Clifford Geertz Together With Radical Objectivity

My electrical current purpose sits nigh the anthropologists, who direct maintain posted this comment from Clifford Geertz on the departmental bulletin board. It appears nigh the cease of the "Introduction" to his 1983 collection of essays, Local Knowledge: Further Essays inwards Interpretative Anthropology. Geertz wrote:

To run across ourselves equally others run across us tin go hold out eye-opening. To run across others equally sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far to a greater extent than hard achievement of seeing ourselves with others, equally a local representative of the forms human life has locally taken, a instance with cases, a the world with worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation in addition to tolerance a sham, comes.

Geertz is writing nearly people viewing themselves inside the context of a diversity of cultures: inwards passing, he mentions "American ethnographers, Moroccan judges, Javanese metaphysicians, or Balinese dancers." But nigh what feels similar an specially divisive election day, it seems worth posing his insights equally a challenge for all of our partisan beliefs.

While I am non a fellow member of the Religious Society of Friends, I attended a college with Quaker roots in addition to married a 22nd-generation Quaker. The Quakers direct maintain a term called a "query," which refers to a question--sometimes a challenging or pointed question-- that is meant to hold out used equally a solid pose down for additional reflection. So hither is Geertz, reformulated equally queries to myself.

• What evidence produce you lot brand to run across yourself equally those from the other sides of the partisan divides run across you? 
• Do you lot direct maintain the "merest decency" to run across those with other political beliefs equally sharing a nature with you? 
• Do you lot run across yourself in addition to your political beliefs "as a local representative of the forms human life has locally taken, a instance with cases"?
• To what extent is your objectivity a affair of self-congratulation?
• To what extent is your tolerance a sham?