Quick Takes

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The past – not dead; not even past – is present as a force-field governing our interactions.

The past is the track we are impelled by our common culture to follow.  Can we get outside our pasts, the patterned experiences which drive our suspicions and our grievances?

  Building a railroad is a different enterprise than riding the already-laid tracks.  We are desperate to be laying the track. Our job after Charlottesville, after Black Lives Matter, after January 6, after November 2024 — our philosophical and political and moral job – is to lay the track on which opposites may travel toward meeting.

Laying track, we can be about re-inventing America

The common ground of Meeting is not in the middle;  it is a different space altogether.  On the same  streets, either we fight as Opposites, Us-Against-Them – or we create this other way of being together:  Meeting.  Civility is not the cause of common ground, but the effect.

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Common ground is a matter of living together, not of agreement in opinions.

An idea is more real to us than a material object seen by the eye.  (Plato)

The optical illusion that we’re living in today: Us-Against-Them

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

Meetings of Opposites produces the actual experience of common ground among people whose opinions or positions are irreconcilable.

          Four components:

• Investigate the nature of visual perception to reveal the mechanism which produces optical illusions.
• Examine current discourse among us – the statues controversy in Charlottesville or any charged issue – to show the same mechanism at work.
• Introduce a philosophical framework for distinguishing perception from being-together.
• Participate in a series of exercises adapted from Outward Bound, to experience a way of being together different from the way perception allows and enforces.

Recognition of perception’s hegemony, along with the personal exercises, produces affective depolarization: A FRESHENED WORLD TO LIVE INTO.

With up to eight pairs of Opposites, each session includes all four components. The workshop series is available anywhere in North America without charge.

It is late for America.

 We’ve been working as opposites — warring, canceling each other — for so long that our polity and the planet are suffering grievous harm. We must here and now be confronted bodily, physiologically, by living, real-time instances of true meeting between persons, so that we have not position-taking but moral sustenance, not an abstraction but an actual country to live in. There’s a big difference between the emptiness of a slogan loudly proclaimed — “The American People!” — and the actuality of living as an American person among others. Common ground is a matter of living together, not of shared opinions.

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Henry McHenry Jr. Charlottesville, Virginia

mchyjr@gmail.com