Music and Common Ground: From Holy Texts to Human Connection

Jason Caplan, founder of the Bridge Institute, recalls an interfaith discussion that left him frustrated by religious gridlock. He was convinced that arguing scripture wasn’t bringing anyone closer. His response was radical simplicity: stop debating beliefs and start making music together. Caplan explains how music creates a frictionless form of dialogue that bypasses defensiveness, builds trust, and lays the groundwork for healthier debate later. From synagogues to summer camps to universities to workplaces, Caplan explores how connection before argument can transform how we disagree.

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. The same information presented differently can lead to completely different decisions. This framing effect demonstrated by tons of researchers. Shows. We don't respond to information itself necessarily, but to how it's packaged.

A medical procedure with a quote, 90% survival rate, seems safer than one with a 10% mortality rate, even though those numbers are really identical. In disagreements, framing determines whether the same facts lead to conflict or consensus. Framing effects manipulate every discussion. Your teenager isn't staying out too late, they're just spending time with friends.

Your partner isn't nagging. They're trying to communicate. A new policy at work isn't micromanagement. It's quality assurance. Same reality, different frames, completely different emotional responses. Whoever controls the frame can really [00:01:00] control a conversation. Political battles are framing wars. Is it a death tax or an estate tax, pro-life or anti-choice?

One person frames frequent texting as staying connected, but the other frames it as being clingy. One sees careful planning as being responsible, and the other frames it as being controlling same behaviors, opposing frames, endless conflicts. We're not disagreeing about what happened, we're disagreeing about what to call it.

Understanding framing effects can help us see through manipulation and communicate more clearly when disagreements seem intractable. Check the frames, what assumptions are built into how we're describing things. How would this look with a different name? Sometimes resolution will. Requires not changing positions, but finding frames that we all can accept.

Framing as loss of therapists say is feeling. I'm Michael Lee, director of the Civility Initiative and Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Jason Kaplan. [00:02:00] Jason is the founder and president of the Bridge Institute, and in 2004, Jason began to create and implement the Universal Language Room.

He has devoted his life to interpersonal communication and bridge building through improvisational music. Jason, tell us an argument story. 

Jason Caplan : Great. Hey, professor Mike Lee. Thanks for having me on. I'll start today by telling you I was invited to an interfaith conference that I was very excited to go to in Chicago, and that's where I really found that first that first disagreement and sense of roadblock and sense of there's no path forward here.

And in a nutshell, it was really that a lot of people got together, interfaith and talked about their different scriptural sources and said my book says this. And then someone say my book says this about that same story. I thought where are we going with this? How can we move forward?

Michael Lee : How much faith do you have in the ability of different groups of people who are fundamentally different beliefs to come together and find common ground in that [00:03:00] environment? Because I think a lot of people would say of course, we don't argue about religion. That's one of the very few things we agree not to argue about.

Religion and politics. 

Jason Caplan : Exactly. So I think without the ability to argue on religion and politics, those disagreements come out in other form. And outside of talking. So that was my question myself at that conference in Chicago. What are we gonna do with this? And I actually felt very confused and perplexed at the time.

Michael Lee : Say more about the specific nature of this particular disagreement, because obviously there's different faith traditions, different conceptions of God, different conceptions of ethics, different conceptions of traditional gender roles and you name it, there's so many different religious arguments can spiral outward from our foundational texts that it's hard to say what is one religious disagreement?

Jason Caplan : Exactly. So I'm coming from the place of an Orthodox Jewish person knowing the Torah and the Talmud and all of that. And I understand the Christian approach and the Islamic approach, and I think there was Bahai and maybe there were a couple Sikh people, but essentially at this. Problem framework wise [00:04:00] was that the Muslim person said to the evangelical person you're misreading this.

And then the evangelical person says, you don't really believe Jesus is divine. And all those different disagreements. And I was thinking, why do people of faith lead with this? Wouldn't we say we're all creative from God? The stories inform us and how do we work together? But it seemed like a lot of the conference was on what made us unique and individuals started to create all those blocks.

