Today,
politics in our nation is waged like war.
Many observe that politics is pursued with the scorched earth strategy
of war where the objective is to annihilate the opposition. But if we are to prosper as one nation, if
we desire to end our undeclared civil war, then we must come to a new
understanding of party and the idea of opposition.
Polarity:
Fracture or Complement
It is common in political-speak today to
describe our nation as "polarized." In
an article entitled "Five Things We Learned on Election Night" CNN editor Paul
Steinhauser wrote:
"The 2012 presidential election
shattered spending records, further polarized a divided country and launched a
thousand hashtags"."
But what does polarity really mean? Are
opposite poles complements like "male and female," or do they represent
irreconcilable contradictions?
The description of polarity imbedded in
the quote has within it a view of polarity as irreconcilable differences or
"fracture" as I have begun to call it.
The concept of "fracture" is introduced and thoroughly discussed in my
article entitled: "Law, Truth, Meaning
and Lies: A Metaphysical View of Berea College v. the Commonwealth of
Kentucky."
Berea College
Jim
Crow was instituted in the United States at the turn of the century. Jim Crow laws were intended to reverse the
achievements of the Civil War and institute in the place of slavery, a
structure of second class citizenship for the former American slaves.
The
State of Kentucky adopted a set of Jim Crow laws in the early 1900's and then
began their enforcement. The aim was to
segregate whites from blacks. The tool
was to make illegal certain associations between whites and blacks. The Berea College case was Jim Crow applied
to higher education. The college was
required by the new law to stop teaching whites and blacks together.
Berea
College organized under the General Laws of Kentucky in 1859. Thus, at the time
when the State of Kentucky indicted the school (1904), whites and blacks had
been attending school together since the school's inception -- approximately 45
years.
The article asserts a few essential
concepts. First:
"Laws, legal argument, and
legal analysis all exist by making distinctions"....that traditional legal
analysis creates distinctions by creating conceptual oppositional pairs: like the public/private distinction. This is how meaning is created."
In other words, lawyers
from law school forward, deal with "oppositional pairs" like the "public v.
private" distinction. We discover that
these oppositions are necessary to create meaning and eventually final
outcomes. We work with them on a daily
basis our entire careers. Most of the
time we arrive at "meaning" and/or "results" by balancing these pairs of
opposites. But sometimes -- like in the
case of Berea College -- the opposing concepts do not achieve their ends via a
process of balancing. Instead they
achieve their ends via a process I have called "fracture."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
