Socio-Political Polarization: A. The Impasse (Column 450)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

A few days ago a friend sent me an article by Elizabeth Kolbert from The New Yorker that addresses socio-political polarization in the United States. Similar phenomena, of course, also exist here and in other places around the world. After I describe the article, I intend to present two insights that came to me this past Shabbat while reading it. In this column I will focus on a built-in tangle in polarized situations. It’s quite a simple point, but I think it’s illuminating. The second insight is no less illuminating, but unfortunately it has a somewhat mathematical flavor (though the math is fairly simple and only sketched from above). I therefore decided to separate it out and leave it for the next column, for the benefit of those among us who are sensitive to and/or allergic to this beloved and dear genre. It will go up very soon, so hurry up and read.

The Phenomenon

I assume we’re all aware of the political polarization that has been intensifying in recent years, in the U.S. as in Israel. People’s identities are increasingly centered around parties and political agendas, and relations between political camps are becoming more polarized. The feeling on both sides is “them” versus “us.” Much has been written about the phenomenon and possible explanations for it. It is attributed mainly to the influence of social networks and the ideological bubbles they create (I too have written about this in the past, for example in column 335, and elsewhere).

Kolbert describes polarization using various data about the situation in the U.S., and her description appears entirely symmetric, as the genre requires. Instead of summarizing, I’ll now bring a translation of extended excerpts from her piece:

According to a YouGov poll, sixty percent of Democrats see the opposing party as “a serious threat to the United States.” For Republicans, that figure approaches seventy percent. A Pew survey found that more than half of all Republicans and almost half of all Democrats believe their political opponents are “immoral.” Another Pew poll, conducted a few months before the 2020 election, found that seven out of ten Democrats who were looking for a partner would not date a Donald Trump voter, and almost five out of ten Republicans would not date someone who supported Hillary Clinton.

Even attitudes toward infectious diseases are now subject to partisan dispute. In a November survey by Marquette University Law School, seventy percent of Democrats said they saw COVID-19 as “a serious problem” in their state, compared with only thirty percent of Republicans. The day after the World Health Organization declared Omicron a “variant of concern,” Representative Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas, tagged the newly identified strain as a Democratic trick to justify no-excuse absentee voting. “Here comes the MEV — the midterm election variant,” tweeted Jackson, who served as White House physician under both Trump and Barack Obama.

How did America get here? Party loyalists have a simple answer: the other side went crazy! Historians and political scientists tend to look for subtler and more substantive explanations. In recent years, they’ve produced an entire library on the subject — books with titles like “Fault Lines,” “Angry Politics,” “Must Politics Be War?” and so on.

It’s easy to get the impression that our situation is quite similar — just replace Trump with Bibi. You’ll see that every issue reverberating in our airspace is divided into pro- or anti-Bibi (once it was at least on a right-left axis. Though according to the Bibists, as we know, anyone anti-Bibi is a leftist — cf. Sa’ar, Hauser, Lieberman, Bennett, and Shaked, among others).

She now moves to more concrete characterizations:

Lilliana Mason is a political scientist (yeah, right!!) at Johns Hopkins. In her book “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” she notes that not long ago it was hard to distinguish between the two parties, both demographically and ideologically. In the early 1950s, Black Americans were divided more or less evenly between the parties, as were whites. The same was true for men, Catholics, and union members. Meanwhile, the parties’ platforms were so similar that the American Political Science Association issued a plea to Democrats and Republicans to do more to differentiate themselves: “The alternatives between the parties are so ill-defined that often it is difficult to tell what the elections have decided, even in the broadest terms.”

The 1950s, Mason notes, were hardly “a time of social peace.” Americans fought — often in ugly ways — over communism, school desegregation, and immigration. Yet the sides were entangled with each other; that is, these battles weren’t fought along party lines. Americans, Mason writes, could “engage in social prejudice or promiscuity, but this was disconnected from their political choices.”

Then came what she calls the Great Sorting. Following the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and more, the G.O.P. [=the Republican Party] became whiter, more church-going, and more male than its counterpart [=the Democratic Party]. These differences, already significant by the early 1990s, became even more pronounced in the 2010s and 2020s.

“We’ve gone from two parties that are a little different in many ways to two parties that are very different in several powerful ways,” Mason says. As the parties sorted socially, they also moved apart ideologically, fulfilling the political scientists’ prediction. In recent election cycles, there was no mistaking the parties’ platforms.

