Episode 47 - Overcoming Polarization

If you're disheartened by the deepening polarization in our world, wonder whether we can ever overcome it and where we might even begin, then this conversation is for you! Join me to explore a few practical things we can each do daily to build our individual and collective muscles for what seems like an impossibly heavy lift.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. If you've ever despaired of the polarization that exists in our world and have wondered whether there is any way of overcoming it or any way of healing the deep divides, then I hope that today's session will give you more hope. And we'll provide you with some ideas that you may try to experiment with in order to heal these deep rifts. Before I start, I did want to mention that this podcast had for a while just been available as a videocast, but it is now available as an audio podcast on all podcast platforms. So whether it's Apple podcast or Spotify or pod bean, and so on, you should be able to access it. So that's good news. It makes it easier for the listeners, you guys, to listen. And feel free to share the news with your friends and colleagues. All right, let's dive in. We humans have a funny habit of identifying ourselves and other people, usually by using labels, indicating things like our color, our race, our ethnic or national origins. In some places, folks are more focused on religious identifiers or political identifiers. Where I live, in America, definitely political polarization and political labels are probably the most egregious of all at the moment. I know for myself that I've always bristled when I find myself described in certain ways. I remember the first time somebody said to me, "Oh, you're a woman of color." And I thought, "what are they talking about?" It was so jarring. I had never thought of myself as having any particular color, let alone being a woman of color as distinct from something else. And I started to wonder why is it that I had this reaction and I realized that generally all of these labels are very superficial and very limiting and what most of us yearn for is to be seen and heard as humans and these labels tend to trivialize us. Our magnificence seems to be lost on other human beings and on ourselves when we self label. And so, I remember thinking, "Gosh, this is a real scourge and we need to find a way to get over it." The trouble with labels is that we end up forgetting our true essence. We forget that we are all created by one Creator regardless of the name which we attribute to the Creator. And we're born for the same purpose. In other words, I deeply believe that we have a common identity, whether we acknowledge it or not, and we're all traveling along the same road towards a common destination, a road on which our main concerns and goals, regardless of national origin, race, political affiliation or religious affiliation. Our main goals are growth, the development of our qualities, in other words, the development of ourselves, our self understanding, and contribution. So I think growth and contribution are the two big goals that all of us really have in life. However, the reality is that we are where we are, and if we want to build a world in which we get rid of this persistent, corrosive fragmentation and polarization, then we need to start by saying, all right, where are we? We do live in an increasingly polarized world. That is the reality. And we have to begin by accepting it. It's only once we've accepted that the fabric of our society has been rudely rent asunder and that there are deep chasms between us that are threatening both the peace and the well being of our planet, that we can decide, "Okay, if this is not serving us any longer, what steps can we make to heal, to knit together the social fabric, to heal the divisions, to narrow the chasms, and to harmonize our differences?" And this is what I'd like to discuss here with you today. Although the goal of healing and knitting together this torn social fabric can seem like an impossibly heavy lift, let's face it. The alternative is truly untenable. It will only lead to ever increasing suffering. We're already suffering, many people in the world are, a lot. And it will lead to excruciatingly slow self destruction. So our other alternative, which strikes me as a better one, is to work up to this heavy lift by starting to build some muscles. So I'd like to offer some thoughts on what these muscles may be and how we can build them seriatim as we move from muscle group to muscle group and gain the necessary strength. The first muscle is this. You and I decide that every time we go somewhere. We set the intention of identifying the people in that crowd that we don't know, who seem to be very different from us, who hold very different opinions, and people we may even think we don't particularly like, and then choose consciously to seek them out and talk to them. I was recently at an event and I heard a television anchor say that when he talks to his mentees, he advises them as journalists to make a list of three people in any gathering that they're going to that they think they may not like or who are very different from them and make a point of going and talking to them. And I thought, "Oh, a like minded spirit. How delightful. So I'm not the only one." There are others of us out there who have the same approach. And I highly recommend it. I've used it and it yields amazing results, especially as we undertake the next muscle building steps. So the second step is once we've identified and approached these folks, we engage them in a meaningful conversation. The goal being to truly learn who they are, what makes them tick and to really understand. We don't need to seek to be persuaded by them or to persuade them. It's just really an act of active listening. So the way I do it that I found surprisingly door-opening is to start by saying to people, "Look, I really don't care to know what your self appointed labels are. Because when I look at you, your identity to me does not consist of your political affiliation or your religion. or your ethnic origins. I look at you as a human being and I'm really interested in getting to know you." And these are the questions I start with. I ask them, "What are your hopes and dreams? What are your fears and anxieties?" And the best one, the one that gets people and yields actually the most fruitful results is, "What keeps you up at night," right? Because we all have things that worry us and keep us up all night. So, that was the second muscle. The third muscle is the attitude we bring to these conversations. We listen with an attitude of curiosity, of non judgment, and of humility. With the goal again of seeking to truly understand the