On most days since Trump took office, the line that has run through my head is from the movie “Airplane!”: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Bret Stephens, NYTimes Columnist.
It feels like the world is having a nervous breakdown. More than 7 in 10 adults reported the future of our nation as a significant source of stress in their lives, making it the most common source of stress in this year’s 2024 survey. The 2024 U.S. presidential election followed closely at 69% – and that was all before the election. The World Happiness Report, released last week showed that the United States had dipped to its lowest slot in the country rankings — 24th — after being ranked as high as 11th in 2012, the first year of the report. Many are responding to all this emotional angst by putting themselves on a “news” diet more powerful than Ozempic.
What is going on? We have experienced worse times – civil wars, world wars, financial depression, deadly disease. But somehow this feels different and not in a good way. Maybe it is the 4,000 to 10,000 advertising messages we are exposed to daily – or the 98.5 we consciously see – each designed to make us uncomfortable about something. Maybe it is the onslaught of political news and partisan rancor that shows up on our smart phones, dominating our attention. Maybe politics, once more about theoretical beliefs, has now landed on our doorstep as actions – lost jobs, cut funding or risked medical support. Maybe our nervous system is just not wired for this scale of message bombardment and change.
We have always been divided on this and that. What has changed are the forces that drive us to take sides on so many issues. In so many ways our technology-driven social media is a huge “sides-taking” machine that has taken cultural warfare to scale. We have moved from horse and buggy “sides-taking” to AI-enabled “sides-taking” that now invades everything: what car you drive, which retailer you prefer, what news source you engage, what social media platform you use, which house of worship you attend – or don’t, what neighbourhood you inhabit, what university you attend.
The speed of these shifts can be head-snapping. Witness in recent months the shift from progressives’ adoration of Tesla cars as environmental savior to demonization, for some warranting attack of drivers and dealers as a show of disdain for Elon Musk’s work in the Trump administration. Just as profound is the embrace of Elon Musk’s EVs by conservatives. Same car, very different narrative.
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari at a conference in Beijing, China recently addressed how the emergence of artificial intelligence greatly adds to the risk of sides that fail to grasp the importance of the greater whole: “All over the world, trust between humans is collapsing. Too many countries think that to be strong is to trust no one and be completely separated from others. If we forget our shared human legacies and lose trust with everyone outside us, that will leave us easy prey for an out-of-control A.I.”
What are sides? They are many things but they often arise as a form of corrective – intended to improve or make things right – around which we organize our lives. They can morph into action and even warfare on behalf of a cause when our allegiance moves from the whole to a subset or group. The death of George Floyd moved large numbers of people to re-organize themselves, their affiliations and their decisions around racial justice and the attendant DEI movement. The massive influx of immigrants moved large numbers of citizens to oppose “open borders.”
Sides also occur within groups. When Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer announced that he would support the Continuing Resolution to fund the federal government, opposed by Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the tension between sides inside the Democrat party boiled over. And as we all know, the failure to take sides can unleash toxic venom from all sides.
Harari makes an insightful distinction between two forms of sides – nationalism vs. fascism: “Nationalism is the belief that one’s own nation is unique and that they have special obligations towards their nation. Fascism, on the other hand, asserts that one’s own nation is supreme and that exclusive obligations should be towards it. Fascism denies all identities except national identity and insists on sacrificing anything and anyone for the nation.” Regardless if the topic is politics, religion or sports teams, it is one thing to believe our side is uniquely right or true. It is another to assume our side is exclusively supreme.
All too often the corrective actions of one side, absent an aim toward wholeness, escalates the tension as it elicits a more extreme swing in the opposite direction from the other side. In each cycle, one group seems almost giddy and the other stressed and despondent. How do we move beyond these repetitive “sides-ism” swings that keep us stuck in place or even regressing while breeding uncertainty, dysfunction and stress?
Transforming Sides into Wholeness
Religion’s main and final goal is to reconnect us (re-ligio) to the Whole, to ourselves, and to one another—and thus heal us. Richard Rohr, priest and writer
I believe it imperative we move from sides as our dominate priority to wholeness. Wholeness can be defined as soundness, health, or well-being in body, mind, soul, or spirit: the state or condition of being not broken, injured, or damaged; intact condition. How do we break this cycle of escalating sides in our politics, faith, and beliefs? It starts with our ability to see beyond the narrow view of win/lose where defeating the other side becomes more important than finding a higher, more sustainable, more functional ground. Interestingly the etymology or root of the word “holy” is: “set aside” but also “whole, uninjured, safe.” ‘Side’ and ‘wholeness,’ reside side-by-side, connected in the root of holy.
