Crossing the divide

I write this post from Canada, savouring the last few drops of my sabbatical year and reflecting back on it. At the core of the Vu d’ici blog has been the idea of seeing the world from a new and different place. My experiences of being such a stranger have included a year spent in Berkeley California (age 13), global cooperation programs that took me to Quebec, Brazil and Bénin (in my 20s) and five years in Beirut (30s). ‘Integrating’ into these communities was magnetic, energizing, and extremely different from a typical tourist experience.

It’s a feeling of being part of a rich fabric that you can touch and learn from the inside. In Sète, the fabric included our neighbours, the parent’s committee at my son’s high school (Collège), the local Transition Town group (more about my experience with that here),  the food coop. Feeling the fabric meant figuring out the trains and buses, wrangling with cell phone companies, finding a plumber. It also meant realizing, in conversation with a charming mayoral candidate allied with the far right Rassemblement National and with an organic rice farmer in nearby Camargues, that people can be deeply committed to ecological well-being and hold deeply xenophobic or racist attitudes to newcomers.

I am fascinated by understanding why people think differently from me. I should say ‘trying to understand’ though, because as Malcolm Gladwell explains in his latest book, Talking to Strangers (I listened to the excellent audiobook version), we really don’t understand each other. In case after case ranging from Sylvia Plath’s suicide to campus rapes to the Madoff Ponzi scheme, he describes ways that people misunderstand the actions of strangers.  

The central, and very topical, story is about police brutality and the case of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman who was stopped for a minor traffic infraction in Texas, jailed after an abusive altercation with the police officer and hanged herself three days later in her cell. Gladwell is at pains to explain that the terrible and recurrent stories of police brutality are not about the racism of individual people, but rather the result of a system that incents and encourages officers to act this way. By training and instructing them to take minor traffic interactions as an excuse to pull over motorists and then by (mis)understanding of strangers (including with racist beliefs) and allowing them to abuse power.

The murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter action may mark one of Gladwell’s renowned ‘tipping points’ in public understanding of police brutality: in recent polls, 69% of Americans say that Floyd’s killing represented a broader problem in law enforcement, compared to 43% in a 2014 poll following police killings of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garnier in New York.

There’s a reinforcing feedback loop between living in bubbles of people like ourselves and polarization. Bubbles polarize, and polarization makes us mistrust or dislike ‘the other’ and stay in our bubbles. Politicization of the current pandemic in the US is just one example.

According to a 2016 Pew poll for the US, Republicans with few or no Democratic friends are twice as likely to rate Democrats coldly than Republicans with Democratic friends. Presumably the reverse is true too.  On the bright side, while polarization is increasing in the US and to a lesser degree in Canada, a 9-country study shows it decreasing in several other OECD countries. Even in the US, studies like the Perception Gap show that people are less divided than they think they are – reinforced by controversy-hungry traditional and social media. In France, coverage of the Gilets Jaunes anti-government protests set off by a proposed gas tax increase was primarily of the most virulent voices and least nuanced arguments.

When people’s identities become tied to a political label, it becomes extremely difficult to change their understanding of issues like climate change or gun control, even in the face of scientific evidence. Science communication research indicates that when ordinary members of the public acquire more scientific knowledge, they seem to become more culturally polarized, not less. People use their analytic skills to bolster evidence supporting their group’s position and to dismiss evidence that undermines it. Why? It seems that adopting a position that puts people at odds with their group’s allegiances risks breaking bonds that they depend on for emotional and material well-being. On the other hand, politically-motivated reasoning seems to be reduced by science curiosity, ‘a hunger for the unexpected, driven by the anticipated pleasure of surprise […]’

According to a Scientific American blog, ‘Afforded a choice, low-curiosity individuals opt for familiar evidence consistent with what they already believe; high-curiosity citizens, in contrast, prefer to explore novel findings, even if that information implies that their group’s position is wrong. Consuming a richer diet of information, high-curiosity citizens predictably form less one-sided and hence less polarized views.’

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/

So, finding ways to foster curiosity is one path toward depolarization. What else? I’m no expert, but it seems to me that experiences of ‘crossing the divide’ where people get to know each other instead of fearing them is critical to breaking the bubble-polarization loop. For example:

• Refugee and immigrant sponsorship and support programs by citizen groups (my family and a group of friends sponsored a  family of Syrian refugees in Montreal under a program like this)
• Mixed income neighbourhoods, including supporting multi-income housing coops
• Journalistic projects aiming to bridge conversations with people from very different contexts and viewpoints (like the BBC’s Crossing the Divide)
• Exchanges between different neighbourhoods, cities, provinces (Alberta/Quebec would be my top pick…) and countries (sabbaticals…!).
• Initiatives that make the ‘other’ and their realities more present in our daily lives like Stephanie Cook, a food service director at the Saskatchewan Health Authority, who brought medicine wheel design into her hospital’s healing garden. She did this in partnership with local First Nations communities and Elders as a response to the murder of an Indigenous man named Colton Boushie.

I know that despite a strong curiosity bias, I’m not immune to interpreting information according to my existing beliefs and that I too enjoy the comfort bubble of like-minded people. But each time I reach out across a divide, I find surprising connections and parallels. Gladwell’s conclusion in Talking to Strangers is that ‘we should approach strangers with caution and humility’ – and, I would add, with deep curiosity.