I tried to write this in a simple, unpretentious way, but I'm not good enough to do that. I know these words are too much for the simple idea: charity needs a comeback, at least for humans interested in doing things. I mean this primarily in a rhetorical sense: because all of our interactions with each other are fundamentally the meetings of minds who cannot know each other's inner reality, they are all tricky negotiations in which we don't hold all the cards and we have to make guesses. Making charitable guesses about the cards you don't hold in these interactions can be a weakness, because of course people can use naivete to deceive you. Everyone seems to understand that these days. What maybe they don't understand is the strength of the position it can leave you in.
Postmodernism and the recursive practice of History has effectively poisoned the old cultural identity of the West. Whether this was necessary or not - whether it was even intentional or not - is left to the reader. Here, I only have to acknowledge that it happened to set up my point. People either still cling to it, full of rage and nostalgia for a version of it that never really was, or else - more commonly - they try to make something new out of the ashes, picking up scraps of historical racial, cultural, religious, philosophical, or commercial identity which can be salvaged in isolation. Isolated, and echoing: in the absence of the contexts which often soundly mediated these pure quanta of identity, they amplify their own importance in the minds of their adherents, soon seeming all-consuming.
This must have been escaped before - possibly many times. Wherever isolated groups of us came willingly, or were forced together by circumstance, people with different backgrounds must have come into close proximity with each other, and sometimes - maybe very rarely - they must have not killed and subjugated each other, but rather formed more or less unified societies. There must, at times, arise the conditions and sentiments which lead people to put aside differences and brook misunderstanding and misperception for the sake of the benefits which accrue to groups that can work together. There must, because groups do exist and do not constantly splinter.
Or at least, that is one perception. A popular alternative can't see any unification of groups without hierarchy. How, they ask, could there ever really be equality between two different groups? Equality is the rarest outcome of any comparison; how much more likely that we could find some way in which to see that even when two groups unified amicably, there was implicit threat or careful deceit which greased the dovetail path. Perceived like this, there is no unity without coercion, no harmony without dominion.
In either event, the structure of communal unity is obviously tenuous and shifting. Whether the West existed occasionally in a state of relative harmony or forever and always in a system of deceptive hierarchical control prior, we now do not have those bonds or chains which kept us together. We do not even seem to know what they are.
Charity is one. Not charity like the alms-house variety, and not even charity of the Christian kind - though perhaps these are other social glues worth consideration. The kind of charity I want to talk about here is on display when your opponent - a real enemy to you, based on past interactions - says something you find vague. Its meaning isn't perhaps all that clear to you, and nothing is ever perfectly clear in human communication, so you'll need to interpret it. Charity is when you choose to interpret it the way which reflects best - in your estimation - on the character of the speaker.
Since it's your enemy, they've probably said something which will reflect on them poorly regardless of whether you interpret it charitably or not, and there's no point in trying to make things be what they really aren't. But if what they've said was really vague - if there really is the possibility that you could understand the statement differently if it came from someone else, or under different circumstances - then charity becomes your friend. There is no enemy like a friend you made hate you, and no friend like an enemy you showed genuine mercy on. Charity avoids the first and provides the latter. Charitable understanding does not come easily; the gut reaction is to see the worst in your enemy - it forces you to consider the situation carefully, warding against premature decisions. Charity makes you look reasonable. By showing that you want to agree, charity invites an enemy to switch sides without fear of being left without a new ally.
Interpreting what others say in the worst way possible - pessimistically, often against their protests to the contrary - only assures everyone that agreement and friendship are not high on the list of priorities. If someone is in favor of banning abortion and you accuse them of being an anti-feminist, even though they claim their views on abortion have nothing to do with feminism and indeed they very much feel that they are feminist! - then you have not interpreted them charitably, but rather reached in order to vilify them with a conclusion that is only hinted at rather than made plain. Far better it were to take their claim to feminism at face value, but question whether their views on abortion line up with a feminist attitude, than to reject the claim immediately by accusing them of the opposite.
To go even further - it should not be outside the realm of decency to remind those who attack you that they might be better served by interpreting the positions you take with charity. To do so invites them to consider that perhaps there is something being missed in their view of your position, if they are arguing in good faith. If they are not arguing with you in good faith, but rather simply to attack you, then it makes them look uncharitable to third parties, who they are presumably attacking you for.
Charity in conversation, then, is a powerful rhetorical tool, and I really think its virtues outweigh the risks of its employment. If we really want to win our arguments not to prove the other side wrong so much as to bring sides together in agreement on a truth, then it is indispensable.
However, it is largely absent from our current culture. The Conservatives attack the Liberals as communists, and the Social Justice Warriors accuse those who disagree with them of racism and microaggressions. Both extremes cannot stand moderate viewpoints - obviously these must be evidence only of a desire not to rock the boat, rather than to arrive at a carefully-calibrated position. Why this is cannot be answered here by me. I do not understand it, other than to point fingers at large trends like postmodern sensibilities, or the accumulation of histories which have eventually proven all our sacred cows profane, or at least of doubtful cleanliness (often via a particularly uncharitable interpretation of historical sources!). Perhaps it is because we are constantly marketed to - we in the West are the consumers of the world, after all - and insofar as marketing is not the product, it is deception, and endless deceptions have left us unready to accept anything at face value for fear of being the mark in a con.
I can only think the guy who forsakes friendships and community in order to avoid being taken in must eventually try to replace those friends and communities with products to fill the void - so that this kind of paranoia makes him - us - the biggest mark of all.
