Some Reflections on Understanding People

Some Reflections on Understanding People
 
Something that has driven me crazy for some time within the church is the way we treat the Pharisees in the Gospel narratives.  I would hear sermons and other messages that would talk about how hypocritical the Pharisees were and that they were people who spent all their time trying to earn their way into heaven while, at the same time, imposing unbearable requirements on the people, seeking to eliminate the people who got in their way rather than give up their power.
 
What particularly bothered me is that it seemed clear to me that the problems that we see in the Pharisees have not gone away.  They are everywhere, perhaps more in the church than anywhere else.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these were not two isolated facts, but were deeply related to one another.  The prevalence of Pharisaic problems in the church makes perfect sense because they are problems that religious leaders are more likely to have than anyone else, precisely because of their status as religious leaders.  If this was indeed true, it seemed that our tendency to demonize the Pharisees did nothing but blind our eyes to seeing how we are just like they are.
 
After that, I felt I could no longer treat the Pharisees that way.  I began to realize that, just like most people who act like the Pharisees in our own day don’t realize they are doing it (and I can give you many examples from my own life where the same has been true of me), it is entirely possible that the Pharisees themselves did not understand the sinfulness of their behavior.  In fact, the more I got inside their heads, the more I realized that they weren’t being evil for evil’s sake, but were trying to act with integrity within their tradition as best they could.
 
This does not, however, mean that the Pharisees were any less wrong.  What it did, though, was help me to understand not only what they were saying and doing but why they were saying and doing it.  More than ever, it has taught me to see where I do exactly the same things, where I wasn’t able to see it before when I behaved as if there was no similarity between them and myself.
 
This has taught me the evils of demonizing people.  It has become more and more clear to me that a large part of our problem today is that we cannot have honest conversations with people and a large part of why we cannot do that is because we tend to demonize the people with whom we disagree.  So long as we refuse to understand why someone might come to a different conclusion than we do, we will never be able to take them seriously.  We will develop a caricature, a straw man, and then ruthlessly cut it down, without taking account of the fact that it bears no relation to reality, or, at least, not much of one.
 
Let me use as an example the issue of abortion, as the opposing sides, as I see it, are rather clearly expressed.  Those who think that abortion is always wrong call themselves “pro-life.”  Those who think that abortions are acceptable in one form or another call themselves “pro-choice.”  Now, pro-lifers will say that pro-choicers are “anti-baby” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, such people advocate the killing of babies (It must be noted that those who are pro-life often work with an understanding of embryonic and fetal life as equal to life outside of the womb, an understanding that is not shared by everyone else).  Pro-choicers, on their part, tend to say that pro-lifers are “anti-women” or something along those lines as, the argument goes, the forcing women to have their baby forces women to give up their dreams and is a financial burden (It must be noted here that the battle often rages the hardest over the issue of pregnancies that result from rape or incest, where the mother had no real choice in the preventing of the pregnancy).
 
The problem with this way of thinking is that it does not reflect the truth, or at least only a partial rendering of the truth.  It is entirely possible that some pro-life people are truly anti-women and some pro-choice people are anti-baby.  However, I have serious doubts that people lay awake at night thinking, “I really hate babies.  How can I act on this intense hatred of babies?  I know, I’ll support abortion!”  Or, conversely, “I really hate women.  How can I oppress women as best as I can?  I know, I will refuse to let them get abortions!”
 
This way of thinking emphasizes only the positive aspects of each view (that life and/or choice is good) and attacks only the negative aspects of the other (that there are bad side-effects that can arise from these views).  In practice, this completely eliminates any hope of real conversation and dealing with issues.  If a pro-lifer calls a pro-choicer a “baby killer,” how likely is that pro-choicer going to want to have real dialogue?  Indeed, how likely is that pro-lifer to want to have real dialogue?  After all, they have resorted to a caricature.
 
Why are do we do this to each other (and here I have stepped away from the specific issue of abortion)?  I think it is because we are desperately afraid.  In our increasingly polarized culture, to take a position that is not on one extreme or the other is to be seen as a traitor to both sides.  To take the opposing side seriously means to treat the people as if they may truly be human and, thus, may have some things in common with well-grounded, sensible people like us, which makes it much harder to take a hard line against them.  To really listen always carries with it the possibility, no matter how small, that we may be convinced by what we hear, or at least that we may begin to see varying shades of grey where we used to see nothing but black and white.  
 
It is difficult to toe the middle line when all around seem to be running as far from that middle as possible.  And yet, though I surely try to live in this tension and I certainly advocate that others do so as well, I do not think we should pursue moderation as if it were a kind of replacement ideology, as if an ideology of the middle is any better than an ideology of the left or the right.  I think that the reason that the extreme positions are destructive is because they are not true, because they distort the facts and then use power to try and enforce conformity to that particular distortion.  I think that we should see shades of grey, not just because I wish we could stop the bitter fighting but because I am convinced that the shades of grey are real and that thinking in terms of black and white forces us away from what really is.  I think that we need to stop demonizing people because it prevents us from experiencing them as they really are.