THE UPCOMING CULTURAL CIVIL WAR

I wrote this article originally on Dec 17, 2019. Little did I know then how true what I suggested in this article has come to pass. I just didn't think the match will be lit by the Black Lives Matter movement.

There’s no doubt in my mind that in the west we are under- going a major drift along a continuum of political ideologies ranging from the far left to the far right as depicted on the attached graph. We really need to ask ourselves some basic and fundamental troubling questions.

To start with, any fair minded person will make the fundamental observation that identity politics is now playing a significant front and center role in shaping the opinions of the populace. This is particularly manifested in the way that people perceive their opinions and beliefs and expect that all the people that are around them will share these opinions and beliefs. Any words, phrases or even what you wear on your head as a cap is quickly identifies you as to whether you belong to that particular identity or you’re an outsider. Most of the time, the reaction is verbal insults but sometimes rises to physical assaults. This is the characteristics of the current cultural Civil War which can easily escalate to a more dangerous and perhaps violent reality.

To a certain extent, the social media provides a forum for venting people’s frustrations and allowing them to express themselves in a manner that is extremely difficult to do physically in large public forums.

Notwithstanding the statistics and the polls, people tend to believe that the majority of other citizens and voters subscribe to their point of view and are unwilling to accept the fact that there are perhaps as many if not more, other people that have contrary points of view to them. This conviction or belief stems from the fact that many people subscribe or generally watch the media that appeals to their point of view. The social media creates tribes and tribes of followers and those being followed, thus create a forum for a violent verbal discourse. The social media is the wild wild west. There are no rules, there are no laws, and all attempts to control it will certainly fail.

It is so typical to note, that anyone who would vote or post an opinion different from you would be labeled appropriately, labels like, racist, Islamophobic, stupid, ignorant, sexist, self serving and scum to name a few. No one wants to think of the fact that if you were to attach these labels by either sides of the political continuum on the others what would result is essentially a very convoluted characterization of the population at large. In essence, a polarized society with no hope of reaching any consensus on the difficult issues of life and community. We all know this fact, we all recognize this fact, we all know we should not be moving in that direction but here we go marching to the very destination that could lead us to a cultural Civil War.

You see, it is very difficult indeed to reach to the point of acknowledging that different people have different points of view. We need to show courtesy and respect and listen carefully as we expect them to do to our point of view. Yes I know, it’s the ancient Good Teacher principle of : Do for others what you want them to do for you. In a democracy, when there is an overwhelming majority, it is perhaps not as difficult to govern ourselves than in a situation when there is a slim majority of say just over 50% (such as what happened during the last US election). Indeed, the principles of democracy are needed much more in the situation of the slim majority than when there is a clear overwhelming majority. When we glorify our political identities, we can easily manipulate these democratic principles to suit our wishes. We can start interpreting our bill of rights and constitution with the lenses of our political identity and political objectives. This will cause more damage to our society than any election or any vote freely exercised. The Brexit experiment in the UK and the Trump Impeachment are cases in point. It will take a long time (if ever) to re-align and repair the damage that identity politics has caused.

When will we learn that reading only one point of view in a given journal or watching TV channels that are highly biased (and motivated by factors of viewership and money) are not the way to understand and apply the above ancient Good Teacher Principle. Thinking that the world is simply how you see it on Facebook or Twitter, Bullying people or refusing to hear others such as what the far left / ANTIFA and the Far Right/Supremasists do, is the slippery slope to chaos and a recipe for disaster. If not stopped, this cultural civil war can indeed lead to the break-up and disintegration of any country, even the mightiest of them all