Michael Lee : I guess I'm interested in hearing you talk a little bit more about the nature of what brought these folks together in the first place. Because if it is an interfaith conference, one would assume that the point of the conference, at least from a faith tradition, was to use your faith. To affirm everyone's common humanity and perhaps make space for the fact that different people have different religious traditions.

But what I'm hearing you say is a more to use a word that I don't really understand the full weight of, but to use this word, a more fundamentalist reading of I have my holy text. My holy text is right, therefore, any other Holy Texas realm. 

Jason Caplan : Exactly so [00:05:00] that the level of expectation and optimism I had going there was quickly swept away and that feeling I didn't wanna ever have again, going into a spiritual mode of talk or event.

Michael Lee : How did this particular argument or arguments like this change the trajectory of your work? 

Jason Caplan : So I said that interfaith doesn't work for me, or this version of interfaith doesn't work for me, and I really don't want to hear about I don't know. I felt there were certain extreme groups that were, made us be moderate.

And since everyone said we believe in God, I was like, let's give this group a chance. And there were so many things I just felt were fundamentally disturbing to me. And so I said to myself. I wanna meet people of faith who believe in God, but I wanna talk to 'em in a radically different way. And actually I just wanna do it with music.

So that when we mentioned earlier in my bio that I came with the Universal Language Room, I had started about two years ago, but I said, I'm really gonna apply to interfaith. I'm gonna meet with people of different faith. And they're gonna say, oh, you're Jewish, so you believe in the Old Testament. And I would say, no, it's, I called the Torah.

And it would go through that whole routine. But if I just said, look, we're just gonna play music and pray [00:06:00] together through music, and then that's it. We're just gonna build that core first. It's all how you start. And I don't wanna get involved with inter-religious doctrinal discussions. Let's just be people of faith and let's convey that through music.

So that's where the ideas sparked out of that disappointment with that interfaith group, 

Michael Lee : you opened with a story of. Of a roadblocks conversation, a kind of doctrinal debate or dispute as you put it, between different faith traditions, and that's a story of, let's say, interfaith failure. You're talking about music as a place of interfaith connection, let's say a success story.

Can you tell a rival story, an answer story that shows the potential for this kind of work playing music and praying. 

Jason Caplan : Oh yeah. I was working on this idea of music and praying together, and it actually took about two to three years to really get people in place and to really develop how I was going to do it.

So fast forward about 2009 when I gathered a Bahai friend, Sikh friend, couple Muslim friends, and I said this and I told 'em the story that I've just told you [00:07:00] and I said, I've really been working on this system to work with you and just to talk with you and let's just have music back and forth. And so we did that first universal language room.

In Manhattan, I think it was called the West Side Synagogue, something like that. And my life and my light bulb went off like in a cartoon. And and I was just sitting with people saying, it seems so intuitive now. It seems so simple now that we would just play music and say, it was nice to see you. It was wonderful to see you.

God bless you. And then we played music and interact with improvisational music. So that was the success of three years project to get to that point, and it felt wonderful.

Michael Lee : And talk about music as a kind of language by which different faiths can communicate or can connect. 

Jason Caplan : I think that there is no friction and there's no trip wire.

So if I'm showing people how to improvise your music and tell me about your feelings, and let me hear it through these four notes, what can I possibly disagree with? So it invites the performer or the presenter of that melody to just present. It invites the receiver to receive without saying, oh yeah, I'm gonna say this back to them.[00:08:00] 

And it totally bypasses those mechanisms that we have so built in. And so it makes dialogue fun, exciting. It makes it a kind of universal prayer and it just opens up all these doors and our defense mechanisms drop very naturally. And and without effort. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. That's what's coming up for me in the work that I do with this podcast.

And on behalf of the civility initiative that I run. As I say that we're doing debate work as well as dialogue work. In other words, we're doing the hard work to separate. Fact from fiction, what's true and how can we make a decision about what's based on what's true, but also what are the stories that we tell ourselves about what's true and how can I honor the place that you have come in the stories that you're telling yourself about the quote unquote facts.