In our time, party habits, race, faith, and even television viewing are correlated. (One study, based on TiVo data, found that the twenty TV shows most popular among Republicans were entirely different from those preferred by Democrats.) As a result, Mason argues, Americans are no longer juggling multiple, potentially contradictory group identities; they’re affiliating with one all-encompassing group that grants them what she calls a “mega-identity.”

When people feel that their “mega-identity” is challenged, they get angry. Politics at every level has been reduced to “us” versus “them,” a basic (and dangerous) dynamic in human political behavior. As Mason puts it, “We have more self-esteem real estate to protect because our identities are linked together.”

This is the point that matters for us here: in recent years correlations have formed between party affiliation and many other divisions. These days one can better predict your party alignment by race, affiliation, religion, and the like. That’s the meaning of the “mega-identity,” i.e., a package deal in which a person finds themselves identified with their group on every parameter — all the way down to TV viewing habits (the figure on differences in popular TV series is nothing short of amazing. I think this is far less pronounced here in Israel) and beyond. What remains most important is the struggle between “us” and “our enemies,” with victory as the focus (see, for example, the Trump quote brought below). Now it’s more important that “we” win and “they” lose than to advance the agenda and improve the situation in and of themselves.

Psychological Explanations

The explanations she brings for this state of affairs lean in psychological directions. She opens the article with a lengthy description of a social-psychology experiment conducted in Oklahoma, and later she cites conclusions by a Polish-born Jewish psychologist named Henri Tajfel, who showed that dividing people into groups, even on arbitrary and irrelevant bases, produces strong group identification across domains — that is, preferring members of one’s own group at the expense of the other group, sometimes in very ugly ways. She adds the phenomenon of social networks. As is well known, they divide people into identity groups that seclude themselves in a virtual space echoing mainly similar voices and facts that support them, while at the same time presenting the other voices and contradictory facts in a distorted and biased fashion, if at all. In this way they greatly reinforce social polarization and ideological radicalization (the echo-chamber effect).

These experiments often seem dubious to me, and the interpretations are usually agenda-driven and sometimes downright banal. Somehow one can always present (predictable) conclusions quite unequivocally and simplistically through an experiment that impresses in its simplicity. But there’s nothing new here; many have already written this.

Proposed Remedies

So what do we do? The only solution I found in her piece is a recommendation to try to step into the opponent’s shoes and understand their position on its own terms:

Several recent books on polarization argue that if, as a nation, we want to overcome the problem, we must start with ourselves. “The first step is for citizens to recognize their own shortcomings,” writes Taylor Dotson, a professor of social sciences at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. In “The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization,” Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia, advises: “Think about and critically observe your own thinking.” “We need to work on ourselves,” urges Robert B. Talisse, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt. “We need to find ways to manage belief polarization within ourselves and our alliances,” he writes.

Clearly, if we all adopted this approach, the walls of the problematic echo chambers we inhabit would crack. This is a good suggestion (truly!) on the personal plane, but it’s hard to see it as a solution to polarization. The problem is precisely that most of us don’t tend to do this. It reminds me of the ultimate solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: okay, stop fighting like children and understand that these wars are bad for both sides. If everyone behaves maturely and moderately, everything will be peachy.

The author herself is well aware of the limitations of this “solution” (see two problems she raises below). It’s no wonder that toward the end she offers dark prophecies about America’s future. One of her concluding lines is quoted from Stephen Marche (a Canadian writer and journalist):

Marche likes sweeping claims. “No American president of any party, now or in the foreseeable future, can be a symbol of unity — only of division,” he writes. “Once the common purpose disappears, it disappears,” he declares later in the same chapter. Unfortunately, too many of his statements sound true, like “When the crisis comes, the institutions won’t be there.”

I’m not sure I understood the article’s bottom line: what is her central claim? How does she explain polarization and what does she propose to solve it? Perhaps she merely aims to point to the impasse (which I’ll sharpen shortly) and to say there is no solution. In any case, from here on (including in the follow-up column) I wish to comment on two interesting points that arose for me while reading: the first is a tangle that makes it hard to exit a polarized state; the second is an alternative explanation (not in the psychological realm) for the polarization phenomenon. I’ll now focus on the first point.

