Our Doomsday Machine

Political polarization is only one symptom of the national disease that afflicts us. From obesity to heart disease to chronic stress, we live with the consequences of the failure to relate to each other authentically, even to perceive and understand what an authentic encounter might be. Can we see the organic causes of the physiological ailments as arising from a single organ system – the organ of relationship?

Without actual evidence of a relationship between the physiological ailments and the failure of personal encounter, this writer (myself in 2012) is lunging, like a fencer with his sword, to puncture a delusion. He wants to interrupt a conversation running in the background like an almost-silent electric motor, asking us to notice the hum, to question it. He wants to open to our inspection the matter of what it is to credit evidence. For believing—especially with the coming of artificial intelligence, which can manufacture apparently flawless pictures of the real, and with the seething of the mob crying havoc online and then out in the streets—even believing in evidence may not ground us in truth.

Medical trials could produce no double-blind evidence that the failure to relate to each other causes obesity or heart disease, even if the latter is taken as a metaphor for a non-physiological ailment. The recent declaration by the Surgeon General of a link between heart disease and loneliness, though, is telling. The inability to listen and be heard is causing personal harm and, ipso facto, societal harm. Our perception of the other based solely on party, on race, on class – on abstractions – is preventing us from addressing national problems and affecting our physical health. Has our addiction to an abstraction like “individual freedom” produced vaccine hesitancy and the refusal of masks?

What else has happened in America since those opening sentences were written in May 2012?

• In 2012, eight “gun incidents” in schools; in 2021 two hundred forty-eight. (In 2012, 7 injured and 34 killed; in 2022, 118 injured and 47 killed.)

• In houses of worship, a total of 54 killed and 32 wounded

• Continuing incidents of mass killing, not only with guns, spiking in the last few years
• In 2017 in Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally, where violence erupted on a college campus and then in a theretofore peaceful small city
• Riots after the killing of George Floyd
• January 6th civil violence in the attempted interruption of governmental process
• The hammer attack on Paul Pelosi
• Twice as many suicides as homicides this year.
• Rates of gun related-homicide more than six times as high as the next-highest country (Portugal)
• Increased and increasing tempo of mass shootings
• The murder of a state legislator, apparently for belonging to a political party

Of course, all these events may exemplify correlation, not causation. The causes of civil violence, complex and interrelated, depend on factors seemingly remote from personal grievance, like geography and demographics. But though some of them involve masses of people acting in concert, their grievance stoked by social media’s monetization of outrage, what the opponents of gun control trumpet relentlessly is true: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. We must recognize individual responsibility and choice. Even with suicide, though, private agony grows from the failure of relationship. We make choices in a context, a milieu inexorably social. What is conditioning our social milieu, the air we’re all breathing? Call it a hypothesis, then, that the national “organ of relationship” has atrophied to the point of failure, at least among a substantial portion of the populace.

How are we to restore the sane common ground we may walk on with our fellows? Can we avoid the fate of the dinosaurs? As their immense size worked against them after a meteor impact reduced sunlight, our reliance on perception instead of relationship now threatens our survival. Under perception’s sway, certain of our truth, we manipulate one another as instruments—whence “cancel culture,” “debate” with hardened positions unheard by the other side, and violence seen as virtue. We get all pissy if an academic dismisses our most fervently held positions as dependent on a context for their truth..

It has been incontrovertibly demonstrated that what you are certain you see in front of you depends on assumptions you bring to the hermeneutic act of seeing. That is, the nature of an act, the meaning of a speech, as Claudine Gay so confidently asserted, depends on the context. This is not an academic matter. The mechanism of perception is poisoning our planet and our polity.

To expose that mechanism for what it is, and to steer ourselves consciously and conscientiously toward a way of being together different than the one perception enables and enforces, we need the milieu of Buber’s “meeting,” between a present and particular I and You—a force field where each of the participants turns to the other with the intention of establishing “a living mutual relation between himself and them.” We need a milieu where opposites may encounter each other in a context unconditioned by perception’s absolutism, outside the narratives that perception spins out of assumptions.

Braver Angels has the best-developed infrastructure to support such a milieu. And there are now several hundred kindred processes, like https://www.wisedemocracy.org/3-wisdom-council-pro... (See the growing list at ListenFirst.org.)

But we need to share in actual physical being together as well as intellectual (verbal) inquiry and debate. If not bowling leagues, then shooting ranges, fitness centers. (Shared sweat counts.) Hunt clubs. Chess clubs. Hotel lobbies. Elevators. Have you ever encountered a person coming down the opposite escalator as you ascend? The opposite of visual perception is eye contact.

The Meetings of Opposites curriculum is designed to bring into presence, among people with irreconcilable opinions, the actual experience of common ground. In several sessions, we expose the mechanism of perception for what it is, we catch ourselves if we fall under its domination, and we consciously and conscientiously steer ourselves toward being together differently than perception enables and enforces.

In each session of a meeting of opposites, we:

• Investigate visual perception to reveal the mechanism which produces optical illusions.
• Examine a local dispute with high voltage to show the same mechanism at work.

(The optical illusion we live in now is Us-Against-Them.)

• Introduce a philosophical framework to distinguish perception from being-together.
• Participate in group challenges, adapted from Outward Bound, to experience a different way of being together than perception allows and enforces.

These workshops replace positionality with relationship, dialogue not between positions but between persons. https://meetingsofopposites.org

It is late for America. We've been working as opposites — canceling each other — for so long that the American Idea is in jeopardy. We must here and now be confronted bodily, physiologically, in living, real-time instances of the true meeting Buber intended, so that we have not position-taking but moral sustenance, not an abstraction but an actual country to live in. There’s a big difference between the emptiness of a slogan — “The American People” — and the actuality of living as an American person among others. Common ground is a matter of living together, not of agreement in opinions. Narrative-driven solidarity will kill us.

Henry McHenry Jr., Founder of Meetings of Opposites and former Outward Bound instructor, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s, went to Yale, holds a PhD in English Pedagogy from UVa, and teaches Shakespeare for OLLI in Charlottesville.