A Discussion with Raymond Perrier, Director, Jesuit Institute of South Africa

With: Raymond Perrier Berkley Center Profile

May 21, 2011

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in May 2011 undergraduate student Conor Finnegan interviewed Raymond Perrier, director of the Jesuit Institute of South Africa. In this interview, Perrier discusses the interplay of race, religion, and education in South Africa and the institute's “Believing in Creation and Evolution” program that helps young adults synthesize religion and science.

The first question is more of a personal one. Can you describe your journey to your present position, and how you were and are inspired to do the work that you do?

I have come to this job having worked previously in an overseas development organization, the U.K. equivalent of Catholic Relief Services, where I was very involved in education, and before that, working in a refugee camp where I also was involved in education supporting both adult literacy programs and young people’s education. I’ve always had a keen interest in education. I’ve also for a number of years been very involved in Jesuit activities and Jesuit-related activities, and those to some degree have come together with this. Plus, my previous professional work was in marketing and advertisement, and a key part of my job here is about not just promoting our work, but also promoting a better image of the Jesuits and of the Church.

Could you also give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you do now?

Yes, I’m the director of the Jesuit Institute—I describe it as a think tank which is focused on the interface between faith and wider society here in South Africa, so that means we’re involved in issues to do with faith and business, faith and culture, faith and the universities, faith and politics, and faith and science. As director, I lead some of the work, but I also oversee all that we do, and I’m also the key person for promoting and marketing what we do.

How does your personal faith influence or motivate, perhaps detract from, or just otherwise affect the work that you do?

It completely frames the work that I do. I work as a Catholic for a Catholic organization, and I’ve done so now in various guises for 10 years. The first 14 years of my professional life, I was working for an entirely secular organization, a marketing consulting firm, where if my faith had any involvement—which was rare—it was usually to highlight tensions between personal values and the work I was doing. For example, did I feel comfortable working for tobacco companies? Did I feel comfortable working for companies involved with the Chinese government? Since I left all that behind in 2001, I have only worked for Catholic organizations as a Jesuit for six years and then for now two successive Catholic charities. And I’ve chosen to do that with the limitations and indeed the financial implications of that because I want to work for organizations where my faith is not only an actual part of what guides me and molds what I do, but is also an opportunity to use the confidence I have in my faith as a way of giving other people confidence in their faith.

In talking to Fr. Anthony [Egan] and Merrill [van der Walt], 64 percent of South Africans are biblical literalists. What do you think are the major reasons behind that biblical literalism? What drives that idea in so many people in this country?

My suspicion is it’s a lack of education across the board. The vast majority of people in this country have got a level of education which isn’t really much beyond primary school, although an increasing number of people graduate from high school. Even then, the level of conceptual thought that they feel comfortable with is relatively low, and that’s still only a minority of people who graduate from high school. That is then exacerbated by the fact that we have a whole hordes of Christian leaders—pastors in evangelical churches and even priests in the Catholic Church—who have either a relatively low level of education, or if they have ticked the boxes and completed diplomas or completed degrees, they’ve managed to do so without really challenging some of the things they’re given. So it’s an education model which reinforces a sense that you believe what you’re told rather than asking questions and challenging.

Are there factors that influence this poor education, which seems to be found across the country? Why is the education here so poorly done?

There’s a huge racial issue about education, so anyone nonwhite and over the age of 30 years old would have grown up in the era of Bantu education, where there was a separate and considerably poorer education for blacks and coloreds and Indians, to use the South African terminology. But I would suggest that the poor quality of education actually also affected white communities as well in that part of what made sure apartheid went unchallenged for so long was that the white community was also given an education which was about being told what to think, rather than being encouraged to think for themselves. So wherever you were, and this is often said in relation to apartheid, everyone was a victim, not just non-white people, because white people similarly grew up in a very patriarchal, a very authoritarian world, and of course a very Calvinistic world. It was deeply influenced by the Dutch Reformed Church. So people over a certain age will have grown up with that, which means that the majority of people who are religious leaders today have grown up with that kind of education, and therefore the parents of the kinds of kids who are in school today have grown up with that sort of education.

Would any one particular group, whether it be a racial group or a religious group, be more inclined to have this belief in biblical literalism?

