For a different perspective on the longest government shutdown in history, consider paradox.
I am a student of paradox. In 2016 I published a book about looking through the lens of biblical paradox to rediscover the mystery of God. Through the course of my research, I discovered that paradox is a major idea in many fields. The essence of paradox—we discover truth within the tension of opposite and mutually exclusive ideas—is everywhere, in science, sociology/psychology, and yes, even politics. A google search of “paradox” produced 139,000,000 results!
The introductory chapter of my book contains the following paragraph:
During the height of the Cold War, Soviet scientist and human rights activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Our tendency to divide good and evil into mutually exclusive social or political polarities is rampant today.
Our daily news make this sound even more eerily prescient today. I went on to make this observation:
Dare we suggest that truth might sometimes reside within the tension created by opposing polarities? Dare we propose that the best policy choices may reside somewhere between Democrats and Republicans, left and right, MSNBC and Fox News? Have we lost our ability to live within (or even recognize) such tensions because we spend most of our time in echo chambers reverberating with the predispositions of people just like us?
The problem with echo chambers is not only that they invigorate polarization by continuing to reinforce a party line. Even worse, a steady diet of “us” versus “them” thinking totally subverts what both sides truly need, which is to realize that in many cases the truth only exists in the tension between opposite extremes. That’s the paradox.
Here’s another paragraph in the same introduction to paradox:
Reflecting on the brutal Serbian fighters who murdered, raped, and pillaged paths of destruction through his native Croatia, theologian Miroslav Volf narrates how he lives in tension: “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”
Volf wonders how he can remain loyal to the demand of the oppressed for justice yet at the same time uphold the forgiveness that God freely offers to the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes.
He concludes that he is “divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy precisely because they were false.”
(Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation, 1996).
Volf’s consideration of those who suffered rape and murder is far more personal and painfully real than any experience 99.99% of Americans have had with immigrants. However, instead of choosing a simplistic “us versus them,” good versus evil narrative, Volf instead understands that he is embroiled in a paradox.
A paradox requires two diametrically opposed ideas (in this case, justice for the victims and embrace the perpetrators) that live in ongoing tension with one another. Volf realizes that jettisoning either idea means losing something essential to the larger truth.
Volf ALSO realizes that there are easy ways to solve this tension (totally accept one side, totally reject the other) so that it no longer troubles one’s mind or heart. But these ways “are easy precisely because they are false.”
We can only have an honest debate about immigration in America when we, like Miroslav Volf, refuse to see reality through the lens of simplistic and false extremes.
One false extreme is “Immigrants are evil and are coming to harm you—only a wall with save you.” Another other false extreme is “Immigration generates no problems that need to be addressed—everything is fine.”
Echo chambers are shredding our national unity. Who is willing to stop listening to only Fox or only MSNBC and recognize the deeper paradox underneath Trump’s tweets and Pelosi’s one liners?
Easy answers generate applause lines but not solutions to complex problems. In the middle of complex issues, who is willing to speak up and testify that the easy answers are easy precisely because they are false?
Living in uncomfortable and confusing tensions requires serious resolve, not showmanship. Who is willing to live in the tension that rejects a wall as a serious solution, but in the same breath maintains that serious solutions based on facts must be found and implemented?
Perhaps some of us can be those who are willing?
