LGBTQanon ?

what the far left and the far right have in common, and why we need to return to the sane center...

I live in Canada, so most of the extreme types I run into come from the left side of loonie. The kind that insist that men can bear children and that budgets balance themselves. Recently though, I was grilling beside a couple at a timeshare in California and got to experience the far right close up. When they discovered I was Canadian they proceeded to tell me that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the love child of Margaret Trudeau and Fidel Castro. I did not believe them, but I also did not argue, because… well, you can’t reason with crazy. They had all kinds of other information for me, that they had found by extensive research on Youtube. The next day I ran into them again at the hot tub. They thought there was too much foam on the surface and said someone must have snuck in during the night and added bubble bath during the night. Apparently once you put on the conspiracy lenses, you can find hidden plots everywhere.

On the surface the extreme left and right would seem to have little in common, but I think they share one thing that allows them to become untethered from reality as most of us experience it. Magical thinking. They both deny objective reality in favor of subjective feeling. They have rejected the idea of Truth with a capitol T, the kind that is outside of ourselves and must be discovered and aligned with, and embraced the idea that we have our own truth, created by us for us. For both, subjective experience and inner-knowing trumps everything else. (Forgive me for using the T-word. Even as a verb it can be triggering) On the far left that means a biological male is female because they feel like a woman and call themselves a woman. Everyone is delighted when they dominate other women in sports, denying the obvious physical advantage they have. We have to pretend it doesn’t exist. This worldview leads to things like the new pregnant man emoji. They think that their feelings and words actually control reality. On the far right, that means the belief that Donald Trump won the last presidential election despite the fact that Joe Biden had 7M more votes. In order to embrace this belief one has to come up with an elaborate conspiracy run by a “cabal” that involves pretty much the whole world. I am not saying that there are not people who feel stuck in the wrong body, or that no form of “deep state” exists at all… I just don’t think running away with those ideas at full speed without being bound by any sense of logic is helping anybody or getting us to the kind of just world we all say we want.

As a young postmodern pagan in 1979, I remember listening to a Boomtown Rats song that said: “ The only truth is there is no truth…” In my under-developed teen brain I thought this was incredibly profound, not realizing that they were just lifting this cliche idea from their Intro to Philosophy class. If we have really decided that the postmodern philosophers are right and there is no ultimate Truth and words can mean whatever we want them to mean, we shouldn’t be surprised if we end up in a Humpty Dumpty world of nonsense and chaos. At least Alice of Thru-the-Looking-Glass fame wrestled with the disconcerting nature of it all, and had the sense to ask Humpty Dumpty whether one can make words mean so many things at once. Humpty’s reply is straight out of the cultural marxist playbook: “ The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.” In other words, everything is just a cultural construct, life is a zero-sum game, and the one with power wins. Which, of course, is simplistic as all get out and mad as a hatter to boot. But here we are. It’s a simply mad world, my friends. A world where up can mean down, in can mean out, and we will all own nothing and be happy with it. Truth is an endangered species and propaganda is king. This has become the norm in the disembodied world of social media, but in real life for real people, “ build back better” seems more like “build back broker.” It is gaslighting on a global scale, whether it leans left or right. Both extremes favor ideology over pragmatism, no matter what the cost is to society or the individual.

Before we slide into totalitarianism and/or anarchy, people of good faith must push back to the admittedly imperfect, but far more sane center. Rather than being swayed by tribe and vibe, we need to reprioritize truth and couth. There are things that are objectively true and provable. Trump really lost the election. Women have babies, men don’t. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something beyond rational, but it is supra-rational, not irrational. It is miracle, not magical thinking. So the New Testament does not argue that all virgins can have babies. It argues that virgins don’t have babies unless God steps in and reverses the natural order of the way things happen. Not magic in the thirteen year old Disney sense, but miraculously possible if there is a Creator who interjects Himself into His own created order. Also, there is a way to say and do things that fosters good will and co-operation among people who fundamentally disagree, rather than create suspicion and division. Just last week in America the Curmudgeon in Chief disparaged a reporter who asked a question he did not like, calling him a “stupid son of a *****!” Call me old school, but I prefer leaders who don’t cuss people out. And see what I did there by calling him a Curmudgeon ?That is not how you win friends and influence people. Neither is calling people you are supposed to be serving “ a small fringe minority with unacceptable views.” Does the Prime Minister not realize how smug and elitist that sounds ? Would it not be better to seek to understand instead of immediately defaulting to name-calling and scapegoating ? True leadership involves having hard but civil conversations with those we consider opposition, not the dividing and hiding pattern we see practised on both sides of the border these days.

The Bible is the moral and spiritual basis of western culture. It is our meta-narrative. In it we find order and meaning, room for the rational and supra-rational. When you lose the overarching meta-narrative of a culture, there is no center, and you have no choice but to orient around lesser narratives. This is happening all around us in real time. It is the source of the spirit of division we sense, but have a hard time articulating. Literally everything has been invaded by a political, zero-sum game spirit. We have traded Bible for tribal, and all our little tribes are now engaging in all out ideological war. It doesn’t have to be this way. There is enough middle ground for everyone. We can meet in the sane center, where we deal with reality as it actually is, pray for wisdom about things we don’t understand, and agree to disagree without resorting to demonizing and slander. There use to be a lot of us here in the middle before the siren song of the echo chambers rang in our ears and we jumped ship port and starboard into this sea of silliness. I am mixing metaphor here in hopes that we can mix as people. When it comes to politics, I am non-binary. There are a few key things in life that require either/or thinking, but many more are both/and. We need to look for common ground based on our common humanity and shared goals. That begins with simple questions like: What do we all have in common ? What can we all agree on ? Is there a way to approach issues we don’t agree on so the outcome is win-win instead of win-lose ? That would at least be a step towards a more civil discourse.

So this is a plea from the sane center. Not every amp needs to be turned up to eleven for every song. Not every hill needs to be one we are willing to die on. Not every headline needs to be written in emotional hyperbole. We can’t let the most extreme among us control every narrative. We can have convictional clarity and compassionate charity at the same time. I believe the Bible calls it “speaking the truth in love.” (Eph 4:15)