Resisting Extremist Polarity

One of the quieter dangers in periods of intense division is not disagreement itself, but the erosion of the common ground beneath it. People have always disagreed about politics, morality, religion, justice, and the distribution of power. Some of those disagreements are profound and cannot be reconciled by simply meeting in the middle. But societies become particularly vulnerable when disagreement begins to determine who is still entitled to dignity, relationship, or belonging.

Under those conditions, complexity becomes suspicious. Refusing total alignment can be interpreted as cowardice or complicity, while acknowledging anything human in an opponent begins to look like betrayal. The space in which people can disagree without becoming enemies grows smaller. History offers many examples of what can happen when that space disappears.

When Conviction Becomes a Test of Belonging

The French Revolution began amid genuine political and material grievances. The old regime was profoundly unequal, food insecurity was severe, political representation was contested, and ordinary people carried burdens that made demands for reform more than philosophical abstractions. The revolution that began in 1789 cannot be understood without taking those conditions seriously.

Yet revolutions also create difficult questions about who belongs to the new order and who threatens it. By 1793, France was facing foreign war, internal rebellion, economic crisis, and fears of counterrevolution. Under those pressures, suspicion widened. The Law of Suspects allowed people to be detained not only for overt acts against the Revolution but on the basis of conduct, relationships, speech, and perceived insufficient commitment. Former revolutionaries themselves became vulnerable as political factions turned against one another. The category of the enemy was no longer confined to those who wanted the old regime restored. It could expand to include people whose revolutionary credentials were judged inadequate.

This is one of the dangers of ideological compression. A complicated political landscape becomes a test of loyalty. People cease to be understood through the whole of their lives and become representatives of a category: patriot or traitor, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, pure or corrupt. Once those categories acquire sufficient moral weight, ordinary protections can begin to look like obstacles to justice.

When Fear Needs a Face

The European witch trials emerged from very different circumstances, and their causes varied considerably across regions and centuries. Religious conflict, demonological belief, local disputes, judicial structures, gender, economic tensions, and environmental pressures all played roles in different places. There was no single European panic unfolding for a single reason. What many persecutions did share, however, was a framework that allowed otherwise difficult misfortunes to acquire a human source.

A failed harvest, a sick child, the death of livestock, an unexplained illness, or conflict between neighbors could become evidence of hidden malevolence. Once someone was suspected of witchcraft, ordinary behavior could be reinterpreted through the accusation. A quarrel became motive. Unusual knowledge became evidence. Misfortune following an argument could become proof. In some jurisdictions, coercive interrogation and denunciations generated further accusations, allowing suspicion to reproduce itself.

The important thing is not that entire communities suddenly became irrational. People acted within religious, legal, and cosmological frameworks that made witchcraft seem genuinely possible. That is precisely what makes the history worth taking seriously. When a community becomes convinced that an invisible threat exists among its own members, removing the suspected source of danger can feel like protection rather than persecution. A neighbor becomes dangerous first in the imagination, and only afterward in law.

When Ideology Enters Ordinary Relationships

The Cultural Revolution demonstrates what this process can look like when ideological categories penetrate everyday relationships on an enormous scale. Beginning in 1966, Mao Zedong mobilized young people against supposed bourgeois, revisionist, and counterrevolutionary influences. Teachers and intellectuals were publicly denounced and humiliated; many were beaten, imprisoned, displaced, or killed. Students attacked teachers, colleagues accused colleagues, and political loyalty became something that had to be repeatedly demonstrated.

The destruction was not produced simply by people possessing strong political convictions. It depended upon a social environment in which ideological classification could overwhelm other relationships. A teacher could cease to be primarily the person who had taught a child for years and become a representative of bourgeois authority. A colleague could become a counterrevolutionary. Once the category became more important than the relationship, treatment that would previously have been unthinkable could acquire a political justification.

That distinction matters. Conviction itself is not the enemy. People sometimes need strong convictions to resist injustice. The danger comes when an idea becomes so totalizing that the person standing in front of us can no longer complicate the category into which we have placed them.