The Author’s Lack of Self-Awareness

I must say I was rather astonished while reading, because after presenting the problem in a symmetric and balanced way, she proceeds to demonstrate and explain to us how Trump is to blame for everything. Here’s the first example:

Trump, one can safely say, has never read Tajfel’s work, but he seems to grasp it intuitively. During the 2016 campaign, Mason notes, he often shifted his positions on policy issues. The one thing he never wavered on was the importance of winning. “We’re going to win at every level,” he told a crowd in Albany. “We’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.”

Or even clearer in this passage:

The trouble with the self-partisan-healing approach proposed here [that each person try to step into the opponent’s shoes; see above] is twofold. First, those who have done the most to polarize America seem the least inclined to identify their own “flaws” and shortcomings. Try to imagine Donald Trump sitting at Mar-a-Lago, chewing a Big Mac and critically reflecting on “his thinking.” [No, Hillary Clinton — or the author herself — surely does this all the time.]

Second, the fact that each side regards the other as “a serious threat” does not mean they threaten to the same degree. The attack on the Capitol on January 6, the ongoing attempts to discredit the 2020 election, new state laws that will make it harder for millions to vote, especially in communities of color — only one party is responsible for these. In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a watchdog group, added the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies.” Although the group’s report did not explicitly blame Republicans, it came fairly close: “A historic turning point occurred in 2020–2021, when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 U.S. election. Baseless allegations of voter fraud and the spread of associated disinformation undermined basic trust in the electoral process.”

There are two problems with the approach that suggests examining your own shortcomings rather than those of the other. Both basically stem from the notion that all the problems lie with the other side. Behold a balanced approach in which everyone examines themselves and finds their own flaws rather than beating their neighbor’s chest.

Again, I’m not sure this isn’t precisely her point (a friend insists it is). There is indeed a degree of absurdity in the expectation that someone convinced their rival is wicked will take the trouble to examine their own position reflectively and be generous toward the other. It’s a no-solution situation. But ultimately, after rereading, it’s quite evident she isn’t sitting in the UN Secretary-General’s chair; she definitely takes a side. Hence I think she herself displays here a glaring lack of self-awareness. In my view, the background is the characteristic left-liberal blind spot we know well here too. So I’ll say a few words about that.

Liberal Lack of Self-Awareness

More than once I’ve heard and read left-leaning people who honestly don’t understand what anyone could possibly want from them. They’re merely pursuing peace and pushing no agenda of their own (they have no “community,” nor “notables,” as I described in the previous column. They’re not a sector like Arabs, Haredim, religious-Zionists, and so forth. They are the framework within which everything takes place. The state — that’s me, and if in practice it isn’t, then it must have been stolen from me). I can’t avoid mentioning Aharon Barak, who didn’t understand what the right wanted from him — he merely “organized the public debate,” enabled it, and ensured everyone’s rights. He was convinced he personally had no agenda at all (unlike, say, Ruth Gavison. See here, and especially his explanations that try to paper over the lack of self-awareness reflected in his remarks).[1]

I get the impression that a liberal leftist often feels they are transparent, and that their values are shared by the entire universe. They carry no particular value-laden baggage that can be disagreed with (but just try telling them they’re an “empty wagon”). After all, everyone agrees that we need justice and to help the weak, and everyone agrees that peace is a supreme value and we must avoid war. So what’s the argument even about? From here follows their unselfaware view that whoever doesn’t act with them and agree with them (doesn’t care for the weak or doesn’t prevent war at any cost) doesn’t hold a different position — they’re simply wicked.

It’s like a child who doesn’t grasp that they too are a person with a particular makeup, not a neutral object by which all others are measured. Or perhaps a better example is those Israelis who speak Hebrew (like me, for instance) and are sure they have no accent. They’re neutral. An accent is something only speakers of other languages have. Isn’t it amazing that our Hebrew, of all things, is an accent-less language?! Is this not the Lord’s doing?!

Thus leftists will eloquently explain the danger of refusal to obey orders from the right, yet entirely justify refusals from their own side (see, for example, the introduction by Chaim Ganz to his book Obedience and Refusal — a truly stunning display of leftist unawareness). I, by the way, enthusiastically support refusals on both sides. Likewise, the values of tolerance and openness are always qualified under “defensive democracy,” which leaves them applicable only toward those who themselves embrace tolerance. But if that’s the criterion, then a person or group who holds only the value of tolerance is effectively unable to be tolerant toward anyone who thinks differently. This nicely demonstrates that when your outlook and its limits are invisible to you, your values become hollow.

