Justin Lee - Talking Across the Divide: How to Communicate with People You Disagree with and Maybe Even Change the World

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.

Abraham Lincoln, 1861

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We are a nation divided.

Turn on the TV or hop online, and it doesnt take long to see evidence of our polarized mentalities. We disagree on race and religion, on science and social issuesbut we dont just disagree; were baffled by each others views, and we have no idea how to get through to one another. Partisan bickering has created a gridlocked government that struggles to get even widely supported things done. Important scientific research is being stalled by competing groups agendas. Culture wars are fracturing our families and tearing our communities apart.

Its like we live on different planets, my friend Ryan said to me the other day.

He was talking about a rift between him and members of his family. Theyd been close at one time, he told me. But in recent years, theyd found themselves more and more often on opposite sides of cultural battles. They were bitterly divided by national politics, by matters of faith and morality, and by shifting cultural views on a variety of issues.

Ryan wanted to be able to sit down with his family and talk through their differencesto help them understand where he was coming from and to hopefully change their attitudes on the issues that mattered most to him. But every time he tried talking to them, he just wound up frustrated. Their views didnt make any sense to him, his didnt make any sense to them, and every conversation seemed to wind up in an argument. Their communication was breaking down somewhere, and the rift between them was widening into an uncrossable chasm. Ryan had eventually fallen into the habit of swallowing his emotions and trying to make nice at family events, but it was eating away at him. He couldnt help wondering what could have happened to cause the people he loved to be so stubborn and to see the world so differently.

And Ryans far from alone. Ive spent twenty years focusing on divisive issues in our society, and in that time, Ive met thousands of people just like himpeople whose families, churches, communities, and workplaces are being torn apart by controversy and conflict, each side baffled by the other, each pointing to different facts and making different assumptions. It is, as Ryan says, almost as if we live on different planets.

Competing ideas have always been part of the American way of life. Our political system is built on contests between differing ideas, and our Constitution reflects the hard-fought compromises of founders who did not see eye to eye on everything. But those compromises wouldnt have happened without communication across lines of disagreement, and our political marketplace of ideas begins to fall apart if were hearing completely different versions of the truth from completely different sources. For this American experiment to function, we have to be able to talk to one another.

But our attempts to communicate are failing, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the current state of American politics. Since 1994, the Pew Research Center has studied Americas political polarization, and in that time, the value divide between Republicans and Democrats has only grown larger. In 2017, Pew found the largest partisan divide in the history of their researcha value gap nearly 250 percent as large as it had been.

An us-vs.-them mentality is taking over our public and private lives.

Ultimately, though, our political troubles are only a symptom of the underlying disease. An us-vs.-them mentality is taking over our public and private lives. Increasingly, we take our disagreements not to the people we disagree with but to our own echo chambersspaces where we can talk about, rather than to, the other sidewhere like-minded people echo our own beliefs right back to us. Our opponents, too, are stuck in their own echo chambers, having their beliefs reinforced by people on their side rather than being encouraged to consider what we have to say. Thats a problem, because some of our biggest challenges as human beings require working together.

My own interest in this problem began with the issues closest to me.

I grew up on a cultural battle line; I dont remember ever not being aware of the culture wars. I was raised in a conservative, evangelical Christian family, with a faith that has stayed with me my entire life. I learned from a young age that my church held certain views on a variety of controversial issues, and I quickly embraced those views as my ownincluding a staunch opposition to homosexuality. As a teenager, I tended to lecture my friends on these issues, earning me the nickname God Boy, a badge I wore with pride.

But puberty brought complications. I wasnt attracted to girls like my male friends were; I was attracted to guys. At eighteen, I finally had to admit to myself that I was gay, a realization that turned my evangelical life upside down and forced me to rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about gay people. As I struggled to make sense of all the new information, I increasingly felt trapped between two worlds. And in college, when I made some gay friends for the first time, it was easy to see how far apart these two worlds were. My gay friends didnt understand my evangelical friends and family, and my evangelical friends and family didnt understand my gay friends. It was, indeed, as if we lived on different planets.