The threat to domestic tranquility is not that people take sides and disagree, but that the sides of a political division will assume the purity and passion of moral absolutism or moral allegory, in which the people on each side think of themselves as Good and of the people on the other side as Evil. The passions on both sides then are reduced to fear mere anger, fear, and hatred. A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war, and trending toward the psychology of the battlefield. So absolute a division forbids actual thought or discourse about moral issues, as it forbids self-knowledge, humor, and forgiveness. It may be that such division is prepared by our convention of two political parties. It may be that actual thought about a problem requires more than two opinions.
There has been a good deal of talk of the way political division has been intensified perhaps mainly by the social media, so that people need to deal little or not at all with the others who are politically unlike themselves. Such exclusiveness, it seems to me, is possible only in large towns and cities. In my own rural community, oriented to the very small town of Port Royal, it is not possible.
Wendell Berry, The Need To Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, 188-189.
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