A farmer once told me, ‘Never name an animal you want to eat!’ It was clear for him that naming something forces you to empathise with it, to relate to it, and to personalise it. Maybe this old carnivorous creed offers a lesson for our increasingly grumpy public square. In a world of ad hominem attacks, there are frequent calls to play the ball and not the man. But maybe we need to get more personal, not less – so personal that we humanise our opponents, learning their names and their stories.
Ad hominem is a Latin phrase that refers to an attack on a person rather than an argument against their position on an issue. Such castigation can make for golden one-liners. No one can deny the piercing elegance of a Paul Keating attack describing a political opponent as a ‘shiver looking for a spine to run up.’ However, democracy calls for more than sharp-witted condescension.
The government recently let slip that Treasury is working up some possible changes to negative gearing, the arrangement through which property investors receive tax concessions. Then the Reserve Bank – as expected – refused to lower interest rates. This was enough to release the hounds. We had a gloves-off public stoush drenched in characteristic absolutism and personal attacks. Those selfish property investors. Those entitled aspiring first home buyers. Those whingeing renters.
Through ad hominem attacks, hell becomes – as per philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre – ‘other people’. Whether it’s about housing, Gaza, Lebanon, energy security or pretty much anything divisive, vitriol flows.
This is usually followed by peacemakers urging us to avoid the personal and focus on the issues. Though well-intentioned, this can trap us in the shallowness of abstraction. We debate using average house prices, numbers of missiles launched and casualty statistics, as if a parent who just lost a child cares about the data. Our use of figures and percentages blurs the real people behind the issues. It’s the sterile jargon of dehumanisation in cerebral garb.
There is no average property investor, average first home-buyer or average renter. There is no average Israeli or Palestinian. There is always more to people than how they conform to narrow narrative stereotypes.
A new report on American political identity from non-partisan research organisation More in Common, reveals that people often have a distorted perception of their opponents. For example, the study found that the broader population overestimates by ten times how much political party allegiance matters to Evangelical Christians. Evidently, the politics of identity is too blunt to convey the complexity of people. The more we know about people, the more qualified we are to healthily disagree with them. Empathy is personal. Its subjects need names and faces.
The fictional White House of Aaron Sorkin’s TV drama The West Wing is a world away from our increasingly grumpy and Trumpy news cycle. But fiction is often where wisdom takes refuge. In a memorable scene, conservative legal advisor Ainsley Hayes is debating the merits of gun rights with her liberal colleagues. She remarks that the problem is not so much that they dislike guns, but that they ‘don’t like the people who do like guns. You don’t like the people.’
'Personalisation isn’t some idealistic attempt at bothsideism, but a pathway to restoring a measure of humanity to our public discourse. As a free society, we will continue to disagree over pretty much everything. What matters is not the disagreement itself but how we express it, and the way we treat those with whom we disagree.'
We’re more likely to demonise those about whom we know little. However, as we draw closer, they become human. Real people with stories, struggles and aspirations. And – like the farmer’s kid who won’t allow their pet cow to become scotch fillet – the closer we are, the less likely we are to eat them (or at least angrily tweet at them.)
Author G.K. Chesterton suggested that when the Bible calls us to love our neighbours and our enemies, it’s because they’re generally the same people. It’s a tall order but not an impossible one. In the words of Yale University theologian Miroslav Volf, a good first step is to include our opponents in the community of humanity – and while we’re at it, include ourselves in the community of sinners. When we move beyond abstraction and start to personalise the people we oppose, we inevitably find common ground, beginning with our shared, immutable imperfection.
Done right, personalisation isn’t some idealistic attempt at bothsideism, but a pathway to restoring a measure of humanity to our public discourse. As a free society, we will continue to disagree over pretty much everything. What matters is not the disagreement itself but how we express it, and the way we treat those with whom we disagree. The simple act of learning someone’s name, of understanding their story, can transform the nature of that disagreement. Make it personal — because in doing so, we humanise the conflict, and ourselves.
Max Jeganathan is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He served as a political and social policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments and is undertaking a PhD in law on human dignity.
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