other, even though we may never agree with them. And to listen to them as though we really care about them as another soul, as another human being created by that same Creator. Now, here comes the fourth muscle, which is actually a really key one. As we listen, we need to train ourselves to recognize and identify those areas of common interest, where interests overlap. You may have all of these opinions and interests and you'll find that there's just a tiny sliver of overlap. That's what we want to get really good at identifying, and ferreting out, and highlighting those in the course of the conversation. Once we've recognized them, really say, "Ah! Here's a nugget.!" And then highlight it. That then takes us to the fifth muscle, which is employing the skill of consultation, true consultation. We talked about this. We spent a whole session discussing what we mean by consultation. It has very specific features and steps. I invite you to go back to episode 19 of the Reimagining Our World series. I'm not going to go over it again, but to employ that skill of consultation in order to identify a path of common service. In other words, say to this person you're talking to. "Oh, wow! Look! We have this area of common interest. What can we do to act together in solidarity, standing shoulder to address this common concern, to solve this problem and so on?" And it's miraculous what happens when you do that. The first thing that happens is that just employing the skill of consultation reminds us that truth is single and indivisible. It merely has various facets. And when we look at this gem of truth, whatever the topic is that we're seeking truth about, we see things from our perspective. So I may look at the gem and see red. You may look at the gem and, from the angle you're looking at it, you may see it as blue. Another may see it as yellow. We could argue with each other and maintain that each of us is right, in which case all of us would be wrong. Because the truth is, it is all those things. Or we could enhance our collective understanding, arrive at truth and seek solutions to common problems by sharing our various perspectives. That's the first magical thing that happens. The second thing that happens is that we actually end up identifying areas of common service. And let me give you an example, actually, as I think about it. During COVID in our building-- we live in an apartment building-- a group of people recognized that the elderly had trouble getting out. They were more at risk and they needed access to food. So a few people got together and identified this as a common concern and a problem to be solved and decided that they would reach out to these elderly who were trapped in their apartments and ask them what they needed and then they would go out to the stores and get the goods and deliver them outside their doors. Now. That was a perfect example. Democrats, Republicans, black, white, brown of different religious persuasions just didn't come into it, because the goal was to focus on this area of common interest that benefited all. The truth about this approach also is that This begins the work of knitting social fabric, and it starts at the local level. It's not as spectacular as doing something at the global level, or so we think, but it's actually far more effective, because we start to knit the rent pieces of our social fabric at the local level. It's work that's done away from gazing eyes, and we're not going to see the effect of it until we get the social fabric built up all around the world in bits and pieces. And one day we're going to wake up and recognize, "Wow, it's It's done, or we're quite a ways along the path." This brings me to an analogy that I love to use, which is that of the transformation that occurs when the caterpillar cocoons itself and the butterfly starts to form within it. What happens is that these hidden groups of cells within the caterpillar called imaginal discs start to multiply rapidly, and as they multiply, each of them is correlated with a part of the butterfly that is to emerge. We don't see all of that. It's going on inside the cocoon, where there's also a tremendous process of disintegration happening, as the caterpillar basically destroys itself. And it is only when the butterfly's fully formed and the parts have come together and it's willing to emerge that it breaks out of the cocoon. And that's when we finally see what's been going on. I firmly believe that is what is happening in our world right now. On the one hand, we have all the chaos and destruction. And on the other hand, we're seeing signs of this rehabilitation of humanity at the grassroots level in localities all around the world by groups of people who are the well wishers of humanity, standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity to solve issues of local and tremendous concern and then slowly growing from that and expanding their purview. Okay, the sixth muscle, and this is honestly where the magic begins to happen. As we engage in in common service with each other, accompanying each other and standing in solidarity together, we find that we start to build bonds of friendship, trust, and love across these supposed divides. This is what is required to take us to the next step, because once this trust has been established and a feeling of safety, a feeling of, wow, I'm not being judged, people are really interested in getting to know me, they see me, they value me, and they want the best for me, and they've been working with me to help solve issues of common concern. Once that feeling of safety and trust evolves, then we can slowly branch out and start tackling the more difficult issues, the things on which we are divided. And what's fascinating about this process, having done it a few times myself, is that the things that seems so existential and so threatening, the positions that we entrenched ourselves in and didn't let go of, all of a sudden, feel like, "You know what? Maybe they're not that existential. Maybe we can work together, do a little bit of give and take and figure out a way or maybe find a completely new perspective that none of us has thought of before." And maybe that's the thing that serves all of us and that we really want, but it's only when we let go of these feelings of fear and entrenchment and polarization that we have any prayer of arriving there. Now, the other thing that happens once we build trust is that as we continue to employ this technique of consultation that we talked about in episode 19, and as we become more open and more authentic in sharing our views and our thoughts and our opinions, we start to spot the hidden assumptions driving many of these opinions. The hidden assumptions within ourselves and in others. These