“Middle Ground”

I was watching a video yesterday that was about brining white liberals and black conservatives to discuss different political issues, especially pertaining to race in America. The video was from a YouTube series called Middle Ground. I stumbled across it after watching a video of Ben Shapiro talking with Neil deGrasse Tyson about their thoughts on transgender issues, which I was honestly impressed by. It was a civil discussion with both expressing their thoughts in ways that were respectful, at least toward each other.

Back to the video I was talking about in the beginning; this channel looks like it does a lot of videos like this were it takes groups of people that they deem to be ironic and contradictory and have them debate each other. I can’t tell if these videos are good examples of political discourse or not. I think healthy debate is usually a good thing, but there were a lot of toxic things going on at least in this one video (primarily from a few individuals, and one in particular). I don’t think these videos capture the true spirit of a middle ground.

To me finding a middle ground is about finding shared values between two opposing parties and using that as the jumping off point for discourse. As opposed to starting at the point of contention and then have each side try to drag the other to their own way of thinking. If you take any two humans from anywhere in the world and ask them what values are at their core, I’d like believe more often than not there will be high amounts of overlap in the majority of cases. Where we differ as humans is in how we go about living those values, which is based on our lived experiences. That is where science can come in to show us what the aggregate of experiences tells us about the outcomes of those various practices in living out values. But science is not the be all end all. Just as in medicine, where there is standard of care and evidence based medicine, the science can be biased and the science cannot definitively tell us what is best for any individual case. It does however, create a place for us to start.