Some thoughts for these polarised times and what I can do as an individual...

I’ve been thinking recently about how polarised the world seems to be getting with every passing generation. Sometimes I brush if off as signs of my becoming older and disconnected, but I can’t help feel it. Leave aside the polarisation on ethnic and religious lines that have existed for thousands of years. I’m talking about a different kind of polarisation, based on our choices, from politics to food. It seems almost as though people who see the world differently from you have to be othered and demonised in some way, and people spend so much time talking about how the other is wrong and talking about how that reflects on them as people and human beings rather than just being a function of different tastes. I may be wrong, but it feels like this whole process of sharp differences between people seems to be accelerated with every passing year. 

Last night, sitting in our patio as a family, I was listening to a conversation between my mother in law and my teenage son which helped shed some light on why this may be the case. My mother in law was trying to persuade our kids to go and hang with the other kids in the locality once the pandemic comes to an end rather than just stick to school friends and each other or their devices. As expected, there was the usual pushback about how they don’t have much in common and why they prefer hanging with their friends. Which is when my son made an interesting point. He said that in earlier generations, kids hung with each other because of geographical proximity. Now they hang with each other thanks to common interests and backgrounds, a process that he said is facilitated by the homogeneous nature of school cohorts as well as the ease of connecting over common interests thanks to the internet and social media. 

I couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere in that observation lies the crux of what is changing in society. As middle class children, we grew up in a time where when we came across strangers, we were forced to seek commonality, to overlook differences in background, language and more. We lived simpler lives in some way but that meant that we had less complexity to navigate, and our likes and dislikes were very broad. If we started slicing our likes and dislikes into every smaller slivers, if we wanted to spend our time with only those people who shared the same likes, then we would face a certain loneliness and social isolation. 

Today, that’s no longer the case. And not just for children but also for adults. Today it is so easy to find people who have the same interests and beliefs and backgrounds as you, that there isn’t any real need to devote the time and energy and effort to find what we have in common when we meet someone who is different from us. In a social gathering, when we feel lost, we don’t seek refuge in a conversation but in our screens. We evaluate, judge and categorise people subconsciously within seconds of meeting them. Our professions don’t expose us to people who are very different from us in terms of what they eat and drink and how they talk and dress or how they spend their weekends. And if they do, they become invisible to us. Don’t believe me? Then tell me how much you really know about the lives and families of your finance and admin departments? And I don’t mean the CFO. 

We live in a time when we gravitate automatically towards “people like us”. And in the process we forget that we are ALL “people like us”. Every human being shares the same dreams and aspirations for themselves and the ones they love. Dignity. Happiness. Opportunity. Purpose. Peace. Our circumstances may give us different pathways, the maps of our lives may be annotated in different languages, but they are all reflections of each other. The challenge is for us to remember that, to be reminded of that. To see the value of spreading our arms wide and embracing the diversity of views and opinions that enrich our minds and souls, rather than retreat behind our beliefs and opinions and interests, watching them ossify and watching our inner selves decay without the nourishment of illumination. 

I don’t know if the changes in our world and the way we interact are permanent. As an ordinary person I can’t change macro forces larger than me. But I do know that as an individual I need to make a conscious effort to engage with those who seem different from me, to engage in dialogue. To not be accusatory or judgemental. To have an open mind. To not see every disagreement as a statement of right or wrong. And I know that leads to accusations of either being naive or enabling evil, and the examples of how you can’t have dialogue with a fascist. But that’s not true. It is a historical truth that all evil ends, and it is also a historical truth that there is neither reconciliation nor healing in the absence of dialogue.

I know it’s hard. But I know it can be done because that’s how we grew up. And it’s one of the things about our lives that’s worth rediscovering, and worth holding on to.