Unbubbling ourselves

On Wednesday morning I realised that I didn't really understand why people like me might vote for Donald Trump and yet clearly, rational well-intentioned people had done so. But I wouldn't be able to tell you why. In the past, I have often been able to help people who might agree with me to at least understand a bit of how our opponents might see things and why it might seem rational for them to approach things in the way they do. But somewhere along the way, I seem to have lost that. And then I realised that I had become a victim of the 'bubble' phenomenon. I had ended up with Tweet feeds and publication notifications and media alerts which reinforced and fueled my existing perspectives on public life and I hadn't got much in there to help me to understand other PoVs.

So, I'm going to begin to look out for things that will help me to do that. This will mean having to look at ideas that I am very unsympathetic to and to be exposed to presentations of ideas and information that will implicitly and unknowingly portray me as an enemy of reason and a danger to social health and economic wellbeing. In short, the reasons that put me off from engaging with them in the first place are things I will need to grow a thick skin about in order to get through to an understanding of the good things that motivate them.

You see, I do think that no-one (or very few people) take positions for perverse and malevolent reasons. At the worst they usually do so for self-interest, often they do so because they believe that the view is right and would be for the good of the many if not all. Probably, like for many of us, those two will exist together in a mixture further stabilised by a self-image and group identity.

As someone called to be a peacemaker and to love not only neighbour but also enemies, I think that I (perhaps we?) should be able to reach out, show understanding and to disagree with empathy and integrity, without arrogance or rudeness and always hoping for positive change (see 1 Cor.13:4-7). I think that always rejoicing in the truth (1 Cor passage again) means that we should be looking for and celebrating things that seem to be well founded in evidence and resonant of the values of Christ even while challenging things that don't. But I also think that we need, as peacemakers, to be enabling our 'enemies' to trust our integrity and commitment to truth and love. We need to demonstrate that we can understand, that we can listen hard enough and well enough to repeat back to them in our own words what their take on things is -even though it may pain us to do so. Because if we can't or won't do that, we will not earn the right to be heard and we will not be able to put over another view, our view, in a way that will have a real possibility of being heard and understood in turn.

In other words, we are called to engage in dialogue. Including taking the risk of listeninng well enough that we ourselves may learn something and perhaps change something about the way we proceed. Loving our neighbour as ourselves involves that, you see.

It's time to stop being inbubbled, it is time to burst our own bubbles in the name of love, peace as justice.

It's time to learn to listen before we speak lest we continue to fund conflict and ever spiralling misunderstanding which could lead to violence.

Sometimes it is hard also to endure the misunderstanding of allies who will see our quest for dialogue as giving undue respect to the heinous and undeserving. They may suspect that we are going over to the enemy and are becoming untrustworthy.  That is indeed hard and we may have to be just as patient with them to help them to understand what we are about.

I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump – The Washington Post – Medium