studies, and so on. No person can digest anything more than the smallest slice of the total information out there.
Additionally, politics is complicated. On every particular political issue—even ones that seem like slam-dunks, like opposition to tariffs—there are smart, informed people on every side of the issue. The presidential candidates are hugely consequential on a multitude of issues—immigration, abortion, PEPFAR, the economy, and a hundred others. It’s genuinely difficult to figure out which candidate is better on average across so many different issues of such immense complexity. Figuring out which candidate better is a highly complicated optimization problem across dozens of different issues of unfathomable complexity.
Given this, though I support Harris, I can see why a reasonable person could disagree, and I know many reasonable people that do. If you’re pro-life, for example, while I still think you should vote for Harris, I can see why you might disagree. In fact, I find it much easier to get into the head of a Trump supporter than, say, someone who rejects SIA—I find politics much trickier to figure out than most philosophical topics. Similarly, if you have very different views about foreign policy, regarding the Ukraine war as an existential threat so long as we keep arming them, while again I disagree, I don’t think you’re crazy.
Lots of people seem to think that disagreeing with them about politics is indicative of corrupt character. I’ve heard many Harris supporters saying that those who vote for Trump don’t respect women because they’re opposed to abortion. This is a staggering failure of cognitive empathy. In the minds of those who oppose abortion, abortion is murder. The reason they oppose abortion isn’t that they support restricting what women can do with their bodies, but that they want to prevent innocent babies from being murdered and women from becoming murderers. You can disagree with this position all you want, but such a position isn’t motivated by malevolence or sexism—it’s a serious and debatable philosophical position.
It’s true, of course, that most people don’t form their political positions in a particularly rational way. Most people are in echochambers, primarily listening to information from their own side, ignorant of basic facts, wholly unable to explain why their opponents believe what they do. But this applies to those who are on your side too!
Forming political views without thinking too hard might be a bit bad, but it’s not bad enough to hate someone over. Most people come to many decisions in a wildly irrational way—having ill-thought out views doesn’t make someone a bad person. If someone forms their political views in an irrational way, you shouldn’t write them off as a bad person, unless you’re prepared to write-off almost everyone on your own side.
People also feel gloomy about the state of the world based on politics. When their side loses, they think the world is going to shit. But they shouldn’t feel that way—we’re at by far the best time in human history, and the world is only getting better. We have so much less to fear and worry about than almost everyone who has ever lived.
Given how complicated politics is, with administrations being hugely consequential on huge numbers of hugely complicated issues, we shouldn’t look down on others based on it, even if they come to disagree. It sounds naive, but politics should be an area where we can disagree without hatred, without thinking the person who disagrees with us is stupid or evil. If you’re the kind of person who gets very mad at your relatives over Thanksgiving dinner because of their political views, or feels visceral rage towards your political opponents, I would encourage you to regard this as a vice and work to minimize it.
This is a superb explication of our present moment in politics and the process in general. If I had the power I'd make it required reading across our country. One of your best.
>Most people are in echochambers, primarily listening to information from their own side, ignorant of basic facts, wholly unable to explain why their opponents believe what they do. But this applies to those who are on your side too!
You remind me of a bit C. S. Lewis wrote in his essay "The Trouble with X" (which is a great little essay, I recommend everyone read it: https://www.noeljesse.com/the-trouble-with-x-by-c-s-lewis/ ):
"Here are two respects in which God’s view must be very different from ours. In the first place, He sees (like you) how all the people in your home or your job are in various degrees awkward or difficult; but when He looks into that home or factory or office He sees one more person of the same kind – the one you never do see. I mean, of course, yourself. That is the next great step in wisdom – to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs.
"It is no good passing this over with some vague, general · admission such as ‘Of course, I know I have my faults.’ It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about – like what the advertisements call ‘halitosis’, which everyone notices except the person who has it. But why, you ask, don’t the others tell me? Believe me, they have tried to tell you over and over again, and you just couldn’t ‘take it’. Perhaps a good deal of what you call their ‘nagging’ or ‘bad temper’ or ‘queerness’ are just their attempts to make you see the truth. And even the faults you do know you don’t know fully. You say, ‘I admit I lost my temper last night’; but the others know that you’re always doing it, that you are a bad-tempered person. You say, ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but everyone else knows that you are a habitual drunkard.
"That is one way in which God’s view must differ from mine. He sees all the characters: I see all except my own. But the second difference is this. He loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving. He does not let go. Don’t say, ‘It’s all very well for Him; He hasn’t got to live with them.’ He has. He is inside them as well as outside them. He is with them far more intimately and closely and incessantly than we can ever be. Every vile thought within their minds (and ours), every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His spirit more than it grieves ours.
"The more we can imitate God in both these respects, the more progress we shall make. We must love ‘X’ more; and we must learn to see ourselves as a person of exactly the same kind. Some people say it is morbid to be always thinking of one’s own faults. That would be all very well if most of us could stop thinking of our own without soon beginning to think about those of other people. For unfortunately we enjoy thinking about other people’s faults: and in the proper sense of the word ‘morbid’, that is the most morbid pleasure in the world."