assumptions are there for all of us, and they're like the operating system that drives the computer. We use our computers blissfully unaware of the code that was written to drive them, right? And the code that exists, the patterns of thinking that are latent within us, that have become so automatic that we don't recognize that they're even there, they are what lead us to these assumptions upon which we then base a lot of our opinions and from which are spawned our strongly held opinions that lead to actions and behaviors. So as we uncover these hidden assumptions --which is another muscle that we need to develop to learn how to uncover these assumptions-- we can raise them to the surface and continue to consult about them. And as these hidden assumptions are reconsidered and maybe tweaked or discarded or replaced, we then can move on to finding solutions in these ever growing areas of difference. For those of you who think this may not be possible, I just want to give you an example. After the Second World War in Western Europe, there was a gentleman by the name of Jean Monnet, who came up with this amazing idea that essentially led to peace in Europe, the peace that in Western Europe we still enjoy. What he recognized was that all the countries of Europe were so decimated after the Second World War that they all needed access to coal and steel in order to rebuild, and yet there had always been this fight between, especially, the Germans and the French over access to coal reserves that were needed in order to fire the furnaces in which steel was made. So Jean Monnet thought, "Well, gosh. We're at an impasse. We need to figure out a way for all nations to get equitable access to coal and steel." So this was the problem they were trying to solve. They'd fought many wars over access to the coal, and people were worried that Germany would then start a third world war. They didn't want to give her full access to her coal reserves and allow her to build all the steel and then potentially create weapons of destruction to start a third world war. So Jean Monnet had the brilliant idea of pulling these resources --coal and steel-- in the hands of a supranational organization. Now this was the solution that was arrived at, and he managed to get on board a key group of people, and it was able to raise their consciousness and challenge their hidden assumptions that they couldn't collaborate with each other, that they would forever have to be in competition with each other, that they would forever be at war with each other, which, by the way, was the language in the literature used between Germans and the French until the Second World War: We hate each other. We drink our hatred with our mother's milk. Does it sound familiar? We hear this in other parts of the world too today, and we think that these conflicts are intractable. But they're not as we've seen in Europe. And so he was able to do that and to raise their consciousness to recognition that they were interdependent enough, and had what he called a fusion of interests, and that they needed to focus on advancing that fusion of interests. And so out of it came the European Coal and Steel Community. There are episodes on it in this series. I suggest you go back and listen to them. I describe all of this in great detail, but the point I'm trying to make here is that for those who are naysayers, we've done this before. It is possible. So let's not sell ourselves a bill of goods by saying, "Oh, this is idealistic or impossible." As somebody put it so aptly, "The idealism of today is the realism of tomorrow." We start with a vision and belief in it and conviction and work towards it. And then it becomes reality. But without a vision, we perish. Some of us may be fearful that once we arrive at a solution, it's then set in stone and oh, gosh, what if it doesn't work out? Well, we don't have to fear, because we can get into building this muscle of consulting, then acting on it, and then periodically reflecting on how well it's going so that we can make the necessary tweaks and adjustments. We may need to just throw out this approach that we came up with, or the solution, and try again, go back to the drawing board, or we can tweak it, modify it, or replace it with something else. The final comment I want to make is to share with you a story that I read in the New York Times that I found quite inspiring. And I'm trying to see what the date was. It was in September of 2023. It's called, "In an Israeli oasis, a model for peace, if messy and imperfect." What I found very exciting about this was that it essentially is about a group of 70 Arab and Jewish families, all citizens of Israel, who came together and basically asked a monastery to give them a piece of land so they could form a village called the Oasis of Peace. The idea was, this was going to be an experiment to see whether it was possible to have folks from these two backgrounds come together and actually live in peace. And long story short, it was incredibly successful. Of course, they have their challenges, but because they had built the muscles of trust and friendship over the years, they were able to negotiate, sometimes painfully, the obstacles that arose. And the most important thing that to me spoke of the success of this project is that some of the kids who grew up there and then left the village to go and make their way in the world discovered that life in the rest of the world was not as satisfying and did not yield that sense of peace and security and comfort that they had back home. And so they returned to this little oasis of peace. I find that a very uplifting, inspiring story. And I do wish that the media would pick up more on these kinds of stories and highlight them, as opposed to focusing incessantly on sensationalizing the bad news, which is, of course, what sells, gets them the ad dollars, and that's how they make their money. Not to mention that there are certain political invested interests involved. But we, as the grassroots, we, the people need to get smarter and start looking for evidence of these processes of knitting and weaving together healthy communities at the grassroots level, because one day we're going to wake up and see that, "Wow! Society is getting closer to the kind of place we wish it to be, the place that we want it to be, and to have the kind of world that we deserve to have." Alright. I see there are some comments, no questions. I'll leave it at that. Again, thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you in not too long from now. There may be another episode towards the end of February, so I'll see you then. And remember, we're now available on audio podcast as well. Take care. Bye bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.