I would have thought the likelihood to be a biblical literalist would be heavily influenced by what kind of religious background you’re from. It is very much part of the Dutch Reformed tradition, so that would be true of white South Africans and the colored South Africans who grew up in that religious tradition. It would be true certainly of a lot of evangelical churches that dominate the black communities, the Pentecostal churches and so on. But it would also probably be truer here of Catholic communities than it would be in other parts of the world, again partly because most Catholic leaders have had a relatively poor level of education so wouldn’t have the comfort of challenging biblical literalism that, say, a priest would in America or the United Kingdom.

In discussing race and a lack of access to quality education, can we call this a social justice issue?

Yes, I think we can. I think lack of deep, sophisticated, conceptual education is indeed a social injustice, a form of poverty. And it’s a form of poverty not just because it leaves people culturally impoverished, but it actually makes them politically impoverished. So I would suggest that people’s failure to challenge, say, biblical literalism would be tied with their failure to challenge some of the political mythologies that, say, the [African National Congress, ANC] benefits from. The ANC benefits from a population that is relatively passive and relatively accepting of some of the claims that it makes, evidenced by its very high turnout, the very high votes it gets in elections. I don’t think it’s unconnected to an education system that encourages people to shut up and repeat verbatim rather than to challenge.

That is related to my next question. How do you think that this belief disadvantages people in other parts of their lives, if it does disadvantage them at all?

Well, we see this a lot in employability. Employers complain all the time that the kind of people who emerge from schools, even though they passed their exams, even though they’ve got their “matric”—as it’s called—even if they’ve passed through university, they actually come into business and come into organizations without an ability to think for themselves. So they will follow a process, but they won’t recognize how they make the process more efficient; they won’t recognize times when the process is actually getting in the way of good delivery. Some would say that there is actually an element of capitalism that benefits from a system in which you have a lot of people who are good processors rather than who are likely to challenge. But of course, in an increasingly knowledge economy, that becomes a real source of poverty. There might be a parallel to draw with the way that education developed here. Originally black people had almost no education at all because the assumption was that they were all going to be miners or farmer workers, and therefore they didn’t even need to be literate. The point at which education was extended in the form of Bantu education to black communities was when it was seen that actually you needed people who could be clerks in banks and clerks in offices and had a degree of literacy, but not too much, so that they wouldn’t challenge the status quo. I think we’re still living out of that kind of model, and we haven’t yet gotten to an education stage where encouraging people to think is seen as something which is a virtue not just for the individual, but a virtue for the economy.

My last question on this part of the topic: Is it just a matter of time then, or is there something else that needs to be done then to address this issue?

I think if there is a political advantage to having a relatively supine population, then it’s not just a matter of time. I think it is, for example, clearly attested to through a variety of statistics that the level of education for black children as well as for whites has declined since the ANC came to power. And the fact that the ANC keeps trying different systems to improve this and hasn’t actually made any noticeable improvement to me betrays an underlining fear that actually they don’t want to improve the educational system. They don’t really want this to be a population full of people who are asking difficult questions.

Moving on to the program itself, can you talk a little bit about when it developed, and when did you first identify a need for a program like this?

Well, my understanding, and this may be one of our own myths that we’ve created, was that it happened because of Merrill, the head of education at [the University of the Witwatersrand, Witts], coming to us and saying that her work in getting children to come into the center was very successful and the young people really liked the exhibition and really bought into the concept of evolution, but that it was being undone by what their teachers and their parents were saying to them when they went back home. And she hoped that there was some way in which a religious organization could help her address that issue, and we were able to point out very quickly that certainly in the Catholic tradition there isn’t an inherent contradiction between creation and evolution, and indeed we would see that as part of our role as an organization interested in faith and society trying to bridge that gap.

When we talk about changing someone’s religious beliefs so that they square with science, so to speak, it is a pretty radical idea in that you’re affecting their religious beliefs, which are often so central to a person’s identity, their conception of themselves. So what is your goal here with the program, what is the best outcome?

