…At least Fogel was willing to be introspective. I suggested to him that Haaretz — the liberal Israeli paper, a fierce critic of Netanyahu, which has relentlessly covered allegations of Israeli war crimes — could not publish in Canada without being deluged with complaints and criticism. “I don’t think you’re entirely wrong,” he says. “What passes for the norm in Israel is sometimes seen by the Jewish community here as crossing the line.”
How can we have a serious discourse with all these invisible lines? Fogel gave me a fatalistic answer: “I’m not sure you can.”
It’s a variation of an idea I heard from Toney, and Kaplan-Myrth, and a host of other people in recent months: we’re too far gone, too polarized, too emotional to be able to talk about this crisis. Many say they respect the positions of the other side, and are keen to figure out points of agreement, yet often caricature their ideological opposites as inflexible, radical, impossible to reason with.
Mediating this conflict through the body politic doesn’t necessarily mean striving for compromise or capitulation, and it doesn’t entail a return to an age of elite gatekeepers. But it has to mean engaging in discussion, debate and argument without immediately calling it all off. Enabling genuine discourse doesn’t fuel hate, and may act as a pressure release valve to actually prevent it. At the same time, we can’t accept hateful language, online or in the street, just because the author insists their side has a monopoly on morality and justice.
There’s nothing naive about this idea: It is literally the foundation of our society. It is deeply cynical to say that our ideological opposites must be silenced, boycotted, or shouted down because they are dangerous or immoral.
Polarization is not a thing that other people do to us. It is a thing we do to each other. In the same way, mediation is not something that will be done for us, but something we have to commit to and work on, every day, ourselves.
Multicultural Meanderings 