Lars at Midsummer

A friend of mine called me yesterday and we chatted a while on our smartphones. We used a popular Internet-based communication app, one that he introduced me to a few months back.  He has been in South America all during the shutdown, having gone there as part of a recent nomadic phase in his life, after having nobly rid himself of almost all of his possessions last year and converting to remote work. Using this particular app on his smartphone like this cuts down on his phone bill.

My friend is Swedish by birth and nationality. He lived for over thirty years in the U.S., however, and has a green card. I met him nine years ago when we were both working in Boulder at a start-up. He loves Colorado because he is an avid downhill skier, but he wanted to take a break from the U.S. for a while, while his circumstances allowed it. That was before the shutdown hit.

Lately we have talked every couple weeks, usually because he calls me. That in itself is refreshing, since many of my friendships have long depended on my keeping up the contact over the years.

Among the reasons he wanted to call was to notify me that it was coming up on the solstice in a few days, and that according to Swedish custom, the midsummer celebration period had started as of that day. In the past he has shared with me photographs of St. John's Eve celebrations he attended in Sweden or among Swedish expatriates, usually wearing festive headgear with flowers and ribbons in the Swedish national colors, and of course holding a glass of beer.

This year, in his isolation abroad, he was wistful about the event, missing the custom more than usual. The city in which he had been stuck during the shutdown is almost directly on the equator, and the days and nights there vary little in length throughout the year.

We are both of us in the tech industry--that's how we met---and we inevitably discuss topics in that field. The business of tech, that is, not the details, as our specialities overlap only at the margins. We joked about how much a relief it is, to purposely forget certain tech knowledge when it becomes outdated, or more commonly, when one resolves to narrow one's speciality and to henceforth leave certain duties to others.

"I love jettisoning useless knowledge overboard," I told him. The metaphor made him laugh hard from recognition of the same satisfaction in himself.

During the shutdown, he has been using the isolation time he has spent inside in his AirBnB rental in a South American capital to study for and to ace a series of certification exams for cloud computing, which he will need in his upcoming remote job. He is planning to move to Spain once the borders open up. He wants to work a few more years, build up some savings, and retire in the world somewhere cheap.

As we both are well aware, our political views are divergent. This usually doesn't cause any issues in our friendship. In fact, it has never caused any serious problem at all.  We have many other things to talk about, and which bring us together. Sometimes the conversation veers into politics, and when I see it going there, I usually try to steer it away,  as I do with everyone. This is not because I don't like talking about politics---if you know me, you know I can freely talk at great length about such things--but out of interests of preserving the peace.

I'm not always successful at this diversion, however, and as it did during our most recent phone call, the conversation sometimes finds itself going there. No doubt in this case it was because recent events have evoked political expressions out of almost everyone.

As always, the political questions he posed to me reflected his genuine curiosity as to why I hold certain views. He always asks his questions in a respectful way, in good faith, even while expressing his disagreement.

As I like to tell him, I find this candor refreshing. I try to give him as calm and direct an answer as possible, without argument or justification, and without hiding anything I believe out of shame, as I am not at all ashamed. I specifically don't try to convince him of anything except the veracity of my statement regarding my own views, and my own steadiness in my beliefs. I want to give him accurate information about what I believe, as if giving an objective summary. He is free to use that information as he pleases.

Few people on the other side seem curious in the way he is. As so many others on my side have lamented, in almost the same words I would use, the other side seems so eager to ascribe to us opinions we may not hold, based on their beliefs about what our side supposedly thinks. Even when they get our opinions right, they usually err greatly as to the reasons we hold those opinions, in a way that strikes us as a diametrically opposed to the reality we experience.

For Lars and me, it helps ease our exchanges on this topic that we have a mutual friend, a long time close friend of his, another Swede of our age, who lives in Switzerland and who also disagrees with Lars on many issues. They regularly have long phone conversations with each other, and have traveled the world together for decades, getting in and out of various weird scrapes. I cannot keep up with their activity, when they are together. They are a force of nature, the two of them.

"Stefan agrees with you," my friend tells me often, about our mutual friend, having just discussed the same topic with him.  Because I'm not the only example of a person on my side that he knows and trusts, I am relieved of the burden of representing my side in its entirety.