The left’s sense of absolute righteousness — and, as a corollary, its fixed view of the right’s wickedness — is especially odd against the backdrop of its stated policy of self-examination and openness to other positions (Black people, Palestinians, the underprivileged, women, LGBTQ+, etc. — all their natural constituencies, of course). But try to find there a listening ear for non-liberal, non-left positions. You’ll have a hard time. Just to be clear, it’s not that the right is more open, but at least it doesn’t proclaim itself to be. Right-wingers generally don’t pretend to step into the other’s shoes. That’s their big failing — but also (a small) advantage. In that sense, it seems to me they’re at least more aware of their own blinders and echo chamber. Take the propaganda pamphlet known as the newspaper “Haaretz” (which admittedly also has good and useful things, including in exposing the wrongs of the occupation), for example — it constantly convinces its readers that it is open, diverse, and tolerant, addressing “thinking people.” I recall the years I subscribed; it was impossible to read its literary supplement. Reviews of a children’s book like Chipopo would very quickly get to the evils of the occupation and the right’s guilt. All the asides and obiters went in the same direction and were painfully predictable. What’s even more amazing is that those “thinking people” are also convinced that this is indeed the situation and that there truly is a variety of opinions from all directions there (well, I did already mention the echo-chamber effect).

From such a starting point Elizabeth can speak of a balanced perspective and of self-critique as a precondition for solving polarization — and in the very same article explain that Trump and his supporters are the root of all evil and therefore there is no solution and no future. The lack of self-awareness here is especially embarrassing, even relative to the typical leftist blind spot. Her accusations appear in the same article that tries to persuade us to examine primarily ourselves, to step into the other’s shoes, and not see them as wicked. The drawback of this approach, as the author immediately explains, is that if you do so, you might indeed stop viewing the other (=Trump and his supporters) as the ultimate evildoer. O holy blindness…

The Impasse

But perhaps the other really is wicked, no? Is it right to assume that in every case the two sides in a dispute are good-faith interlocutors? Certainly there’s no necessity for that. So what do we do when we’re dealing with a genuine evildoer? Must we still be generous toward them? Here the article offers no answer. I suspect that if you ask the author about Trump, she’ll surely tell you: what do you want? I examined the Trumpists’ positions and this is my conclusion. They really are wicked, primitive fools who do harm. We can’t a priori rule out the possibility that a side on the map is malicious and harmful.

One might argue that if we’re dealing with tens of percent of U.S. citizens, it’s not reasonable to think so. One person may be a manipulative, evil, harmful demagogue — but to accuse all their supporters of that is problematic. Yet can we rule out phenomena in which a broad public follows a charismatic, wicked manipulator? That’s certainly possible. On the other hand, the other side is equally convinced of this about you — so practically, what can be done? The author indeed offers nothing. But that’s the situation on both sides of the barricade, and that’s usually the situation around most political barricades today. Both sides truly and sincerely aren’t aware of their biases, and thus each is truly convinced the other is wicked and harmful. So the advice to step into the other’s shoes is essentially empty. It applies in cases where I don’t perceive my rivals as wicked — but then I’ll likely do it anyway. That’s not where the problem lies.

This reminds me of a personal experience. Nearly twenty years ago I used to travel from Yeruham to Bnei Brak every two weeks to give a class to yeshiva students and kollel fellows who were interested.[2] At that time the “haters-versus-combatants” feud at the Ponovezh Yeshiva began, and I felt that participants in the class were deeply involved in it. I asked them how they explain this astonishing phenomenon, whereby leading rabbis and students of one of the finest yeshivot in the universe, diligent and outstanding scholars, are engaged in hurling yogurt cups and power struggles like the emptiest of hooligans. How does this happen among the students, and how do the rabbis not stop it (or why aren’t they being listened to)?

To my astonishment, their answer was: because the other side are evildoers exploiting our desire for peace and our fear of Heaven to seize property and positions of power, and therefore we must not concede lest sin be rewarded. I don’t remember whether there were participants from both parties or only from one, and which one (I can never follow and understand that nonsense), but even if I heard only one side, I’m certain that’s what the other side also claimed in that ridiculous/sad quarrel.

My conclusion was that this is an impasse with no solution. You cannot demand of them: understand the other side, try to step into their shoes and grasp their positions, and then world peace will reign. Each of them explains that they already tried and examined and found that the others’ claims lack substance, since they are cynical, wicked, foolish, and harmful, and they will exploit our desire for peace and our willingness to yield, so we must not surrender to their forcefulness. You can’t even tell them plainly that in your opinion this isn’t the case, since — as explained above — it is certainly possible that in some disputes one side is wicked and harmful, and then perhaps it truly isn’t right to yield. This is precisely the political impasse I described in miniature.

