Seeing the other side: Mary Winter’s Thought for the Week

‘Why is it so hard to have amicable conversations with people we don’t agree with?’

As I write, police in British cities are braced for more discord. A refugee friend reports that a colleague who wears the hijab is afraid to come to work. Lancaster organisation East Meets West has cancelled an outing, for fear of intimidation. A friend whose son is a police officer is consumed with anxiety. But that’s not all. On Sunday 4 August, a couple of hundred members of the public stood on the steps of Lancaster Town Hall, holding signs indicating their support for refugees and other migrants (above). The planned demonstration by the English Defence League fizzled out. In Blackpool, those attending the city’s annual punk festival challenged far-right demonstrators and helped clear up the mess afterwards. Following serious rioting in Middlesbrough, police were overwhelmed by support from the public, who brought food and thank-you cards.

We discussed the evolving situation after Meeting for Worship last Sunday. One Friend reminded us that one of the groups for which we are currently fundraising – Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families for Reconciliation and Peace – has the slogan ‘It won’t end until we talk’, and suggested that in this situation, too, talking to each other might be the answer. That got me thinking. And over the next few days, I began to see increasing sparks of light.

Some of you will be familiar with the story of Adam Kelwick, the imam from Liverpool who tackled the threatening atmosphere outside his mosque by bringing out food. As so often happens when we share food, conversations began and people began to open up. They realised that they shared many of the same concerns, and that they were all being manipulated by social media to pit one side against the other. In a subsequent radio interview, Kelwick spoke of the need to talk: ‘See the other side as human, talk, listen – and amazing things will happen.’ 

This sounds remarkably like the Quaker injunction to recognise God in everyone. If you’re not too sure about the whole ‘God’ bit, we could describe it as ‘establishing common ground based on our shared humanity’. 

This can seem scary and difficult, of course: why is it so hard to have amicable conversations with people we don’t agree with? Science can help us here. Humans feel safe when they belong to some sort of tribe, and we find it reassuring to talk to people who share our views. But an opposing view can make us feel threatened – and that is when the ‘fight or flight’ reflex kicks in. We have all experienced how destructive that can be.

If we follow the imam’s advice, though – seeing the other side as human, talking and listening – then we can get past the divisions – genuine or perceived – and start to see what we have in common. We all want a society where we recognise, as murdered MP Jo Cox said, that ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’. May we all find opportunities, over the coming weeks, to see ‘that of God in everyone’, to share food, to talk and listen, and to remind ourselves of our common humanity.

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