What if We're Just Polarized? Lincoln's Address and the Limits of Comity

When might an appeal to depolarize, to treat the other side as a good-faith partner rather than as a mortal enemy, be not merely naive but unethical?

I thought about this while listening to Vox editor Ezra Klein being interviewed on a recent Better Angels podcast. Klein gives credit to Better Angels for doing all the things that have even the slightest bit of evidence for working to get people depolarized (namely, face-to-face interactions with mutual vulnerability in an environment where judgment and proselytizing are suspended). On the whole, though, Klein admits that he's not sanguine about Americans' ability to move beyond intense partisan disputes. "What if we're just polarized?" he asks. That is, what if the intense, passionate divisions exist because our disagreements really are just that deep and meaningful?

Better Angels takes its name from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. On the eve of the Civil War (March 4, 1861), Lincoln makes one last attempt to prevent the Southern states from seceding--even though he acknowledges the basic disagreement: "One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended." How, he asks, do we resolve this fundamental dispute? He continues:

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory, after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.

I'll tackle the elephant in this room below, but on a purely rhetorical level, this is stirring stuff. I think of this passage often as I contemplate the state of the United Methodist Church. Are we likely to be any more amicable--or, better, any more effective--as a government of strangers than as a government of friends? Individuals in small systems--marriages, for example--can sometimes benefit from separation. But individuals can separate physically. After a divorce or breakup, I don't ever have to see my ex if I really don't want to. But that attribute doesn't scale up. Participants in a democracy are stuck with one another. 

Lincoln's final paragraph lifts into near-poetry:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

 (Can you believe Presidents used to talk like that?)

Poetry aside, though, the speech fell on deaf ears. The South seceded the following month, sparking the Civil War. Lincoln's Better Angels push failed.

And yet (and here's the elephant): it's hard for me to wish for some historical counterfactual here, some alternate history where the South hears Lincoln's plea for unity and decides to stick it out a bit more. "The South sticking it out," after all, means "they keep human beings enslaved." Lincoln's plea for comity and Union is also a plea to keep slavery going for a while. Indeed, Lincoln starts his speech (in a section Better Angels is less apt to quote) by insisting that, as he had promised throughout his campaign, he will not touch slavery in the South. The South, he says, is afraid that they will lose their "property." He reassures them that he has no plans to take this "property" from them. 

This can't be over-emphasized: the "property" Lincoln talks about consists of people dehumanized, imprisoned, tortured, and exploited. None of Lincoln's beautiful speech addressed enslaved (or formerly enslaved, or potentially enslaved) people. The angels of unity Lincoln appealed to would not have been appreciably "better" for those souls trapped in that earthly hell. This is an original-sin-level failure of patriotic empathy in a speech otherwise replete with empathic overtures.

From my 2019 perspective--and from every eternal perspective my faith allows me to imagine--antebellum slavery constitutes one of the prime historical exemplars of large-scale human evil. To equivocate on this point--to suggest (as Lincoln did) that the truth is somewhere in the middle, that good and reasonable people can disagree, that slow deliberation is the best way forward--is nearly as bad as participating in the evil directly. 

In the context of antebellum slavery, there's simply no responsible way to debate "both sides" of slavery, no ethical relationship to its happening apart from immediate abolitionism. From a present-day perspective, the issue seems so clear cut. If a part of society insists on enslaving people, that part should be forcibly prevented from doing so and prosecuted if they do. Reasoned intervention--convincing them out of an impoverished worldview that refuses equal dignity to all--can wait until after slavers are made to stop fricking keeping people chained up as if they were property.

Something like this view--it's wrong even to treat this as debatable--informs the resistance I occasionally hear from people when I talk about Better Angels. On right and left alike, there are some issues that for some people are civility dealbreakers. Examples: There is no ethical debate about the right to/wrong of abortion. There is no ethical debate about the danger of human-caused global warming. There is no ethical debate about the im/permissibility of drag queen story hour.

Two ending thoughts, then: 

(1) I'm not sure how Better Angels and other depolarizing initiatives navigate a debate not between reds and blues but between those who think issue X is debatable versus those who think it's so morally clear-cut that debate is evil. 

(2) I would love to think that my moral clarity about antebellum slavery derives from my superior ethical reasoning or consonance with the Holy Spirit. I'd like to think that, were I me in 1860, I'd be an ardent/active abolitionist. But I think instead that my clarity has more to do with racial and historical privilege than with some innate moral superiority. That admission, then, leads me to wonder what issues I consider debatable now that future generations will rightly condemn me for tolerating or talking about as if it were an interesting intellectual exercise. I have several guesses: mass incarceration, global warming, wealth inequality. Or how about the still-extant reality of human trafficking and modern slavery (including prison labor in the US)? What does it mean that I'm not dropping everything to battle for/against those realities? In that view, how dare I call myself a better angel?

More tomorrow,

JF