Well, yes, I would say we are changing people’s religious beliefs, and it’s part of the tradition of catechism that there are good religious beliefs and bad religious beliefs. I wouldn’t frame that in terms of truth and non-truth. I don’t think that helps, but there are ways of understanding our relationship with God which are good for us as human beings and ways that are not good, and we see that very clearly in other areas of our work, like our spirituality work where we’re helping people to question the image of God and question perhaps a very judgmental, patriarchal, male image of God and find other images of God that are actually closer to their true experience, rather than something that is imposed on them. So I wouldn’t say that changing people’s religious beliefs is necessarily a bad thing. I also hope that this program isn’t just about changing people’s religious beliefs, but also changing their scientific beliefs, i.e., helping them to see that science doesn’t have all the answers and in fact shouldn’t claim to have all the answers. Science only has—if it has answers at all—answers to scientific questions, and it doesn’t have answers to non-scientific questions. And part of the problem with this debate is that people who don’t understand the theology and don’t understand the science think that everything is a scientific question, even when there are things that are not a scientific question.

As someone who has done the lecture before, you are teaching very young adults here, who are impressionable. Often with ideas like this, they are more difficult to get across because they are complicated, complex, bigger issues, and students may not have the proper background in education, as we talked about. It may be harder for them to understand. So what do you do, what tools do you use to get on their level and help communicate these complex ideas?

It’s a real challenge, and it’s worth pointing out that this is the only work that we do with that age of people, and it’s the first work that we’ve done with school-age children, so we do a lot of work with schools supporting teachers or specifically [religious education, RE] teachers, supporting principals. This is one of our few areas where we are dealing directly with young people. And in fact, when we start doing it, I did challenge the team about whether we had the skills to do it and whether it would be better for us instead to be training teachers to do this, rather than us delivering it ourselves. What we decided was that would take the plunge doing it ourselves so that we could actually find out what young people responded to so that we would be better able to support their teachers. So how do we do it? I think part of what makes it successful is that it’s very visual. We’re using PowerPoint, and we’re using images rather than words. Part of it is that everyone who delivers it is very good at interactivity, so we’re asking young people questions, we’re getting them to help frame the discussion and see how it develops. And then another very important part of it is that we’re positioning this at the level we think young people are able to engage with. So we’re cautious about what concepts we introduce. We look at some of the basic issues of human evolution, but we don’t go into some of the details or some of the niceties when we look at the issue of biblical truth and biblical literalism. We take it at a fairly broad-brush level. We’re not querying too much some of the underlying questions about the creation of a canon of scripture, or differences between different canons and so on. For example, we leave as unchallenged that the Bible is the Bible, even though that clearly there is some historic tension around that. What we’re questioning is how we understand the books within it, rather than questioning whether certain books should even be in it in the first place or whether the things that we now call books are indeed books in their own right, or in the case of Isaiah are actually combinations of writings that have been redacted together over the years.

What do you think the program does best? What do you see as its greatest successes?

I think the best thing it does is ask the question and point to an answer which is not a straightforward answer. So if we go into a group and at the beginning of the session, they’re really clear about what they believe and at the end of the session, they’re not clear about what they believe, I would actually regard that as a success because by and large if they’re clear about what they believe, what they believe is something that we would actually say is wrong. They’re either believing in a one-dimensional view of science or a one-dimensional view of biblical creation. And that’s why I think we have to do it with the age group we’re doing it with, which is effectively 16, 17, 18 years old. I think any younger than that and you end up confusing people, and you don’t give them a sense that ambiguity is a good thing—then they’re worse off than when they started. By this age, young people are coping with ambiguity. They’re already asking questions about their own religion, so they’re already challenging whether or not they should go to church; some of them are challenging whether or not they should believe in God, and so it’s okay in that environment to introduce for those who do believe in God a further level of ambiguity. I think complexity is a good thing. We shouldn’t encourage people to believe in simple answers to complex questions.

I think the pushback against an idea like that though is that you are only there for two hours and with grade 12 students. For example, you go in there, you give them these ideas, and they do become confused or questioning, things become ambiguous, and then a few months later they’ll graduate and they’ll be lost. In some cases the RE teachers aren’t in a position to answer questions like that, or that maybe the authority of a priest who is lecturing is greater than that of their RE teacher, and so you may lose people by introducing this ambiguity. Can you address this issue at all?

