Words and ideas, no matter how repulsive we might find them to be, are never an excuse for violence.
If you have spent even just a little time reading or viewing the news over the past week, you have certainly seen many reports about the public assassination of American conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk last week, while he was engaging in debate with students at a Utah university.
I disagreed with Charlie Kirk on many issues, but never would I have wanted to see him harmed due to his views, over his political positions. Think what you may about his ideas or his religious or political stances, that’s fair, but he had a wife and two little children who have now lost husband and a father, and that is tragic, no matter what your political beliefs happen to be.
While there was much I disagreed with as far as Kirk’s political and ideological views, I always respected his encouraging others to engage in respectful debate. His shtick was essentially to state his position on an issue, and then challenge others to prove him wrong.
From the many videos of Kirk’s debates that I have seen over the years, a significant number of them recorded on university campuses, he was a vigorous debater, but he allowed those challenging him plenty of uninterrupted time to state their case.
The polarization of American society has been painfully clear over the past decade or more, and in today’s polarized climate, Kirk’s killing is sadly not as surprising or as shocking as it should be.
It can be easy to view political polarization as an American problem, but it isn’t. Many countries around the globe have become increasingly polarized in recent years, including here in Canada.
As I have written before, throughout my life I have often learned more from folks with whom I have differing views than I have learned while staying safe within my bubble of like-minded friends and acquaintances. In recent years however, we seem to be more polarized than ever, making it more of a challenge to bridge gaps, and to have civil conversations with those with whom we might not agree. When opposing sides become so deeply divided it can hamper progress, as little gets done between the bickering parties.
Just a year ago I wrote about the increasing polarization in Canada, noting one ongoing study which began in 1965 that demonstrates just how polarized we have become.
“Since 1965, teams of political scientists have surveyed thousands of Canadians after every federal election. Most of the questions don’t change from one survey to the next, so the Canadian Election Study has become a basic tool for measuring Canadians’ attitudes toward politics, the economy, and one another over time. It’s now older than the latest generation of academics who run it,” noted a column published in the Globe & Mail in May of last year.
Interestingly, one of the standard sets of questions in that study is called the ‘feeling thermometer’, and respondents are given the name of a political party and asked how they feel about it on a scale from zero to 100, with a zero representing a very negative feeling, and 100 representing a very positive feeling.
“From 1988 to 2004, the average gap between the two scores, for supporters of all parties, was about 20 points. It would bump up or down a bit from election to election, but it stayed close to 20 points,” the column advised. “…Then the gap started to widen, fairly consistently through five consecutive elections, until in 2019 it had more than doubled to 44 points.”
As the column noted, “Canadians used to think the parties they voted against were all right, just not their cup of tea. Lately they more often believe the opposing party is beyond redemption.”
That is a real shift in our views of political parties with which we do not personally align, and there is a term for this phenomenon – ‘affective polarization’, which the column explained is essentially ‘disdain for the other side’.
“This gap is actually bigger than partisans’ real disagreement on the issues facing government, such as taxation, immigration, or crime and punishment. It hasn’t only been happening in Canada. Affective polarization was first identified in the United States where, like most things, it’s bigger than here,” the column noted, adding that the same phenomenon is being seen in many nations.
It is no wonder that having civil conversations with those with opposing views has become more difficult in recent years, with many preferring to align themselves with a camp that reflects their own views, shutting everyone else out, often labelling them as the ‘enemy’.
“Affective polarization erodes communities because people who support opposing parties increasingly don’t even want to know one another. In the United States, about 40 per cent of respondents say they’d be upset if their son or daughter married someone from another party, or if such a person became their neighbour,” the column advised, adding that while that number is lower in Canada at roughly 29 percent, it is growing.
“Obviously we wouldn’t want us to all think and feel the same way, but the polarization we have been experiencing seems to be stripping away our empathy, and we have increasingly become an ‘us against them’ society where you either agree with someone, or they are an enemy, and from my perspective that is a sad state of affairs indeed,” I noted in an editorial last year.
It is also a dangerous place to be, as with increased polarization comes increased extremism on both ends of the political spectrum.
Whatever the motivations of Charlie Kirk’s shooter, they were misguided, and they certainly can’t justify taking a life. As a society we need to relearn the ability to respectfully disagree, to not treat those with different views as if they are an enemy; we need to re-think the us-against-them mentality that has taken over our social interactions.
I have written many times over the years that I miss the days when you could disagree with someone, disagree with them strongly even, but still have a beer together and be friends. Some of the people I have most enjoyed spending time with in my lifetime have been folks that have very opposite views to my own, but today it seems you either agree in full or you are an enemy. That is a dangerous place to be.