An Interpretive Note

On another reading, one could interpret her article exactly along the lines I’ve described here. She herself understands that in most debates there are two legitimate sides and no saints and sinners, and therefore she proposes that everyone examine themselves rather than the other. The problem arises in cases where one side truly appears wicked and unjust. A friend argued that this is the article’s fundamental claim. According to his reading, her main point is that this is the root of the present predicament. And indeed, she offers no solution for such cases, since perhaps there is no solution. On his reading, her subject is precisely the impasse I describe.

However, in my view the article doesn’t merely point to the impasse — it suffers from it (just as the writings of Rabbi Shagar are not about postmodernism; they are postmodern). To me this is the same leftist lack of self-awareness I described above. We should remember we’re dealing with the frustration and bitterness of nearly half of American (and Israeli) voters. It’s not reasonable that they’re all simply wicked for no reason. If there is so much support for such a wicked manipulator (insert Bibi or Trump here), there is likely deep, genuine frustration (regardless of whether that person is indeed a manipulator, and that among their supporters there are, in fact, quite a few fools). Therefore, if one truly stands behind this recommendation, then one should apply it here as well: try to step into the other’s shoes (the Trumpist). But I didn’t find such a passage in her article.

In almost every heated debate, each side is sure the truth is with them and the other side is talking nonsense. Hence arises the view of the other as wicked, beyond dialogue. If in such situations she doesn’t recommend adopting her advice — to examine ourselves and not see the other as wicked — then to which situations does she apply it?! The hard cases are when it’s obvious to us that the other is wicked and there’s nothing to check in their positions. There the task is to ask whether perhaps we’re wrong after all. Therefore I insist on seeing this article as an expression of typical leftist lack of self-awareness rather than as a neutral academic argument.

So what, then, is the alternative? Is a situation in which I regard my rival as wicked/stupid/harmful truly a dead end?

Is There Anything to Be Done Despite It All?

It seems to me one can make a claim even about such a case: are you sure you examined it? Didn’t you decide this within your echo chamber without really trying to adopt the other’s point of view? In many cases we decide a priori that there’s nothing to examine and no opposing position. I tend toward (true) left-ness in this sense, since I hope that at least in most cases, if one checks seriously, one may discover that there is, after all, some validity to the other side’s arguments, and not everyone there is wicked, harmful, and foolish. But if someone refuses to examine and entrenches themselves in the claim that they did examine and, in their view, there is no real other side — then there really is nothing to be done. That is the essence of the impasse I’ve described.

Why examine even those who seem wicked to us? Two reasons can be offered:

• Practical. The other may be wicked and foolish and truly wrong, but we have no other way to move forward — unless there’s a possibility of a solution by force, which often doesn’t exist. This, for example, is how I view the Palestinian position. It’s clear they are the wrongdoers and mainly responsible for their situation, and I have no sympathy for them (as a group), but at present I see no way to move forward without accepting that this is their viewpoint and trying to reach an arrangement (if one is possible at all — at the moment it seems not).
• Moral. I don’t always see correctly, and it’s possible I’m wrong in my initial judgment. Here sometimes people raise arguments about unity and mutual responsibility, but in my opinion they’re irrelevant. If I’m wrong, then it’s my duty to re-examine — even if my rival is not of my people and I feel no special shared destiny or obligation toward them. I simply must check whether I have erred.

Incidentally, this is precisely what I didn’t find in the author. I didn’t find in her article an analysis of why such a large public follows a wicked manipulator like Trump. As I explained, if you don’t apply this recommendation to those you regard as wicked (intolerant, non-left, etc.), then it is essentially empty. A defensive democracy — at least when taken to the limit — is an empty democracy. Therefore I don’t accept my friend’s interpretation of her words; to my mind, this is an article that expresses typical leftist lack of self-awareness.

A Personal Note

Some of you may be surprised, but despite the decisiveness of my tone, I do try to act according to this (so-called “leftist”) recommendation (I’m sure many will say they’re not surprised at all, since I’m a known leftist). I truly try to examine whether there are real points worth considering or a presumption of merit even in my rival’s position, even if they seem foolish and wicked to me (up to Hitler and beyond). In many cases I even find such points. That doesn’t prevent me from forming a stance both on substance (regarding their positions and actions) and personally (regarding them themselves — wicked or righteous, foolish or wise).