Well, if I can quote John Stuart Mill, “Better to be a philosopher and miserable than a pig and happy.” Yes, they will leave school, and they may still have these questions unresolved. A lot of them will go on to university, and Witts, the big university in town, did a survey of students recently asking them if they believe in creation or evolution. And what was really striking was that none of the people who replied said, “The question is wrong. Creation and evolution are not alternatives.” So there’s a whole group, a whole generation of people who went to university thinking they either had to believe in creation or evolution and weren’t even able to say to the questioner, “Actually, you’ve asked me the wrong question. It’s like asking me do I prefer apple juice or chocolate." So I would rather that we have young people who weren’t sure than have young people who are absolutely convinced that they believed in evolution and therefore couldn’t believe in a creator God, or be absolutely convinced in a seven-day creation God and therefore couldn’t believe in evolution, because I think both of those are faulty positions and they should be challenged.

So what do you think is the responsibility of the program? We talked about the goal of it, but going in, introducing these ideas, what is the responsibility of the program?

I think the responsibility is to cause young people to question and that by doing it, where you’ve effectively got very authoritative people, both from a scientific background in the case of the Origins [Centre] people, and from a theological background in the case of the Jesuit Institute people, both saying the same thing. Remember, they’re not competing with each other: they’re both giving the same line, which is creation and evolution are compatible, and here is a way of them coexisting. So I think as a result of that, our responsibility is to challenge them to question the fixed idea they’ve had and hopefully continue to challenge it in the classroom and challenge it with their RE teachers or their science teachers. If their RE teachers and their science teachers are lacking in the ability to answer that, then the onus is on them to do further research themselves and to be able to respond to the entirely legitimate questions of the young people.

What are the weaknesses of the program then? Is there anything you think the program could do better or improve upon?

The fundamental weakness is point of delivery. When we first did it, young people had to come to the museum, the Origins Centre—a beautiful place, well worth visiting, but of course there is an expense involved in that, both paying the entrance fee and also the cost of transport. It was obviously only accessible to schools within the Johannesburg area. By going out to schools, we have now at least covered Johannesburg and Pretoria, and overcome the issue about costs because although we’re charging, we’re charging a lot less than the net cost of coming to the museum. But we’re still only in Hauteng [Province], so our big issue is how we get this out to the rest of the country because it clearly is a national problem, not just a regional one. So one of the ways of doing that is the bus idea, which Merrill has already talked about so I won’t repeat all that. She may not have mentioned this, but for me, there’s a further value: it’s the value of taking the bus to young people around the country, but it’s also the value of taking this to churches. And if we make the bus idea work, we would do it as a double delivery: Monday through Fridays in schools, but Saturdays and Sundays in churches, because there is clearly a huge number of adults out there who should be challenged about these questions, and that’s one of the best ways of getting to them. And a bus driving around talking about evolution is not likely to get people interested. A bus which appears in the church car park, because people are very loyal to their local churches, might get them interested and get them intrigued, and then they are even more interested that this is a church organization supporting this, not just a scientific organization.

The other big drawback is actually what you’ve identified: how we follow up from that intervention, and that is why I would much rather that going forwards our efforts are focused on delivering work for teachers, both for existing teachers and for teachers in training because obviously they can ask questions at a much deeper level and then deliver the material themselves to the young people and be able to follow up with them.

Of course, another major drawback is that we have approached this from a Catholic point of view, which while we’re working with Catholic schools is kind of okay, except only 30 percent of young people in Catholic schools are themselves Catholics. So we know that in those schools, we’ve got children from evangelical backgrounds, from Muslim backgrounds, from Hindu backgrounds, from Pentecostal backgrounds, and the approach that we take to biblical interpretation is something that their pastors would definitely not be comfortable with. Whereas a lot of Catholic priests might say, “Oh, I never really thought of it that way, but now that you mentioned it, yes, that’s okay,” a lot of Protestant pastors would rail against that and would probably be quite critical of the approach we’re taking. And we’re not really equipping the young people to be able to respond to that, given the length of the program.

Along those same lines, who or what constitutes the greatest source of opposition to the program and the ideas you put out there?

