Political Paralysis by Polarisation

If you live in a prosperous country, you are probably unhappy. Partly because your salary is no longer increasing, but also because your society is divided over the question whether to share that prosperity with newcomers or not. In the US, you may be in favour of Trump or against Trump. In Britain, you may be in favour of the Brexit or not. In Sweden you may be in favour of the Swedish Democrats or not. In Germany, France, Belgium, there is a deep trench between traditional parties and the so-called ‘populist’ parties. Not a single country escapes and the entire political system gets polarised about the issue.

The cause of the polarisation is obviously: we don’t succeed well in integrating the newcomers. While the newcomers already have a social backlog and tend to live in ghettos, the original inhabitants work themselves to death to stay ahead of them. Two camps exist: those who believe there is no work/ integration possibility left for newcomers and those who believe that humanity needs to prevail. The press tends to reduce the problem to a problem of racism. At both sides of the trench through society, people accuse the other side of being immoral. 

People draw the wrong lesson from World War II. We see the War now as a fight between good and evil. That is because we can watch the 1930 - 1945 years with the eyes of someone who lives in 2018, knowing what happened after 1930. We believe we know what was an appropriate moral conduct in 1930, but we forget that the people of 1930 lived in an uncertain world, just like we do today. People of 1930 believed an appropriate moral conduct was to fight communism. Why ? Because communism was believed to be dangerous. Just like we think we know what is dangerous today. Some believe ethnic nationalism is dangerous and some believe the Islam is dangerous. Who is right? We can’t say, because this is a question about the future.

I believe therefore that the best moral conduct possible is to stop with this polarisation and admit that we don’t know what is dangerous. We can only say extremism is dangerous because it leads to violence. We should not be naive and tolerate anything from those who don’t behave properly. But we should plead for dialogue with the ones who seem to have an opinion that is different from ours. We should stop digging trenches and start taking more risks. It takes courage to do that. The real victims of this polarisation are the ones who live in precarious circumstances: the refugees including the trans-migrants and the original inhabitants of the poorer suburbs.

I refer to my Dutch blogs about polarisation and Christmas 2016.