Tuesday evening, November 4th, was a happy day in our household. We watched with increasing joy as the election returns came in, and when the television news sources suddenly called the election around 10 p.m., we started dancing around the house, joyous and crying. We watched in quick succession the gracious concession speech of Senator John McCain, and then a bit later, the election speech of now president-elect Barack Obama. I felt proud of our country, and hopeful. I tend to think Obama becoming president will improve the conversation about race in our country and in the world. It will benefit the middle class and poor. It will mean better international relations in a global community. I could go on.

So you can tell which side of the political divide I fall on. My political positions as a Lutheran Christian are obviously much more complex than whatever is generally represented by party politics. I tend to be a pro-life progressive, and my sympathies for Anabaptist forms of pacifism mean I struggle with some of the rhetoric and leadership of basically any governmental leader on the right or the left, especially when we talk about war and military expenditures. Nevertheless, in general I vote Democrat. I choose not to exit myself from participation in democracy, as morally compromising as this can be at times.

About 30 minutes after Obama's speech, I started receiving e-mail and Facebook messages from friends on the conservative side of the political equation. They were saddened, shocked, angry, despairing. They feel this is a tragedy for the unborn, horrible for our national economy, even a possible sign of the rising of the Anti-Christ. They go on. Contrary to my own perception of Obama as an authentic, honest, and strong leader, they see him as a fake, saying one thing to get elected when his actual past actions belie something else entirely.

In other words, we seem to have virtually incommensurable horizons. We can hardly talk about the election and Obama in a way that makes sense in any rational way, because what they see as black I see as white, and vice versa. 

This troubles me. I don't want to live in a little liberal/progressive bubble. I don't want to see the world so differently from my conservative friends that we literally can't understand each other, and yet this seems to be what has happened.

I pride myself on staying in touch with a wide array of people from a variety of political perspectives. I am a pastor of a diverse congregation, so that helps. I nurture friendships across political lines. My grandfather was a Republican congressman in Iowa for 14 years. So my political context is diverse. And yet it seems, even when I nurture such relationships, the incommensurability of our worldviews chafes. As one friend wrote after the election, "I seem to have a worldview radically different from the rest of you, and I don't know how this happened."

It is an interesting question, how we come, over time, to adopt such different worldviews. It has a lot to do with what we read, who we talk to, where we live. I like Hans Georg Gadamer's work in this area, and his phenomenological approach to a "fusion of horizons." This quote from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy summarizes his position well:

Awareness of the historically effected character of understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’ (’Horizont’) -- understanding and interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation -- indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change. http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/gadamer/

So, our horizons can change, and at least for Gadamer, they are not finally incommensurable. Neither are they ever completely fused. Instead, it is an ongoing process of fusion. The dictionary continues:

The notion of ‘horizon’ employed here derives from phenomenology according to which the ‘horizon’ is the larger context of meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a ‘fusion of horizons', then so it always involves the formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final completion or complete elucidation -- moreover, inasmuch as our own history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process of understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us. 

As a test case of the proof of Gadamer's point, it might be interesting to learn what readers of Lutheran Forum think of Bishop Mark Hanson's recent "Statement on the 2008 Presidential Election." In it, he writes:

Scripture is clear about what should matter to us as Christians in public life: hospitality to strangers, concern for people in poverty, peacemaking and care for creation. From these core biblical values, I appeal to President-elect Obama to establish the following priorities for his administration:

* a response to the current economic crisis with special focus on low-income people

* a robust diplomatic effort to restore U.S. credibility abroad

* a fulfillment of the promised U.S. funding share of the Millennium Development Goals

* strong support for alternative energy research to end our dependence on oil and establish a new green economy

* fair and humane immigration reform

* serious re-engagement with a peace process for Palestinians and Israelis

How well does this represent your own political perspective? What aspects of it are familiar? What alien? How can we experience a Horizontverschmelzung, a fusion of horizons?