Living with Other People

It's always interesting encountering people with whom one disagrees on fundamental things in everyday life.

On the one hand, there's the option of simply ignoring the differences, focusing on the things held in common, and moving on.

On the other hand, there's more and more an insistence that everyone else be in accord on certain fundamentals, whether those be the priorities of the left or of the right, before a person may be accorded any kind of respect or treated with any dignity.

It's a tricky thing--of course, human dignity is intrinsic and inalienable. Fundamental respect and love for our neighbor is essential, in the full, philosophical sense.

And yet that doesn't mean every opinion can be allowed to pass unremarked, can it?

Certainly people in power need to be challenged on matters of fact, on areas where they jeopardize other peoples' well being. Certainly we now look back and wish for a world in which Hitler had been greeted by an outraged uprising of the whole world, an utter refusal to countenance his racial and nationalistic insanity, and a swift and certain challenge that could have headed off Holocaust and the slaughter of war.

So there are certain opinions, certain attitudes, that ought bring out a resolute opposition from us, reflecting perhaps the example of Dietrich von Hildebrand, recognizing certain evils as fully incompatible with Christianity or civilization.

And yet in an era where the errors of Russia influence almost all of us; when our first premises are so often out of whack in ways of which we are completely unconscious, what gives us the right to decide that we have accurately discerned whose opinions we must repudiate utterly? Left and right justify dehumanizing policies, governing choices that do actively lead to the deaths of innocents. We are faced with a world looking more and more like the milieu of the Caesars than the city of God.

How are we to oppose when we are so often, unconsciously, part of the problem?