Do You Value People First?

Do we really value people enough?  Do we value them enough to prioritize peacefulness, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control?  My Christian friends will recognize that list as a partial one from Galatians 5:22.

What prompts this particular musing is some postings and responses by people I truly love and care about but which made me feel hated, devalued, fearful, generalized, categorized, and as if I would not be accepted were I to interact with them with integrity (i.e. to be myself).  I’m not going to call out any details – I honestly don’t want them to know who they are – because the problem isn’t unique to them.  That has been me in the past.  It is them now.  It is nearly all of us as some point in our lives.  And my response, offense, is also the wrong one – a book calls that “the bait of Satan”.  What I really want to write about is an archaic term:  civility.

The root of civility is civil -- and relates to the idea of public -- it addresses the communal, tribe-like nature of humanity.  There was a time when this was a core value of most regardless of viewpoint.  It is shocking to think that not that long ago, people of faith viewed the engagement in politics as evil, sullying, and being unequally yoked.  Someone reminded me of that viewpoint the other day and I nearly laughed out loud – it sounded ridiculous to me.  Growing up, I heard “never talk about politics and religion in polite company”.  My family roundly ignored the advice – those were the most fun topics – everyone could get riled up and what was more fun than watching adults act like impetuous children?  There is so much adrenaline and anger can do crazy things to people’s appearances – twisted features, glaring eyes . . . as a kid, what could be better -- but watching riots on the streets, violent threats, and destroyed lives and livelihoods makes it not fun at all.  

I’ve aged and I think shifted my priorities a bit – you see, I interact with people who sometimes think very differently than me.  I love them.  I love their creativity.  I love their heart.  I love their passion.  I even love their tortured personalities because I recognize a lot of myself in them.  We create together – and that is wonderful.  We worship together.  We laugh together.  We cry together.  We “spur each other on to good works”.  We sharpen each other as iron.  So there is no room in my heart for hatred of my friends.

But the whole circus is a huge tempataion for me – I love to argue.  I love to debate.  I love to win.  I’m stubborn.  I’m opinionated.  I’m passionate about helping people – and avoiding hurt – and not repeating the mistakes of history.  And, I’ve watched the movie “Idiocracy” and it is an all too terrifying true representation of the future of civilized behavior.  I'm not an idiot.  My friends aren't idiots.  But yet, somehow, we can't talk like people - like everyone - used to.  And that makes me terribly sad.

I would love to engage these people in a real discussion – I love finding compromises – people who know me deeply would know that I am very much a peacemaker at heart.  Some who know me very well would dispute that claim unless I rephrase it:  I am a problem-solver.  And isn’t peace-making really problem-solving?  But, I am an Engineer down to my toes.

Can I be real a second?  Some would call me a “white guy”.  Some would use the word "privilege".   Those words ignore my personal life story.  They are overly simplistic.  To label me such is to engage in exactly what so many protest but the irony is often lost or unseen.  Instead I believe absolutely in content of character -- God made 2 people -- a man and a woman - and all of us came from them.  Assigning value according to "race" or which chromosomes you have is ridiculous.  

Go ahead and categorize this:  much of my family comes from Eastern Europe and I have a Mediterranean complexion.  I grew up in a part of the country much more ethnically mixed and ethnically proud than all of Indiana – I was a Pollack, and I won’t use the other words everyone else was labelled with – if you’ve watched Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, you get it – if not or if that offends you, you won’t.  The labels were only slightly hurtful because we at least engaged – it was not much harsher than “smack talk” in a ball game.  My test scores proved I wasn't a "dumb" Pollack.  That being said, my identity took as many hits as anyone else's -- whose hasn't?  

My Great-Grandparents immigrated through Ellis Island.  My Polish Grandfather and Russian Grandmother were hated by both contingents in their community because of the Communist takeover of Poland.  I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Case Western Reserve University – you can’t call me uneducated.  No one in my family had guns but my pastor is a hunter (and so is incidentally the artist who founded our theater company).  I've had times in life where I was bordering on upper middle class, but I’ve made below poverty the last 12 years due to various actions and policies by our government which I won’t go into here.  I had a wife die of cancer after $1M worth of care -- $50,000 out of my pocket – and I am strongly opinionated on what should be done to fix the system.  I can tell you how many tens and hundreds of millions of bodies have been caused by various ideologies and philosophies.  And I scrupulously fact-check everything I read.  I’m not Republican – I am a Constitutionalist and I’ll let you infer what that means.  My business partner whom I love dearly is black (he doesn’t prefer the term “African American”) – and he knows I respect him as the most talented Salesman and Entrepreneur I’ve ever known and that is saying a lot because I come from a family of great salesmen.  And I’m a Christian.  And a young-earth creationist.  And a homeschool Dad.  And a missionary.  And a thespian.  I value life -- old and young and everything in-between.  But boy do I sometimes want to call out organizations that mislead people -- even as I love personally the individuals they have harmed with their indoctrination.  Now how would you like to categorize me?  See the problem?  Can the labels encompass who I am?  The forces that shaped me?  And I haven't mentioned the most shaping of all -- I am an Engineer -- a math nerd.  Who loves numbers.