Taking sides may exert effort for correction, but it also often actually grows the divide and lacks a vision for wholeness that completes and restores. How can we move to become more connected, and in the process more whole, healthy and safe in the midst of a divided world obsessed by sides? Actually, it is something we have done repeatedly throughout history.
Start with biblical Old Testament times where according to scripture God chose sides by picking the Jews as his chosen people. But his New Testament son, moved to wholeness by including the Gentiles. Jews or Gentiles? Wholeness for both.
Now to the Civil War: President Lincoln eventually took sides against slavery, and after a bloody war that killed over 600,000 soldiers, what did he do? He worked to make the Confederacy whole. Abraham Lincoln’s treatment of the rebel armies at the end of the Civil War, as told in Team of Rivals, provides a primer in wholeness:
With the war drawing to a close, Sherman inquired of Lincoln: “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.?” Lincoln replied that “all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.” He wanted no retaliation or retribution. “Let them have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want no one punished; treat them liberally all around. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.”
Lincoln’s words in his second inaugural address still resonate: “with malice toward none, and charity toward all…” Union or Confederate? Wholeness for both – that surely was messy and is still a work-in-progress.
Fast forward to World War II. Hitler’s Germany chose sides – the ‘Aryan’ race over the Jews. But the Allies prevailed as the winning side in the war against the Axis powers. Allies vs. the Germans? No, the Marshall Plan was designed to create connection and wholeness for all sides including West Germany.
Sides play an important role. They provide correction and reform. But long-term a state of warfare is not sustainable. Win or lose, sides have to make concessions in the name of a higher whole. What made Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi great? They took sides in a powerful way, but their ultimate greatness came from their larger vision and mission for wholeness for all sides.
Richard Rohr describes the challenge: “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness—mine, yours, ours—need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.” Wholeness begins with the recognizing that no matter how much I detest the other side and how angry I am, that the other side brings value, insight and commitment that my side needs. And the only way to tap that value, is to become a part of making them whole – regardless if I am a part of the winning side, the losing side or a stalemate. When I refuse to “love” them, I usually wind up becoming what I hate in them. I become an obstacle to healing, restoration and productive relationship and in the process become the agent of my own impotence to heal, be restored, and to function productively.
We are at a stage in our country, organizations, faith and family – where we need to move beyond correction, no matter how righteous we may feel – to wholeness. Roosevelt, Churchill, Lincoln, Jesus – those are pretty good role models who knew how to take sides in perilous times, but were forces for the cause of rebuilding relationship and wholeness.
Each new leader, in each new season must re-operationalize their beliefs and leadership approach to sides and wholeness. It seems lately our leaders too often have succumbed to ‘sides-ism’: from a weakened President Biden that allowed his administration to move to the left of where the country was to President Trump who is using brute force to move the country beyond established leadership norms and to the right of prevailing political winds. Too many of their followers have done likewise.
It is time for a different vision. One where our sides are viewed as a correction step that aspires to reach relational wholeness because it changes us, our efforts and the results when that is our aim. The alternative: use authoritarianism to oppress people into submission, which always feeds a resistance movement.
It is like a marriage relationship. There we understand, that winning every single argument, getting our side to prevail in every case, may garner some victories but risks losing the marriage. Who would say, it is my goal to defeat my spouse in every way possible. Same in a society. Whether a marriage or our country, the design is for wholeness that places the relationship above our many sides.
Here is the question: If you could get every issue you care about to bend to your preference, would it result in a society worth having? The very essence of wholeness means compromise, tolerating what and who you disagree with or find imperfect. Human life is intrinsically miserable together at times, but unbearable alone. That’s the deal. We are all so gloriously and feebly made for each other.
As David French stated so powerfully “one cannot truly defeat the enemy with the enemy’s tools.” It transforms the contest between good and evil into a contest between evils. When we come to see the other side as pure evil, we become more evil-like. When we say “fight fire with fire,” we become the evil we abhor in others. Wholeness is the only thing that ultimately makes fighting for sides worthwhile. Eventually, we must move beyond trying to win the war, and win the peace – win the wholeness. It’s what happens symbolically as the players from each side – jubilant winners and the heart-broken defeated – line up and shake hands after each March Madness basketball game. It’s what must eventually happen in life and death struggles like the bloody stalemate that is the Russia/Ukraine war – sides must give way to a whole that is hard to swallow for each.
So how shall we navigate this stressful, happiness-challenged time? By recognizing the vital need for correction to redirect what is broken and yet realize it is a crucial but insufficient step toward a higher aim – wholeness. Our job in this tumultuous hour – regardless if you are giddy or frozen with anger or fear at the current circumstances – is not to get stuck in the correction of sides. Each in our own way must move forward toward the next vital step in the process: restoration of relational wholeness. We can’t stay stuck in the ‘sides’ menu, we must be agents for the main course – relational wholeness.