The term “bridging divides” bothers me. Can meaningful dialogue exist between people that are deeply divided? It often feels pretty unrealistic, especially when real conditions in the world are the basis for that division. For example, why would an African-American be interested in “bridging” with a White Supremacist? How can we expect words alone to shift such deeply entrenched and systematic oppression? What’s the point of that?

We can’t, of course. But there’s also very good reason to try and learn from people in geographic, social and identity groups different from our own. Global warming, for example, gun violence, or the future of artificial intelligence, those are good reasons. None of these problems can be addressed with out a lot more people in this country and this world getting on the same page about them.

As a host interested in exploring the nature of difference, this was an obstacle for me

I recently put out a podcast, Of Two Minds, that puts two people in conversation that are deeply divided. The object is to understand the nature of their difference. Is it ideological? Cultural? Do people with opposing views want irreconcilably different worlds or do they just have different ideas about how to get there? I’d love to share a little about what I learned along the way.

It’s not easy to work against the way we’re been wired: socially, experimentally and even neurologically. A lot of our beliefs were formed out of loyalty, to win approval from our friends and family. Or even survival. We individuate as we get farther from our origins, but most of us never veer too far. Yes, we are also rational beings, but we tend to reinforce the beliefs we were given through the books we read and culture we partake in. Often our experiences in life more deeply entrench the emotional core of our belief systems.

In an attempt to challenge this on Of Two Minds, I asked my guests to listen to each other’s back-stories before putting them in conversation. They listened to stories about how the other guest felt as a child, what their parents were like, the first time they fell in love, and times in their lives they felt desperate or scared.

After hearing these intimate details, I often found my guests disarmed. Then, when I put them in conversation, I found they wanted to minimize their differences and focus on what they had in common. These were people who disagrees about whether global warming was real, whether police violence was motivated by racism and now they wanted to talk about what it was like to run in the forest as a child, be parents or cook gumbo. In most cases, they began to like each other.

As a host interested in exploring the nature of difference, this was an obstacle for me. Two people I’d brought together on the basis of their difference were now reluctant to disagree. They didn’t want to come across as rude and judgmental. They just wanted to have a nice chat.

Getting to know a person’s inner life is a little like falling in love, right? All we see at first is what we like, what we have in common, what we can empathize with. And sometimes that euphoria of connection temporarily blinds us.

These, days the legacy of that history feels all too real.

This was exasperated by the fact that most of my guests also came into the conversation with a lot of anxiety and distrust – so much, in fact, that they were sometimes reluctant to go through with the conversation at all. The anxiety, I believe, stems from the deep distrust: a distrust of politics, a distrust of one another and a distrust of journalism.

The distrust of journalists as a group is deeply troubling. On one hand I understand it, a lot of unethical and bad journalism has come out of the Internet age. On the other hand, a lot of powerful people, like our President, want the public to distrust journalists because they don’t want the horrible and unethical things they do to come back to them. They don’t want you to know the stories that aren’t being told because it’s often them that are to blame.

Powerful people in American history have successfully kept America divided along social, political, class, racial and geographic lines since its inception. In the 17th century poor whites and freed slaves were systematically pitted against each other to prevent them from joining forces against plantation owners. These, days the legacy of that history feels all too real.

We live in a huge, astoundingly diverse country. In order to have empathy for our fellow citizens, we have to spend a lot of time trying to understand what their lives are like, why they believe what they do and what makes sense in their context. Someone in San Francisco may never have the chance to meet someone from rural Louisiana or Kansas or DC in person. Yet, we think we can convince them we know what’s best for them in regards to healthcare or global warming, without understanding the context for their beliefs.

What doing these interviews really brought home for me — again and again — is that I was reminded that people navigate the world in their own context, not mine. And every context is different, sometimes in pretty significant ways.

One great thing I found was that when our guests got past their anxiety and dove in, they often came out of the conversation feeling better. Most of them enjoyed the opportunity for an honest conversation with someone with a different point of view.

There are differences that matter and differences that don’t matter. The fact that we both like strawberries, or feel compelled to sit on a bench every time we pass by one, might not be basis enough for us to fall in love, or fight for a clean planet together, but it might open the door just enough to see if that’s even possible.

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