“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”

In New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan writes about our current culture,

...it’s a culture where each moment of conflict galvanizes and tribalizes us still further, in what seems like an endlessly repeating loop of resentment, righteousness, and revenge. It’s now even invaded the Catholic church.

...It is much harder to see, as Solzhenitsyn did, even after he had been sent to the gulag by his ideological enemies, that good and evil run through every human heart.

...There seem to be just two inalterable categories: the oppressors or the oppressed; elite globalists or decent “normal” people. You are in one camp or the other, and, as time passes, those of us who don’t fit into this rubric will become irrelevant to the discourse, if we haven’t already got there.

...The parties are currently doing all they can to maximize these tribal conflicts as a way to seek power. This isn’t liberal democracy.

...In such a civil war, the idea that the Supreme Court could ever perform the role it was designed to — interpret the law in a non-tribal way — is laughable. Indeed, the notion of a filibuster becomes moot, because it requires some sort of common ground between senators, and this is regarded by both sides as complicity in evil.

...Give a street mob masks, Haidt and Lukianoff note, so they can hide their identity and their capacity for violent and aggressive conduct suddenly soars.

...We live then in a paradox. Our society has less crime and less danger than ever, and yet we see threats everywhere. It has become more racially and culturally diverse than any society in the history of humankind, but it is plagued by “white supremacists” or “hordes of illegals.” And you cannot question these feelings because subjectivity is more important than objectivity, and sensitivity trumps reality. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people live in a world unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of humankind, and to our predecessors of only five years ago, and yet we are told by our leaders that we are “under siege.” As women kick ass in our economy and culture, as they achieve success that previous generations would have thought extraordinary, what is the response? Rage, of course! Furious rage!

...Look at the Kavanaugh–Ford nightmare. Both individuals are besieged by haters and trolls, requiring police protection. She or he has to be believed in the entirety of their claims, with no qualification. So because Ford is a registered Democrat, she must be lying. Because Kavanaugh is an affluent white male, he must be guilty, and even if he isn’t, his privilege will compensate, so who cares? Kavanaugh’s striking record of hiring and mentoring women as clerks becomes evidence of his creepiness, not his decency. Ford’s completely understandable reluctance to go public is deemed proof of her duplicity. The idea that we should suspend judgment until an investigation concludes and we know all the facts we can know is not exactly a popular one.

...campus rules and race and gender ideology have been imported wholesale into vast swaths of corporate culture. Working at Google is now indistinguishable from attending Yale. And the nonnegotiable defense of feelings, rather than objective reality, is contagious. It’s a short cut, it’s easy, and it can become its own reward.

...I was struck in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book by a quote that is almost a perfect inversion of today’s political conversation. “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.” Those words were written in 1945 by Pauli Murray, a transgender, black civil rights activist. Her words foreshadowed the approach taken by Martin Luther King, a humanizing approach that today’s cultural revolutionaries have little time for.

Read more here.