No

We live in a contradictory world. The best of our human qualities can become destructive. The pursuit of truth and justice can turn into dogmatism and self-righteous anger. Willingness to rally in defense of one’s homeland and one’s ideals can lead to bloodshed; once years have passed, it becomes impossible to sort out who’s right and who’s wrong. Empathy for "your own" can dehumanize others. Everything that lifts us up and brings us together can also make us blind.

In times of conflict, we have an especially acute sense that the world becomes two-dimensional: there are friends and enemies, heroes and traitors, oppressors and oppressed, aggressors and victims. It may seem that absolute clarity has come to the world at last, which only a scoundrel or an idiot could fail to see.

In such moments, we react harshly to anyone who attempts to complicate our worldview. To avoid being exposed to unnecessary doubts, we only interact with people who already share our views and feelings — this is particularly easy to do in the world of social media, where anyone can assemble a group of like-minded people and then believe that they know the whole truth.

The position that "not everything is clear cut" becomes unseemly. Dissidents and doubters are driven away or compelled to be silent. Every group involved in the conflict begins to live by the principle that "whoever isn’t with us is against us".

We hide our own radicalism from ourselves by imagining the myriad circumstances that supposedly leave us no choice. Once, that force was the will of God. Nowadays, "common sense", "progress", "civilization", "norms", or "historical inevitability" increasingly take its place. It is "they" who are senseless, fanatical, backward barbarians, while "we" are their polar opposite. It wasn’t us who decided to set out on the warpath; they forced us. And we’re on the right side of history.

In the modern world, conflict is not limited to open clashes between people. Whatever makes us uncomfortable can turn out to be a battlefield. A newspaper we dislike is participating in information warfare, a competing firm from another country is doing trade war — a Hollywood film — culture war, a monument we hate, memory war.

I would love to write that there’s some simple means to free ourselves from this obsession with polarization. To get from a black-and-white world to a full-color world. But there isn’t any simple answer. The problem is that evil really exists in the world. It’s not illusory. There are liars who manipulate information, dictators who invade other countries, war criminals who give out sadistic and illegal orders, and soldiers who carry them out.

Taken together, this leaves us to face a difficult test— will we be able to transform the polarizing force that acts within each of us? Will we, in a moment of pain, fear and despair, refuse to join forces with those who admit no doubt? Will we want to? When all is said and done, maybe there are some ends which justify the dehumanization of others?

Ilya Venyavkin