That's a dialogic let go of winning approach. And the first one is more of a debate approach, and both I think are necessary. This example, just to put words in your mouth, sounds very much. Like dialogue work. But in some ways it's a refusal of debate work [00:09:00] because one, you're not talking to start at least before you pray, talking at a conventional sense, you're speaking musically.

But two, there's definitely no argument. And you just talked about how there's no friction, there is none of the friction that necessitate that is the building block of debate. And so therefore there can't be disagreement whether it's destructive or constructive disagreement. But the whole model refuses the idea of.

Potentially constructive disagreement. Is that fair? 

Jason Caplan : I think step one, that's exactly the correct way to characterize step one. And I come from, again, the Orthodox Jewish community. So we are always arguing on the Talmud and we're hearing about arguments. And the Talmud is the collection of thousands of years of argument.

But the Talmud and what I'm trying to do with music always loves the opponent. So step one of the universal language room is frictionless dialogue, but we do apply it to debate. And I think when people first love dialogue, then the debate can be healthy. If you go into a debate saying, I'm gonna win, it's not much of a debate, but if you go into the debate saying, I just love exchanging [00:10:00] ideas and I've already with this other person across from me exchange music ideas, I wanna hear what you have to say about politics.

Okay? And like we do in Tom Ick discourse, we say. Explain what you're saying to me again, I think I'm missing it. We go through that step, which modern dialogue doesn't seem to happen, why your project is so important. But I would say step one, the way you characterize it, we do have step one, but step two would be bring it to the debate with that respect and joy of dialogue that you heard or experienced.

First, 

Michael Lee : I wanna make sure I'm understanding all the steps too. Are there more steps beyond one and two? 

Jason Caplan : It we've gone all kinds of places. So let's say I went to an autism camp. So the first step of the autism camp was just to play music with the autistic children. And they really connect with music.

They looked at me like I was an adult who understood them. The way that I feel about music. And and then after that, then I sat and talked with them. And so step one would be the social bonding through music with the autistic children, and then just regularly talking with them and they, and them seeing the transition, or I went to.

[00:11:00] Drug rehabilitation center, and I did this and I did this, and I talked about the power of music and then how you could apply it to getting the feelings you got from a drug without the chemical, so I'm always interested and it's a very unfinished book. What's the application of step one, 

Michael Lee : right?

Yeah. I would say more. You've brought up, I was gonna ask about the potential applications beyond. Common religious or different religious traditions in the same room, playing music and praying. So you've talked about going to a camp for autistic children, a drug rehabilitation center. What are some other possible or actual outlets for your work?

Jason Caplan : We had a really beautiful one. I was invited to University of Memphis for two grad. Student programs that had different approaches to autism. And the grad students really on those two different programs weren't seeing eye to eye when they came to help a patient together. So we brought in universal language for them to talk and discuss through music first.

Then we had breakout sessions of them saying, but our philosophical outlook to solve this is this [00:12:00] and our how can we work together for the good of the patient? And so we saw that application really well. In general, I, it started out as a religion spiritual program, but I wanted to make it universal and secular appealing.

So yeah, each day is a new challenge of where to apply it. 

Michael Lee : What is your highest hope for this kind of a work? If you could snap your fingers and make your work the most successful, what are the kinds of goals that you would set for your. 

Jason Caplan : I have thought about this in my mind, I would love to fly to Sweden or the Philippines and there'd be a universal language there, universal language room.

I visit that room before I go into any tourist place, sit with local people, get to know their rhythms, get to know their melodies, interact with them. They get to know mine. Really feel that connection of humanity first, and then go be a tourist, but I. I, I would love to be, people say I'm a global citizen, but there is no global government.

So it's really a romantic feeling. But if I, but if somebody could be a global human and really just say, I go to Alaska and Russia and Israel and I play music with all the people, and we have that [00:13:00] common language. That's my big expansive goal. 

Michael Lee : Jason Kaplan, thank you so much for being on when we disagree.

Jason Caplan : Thanks, professor Mike Lee. I really enjoyed being here. 

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.