We seem to be entering a time of perhaps even greater polarization than the last eight or 12 years. To be clear upfront, I am unabashedly on the liberal side of things, though I am happy to recognize that some conservative policies can be a very good thing. Ending government waste is one such – but we may differ on how that is to be achieved, and on what scale and at whose expense. What those are is a matter for another discussion, but what I want to emphasize and cry out for is respect.

Like it or not, we are a community, nationally, regionally and locally.  I pay my taxes too, I form my political opinions on my own life experience and religious beliefs, and need the same things you do. I also believe that we cannot do or have those things we all need, or believe in, without exercising dome mutual respect and forbearance.

Kenneth Clark, in the peroration of Civilization, said, “At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of out time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology…  I also hold one or two beliefs that re more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos.”

Color me stick-in-the-mud.

At the end of Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (Ascent Of Man, episode 11 – Knowledge Or Certainty), Brownowski quotes Oliver Cromwell, in a letter to the Scottish Parliament in 1650, a quotation known as Cromwell’s Rule, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”  Having cited this, Bronowski wades into a pool at Auschwitz, where the ashes of cremated victims were dumped, and says that this is what comes of too much certainty.

Sir Karl Popper put forth his thesis that a theory is valuable only as far as we can disprove it; if we accept a theory as settled fact, we cannot adjust to new problems.  In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper predicted the fall of communism and Nazism on those grounds: absolutism forbids new ideas and cannot admit mistakes, so it grows rigid, cannot adapt, and dies. And absolutism brings us things like Prohibition and book banning.

Which brings me back to my belief that we must exercise mutual respect and tolerance. That doesn’t mean we have to agree. But it does mean that we must restrain ourselves from denigrating each other and refusing to hear what the other side, with its equally legitimate life experience, has to say. The use of phrases such as “leftist” or “virtue signaling” are nothing less than an attempt to denigrate and dismiss another’s opinion without listening or learning. (Of course, sometimes we can justly doubt the honesty of another person who may be in it for the ride – power, profit, etc. But that’s another discussion too.)

Can we please, here in pleasant Edmonds, and in MEN, do ourselves the service of listening to each other, and grant each other the respect to acknowledge the other person’s honesty and dignity, and discipline ourselves, not to agree, not to back off from reasoned discussion, but to listen? To use facts and clear statements of our ideas, rather than emotions and suspicions? And just maybe – learn?

— By Nathaniel Brown

Nathaniel Brown is an Edmonds resident.