polarization

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

... an impression of inescapable noise or acute disorder, a rush of adrenalin, sensations of alarm, a sense of unbalance or chaos, residual feeling of nausea and anxiety. These are the forms of bodily distress that occur when one's ingrained, taken-for-granted sense of how certain things are - and thus presumably will be and in some sense should be - is suddenly or insistently confronted by something very much at odds with it.

Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.

Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.

Where did it go, the moderate opine? I can't find it here nor there!'Perhaps then it's twixt the false dichotomy?

The author observers that better technology actually increased division because rival outlets funded by rival parties could get their slant to the partisans

The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.

Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.

Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.

The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.