Skarsgård: The Western lens hides our own violence
Gustaf Skarsgård and Frida Stranne write about the selective morality that conceals our own responsibility for war – leaving us unable to understand it, and therefore doomed to keep reproducing it.
When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams resumed their correspondence in 1812, they had not written to each other for ten years. Both were among the most important founding fathers of the American republic, central to the work of shaping the new state, but they held sharply different views of the direction the country should take.
In the early years of the revolution, they had been close allies. Later, in a period marked by deep ideological conflict, they became fierce political opponents.
When they began writing to one another again, their disagreements remained fundamental. They still tried, in different ways, to persuade each other. But the form of the exchange had changed.
The conversation was no longer driven by the same need to win. There was a greater willingness to test arguments, question assumptions and think further.
They argued sharply. At times, they were cutting. They challenged each other’s reasoning and made their differences explicit. What had changed was that disagreement was no longer treated as a threat to the relationship.
They corresponded in order to understand each other’s positions and to develop their own. There was a genuine willingness to test one’s standpoint against another mind – and to allow one’s own ideas to become more nuanced, more grounded and more deeply considered.
There was also an intellectual discipline in the exchange: not to ascribe worse motives to the other than to oneself, and to stay with an argument long enough to examine it properly.
Their correspondence reminds us of something important. Conviction does not have to turn conversation into combat. On the contrary, meaningful dialogue often depends on clear positions – but also on the possibility that those positions can be tested, challenged and developed through the encounter.
Today, we see something very different, both in public debate and in many personal relationships. At the very moment when the questions facing humanity have become more consequential, the forms through which we discuss them have grown weaker.
Conversations move at a pace that leaves little room for reflection. They are often charged with strong emotion, but offer little space for examination. Positions are quickly taken, reflexively defended and tied closely to identity.
When someone tests your argument or tries to establish another understanding, it is easily perceived as a personal attack.
We also live in increasingly narrow bubbles, exposed to limited images of the world. Anything that does not fit becomes difficult to handle because it creates cognitive dissonance. At the same time as the challenges we face deepen – ecologically, politically and socially – our ability to speak about them in ways that lead to understanding and change appears to be weakening.