I guess there are two sources of opposition. There is the opposition of silence, so the real problem is that most people aren’t asking the question. Most RE teachers aren’t trying to ask the evolution question; most science teachers aren’t trying to ask the religious question, even though the majority of science teachers statistically are likely themselves likely to be quite religious. So you end up with a situation in which the challenge is not from people resisting it, but not realizing that this is a problem and that it needs to be solved. We haven’t yet come across open hostility, people saying “I disagree with you,” but I imagine if this gets bigger, we will encounter that, and it will be particularly in certain parts of the Christian community and even potentially within the Catholic community: groups who are opposed to what we’re saying because they see it as going too far, really challenging their understanding of their faith, and of course you then get into much more complicated territory. For example, with pastors and priests who would start saying, “Well, if you challenge this bit of the Bible, then which bits of the Bible go unchallenged?” And you start getting questions about do you believe in the virgin birth and do you believe in the three wise men and so on, and people are not very comfortable with the idea that the three wise men may not actually have been three men on a camel bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh and might just have been a story retrofitted to the tale of Christ’s birth.

With that source of opposition, especially in terms of silence, how do you handle that?

I guess we handle the silence by breaking the silence. We are in a sense asking the question that other people aren’t asking; we are the story that dare not speak its name. And what I have found is that in almost every situation when I have presented, and certainly in speaking to adults about it and told them what we’re doing, their reaction is not hostile, but surprised. They say, “Oh, I never really realized, I never really thought about it that way, but now that you explain it, I can see why that’s a good way of thinking about this, and actually I wish somebody had told me this before.” So quite a lot of adults I’ve spoken to about this programs say I wish we had had this when we were in school. So they’re actually quite pleased that we’re breaching that silence.

Are there any other challenges that the program faces that you would like to discuss?

We have a challenge of taking it onto the next stage. I really want to turn this into a bigger thing about faith and science, which would look at a lot of the life issues: beginning of life, end of life questions, that would look at the relationship, the theological questions to do with things like stem cell research, to do with things like birth control and other medical issues, and also some of the other evolutionary questions—cosmology, big bang, all that kind of stuff. I hope that there would be more of an appetite for that. When we did a survey of teachers, there wasn’t as much enthusiasm for looking at other faith and science questions as I would have liked. And I wonder if that’s partly because they’re not that interested or maybe because they’re scared of some of the things it might then raise. So clearly, for example, the scientific view of homosexuality has changed dramatically in the last 30, 40 years. The Church’s theological view has barely changed at all, and I can see for some people, that is beginning to open questions that they’d rather not have opened. If we get into that, I could imagine some opposition from within the Church and indeed possibly from within the bishops' conference. They don’t mind us talking about creation/evolution. I think they might feel uncomfortable with us talking about some of the other faith and science issues.

I think what’s interesting there, though, is that you have this separate Jesuit identity that almost allows you to talk about issues like this. Can you talk a little bit about how that identity as a Jesuit organization has affected the program, and maybe what Jesuit ideals are a part of the program?

Yes, we would absolutely see ourselves as a Jesuit organization, and as being able to ask questions and answer questions that other parts of the Church either aren’t equipped to answer or don’t feel comfortable answering. I don’t think that’s the case; I think in the case of creation/evolution, it’s not that people are uncomfortable, they’re just not equipped to answer, but with some of the bigger faith and science questions, there might be areas that they don’t feel confident about going into, and it’s very much part of the tradition of the Jesuits to do that. So we invoke Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as one of the models of a Christian evolutionist in the program. Of course, it’s not coincidental that he was a Jesuit, and it’s not coincidental that as a Jesuit paleontologist, he was under suspicion from parts of the Church for a number of years and was silenced. I think his writings were banned at one stage. But that’s not atypical of what happens to Jesuits who push the envelope and usually a few decades after they’re dead, they get rehabilitated, but by that stage, they’re dead. So yes, I would see that as part of Jesuit tradition of education, and of course a Jesuit tradition that from the outset has seen secular studies not as something hostile to good religious education, but actually as something which is entirely necessary for good religious education. You can’t actually teach young people about any issue to do with the world unless you’re prepared to absorb the full understanding of the world. And that’s why in Jesuit formation, Jesuits who have been trained to be priests always do philosophy before they do theology. They have to understand the secular sciences before they can engage with the theology, the queen of sciences, as it used to be called.

And how do you think the Jesuit identity affects the community’s perception of the program, if at all?