And my love of numbers is what puts me outside the bell curve.  I cannot discuss most of my beliefs with most of my friends.  The reason has nothing to do with their views or mine but everything to do with Civility.  And that nice list from Galatians.  You see, you will never ever win a debate with me on anything connected to feelings.  I have feelings, but every molecule in me builds systems based on facts not feelings.  You see, if I feel that piece of wood is strong enough to support 20 people at a railing on my deck, that just isn't good enough.  Not if it kills people when it collapses.  And not a lot of people think like that.  Things "sound fair" to them in certain ways -- but they don't think 20 steps ahead like I do -- it's not their gift -- or their curse.  So I guess people get to call me "heartless" a lot.  But really I just don’t recognize feelings as persuasive in policy discussions.  I have 8 semesters of college-level calculus, a great understanding of statistics, and a newsman’s eye for biased arguments.

And that's my other problem -- I was a "paper-boy" (sorry, that's what they called them back when I was a kid when the earth was still cooling).  At 12 and 13 my favorite part of the paper was the editorial page -- and they used 11th grade vocabulary back then not 5th grade.  And they wrote with a pretty sharp pen.  As a consequence, I have a very sharp tongue -- very blunt, to the point, and surgical.  I learned a lot of my intolerance for nonsense naturally, but my kids read the book “The Fallacy Detective” and I learned a whole lot more -- it's a primer on our modern "faux news" across the spectrum.

And the Fallacy Detective is where I’m going to start to wrap up this poorly-structured and rambling post.  Sorry, I'm too personally invested in this to tighten up my argument.  I’ll give you just the chapter headings – “Avoiding the Question”:  Red Herring Falacy, Special Pleading, Ad Hominem attack, Genetic Falacy, Tu Quoque, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to the People, Straw Man arguments, Circular Reasoning, Part-to-Whole, Either-Or.  In one 200 page book written for 5^th to 7^th graders, you have every mistake made by a vast percentage of our modern media and countless people who post on facebook, speak in public, try to “influence”, and the like. 

One example:  Just the other day a real gem came across and got some friends very riled:  “The United States is in the Bottom 10 for Danger to Women” – sounds shocking, doesn’t it?  "We need to go protest".  "It's all the fault of (fill-in-your-favorite-blank)".  
US Makes the List of 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women

The article came from The Hill rehashing an original article from Reuters.  Scholastically it was utter garbage – in the first sentence:  “548 Experts were Polled”.  Let’s see we have “appeal to authority” from the Fallacy Detective.  They were "polled" so we have an opinion piece masquerading as factual scholarship -- you see in science, you establish a hypothesis, measure some real data, and report results -- you don't "poll" people -- by definition that is "opinion".  In the final paragraph (long after most people quit reading) we finally get the composition of these supposed experts:  members of non-profits with no particular expertise in the subject, people with vested interests in grants and giveaways to solve the problem, "development specialists" -- i.e. tourism boards of various countries, and “social commentators” (in other words, anyone who wants to hang out their shingle and pretend they have something to say).  A real hodge-podge of hand-chosen folks each with an overly loud mouth and a vested interest in pushing a particular narrative.  Fake News.  Click Bait.  Red Meat.  Whatever you call it.  I call it garbage.  

And yet, after a bunch of arguments back-and-forth, friends were at each other’s throats hating each other.  Over some poorly-written, poorly-researched, opinion-non-fact nonsense.  I loved my son's methodology to test this for reasonableness -- he thought of 1 country that he thought might be worse than the US that wasn't on the list.  He looked up their numbers on the survey.  Then he googled "(country name) sexual harassment percentage".  The Reuters survey number:  9.6% from a few people on a government board (it is safe to assume they were all male given this particular country's view on women).  The numbers he found for the same country through more reasonable methods?  60% of males in that country said "women enjoy being touched and harassed", and 99.5% of women reported significant harassment on a daily basis.  Way to go, son.  I raised someone to question what they read.  A bit different than I would go about disproving the claim, but it worked.  Personally I thought of Sweden giving a serial rapist whose most recent victim was a 92 year old a 3 month sentence since the perpetrator was a UN-favored migrant as a pretty good bellwether of other countries that perhaps were mis-sequenced in the "big scary survey" 

And see, just in this little example, I've probably offended some who don't like my numbers-based approach to such topics.  And so basically it isn't safe for me to interact publicly any more -- not if I value friendships over argument.  I'm not big on family pictures because I don’t like being face-captured and profiled, and I love cats but don’t get me started on the relative value of memes.  If I stop posting political things, I might post something twice a year otherwise.  But I’m back to my own email list of a few friends who  know me well enough to slap me on the back and say “There goes Brian proving his tin-foil-hat credentials again.  I love you man.”  The thing is though, this goes the other way too – I’m going to have to start hiding posts from certain people because I want to keep loving them.  And I’m way too tempted to respond.  And I’m not at all sure some of my friends really can handle being pushed with my numbers because that's not their process.  And so It makes me a lot more interested these days in discussing how we even make a framework for discussion and avoiding the actual hot-topics.  Without an agreed framework of Civility, we don’t have any business discussing the other stuff – because that framework is what puts the relationship ahead of the ideal.  And the thing is – I will have that relationship for eternity.  The competing ideologies are a symptom of a fallen world – come to think of it, maybe the old admonitions weren’t so silly after all.  And, if you like to argue and have a thick enough skin, let me know -- heck, if you want to switch sides and let me argue your point while you argue mine, that sounds fun to me.