Megan Wildhood reviews MoÌnica GuzmaÌn's I Never Thought of It That Way, a book that looks at how people can speak to each other across partisan divides. "Prioritizing listening deeply to understand the other person's values and perspectives can help lessen the risk of triggering their defensiveness or shutting the other person down... when we focus so much on the righteousness of our side, we stop thinking straight [and] lose the ability to truly consider what's different." I would be included to agree if I felt the divide were about values and perspectives, but I fear it's more about power and identity. It's more like winning a game than winning an argument. Politics - and education - today are played by finding mechanisms that tilt the playing field, not by finding reasons that convince.
The content doesn't matter; the point is to distract, weaken and disorient your opponent, not to convince them of anything, much less reach some sort of common ground. I might agree with my friend about most things, but he'll vote conservative because that's his team, and I'll vote socialist because that's mine. It's like the Flames and the Oilers; there's no convincing the other side, and there no point to it, even. We need - for the sake of our society - to understand that knowledge, learning, decision-making, and the rest are not cognitive activities, governed by reason, but rather are physical activities, governed by experience. Start here. This is where society begins.
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