How to disagree in a civilised manner, when to avoid the opposition: a middle way from Maalouf and Buddha, sort of

Thanks to the website "Brain Pickings" for these insights:

“To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high,” the Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf wrote in his timeless, increasingly timely reflection on how to disagree. 

It is in times as divisive as ours and as sundered by conflicting perspectives that the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living. To respond in a reactive culture, to marry firm moral conviction with a spirit of goodwill and the porousness necessary for appraising other perspectives in order to evolve one’s own, is a Herculean feat of character. 

And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so antithetical to one’s own that the collision is bound to shatter one’s sanity rather than build common ground." 

Wise words for our times, in which we seem increasingly polarised; we Facebook opinions around our friends and our "friends," not seeming to realise that we we are often merely shouting into an echo-chamber. (Facebook is a lousy medium for political exchanges, since it consists of short, often shouty declarations from individuals, plus links to things they agree with. A lot of it seems to me to show a need for reassurance, and also a degree of showing off how many ways we can agree wittily or aggressively with what's already been stated,) 

We Tweet even shorter minimanifestos of for-and-against around the planet.  And in Mr Trump's case, we decide the election has been rigged before it happens.

Being a member of the clickocracy is much easier and quicker than being a functioning part of a democracy, an individual open to genuine debate and discussion, in which individuals can disagree without reaching for an electronic blunderbuss, in which people of opposing views can still like each other.

A friend of mine, a long-time member of the Labour Party, said she could no longer support Mr Corbyn, but she expected she would lose old friends in the Party over it. That is sad, in the full sense of the world.

This is the same world in which we call those whose views and politcal acts we disagree with "fascists" or "Trots." (Note to self and the world - never call anyone a fascist unless they really do support a totalitarian militaristic one-party state system based on racial purity and genocide. It's a gross insult to all those who suffered under fascism. And stop being hysterical about differences of political opinion and action that are minor, compared to the difference between our society and fascist Italy/Nazi Germany.)

Apperently Buddha said something like "if you encounter people who are agreessive and bothersome, and not open to reason and calm exchange of views, then it's best to avoid them." (Er...I may have adapted the quote a little.)

Maalouf gives us a mature and useful view of how to approach each other, and a practical view of when it's best to disengage. We surely very much need this vision in our daily, social and political lives.