Stuck in the Polar Regions of belief.
Got back from a short vacation and found this story in The Moderate Voice. Follow it to a very interesting couple stories bringing some cogent criticism on some of the more media-covered religious right lately.
The Moderate Voice – Jewish Leader Condemns Religious Right (UPDATED) A prominent Jewish leader has blasted the religious right in a very public way.
What has been validly brought out in the commentary in those stories is that this is true of the religious right in any religion. However, I would want to go further and say that the process is true in any extreme movement, religious or not, right or left, north or south, or west or east. The difficulty comes from the gridlock of imagination that comes from the polarities.
This is not my original idea, though I whole-heartedly believe it. (Be patient, I need to set this up) For a few days, I am going to dig out some quotes from Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman (Bethesda, Maryland) who before is death in 1996 was a major interpreter of the Bowen Theory of Family Emotional Process through a well-known book, Generation to Generation. At his death he was in process of writing another book, and it is from that book I will be quoting. The books title says a lot, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Upon his death, his publisher dropped him, but his wife and estate published his unfinished manuscript in 1999. These quotes are copyright the Edwin Friedman Estate.
Now back to polarized thinking. Ed Friedman believed that we were a society that has been imaginatively stuck in gridlock and needed to be unstuck. Hear Rabbi Friedman on polarized thought, then I will be back with a couple more comments.
The Third characteristic of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is polarized either/or, black/white, all-or-nothing thinking, and eventually, similar forms of relating that restrict the options of the mind [emphasis mine] Paradigms that might begin simply as theoretical differences become hardened into intense, oppositional, emotional commitments over even the most unemotional subject matter. [p. 45, A Failure of Nerve]
This is where I expand the view of Rabbi Yoffie from just applying to the religious right to the religious left as well. In the United Methodist Church we have our share of both and it is always painful to watch them battle on the floor of conference (or in the media of the church). It is obvious that they not only cannot listen to each other, but they will not. And it is the choice to restrict the options of their minds that causes the most damage to whatever system they are in whether it is the church the synagogue, the society, the house, the senate, the home, the work, the blogosphere or even the world stage.
For any of our systems to survive the vagaries of life we must listen to all the options available to us and we must be ever looking for the one that responds best to the challenges before us. Otherwise the storms and the struggles will win.
A little more from Ed that points a bit toward the way out.
Whether one is baking a cake of examining an institutional mix, the interaction of ingredients is almost always a function of the temperature and pressure of the environment. When troubled couples, for example, make a breakthrough, often the issues that they have differed over have not gone away but the two sides have become less reactive to one another. [p. 46, A Failure of Nerve]
That is one of the key reasons I find myself an independent moderate. I don’t have to play the reactive role. I don’t have to stick to the script of my polarity. If I can stay unscorched from the fires of the edges and listen to the points of view, somewhere in all that noise of words is a composition of the truth that will lead us through our current situation.
Unfortunately what often has to happen is that the polar ice-scripts have to experience melt-down before they will begin to see that maybe they don’t have the only answer (the arrogance that Rabbi Yoffie refers to in his comments) and that somewhere in the mix of ideas and ingredients and relationships comes inspiration.
I always hope we don’t have to experience that, but we usually do.
