I once read a piece about a man of some intellectual note. This luminary was asked what he disliked most in contemporary society. His answer was ‘monotheistic absolutism.’ My reaction was ‘what?’ The wisdom of his response, however, grew on me over time and has risen to the top of my own pet peeves, a rather lengthy list indeed.

If you also responded with a ‘what,’ let me add a brief explanation. Strictly speaking, monotheistic absolutism is a belief that one’s own perception of the divine (or truth) is the correct one, despite all the alternatives out there. That is, there is only one truth, it is known, and you possess it.

One might argue that more people have been slaughtered in the name of God (or received truth) than for any other reason. While I cannot prove such, the assertion seems plausible. However, this human affliction goes beyond a devotion to a narrow interpretation of the divine. In my mind, it speaks to all those who insist on rigid truths about the world and on an irritating obsession respecting the righteousness of one’s own peculiar approach to reality. In such people, nuanced thinking, empathic connections, and flexibility are rarely found and often considered verboten.

This struggle among world views is nothing new. As we first emerged from the darker ages, sometime around the later part if the 15th century (if not a bit earlier), certain humanistic views began to replace the rigid, hierarchical views that had previously dominated Europe, at least since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years or so earlier. During this period of stagnation covering about a millenia, intellectual progress and creative thinking shifted to the Middle East, especially to Baghdad. This was the so-called Islamic Golden Age, which emerged as Europe foundered in ignorance and a startlingly narrow approach to the world in which the masses struggled to survive.

The European perspective, rooted in Scholasticism, assumed that all had been revealed by God in scripture and that was that. Man’s concerns were with the next life, not this one. Besides, all authority flowed downward, given by the church or appointed leaders, and nothing was to be questioned. Any extent progress in human understanding took place elsewhere, in China and in the larger Islamic Caliphtes where inquiry into mathematics, astronomy, optics, medicine, literature, and other disciplines were encouraged. That Islamic impulse to better understand our world came to a crashing halt when the Mongols sacked Baghdad around 1250 AD and when China cut itself off from the rest of the world.

Slowly, the centers of human inquiry and investigation shifted to Europe. By the early 1500s, Erasmus was writing scathing critiques of the old order, including the Vatican, and their ‘head in the sand’ attitude to change. Martin Luther was leading a revolt against obvious failures and greed found in the Church’s hierarchy. Gutenberg revolutionized communications with his movable type innovation. And more and more secular centers of learning (Oxford was formed around this time) began to consider a new approach to learning, one that would come to he known as humanism.

Imcrementally, it was reasoned that all knowledge was not lodged in scripture nor the ancient texts from Greece and other past ‘golden ages.’ Rather, our world remained open to rigorous observation and deductive investigation. Science evolved slowly and hesitantly, but it kept improving as a strategy for understanding things, though not without risk to those who pursued it. For example, Copernicus didn’t permit the publication of his ground breaking work disputing an earth centered universe until after his death. Galileo, who confirmed his predecessors theories, was forced to recant by the Vatican. Still, their scholarly works, once unleashed on the world, proved that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has arrived. Once we began to look at the world about us in an open and honest fashion, there was no looking back even if this new way of looking at things spread very incrementally.

Why now belabor this period of social and cognitive transformation? Well, I was reminded of all this on my recent trip to Belfast and Northern Ireland. No one could help but notice the obvious evidence of divisions and hate that separated people who looked so much alike but who saw the world through different lenses. Seeing the tribal limitations of ‘my people’ reminded me how easy it is to close our minds and then our hearts.

In Belfast and Derry, walls divided communities whose elemental distinctions were rooted in religious conflicts that go back many centuries. Relatively minor differences in how each side had approached God resulted in salient cultural rationales for bombing and killing one another.

Of course, nothing is that simple. Religious intolerance segues into cultural distinctions which then translate into political and economic consequences of substantive importance. God can too easily become a convenient basis for distributing society’s goodies in unfair ways. In each case, however, some people get stuck in their set beliefs, unable to see beyond their narrow views even as others can bend and find opportunities for compromise and change. The 1998 Easter Peace agreements between Protestants and Catholics did happen.

I cannot help but wonder if our American cultural conflict is of a similar character. Is the separation between our Red and Blue political nations essentially based in some fundamental dichotomy in how each side views the world. One side is stuck in a hierarchical world of fixed beliefs rooted somehow in a cultish devotion to the notion of a strong man or demigod who would rule over an ordered and unchanging society.

The other side believes in things like science and progress and the perfectibility of society through collective action. The world is not fixed in their view but is amenable to change and improvement through science and experimentation. One side is driven by fear and unquestioned faith, the other by hope and reason. This is not all that different from the tensions that existed when our world took tentative steps from an irrational devotion to absolute truths in the so-called dark ages toward a new humanism in the Renaissance as a step toward the modern world.

Most agree that our existing cultural divide is growing. The last time we were so polarized was in the years before our Civil War. The divisions then were more complex than merely a belief in slavery or not. What separated us were more fundamental differences in how each side saw the world. One side desired a hierarchical society based on fixed truths, an institutional framework where people were assigned to higher and lower positions based on ascribed and usually immutable attributes (like race). In that world, one ordained by the creator, there existed little opportunity for change. The world was perfect as it was, a reflection of divine will.

The other side saw all kinds of new possibilities, as reflected in the emergence of the new Republican Party of that era. That new philosophy was premised in progress and the promise of a better world if the shackles that limited individuals might be torn away, especially with the help of government and a focus on the public good. Thus, one side invested in education and infrastructure and experimentation while the other sought desperately to resist all change to an already perfect world.

Such fundamental differences were not amenable to discussion and compromise back then nor now. In the middle ages, Europe convulsed in several periods of constant war between cultures associated with religious differences, the 30 Years War being particularly savage. In America, during the middle of the 19th century, we dissolved into a fratricidal civil conflict to determine which world view might dominate as the country expanded westward. That dispute cost us between 600 and 700,000 lives and did not bring us together in our hearts.

Even on a micro-scale, violence prevailed. Southern Congressman Preston Brooks almost beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to death for speaking out against slavery. Other political and media spokespersons from the south defended this vicious attack in Congress. Violence was sanctioned politically and morally in the pursuit of unassailable values of highly questionable merit.

Recently, we have witnessed an insurrection against the orderly transition of power, a fundamental precept of our democracy. A still sitting President urged a violent mob on. And then, an entire major political party accepted this treasonable act.

Have we learned nothing from history? At long last, have we learned nothing at all? All around us, we see walls being erected, mostly symbolic, but real nevertheless. We cannot talk to one another. We cannot understand one another. We have no common narrative nor set of norms to share. We are strangers, no different than the citizens of Belfast or Derry who erected tall, thick walls to keep the other at arms length, at least when they were not trying to kill one another.

We have one planet on which we all live. We will either work together to make the best go of it or watch the human experiment dissolve in its own folly. Once again, I’m glad I’m old.