When during our recent call the conversation turned to politics and became more animated than normal, I didn't mind responding to his interrogation per se. But there was something unsettling about the way it played out this time, compared to previous ones. After nearly every question he asked me, me I was compelled to tell him that any sense of accuracy about my answers forced me to dispute the very premises embedded the question, even over the meaning of certain words.

It was a brutal slog for a while during our call. It was like two people speaking entirely different languages. Especially over our digital devices this exchange made me feel as if no real communication was happening at all between us. Nevertheless we pushed on with our conversation, and we even found some things to agree about, and other things to disagree about, and then we moved onto other topics.

What was most grievous, however, was not the specific frustration we had both just experienced with each other.  That was relatively minor in importance in regard to our friendship. Instead I was struck with sorrow from thinking that if he and I, who make a point of fostering the goodwill between us, find this activity difficult, then how much more challenging it must be for so many others out there, among whom a similar resolve of mutual charity has not been pledged?

How painful it must be for many out there at this moment who are trying to bridge these most fundamental epistemological gaps (to borrow a phrase popular in contemporary Critical Theory). Human nature dictates that many of these interactions are probably not turning out well, leaving wounds that will not soon heal, if they ever do.

The experience has heightened my existing chariness, won by bitter experience, that activates during any conversation these days. Even when not discussing current events, politics seems only a sentence or two away from barging in.  I am thus on guard against accidentally climbing any set of rhetorical gallows that might have secretly been erected for me, in order to out me and condemn me, thus proving to the other person the invalidity of my intellect or the dissolution of my sanity.

I've had this happen and it is not fun. It never persuades me of the other person's cause, but most of the time I don't get the idea like that was the point. Their plea to me takes the form of saying: don't get the idea that there is ANY common ground between us on these things, You must abandon everything you believe right now if you wish for me to consider your opinions as worthy of any respect.

Some might demand my capitulation in this way believing it is their duty to do so, in the fight of Good against Evil.  In their eyes, my opinions mean that at best I am ignorant, and thus I need to be informed of such out of charity. In this case, they might deliver their opinion with a tone of voice that suggests that they believe, like a stern professor lecturing a yokel freshman, that it has never occurred to me that not everyone shares my parochial viewpoint.

They convey the impression that they are delivering news to me by their rebuke of me. Why else would I have sought their fellowship, if I did not naively expect a reflection of my own opinions? Can it be that I just don't talk to enough people, or don't read the right news websites, to be yet aware of the consensus shared by all decent, good, intelligent people? No doubt I've been led astray by bad influences. Now that I have been corrected by them on this point, however, they expect to me to fall in line and to get on the right side of history.

If I fail to fall in line, however, then perhaps I have gone bad in the worst possible way. Perhaps, as they might have already suspected, I am truly one of the irredeemable ones, as wrong as wrong can be. Sadly, for my own sake, I need to be humiliated, to have my ego crushed without mercy if necessary, lest I draw others into my whirlpool of error. My continued resistance to fact and reason is a danger to others and to humanity, It is doing violence, which must be stopped

Remembering such exchanges, or even imaging the possibility of new ones in regard to certain individuals who might contemn me, I struggle to hold my choleric self from internal outbursts of uncharitable thoughts. Repenting for these petty imagined skirmishes to my brothers and sisters is a daily task of prayer, even as I would, I am certain now, hold my tongue in person, to the point of allowing them to believe that their rebuke had wrought its desired effect in me. If they need to report my fallen state, as well as their triumph over me, on social media to any mutual friends we share, I'm fine with that.

Thankfully none of this applies to Lars and me so far, Beneath the contentious debate there is still mutual respect, cordiality, and even curiosity. I think we can keep pulling it off. For this I am extremely grateful. Lars is a rare gem of a soul. Perhaps I will find other friends on the other side for whom this applies as well, with whom I have erroneously written off the possibility of fellowship in the current era. In any case, I will keep looking, and trying, albeit cautiously and selectively. At the moment, in most cases, I prefer to stand and wait.

The worst of this kind of thing is probably yet to come for all of us as a nation, however. It does not make me despair to think of this situation we are all in, That's a vice in which I refuse to indulge. I pray for everyone I know.