When Neighbors Become Symbols

The wars following the breakup of Yugoslavia offer another devastating example. Political leaders and media drew upon historical grievances, nationalist narratives, memories of earlier violence, and fears about collective survival. Propaganda did not single-handedly create the wars, but it contributed to environments in which ethnic identity became increasingly tied to threat and political loyalty. Research into the conflicts has documented the significant role propaganda and dehumanizing rhetoric played in shaping perceptions of other ethnic groups.

This mattered because the people being transformed into enemies were often not strangers. They had been neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and members of communities in which identities had existed alongside ordinary relationships. Violence required those relationships to be reinterpreted. A neighbor had to become first a Serb, Croat, Bosniak, or other politically charged identity, and then that identity had to become evidence of danger.

Dehumanizing language helps make that transformation possible because it compresses a person into a threat. Once someone becomes an infestation, contaminant, parasite, traitor, or existential danger, cruelty can be described as defense. Language does not mechanically produce atrocity, and people remain responsible for what they do. But language can change the moral environment in which actions become imaginable.

The Danger of Compression

These histories are radically different in their causes, ideologies, institutions, and consequences. They should not be flattened into a single formula. But one recurring mechanism is worth noticing: human complexity is difficult for absolutism to tolerate.

Extremist thinking benefits from compression. The world becomes easier to navigate when everyone can be sorted into loyal or disloyal, victim or oppressor, pure or corrupt, patriot or enemy. Categories themselves are unavoidable; human beings use them constantly to understand social life. The danger begins when the category becomes so complete that no contrary information about the person inside it is allowed to matter.

This is also why dehumanization deserves attention before it becomes explicitly violent. Violence does not begin only when someone picks up a weapon. Moral distance can be constructed much earlier, through jokes, euphemisms, collective blame, fantasies of removal, and language that turns actual people into abstract problems. It becomes easier to accept suffering when we have stopped imagining the person experiencing it as fully human.

What Common Ground Is For

Common ground does not mean pretending every disagreement has two equally valid sides. It does not require neutrality toward injustice, nor does it ask people to abandon moral judgment in favor of perpetual compromise. There are actions worth condemning, claims worth rejecting, and boundaries worth defending.

What common ground protects is something more fundamental: the recognition that disagreement does not erase personhood. It allows us to oppose what someone believes or does without needing to transform that person into something less than human. It leaves room for evidence to complicate our assumptions, for relationships to survive disagreement when possible, and for people to change without first having to crawl out of a category we have declared permanent.

That kind of common ground requires active maintenance. It means refusing dehumanizing language even when it is directed toward people we strongly oppose. It means noticing when outrage is asking us to stop thinking and begin sorting. It means protecting families, friendships, neighborhoods, classrooms, and communities from the demand that every human relationship become a test of ideological allegiance.

Tending the Shared Hearth

I return to the hearth because it offers a different image of common ground than the political “middle.” A hearth is not halfway between two positions. It is a shared place. The people gathered around it can disagree profoundly. They can argue about what has happened, what should happen next, and what obligations they owe one another. Sharing the fire does not resolve those disagreements.

What it does is preserve a relationship beneath them. Historically, households and communities often depended upon people continuing to work, eat, trade, care, and survive alongside others with whom they did not agree. That coexistence was never automatically peaceful, and the hearth should not be romanticized as a place without hierarchy, conflict, or violence. But its basic logic remains useful: some things must remain shared if people are going to continue living together.

Perhaps that is what is worth tending now. Not an imaginary middle in which every position is diluted until nobody objects, but enough common ground that conviction does not require dehumanization. Enough room for complexity to interrupt certainty. Enough relationship that a person cannot be reduced entirely to the worst category we can assign them.

The hearth does not ask us to surrender our convictions before approaching it. It asks whether we can bring them with us without throwing one another into the fire.

Sources and further reading:

Bandura, Albert. “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 193–209.

Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.

Linton, Marisa. Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Ramet, Sabrina P. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002.

Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.