As I have been talking with people of all ages and political convictions, at the end of the conversation the question invariably gets asked: “What can we do to bridge the divide?” As one committed to teaching people how to navigate the ethics of creativity—how individuals and communities can live well together in a time of great ambiguity—the question deserves a thoughtful response. With an opening caveat that thriving in a time of creative ambiguity begins with an understanding that changing one’s mind is not the kiss of death, I’d like to offer some seemingly simple—but deceptively difficult—strategies that might help.
In addition to being willing to see and name the world around us differently, note that we can only change ourselves: we cannot change the minds, beliefs, or behaviors of anyone else. Now, as we change our reaction to what people say and do, they will have to adjust to what can be called our new step in the dance of life. Remember, we can only change ourselves. And so, four strategies can help us change our mind and thus change our lives: separate facts from cause, from value judgments, from possible solutions—and tone down the rhetoric!
Separating Facts from Cause
My aunt Patricia has a favorite game: whenever you see something, give five different reasons that item or event happened. If you see a stick in a stream, it may have fallen from a tree. A youngster may have thrown it in the water. A beaver may have dropped it as it was building its dam. The wind may have broken the branch. The stick may have been the mast on a toy sailboat and fallen off. Try it—by imagining five causes for everything you see, you’ll get skilled at the first step in bridging the ideological divide—separating facts from the cause.
The exercise of separating facts from cause requires some work. As we enter into conversation, we often have to sift through the words we hear and say to find the fact hidden in the rhetoric. Taking on the discipline of a scientist, practice trying to only see what is there. As the authors of Minds Wide Shut remind us, good judgment comes from “experience sensitively considered and reconsidered” (Morson & Schapiro, 2021, 208).
Separating Facts from Value Judgments
Going back to Aunt Patricia’s game, we often simultaneously add a value judgment to the naming of the fact. The stick in the water fell from a diseased tree. A playful youngster threw it in the brook. A careless beaver dropped it. The devastating wind broke it. An unskilled craftsman made a defective mast. Value judgments come as we label an event “good-bad,” “right-wrong,” “kind-mean,” and so on. But we can train ourselves to separate the value judgments from the facts.
A famous Chinese folk story called “A Blessing in Disguise” traces the reaction of a wise farmer to a series of seemingly catastrophic events. As his neighbors bemoan his bad luck, he says, “Just so—things happen.” Then, the event that was labelled bad with another turn of time becomes good. And so on. Responding to our life events and stories of our conversation partners with, “Just so—things happen,” helps us neutralize the emotional impact of the event. Free from our first emotional response, we can see that any event can have a varieties of value judgments, depending on the perspective of the person recounting the happening. If we can remove our emotions from the mix, we can find a place where we agree on facts—with no value judgments attached to those facts.
Separating Facts from Solutions
Once we have identified facts and separated value judgment from the occurrence, the next step we take is to determine solutions to fix the problem. The stick in the water fell from a diseased tree, so we should cut down the tree. A playful youngster threw it in the water, so we should celebrate the innocence of youth. A careless beaver dropped it, so we need to get rid of the beavers. The devastating wind broke it, so we may have to ask for funds to do a massive clean-up. An unskilled craftsman made a defective mast, clearly someone needs training.
My mother who taught ninth grade English for over thirty years often said that every policy change that affects curriculum change loses 10% of the students—it is just a matter of which students are hurt rather than benefit from the decision. As we advocate for our favorite policy change, we often forget to count the monetary and social costs. We also fail to account for human nature, which could either operate at its best or be tempted/corrupted into being its worst. And we don’t notice who will be hurt and who will be helped by the change. Policy making is very hard work. People have to be willing to compromise—harmonize—the values in tension in order to move from the edges of passionate advocacy to the center of realistic, effective action. Which leads to our last strategy.
Tone down the Rhetoric
The difficulty is that facts themselves are pretty boring. The media on all sides of the political divide make their money based on “clicks,” the number of people reading the articles. The over-the top emotional headlines have been appropriately named “clickbait,” as anxious, adrenaline-fueled readers rush to see what atrocity has been committed by their favorite villain. The practice has been taken up on our social media pages as we post and re-post memes that have a scintilla of fact and are dressed up with thinly veiled innuendos to fan the flames of extremism as we all go into our corners and prepare for righteous battle.
An alternative is to listen to each other with what has been called “generous ears.” Rather than using the differences to fuel the flames of hatred and disdain, we could see where each other is hurting, where we are afraid, where we are at a loss to proceed.
Morson and Schapiro end Minds Wide Shut with a retelling of the Chekhov short story “Enemies” (1887). Chekhov paints a story of two men whose lives intersect: a physician whose only son has just died is asked to help a man whose wife is ill unto death. As the story unfolds, we learn the wife fabricated the illness to get an opportunity to run off with her lover. Each man is now overcome with personal grief and yet neither can find any compassion for the other. Hate overcomes them. What could have been an opportunity for consolation was lost in what Chekhov calls “the egoism of the unhappy.”
Engaging in these four strategies requires both practice as well as a commitment to creating harmony and peace in our lives. Because we may have to give up the comfort of our certain ideological positions (positions often taken out of our general—and sometimes unspecified—unhappiness), the price for being righteous is very high. If we truly want to bridge the ideological divide, we have to begin with building relationships through generous listening, and separating facts from cause, value, and policy solutions. We can then learn to live in a more harmonious middle. I think the result is well worth the effort.
Engaging in these four strategies requires both practice as well as a commitment to creating harmony and peace in our lives. Because we may have to give up the comfort of our certain ideological positions (positions often taken out of our general—and sometimes unspecified—unhappiness), the price for being righteous is very high. If we truly want to bridge the ideological divide, we have to begin with building relationships through generous listening, and separating facts from cause, value, and policy solutions. We can then learn to live in a more harmonious middle. I think the result is well worth the effort.