Seeing all sides of things is a key part of wisdom. Nowadays, the notion of a “patriarchy” focuses attention on the downsides of our culture. But there are good things about our culture as well. As a culture, we should definitely treat women better. And we can do that without tearing our culture down and starting over.

The same can be said about other groups. In general, we should look down on other people less than we do. And we can treat everyone with a more dignity without declaring the whole system to be rotten. Things are bad now, but they used to be even worse. There is hope even within the basic framework of our society handed down from our ancestors, who tried to make the world a better place for us.

Bad things happen when members of any group treat any other group badly, even in small ways, if that mistreatment happens millions of times. The motivation for ethnic strife, and even war, is often built on millions, if not billions, of small slights.

Nowadays, in the US, we are fueling strife between Democrats and Republicans, with a lot of deep disrespect on both sides. This is not good for our republic. Healing requires some effort to understand the other side’s point well enough to realize that a good person could believe that. Nowadays, that is heresy to one’s own side. But we need that kind of heresy.

There is a gigantic difference between someone being wrong, wrong, wrong about something and their being a bad person. If we don’t make that distinction, we’ll tear our society apart. You might be able to convince me that politicians are on average bad people, but I am not willing to believe, as many seem to these days, that half of the American people (those who voted for the other guy) are bad!