Trying Not to Vilify Trump Supporters

Today I posted to Facebook a Nicholas Kristof column in which he urges his readers not to vilify Trump supporters as the "enemy." He says he received a backlash from people disinclined to follow his advice after he initially tweeted it. A friend of mine commented that "Actually many of them are [enemies]." This is how I replied:

It's very easy for me to demonize and malign Trump supporters. And goodness knows I've done my share of it. But it doesn't feel good to me to despise and reject people for their beliefs, just as it doesn't feel good to be despised and rejected by others for my beliefs. It also seems counterproductive, as Kristof points out.

What helps me to stop doing this or, at least, to do less of it is to understand that various factors cause people to do the things they do, including support Trump, that they don't choose. Researchers and theorists such as Jonathan Haidt and George Lakoff are illuminating what these causes are.

The way I see it, the fact that we don't support Trump is not something we can rightfully take credit for, and we can't rightfully blame others for supporting him. What we can do is try to understand why people do what they do and work with this understanding as best we can to foster the best circumstances that we can. As the great philosopher Spinoza said, "“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

I'm REALLY trying to follow Spinoza's lead because it seems like the best way to live. It's tremendously difficult at times. And this is one of those times. But, as Spinoza also said, "All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare."

The Kosmos in a Single Sentence

Once upon a time, one of my philosophy professors asked the class if we could think of one sentence that did a good job of summarizing the essence of any great philosopher's philosophy. The one that came to my mind immediately was Spinoza's, "The better we understand particular things, the better we understand God." I was too shy to say this in class. But I ended up writing a paper that purported to show how the essence of Spinoza's metaphysics, ethics, theology, and politics could all be inferred from this one little quote. I say my paper "purported to show" this, because, in retrospect, I'm sure it was comically crude and didn't come even close to accomplishing its lofty task.

Yet, I think tremendous wisdom is nevertheless distilled in that pithy quote. So when I recently encountered, by way of Bill Harryman's blog, a blog article that asked its readers to post a single sentence that captures the essential knowledge or wisdom they have gained from their field of expertise or interest, I thought of Spinoza's quote and a couple of others and fused them into one compound sentence: "All is One and One is All; the better we understand particular things, the better we understand God; and in this life, we cannot do great things, we can only do small things with great love."

Actually, I posted the first two parts of this sentence in the comments section of Bill's and the other blog and have subsequently added the third part, courtesy of Mother Teresa, here to distill my essential metaphysics, ethics, theology, and politics. That is, I believe that we would do well to understand, not only with our intellects but also with our hearts, that "God" is the unified totality of existence in which every particular part of It exists and functions only in relation to the Whole, that the person who understands this deeply is overflowing with love for the divine Oneness and Its ostensive parts and conducts his or her life accordingly, and that the best political system is one that benevolently and effectively fosters this understanding, feeling, and conduct.