Imagine yourself standing at the very top of a mountain ridge, with a long slope falling down to the left and to the right. Imagine yourself straddling that crest, with one foot to the left and one foot to the right of the ridgeline. Now imagine yourself picking up a stone and tossing it upward so it will come down right on the very peak of the ridge.

You wouldn’t be able to do it. However carefully you tossed the stone, it would inevitably bounce to one side or the other. And here’s the point.

Once the stone made the slightest deviation toward one side or the other, it would then tumble down the mountainside, gathering momentum. It would eventually come to rest hundreds or thousands of feet downhill and hundreds or thousands of feet away to the right or to the left. You could do this over and over again and every stone you threw would cascade down to the left or right. And each time, all that movement would be a consequence of the slightest variation in your initial toss.

American society in 2020 is massively divided. People are separated by mountains of difference: different priorities, different facts, different sources. This division makes good policy, good administration, and good social action impossible. It doesn’t matter which party holds an office or the majority in a legislature or a court. America can’t go on for long with citizens as widely divided and as intolerant of each other as they are today.

I want to suggest a big idea here. Maybe the differences aren’t as great as they seem, nor as inevitable.

The stones being tossed from the mountaintop represent citizens. The initial toss is the early impressions that each person experiences in life that leads them to make simple choices about what to value and who to trust. The long cascade down the hill is the movement toward more extreme and more unmitigated opinions that results when a person simply follows the path of least resistance.

Many people who think they’ve grown wiser and more sophisticated have perhaps done nothing more than tumble down the mountain, resisting nothing and choosing nothing. They think, perhaps, that they’re making better decisions when in fact they’ve only fallen into a place where no choice remains to be made.

The great Christian writer C. S Lewis explained this idea well in his book Mere Christianity. Behavior is grounded in what people believe as well as what they think is right and proper. People sometimes credit themselves with virtue when they are only acting on their beliefs. Here’s Lewis:

[T]he reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?
There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.”

This passage has drawn criticism from people who style themselves witches and claim persecution because Lewis justifies executing real witches. That is silly and can be dismissed promptly. Lewis applies the term “witch” to a person who has actually “sold themselves to the devil” and who is actually “using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather.” Modern play-acting witches haven’t made a Satanic bargain, are incapable of effectual curses, and are irrelevant.

Lewis is no doubt right that modern folks believe themselves superior to the puritans of Salem, Massachusetts, who executed 19 people for witchery in 1692. The Salem Witch Trials are a perennial favorite theme. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible has been performed on major stages around the country nonstop for decades. Each year, new books emerge offering new medical or psychological spin on the Salem mania. The term “witch hunt” is in common use to describe any energetic and thorough search for wrongdoing. To call an investigation a “witch hunt” is to claim that it is a) motivated by foolishness, and b) looking for something that doesn’t exist.

But Lewis is also correct, I believe, that contemporary people would take appropriate action if they believed, as the puritans of Salem did, that danger threatened them. And today, because the range of opinions and the sources of information are so diverse, we’ve got citizens seeing danger from many directions and holding the most outrageous views.

There are citizens who’ve lived their entire lives in white, rural communities and who’ve never met or held 10 minutes’ conversation with a black person. Their only notion of black people comes from Dirty Harry movies and Willie Horton political ads. They are racist and that’s bad. But they are acting on the only information they have.
There are citizens who sincerely believe that social justice depends on themselves going to conferences and talking about academic concepts like “microaggression” or “intersectionality” and who seriously think that their path to a tenured position on a university faculty is the most meaningful measure of social progress. (The Congenial Iconoclast disagrees: the most meaningful measure of social progress is equality of opportunity and of security for the working classes.)
There are citizens who’ve been told by religious and spiritual leaders that stopping abortion is the only thing that matters and, believing that, they dare not oppose savage treatment of immigrants, corporate welfare, environmental degradation or any other perverse policies from politicians who mouth the pro-life talk.

These and many more types of citizens are out there, acting in ways that feel moral and right and enlightened to them. If they are extreme, it is only because the followed the process to its conclusion. They began with an innocent value, then they followed news sources and opinion leaders who shared those values, and then drifted into echo chambers where only the purest most extreme views get through.

But the important thing to remember is that they may not be terrible people. They may not be stupid people. They may not be as bad in any way as the comment section in opposing publications make them out to be. (And it is certain that liberal / progressive opinions are no less unfair about conservative citizens are the conservatives are about the libs.)

It will not be easy digging our society and our community out of the holes they are in. The social media will continue to filter information and steer individuals farther in the direction it chooses for them. Few people will make the necessary effort to sample diverse and changing sources of information. If you try to reason with them, they’ll distrust you. And because you’re not informed by the sources they respect, they’ll suppose you uninformed and unqualified to instruct them.

Getting a stone from down in a valley back up to the top of the mountain is a hard task. So hard in fact, that Greek mythology offers the fate of Sisyphus as one of the grimmest punishments ever handed down by the gods. Sisyphus was doomed to roll a heavy stone up a mountainside, only to have it slip back down to the bottom again and again.

Building consensus is a Sisyphean task. But it is the job that we’re faced with. America will be ungovernable until it is achieved.