I think for a lot of people, they don’t really know who Jesuits are, so they don’t have a strong sense. The kids certainly wouldn’t, but even the teachers in the schools probably don’t. They just think, “Well, it’s another Church group, and they’re the clever ones in the Church”—that’s probably as much of an identity as we have. And that obviously works to our advantage. A few of the more informed RE teachers might have a sense the Jesuits are a bit more adventurous intellectually than other priests or other religious groups within the Church and therefore would understand how this fits with that identity. The profile of the Jesuits in South Africa is very low indeed, so for a lot of people there just isn’t a perception. Part of the job of the Institute is to raise the profile of Jesuits, and that’s one of the reasons for me for doing this program, because it’s a very easy way of me explaining what we do, but also why this is a particularly Jesuit thing to do.

One of the teachers I spoke to said the Jesuits have a reputation as liberal, and she used the word with a negative connotation. She did not have a good experience with one of the presentations, and so she was talking about bringing in a more conservative priest to address the issue. How do you deal with a challenge like that?

That’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard that, and I can absolutely see that being a problem if we were to go into other areas of faith and science where there is more clearly some of the neuralgic issues that people in the Church get very worked up about, where there’s more clearly a conservative and liberal position. My suspicion in a case like that is she’s very uninformed about the Catholic Church’s tradition. She probably believes that there is a conservative block in the Catholic Church that believes in seven-day creationism and a liberal group that doesn’t. She’d be very hard-pressed to find any kind of Catholic tradition of belief in seven-day creationism, and even the most conservative of Catholic organizations and teachers would not espouse that.

What do you think that educators around the world could learn from the program, and what could be implemented elsewhere?

Well, what I would love to see a program like this that shows scientific groups and religious groups working along side each other to square the circle in the U.S. context, where there is a very strong pro-creation/pro-evolution polarization within society. It would be, I presume, a lot harder because you could do it within Catholic schools in the United States, but it would be a lot harder, of course, to do it in government schools because of the whole separation of church and state stuff. If what we’ve identified here, which is an unchallenged assumption that creation and evolution are incompatible, and we’re challenging that and proving that’s not the case, I think there are also unchallenged assumptions in other parts of the world. So in Britain, for example, the education would have an unchallenged assumption that evolution trumps creation and that there is no religious story once you believe in evolution, and that’s very much what we’ve seen, for example, at Marapeng. There is an evolution story, which completely ignores the fact there have been religious answers to these questions. And I would hope that there’s an opportunity in other parts of the world to question that. For example, from all of my work in Catholic schools in Britain, I’ve never seen anybody looking at the question of evolution from a believer’s point of view and challenging how we as believers are to understand evolution, or indeed how as believers we are to understand science and see science as being at the service of God, rather than something which is opposed to God.

Anything else to add?

I wonder if there is something about South Africa, as is so often the case—it’s between the First World and the Third World, and I think I said this to you very early on. We’re not a Second World country, we’re a First [World] and a Third World country combined, so if the first world has a problem with asking the creation question alongside evolution, it’s clear that large parts of the Third World have a problem looking at the evolution question because of their belief in creation, and the reason why it comes to a head therefore in this country is that you do have those two colliding much more and therefore needing to be answered. But just in the way that I would hope that faith-based schools in the developed world would want to start challenging some of the ways in which evolution is taught to show that it isn’t incompatible with creation, I would also hope that in the Third World, where creation is probably taught from a literalist point of view, that there is a way to introduce evolution in a way that makes it possible for people to believe rather than rejecting it out of hand because their belief in creationism is so strong.

Fr. Peter described this fact as an almost schizophrenia in South Africa, that you are caught in between, and in the same way, you kind of have both beliefs at the same time.

And it’s interesting. It’s not just that they are beliefs—they are deeply held beliefs. So there is a deeply held religious belief obviously in a creator God and a God who has revealed himself through the Bible, and the conclusion of that is therefore Genesis must be true, understanding true in the wrong sense, I would suggest. Coupled with that, as we have just seen at Marapeng, a very strong sense of it began in Africa: the idea that this is the cradle of humankind; this is where humankind began. And that’s not presented as a “This is where the Garden of Eden is” story, but rather “This is where evolution began.” Now, if South Africans genuinely believe that all the rest of humanity descends from people who were in South Africa, it means that they’re also internalizing a view of themselves as dating back to the earliest hominid ancestors. And clearly, those two ideas, those two self-identities—I believe in the Bible and I believe that I am the successor of early hominid ancestors—those two self-identities are not compatible, and for most people, they sit alongside each other without ever questioning them. So maybe it’s potentially more extreme here because of those two stronger elements.

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