Waching daily Feb 27 2018

"Move your guilty ass to Ferguson or shut your piehole,"

- Dave from Chicago.

I'd written this article about the events

in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown,

and I think Dave's response to me is part

of a larger problem in our society.

When we encounter ideas that we don't like,

we shut them down or dismiss them

instead of engaging with them.

And the question is, what do we do about it?

I'm John Inazu, and I'm the author of Confident Pluralism,

Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference.

The differences that we have don't just affect what we think

but how we think and how we see the world.

This plays out all around our lives,

red states and blue states,

Whole Foods and Chick-fil-A, Fox News and MSNBC.

Our country faces two distinct challenges right now.

The first is we're too quick to dismiss

and insult other points of view.

The second challenge, just as problematic,

is we surround ourselves with people who think just like us

and who don't actually challenge our ideas.

Imagine what my own writing would look like

if I only shared drafts with my mom,

who thinks everything I write is gold.

One of the new challenges we face today

is with social media, and it's not that the news

is more partisan or that we have more echo chambers.

We've always had those.

The challenge I think though is that the volume

of what we're hearing has just ratcheted up.

When I was growing up,

I would get the news maybe twice a day.

I'd read the morning paper, and I'd watch the evening news.

Now I'm getting news updates

every three minutes on my phone,

and that's reinforcing what I think.

That's making me angrier at the people I don't agree with,

but I'm not challenging my ideas.

So one of the things we need to do is put a pause

on the instant updates and find the spaces

where we can actually reflect.

Confident Pluralism is a framework

for engaging across difference.

Confidence doesn't mean arrogance or certainty.

It means being secure enough in your own beliefs

that you aren't afraid to engage with others

and have them challenged.

Through confidence, we can better embrace pluralism.

Pluralism doesn't mean relativism

or pretending like our differences don't matter.

It means recognizing the reality of our deep differences

and working toward common ground.

One reviewer of my book suggested

that it was doomed to immediate irrelevance.

And I don't think that's true.

I actually have some optimism that we can move forward,

and one of the reasons is that we've been here before.

We've long had deep differences in our country,

and sometimes even against great odds,

we've found a way to maintain a modest unity.

Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

So what can you and I do in our daily lives

in our interactions with other people?

Rather than demand acceptance, we can choose tolerance.

And instead of insisting on moral certainty,

we can engage others in humility.

And rather than resorting to outrage,

we can cultivate patience.

Every one of us can choose to modulate

our social media practices.

We can choose diversify our news feeds

to make sure we're hearing more than one side of a story.

We can choose to reach out to someone

who's different than us to share a meal or a conversation.

I seldom find someone who has nothing to offer me,

but actually, even the people who disagree with me the most

have some insight or some perspective

or some bit of wisdom that's going to make me

a better person, a better citizen, a better friend.

And I learn best when I'm open to listening to other people.

We're not always going to bridge ideological difference,

but we can start to bridge relational difference,

and we can start to see each other as human beings.