Is it ethically responsible to maintain good relationships with people who you fundamentally disagree with?
So I was scrolling tiktok (as one does) and came across a video of a woman asking whether people are less interested in socializing/ community/ etc because of moral injury (creator- Lisa Kays). The idea being that after the covid lockdowns some people were less, let's say responsive, than others to the situation (or maybe more) and those interactions then caused caused a sort of disillusionment with the activity of maintaining social bonds with others. She also mentioned Gaza as an example, not being able to justify continuing to interact with people who hold an opposing position.
After hearing this I was reminded of the story of Daryl Davis, a black man who befriended a member of the kkk and that friendship eventually resulted in some members denouncing the organization and leaving it.
There are many polarizing topics in our society that seemingly prompt us to 'choose a side', and both sides are chosen and strongly defended.
So my question is this, should we make an effort to maintain community and social relationships with people who think so differently from how we do that their views feel like a moral attack?
On the one hand, trying to interact with someone who has fundamentally different views than you can be an exhausting experience. Sometimes it can even be a dangerous one. In some instances it can injure our own mental/ emotional/ physical well-being, and from a certain perspective this activity can be positioned as a form of self harm. On top of that, it is not our personal responsibility to police other's thoughts, we are not their keepers. Engaging with someone with only this as motivation can be positioned as not having a genuine desire to interact with them, or can even be seen as dehumanizing if you're engaging with the ideology and not the person holding it.
On the other hand, not interacting with those who disagree with us doesn't make them disappear. They will still exist in our communities/ families/ workplaces/ voting booths/ etc. and might even be people we love. Not trying to interact with people in spite of how they think could create more social division and strife and foster conditions for a complete lack of empathetic engagement with difference, which can also be seen as dehumanizing in that groups of people come to be ideologically reduced to a monolith. In addition, everyone has had a 'bad take' and how we think about and interact with the world around us continues to change over time. In someone might be holding very harmful views, but might not understand or appreciate how or why they are harmful. At the same time, real harm can come from enacting some ideas. However, diversity also requires that we allow for differences to exist, and how is that line drawn? Not to mention that critical engagement comes through dialogue and if I am absolutely certain that my views are always correct and I know everything about everything there is no room for growth.
So how do you reconcile this? How can we engage with difference without it leading to some kind of authoritarianism? (Fascism is only favoured by those on the 'winning' side after all, and power changes hands). Where do things like empathy/ love/ patience/ etc. fit in with addressing (or not addressing) what you see as potentially harmful rhetoric? Should ideas be upheld at the expense of community or should social cohesion take precedence? Or does this binary not accurately reflect lived experience?
To be clear, I'm not asking about actual positions on contentious issues, but about the act of interacting with those who see things differently from how we do. This is meant to be a friendly discussion about how we deal with difference :)