As you can see even here on the site and in general, I am often accused of fanaticism on the one hand, and of excessive openness on the other. Some accuse me of severe leftism, others of extreme right-wing views. You’ll find accusations of excessive liberalism (Reformism, heresy) but also of conservatism and Haredi-ism (covert, more or less). Pathological hatred of Haredim and contempt for religious-Zionists. Reformism on the one hand, but also harsh and unfair criticism of Reform Jews. Mockery of missionary-style apologists and being a despicable apologist myself (proofs of God’s existence, yeah right; the fellow lives in the 12th century). The common denominator of all these accusations is that it’s hard to define my “mega-identity.” I think I don’t have one — or at least I try very hard to flee from it. Many of the battles I wage here on the site are against imagined correlations and template thinking. I argue that even if, heaven forbid, a certain banner (“mega-identity”) flutters over your head, that doesn’t oblige you to a package deal adopting an entire basket of positions. I repeatedly cry out hoarsely for examining each question on its own and forming an independent stance on each one. Get out of the boxes and “mega-identities” we are almost forced into.

I do observe, again and again, what I wrote above — that such a recommendation is not a solution to social polarization, since people don’t tend to do it. They act and judge by stereotypes and labels rather than forming an independent stance on each question. But I don’t despair. The more people who train themselves to think independently and not enter package deals, the better our situation will be. Needless to say, I’m very much in favor of polarization and extremism in their conventional sense — both in the positions themselves and in how they’re expressed. You can see this clearly on the site. The Chazon Ish, in his well-known letter, writes that extremism expresses love of truth and faith in the rightness of the path, while compromise often expresses mediocrity and lack of backbone. “Only donkeys walk in the middle,” as Moshe Dayan said. But at the same time, I strongly oppose polarization in the sense described here — that is, package-deal “mega-identities,” and division into “us” and “them,” or “us” and “our enemies.” That’s why I sometimes defend evildoers and accuse righteous people, and indeed appear extreme in my liberal positions (in those areas) or conservative (in others). The very mix of these positions is reassuring to me (check how many columns on the site include the phrase “imagined correlations”). It’s a decent indication that I haven’t fallen into the pit of the “mega-identity,” heaven forfend — and I’m happy about that.

Needless to say, this is how I see myself and my positions, but I’m sure many will disagree and accuse me too of lack of self-awareness, one-sided vision, and rash accusations toward other positions and people. Well then, we still have work to do…

Conclusion

The conclusion is that in situations where there is a wicked side, there is no solution. Perhaps the author herself meant this and perhaps not, but it’s a rather bleak and even despairing insight. As a general recommendation from a more self-aware perspective, I propose a slightly different suggestion. A broad phenomenon usually doesn’t express pure wickedness. Therefore, even where it seems that way to you, think again about the other side and try to understand how they see the picture. And even if there is wickedness, the path of war will not always bring you to a solution.

This is not a postmodern statement that believes in multiple truths, but a generous one that starts from the premise that people are usually not wicked — or at least not purely wicked. There is something real in their position beyond any wickedness that may or may not be there. Hence it’s not advisable to make do with a despairing view of the other as an evildoer from whom nothing good can come. Try to understand what drives them and what led them to think and act as they do. After that, each person can form their own view and decide whether the other is right or not — and even reach the conclusion that they are wicked.

In the next column I’ll move to the second insight, which may be no less bleak, but the discovery of it gave me great intellectual pleasure. It’s an explanation of the polarization phenomenon in terms of a mathematical algorithm. You’ll see that it’s an account unrelated to psychology, and I’ll end by pointing to an advantage and a measure of optimism that emerges from this explanation.

[1] Incidentally, those who read his words precisely will see he didn’t really say that she has an agenda, but that her agenda doesn’t fit the court (i.e., his own). The mockery and jokes made at his expense back then — as if he disqualified Gavison because she had an agenda — were imprecise. But on the substance, it’s clear that’s exactly what he thought.

[2] Needless to say, the class was clandestine, and there were even participants who suffered after it became known that they attended. And that was before my current “heresies.” At that time the problem was merely that in the Midah Tovah weekly sheets on the Torah portions there appeared, here and there, foreign words — heaven forfend (so my son was told at the Grodno Yeshiva when they asked him that I not show up there to study with him, and thus that class in Bnei Brak was born).