Magpies and Gadflies

While walking in the park today, I paused by a bench and sat down to think. I was suddenly made aware of a black-billed magpie that was roosted in a pine several hundred feet from where I was sitting. He was cawing loudly every few seconds, whether to attract a mate or ward off rival birds, I'm still not sure. Across the park from this magpie stood a tall church, and from this church emanated a second magpie call.

A kind of competition emerged. Whenever the one bird spoke, the second by the church would reply. If the first magpie grew quiet, so would the second, but the moment it tried to call again, the other magpie would shriek back in rapid succession.

This quickly escalated—the bird in the tree tried to intimidate his rival, but as his calls increased in both volume and frequency those competing calls did precisely the same thing. This incessant babbling started to irritate me. I was particularly annoyed with the second magpie, who only spoke after the first and seemed to be provoking the competition. Why won’t that bird just leave the matter alone? I asked myself.

It was only after several minutes that I realized that the second birdcall matched the first’s a little too closely. I stood up and walked to the church. As I did so, the answering birdcall grew softer until I could no longer hear it. I arrived at the church and there could not locate any bird. I returned to where I had been sitting before where I found the two calls were just as loud as they had ever been, with the first call bellowing out a challenge and the other matching its tone and frequency exactly. The second call—the one that had so annoyed me—was only an echo. The first magpie, the only real one, did not seem to realize this, and he was still cawing at his pretend rival when I left the park almost an hour later.

I wonder if we people are sometimes like that magpie.

This week in class I was invited to do some homework that chafed at me. I was asked to research some social issues that I and my professor have different stances on, and the readings assigned by my professor were not very kind to my side of the issue. I balked at completing the readings and considered using the time instead to draft an angry email to my professor. I felt justified in doing so; he was not being fair to my side of the argument, why should I listen to his? However, in my Freedom and Civil Society class I have been studying how to approach other people with civility, even when we disagree. A foundational part of this process involves listening to our opposition with the intent to understand where they are coming from. So, I read the assigned material with a prayer in my heart that I might understand the good behind my professor’s stance, and with the knowledge I had been wrong before.

 It was hard, at first. The first half of my study, I was railing. I had to pause periodically to cool down after what I viewed as a complete misrepresentation of my side of the argument and of the scientific evidence. I found its very language inflaming, and it took every ounce of grit I had to keep going. But as I continued reading, something changed. I started to learn a little from the studies cited and agree with them. The language became less offensive as I moved through the material and got down to the heart of their argument. Reading through their conclusions, I suddenly realized that there had been no disagreement—that ultimately the authors and I were working for the same reality, but just coming at it from different directions. When I penetrated the fog created by their perceived attacks and my own defense mechanisms, I saw their intentions clearly and realized I identified with them. This surprised me, as we were speaking from opposite sides of the social/political spectrum.

In society today there is a lot of babble that doesn’t really go anywhere. We have become increasingly polarized, so that whenever one side says something the other flies to the defense. Our conversations increase in volume and rancor. Before long we’re quipping back and forth at lightning pace, each determined not to let the other have the last word in Parliament, at school, or on social media platforms. Just as I became frustrated with the second mockingbird, we might grow irritated with the competition for refusing to drop the issue.

But how much of our disagreement is real, and how much is imaginary? We rarely stop to consider how much we are contributing to the argument, or how quickly defense becomes offensive. Sometimes, in our haste to defend ourselves we speak or behave in a manner that makes it more likely, not less, for the disagreement to perpetuate. We usually preface our own views with attacks at the other side, or even habitual jargon that rankles those of the other position. However, this widens the rifts further instead of bringing society towards an agreement. What if my actions are effectively bringing about the responses I loathe?

If we pause in our debate long enough to understand the other side, we might discover that we have no real rival, just as I did in my class. We might find that they are calling for essentially the same things we are, but that the meaning of our conversation was lost among the abrasive words.

Photo by Vlad Kiselov on Unsplash