Meghan Daum seems to have carved out a place that could bust closed doors open again if we can just hang on long enough. After her piece about the Dark Web and nuance, I commented that nuance on any topic was welcome. Many disagreed, believing that nuance was a luxury for those who weren’t on the front lines fighting for something essential. I get that argument, but still can’t (don’t want to) fathom a world where someone on the left can’t question the gun control argument or someone on the right can’t say something insightful and positive about Islam. We’ve got to start chipping away at orthodoxy and dogma to ever get back to a place of critical thought and dialogue. Peterson is a complex guy and regarding his statements about pronouns: he should win, lose, or draw on a stage of ideas that we can handle, instead of creating a new layer of cultural permafrost by entering yet another cycle of threat, controversy, closure. With Meghan, we know what she believes in, she’s clear about it, but she sees the other guy too, with the same level of nuance and ambiguity she applies to herself. We need more of that, and if we build that kind of depth and intellectual rigor into our thinking on a large scale, we may be looking at new leadership that reflects our higher selves, rather than the current reflection — and we can have fewer of those pitched battles requiring us to drop nuance and march lockstep with our team.