Can we agree to disagree?

I don't follow the State of the Union speeches as a rule, but this one happens to tap into a vein of thought commonly shunned; talking to people you don't agree with.

First quote (from linked article, emphasis mine):

Former House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill and President Ronald Reagan would be proud of their heirs -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- for truly demonstrating what civility could look like. We don't all have to agree with each other, but for the good of the country, it's important that we sit together as Americans. After all, this could be good for the country, too.

Nice and touchy-feely boilerplate "why can't we be friends?" stuff. It occurs to me that if it were that simple/easy people would do a lot more of it.

Second quote, Lt. Col Tom Kratman, SF author, from an exchange in the Chaos Manor mail (emphasis again mine):

“In any case,” Kratman concluded, “nobody converts anybody; we, as a society, are way past that. Right and left don’t share basic assumptions, don’t use the same words with the same meanings, and generally just talk past each other.”

Ah, fundamentals; where most mortals fear to tread, but the bread and butter of my blog. People are indeed people wherever you go, but nobody pretends that we're all clones of each other. The nutcase who shot Gabrielle Giffords (and killed those 6 other people, but who remembers them now?) is a garden-variety wacko with a grudge who happened to take it out on a local politician (and bystanders). Most people don't do that sort of thing, nor would they under any reasonably probable scenarios. Here is an automatic Us/Them that nobody in their right mind will argue with.

We start here with proclivities, and from the obviously violently insane we can move to mushier boundaries. How about criminals vs. non-criminals? Here lines start to blur, but most people would see them pretty clearly until past the psycho and sociopaths. There are things which are just "not done" which most people will agree on. Killing for fun isn't part of anyone's culture, at least not one which has survived, as their neighbours would quickly eliminate them.

Not that killing for other reasons is so proscribed; a monothestic religion which will remain nameless (but has over 1B adherents) contains within its basic tenets that killing or enslaving unbelievers is perfectly acceptable. No points for guessing who I'm talking about, but needless to say everyone else doesn't think this is a good idea, at least if they bother to know how things actually are. Could be important to them, but sticking heads in the sand is popular pastime.

No amount of hand holding or exhortations to "civility" will change the fact that people often have very different worldviews. I know lots of people who don't share my basic assumptions about life, but I find as I get older those friends sort of drop off. This is as civil as it gets, but at the end of the day it takes a lot more work to either confront or avoid ideological differences, and like-minded people are more relaxing to hang out with.

I have been in huge arguments with people who see exactly the same information as me completely differently. This was fun sometimes, but it stops being fun pretty quickly when the topics are not hypothetical/recreational. People continue to die for differences far smaller than those I have had with my lefty aquaintances. I like to think I'm reasonably civilized, but the veneer is stripped away rapidly from the best of us if we feel threatened. In my case the list of what I will kill to protect is limited to my immediate family, but history tells us that Ideas have killed a lot more people than Self-Defence ever will.

So can we all be friends? Not everyone with everyone else, and NOTHING will change that, certainly not cheap talk from politicians. Like goes with like, birds of a feather, oil and water, all that is as inescapable as magnetism, which of course repels as well as attracts. This is not a Yin-Yang thing of complementary interconnected opposites, but polar ones, separated from each other. Ideas are trouble when they divide people, and you'll be hard pressed to find any significant Idea (caps intentional) that can't polarize people.

Ideas also distort language, imparting particular meanings to ordinary words; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia changed the connotations if not the outright meaning of the word "red". It was to denote "good", but of course the other side (us) uses "Red" to mean "subversive Commie", a meaning it holds to some extent today. And then of course there's the classic Humpty Dumpty dissertation on meanings:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for youu!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

This brings me back to the Left-Right divide, and I think I'll tackle what I think that means another day; that will hopefully be less "impenetrable" than the above. I'll sign off for now by saying that compromise (from ALL parties) is necessary if we're going to keep the lights on and the wheels turning, but that will be done by Centrists, and I guess I'll work up a definition for that next time too.