What If Most of Our Arguments Are Actually Merge Conflicts?
Are we really disagreeing about what's true, or running into merge conflicts between different cultural forks?
Culture as an Open-Source Project
I’ve been thinking about why people can have such a hard time with things like pronouns, religion, politics, gender, morality, and other subjects where everyone seems completely certain that the other side just doesn’t get it.
A metaphor that is helping me is GitHub.
Imagine culture as an enormous open-source project that nobody consciously designed.
There isn’t one repository. There are thousands of overlapping repositories: Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, queer culture, masculinity, femininity, academia, therapy culture, national cultures, families, marriages, workplaces, friend groups.
And every individual is running their own fork.
We didn’t consciously choose most of it. We started absorbing code before we could even speak.
Our parents contributed. Our communities contributed. Religion contributed. School contributed. Friends contributed. Experiences contributed. We made our own modifications along the way. We borrowed things from other branches.
Most of these projects aren’t explicit. They exist largely in our minds and relationships.
Then two people meet and say:
“This is what that word means.”
But sometimes what has actually happened is that two branches have encountered a merge conflict.
When Branches Collide: Pronouns
Take pronouns.
One cultural branch might say:
“Pronouns describe something about biological sex. They’re ordinary grammatical references, not something an individual chooses.”
Another might say:
“Pronouns participate in social identity. How someone wants to be recognized therefore matters to which pronouns we use.”
From inside either branch, its interpretation can seem obvious.
So one person hears, “My pronouns are they/them,” and experiences a category error.
Another hears someone deliberately refusing those pronouns and experiences a relational or moral violation.
They appear to be arguing about a tiny piece of language.
Underneath it, though, may be different understandings of language, identity, authority, relationship, biology, and reality.
Going Up a Level: Religion
The same thing happens with religion.
Someone can talk beautifully about what Jesus means to them. But it’s considerably harder to ask:
What is Jesus for you?
What does that understanding organize in your life?
What assumptions does it contain?
What becomes possible through that understanding?
What would feel threatened if you held it differently?
Those questions move us up a level.
Instead of only asking whether a belief is right or wrong, we become capable of observing the system through which we’re making meaning.
And that can be frightening.
Because these systems aren’t merely collections of ideas.
They contain belonging.
Family.
Morality.
Status.
Identity.
Safety.
Sometimes God.
To see my worldview as one evolving branch among many can feel like I’m betraying it.
Everyone’s Blind Spot
And this isn’t particularly a conservative, progressive, religious, or secular problem.
A progressive person might easily see Christianity as a cultural framework while having tremendous difficulty seeing their own moral vocabulary as one.
A conservative might recognize ideology everywhere except inside conservatism.
A Christian might recognize other religions as interpretive traditions while experiencing their own as simply reality.
And those of us who enjoy thinking at the meta-level have exactly the same trap:
We can become attached to being the people who see the repositories.
Then we’ve just created another tribe.
Another identity.
Another branch convinced that everyone else needs to merge into ours.
Three Kinds of Harmony
So I don’t think the goal is to eliminate our local identities.
Maybe there are different levels of harmony.
Local harmony: We agree about what is true.
Pluralistic harmony: We don’t agree, but we allow one another to exist.
Meta-harmony: We become curious about how each of our systems generates meaning, what each one is protecting, and whether we can create relationship without requiring one system to conquer the other.
And even meta-harmony can’t become compulsory.
If I tell someone, “You need to transcend your worldview and see that it’s only a framework,” I’ve simply turned transcendence into another doctrine.
The harder practice is being able to hold:
This is the system through which I currently understand reality. I may believe it deeply. And I can still become curious about the system through which you understand reality.
Under Pressure
That’s easy when nothing important is happening.
It gets much harder when my children are at stake.
My marriage.
My dignity.
My community.
My politics.
My identity.
My God.
Under pressure, our minds have powerful reasons to collapse complexity:
This is right. That is wrong. This is us. That is them. Defend this.
Which makes me wonder whether one of the most important capacities we could develop is something surprisingly simple:
Can I remain aware of the organizer energy I’m inhabiting at precisely the moment that organizer energy is telling me I can’t afford to question it?
Seeing the Branch We’re Standing On
Maybe that’s where consciousness actually becomes a practice rather than an idea.
Not finding the perfect repository.
Not getting everybody onto the same branch.
But learning to see the branch we’re standing on—even during the merge conflict.