RACHEL FLOR: Good evening. I'm Rachel Flor, Executive
Director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. On behalf of all of my library
and foundation colleagues, I'm delighted to welcome
all of you who are watching tonight's program online. Thank you so much for
joining us this evening. I would also like to
acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters of the
Kennedy Library forums-- lead sponsors Bank of America,
The Lowell Institute, and AT&T, and our media sponsors,
the Boston Globe and WBUR. We look forward to a
robust question and answer period this evening. You'll see full
instructions on screen for submitting your
questions via email, or comments on our YouTube
page during the program. We are so grateful to have
this timely opportunity to explore productive
discussions, across conflicts and divides, with our
distinguished guests this evening. And we have a fabulous
panel, so I won't delay in introducing each of them. I'm so pleased to extend
a warm virtual welcome to the library to Peter
T. Coleman, Professor of Psychology and Education
at Columbia University. Dr. Coleman directs the Morton
Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and
Conflict Resolution, is the Founding Director
of the Institute for Psychological
Science and Practice, and is Executive Director of
Columbia University's Advance Consortium on Cooperation,
Conflict, and Complexity. He is a renowned expert
on constructive conflict resolution and
sustainable peace. And his newest
book, The Way Out, How to Overcome
Toxic Polarization, will be released next month. I'm also delighted to welcome
our Archon Fung to the library virtually. Dr. Fung is the Winthrop
Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and
Self-government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores
policies, practices, and institutional designs
that deepen the quality of Democratic Governance. He focuses upon public
participation, deliberation, and transparency. He co-directs the Transparency
Policy Project and leads Democratic governance programs-- governance programs
at the Ash Center for Democratic
Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School. He has authored five books,
for edited collections, and over 50 articles appearing
in professional journals. It is also a pleasure to welcome
the Reverend Irene Monroe to the library this evening. A theologian, a syndicated
columnist and co-host of GBH's "All
Revved Up" podcast, she is also a weekly commentator
on GBH's Boston Public Radio Show. Her columns appear in 23
cities across the country and in the UK and
Canada, and she writes a weekly column
in the Boston LGBTQ newspaper, Bay Windows. She has served as a visiting
scholar in the Religion and Conflict
Transformation Program at Boston University's
School of Theology, and is the Boston voice for
Detours African-American Heritage Trail. She has received numerous
awards for her activism. I'm also so pleased to
extend a virtual welcome to Amanda Ripley. Miserably is an
investigative journalist who has spent her career
trying to make sense of complicated human
mysteries, from what happens to our
brain in a disaster to how some countries
manage to educate virtually all of their kids
to think for themselves. Her first book, The
Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster
Strikes and Why, was published in 15
countries and turned into a PBS documentary. Her next book, The
Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way was
a New York Times bestseller. She writes for The Atlantic,
Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and
the Wall Street Journal, among other publications,
and her most recent book is High Conflict, Why We Get
Trapped and How We Get Out. I'm also delighted to welcome
Deb Roy to the library virtually. Dr. Roy is Professor of Media
Arts and sciences at MIT, where he directs the MIT Center
for Constructive Communication, and is Executive Director
of the MIT Media Labs. He leads research in
applied machine learning and human machine
interaction with applications and designing systems for
learning and constructive dialogue, and for mapping and
analyzing large scale media ecosystems. Deb is also Co-founder
and Chair of Cortico, a nonprofit social
technology company that develops and operates the
Local Voices Network to surface under heard voices and bridge
divides, and was Co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs. He is the author of over 160
academic papers, including a study of the
spread of false news, that was the cover of
Science Magazine in 2018, and one of the most influential
academic publications of that year. And finally, I'm so
pleased to welcome Mo Elleithee, our moderator
for this evening's discussion. He is the Founder and
Executive Director of Georgetown
University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. Before launching the
institute in 2015, he spent two decades as one
of the top communications strategists in the
Democratic party, most recently, as
Communications Director and Chief Spokesman of the
Democratic National Committee. A veteran of four
presidential campaigns, he has also worked on numerous
other statewide and local races in every region of the country. A frequent political commentary
on television and radio, Mo was named a Fox News
Contributor in 2016. And now over to you, Mo. Thanks so much for being here. MO ELLEITHEE: Rachel, thank you
so much for the warm welcome, and thank you to the JFK
Library for putting together such an esteemed panel. We were joking in the
virtual green room beforehand about how much we
all miss being there in person, and so we're looking forward to
maybe doing this conversation again, if we don't embarrass
ourselves with this audition, getting an invitation
to come do it in person. And I also just want to thank
all the other panelists. I am humbled being here
with such big brains, people who have thought and studied
and researched this issue, and covered this
issue for so long. Look, I'm a-- I'm a reforming political hack. I spent, as I tell the students
at Georgetown all the time, I'm not there to help teach
them how to do politics because people hate
politics, and I'm one of the guys
that helped break it by doing all the things, during
my 20-year career, that people say they hate about politics. So I'm humbled to be
here with all of you, and I'm hoping to learn a lot
as we take a look at this issue. Students ask me all the time,
has it always been this bad? Or, have politics always
felt this polarized? And I say, you know,
it feels worse, but it's not like it was
always sunshine and roses. We have always been divided. We've had one
non-partisan president in the history of the
Republic, and the race to succeed him between
the Adams and Jefferson, they were calling each other
liars, thieves, scoundrels, and worse. We had beatings on the floor of
the House of Representatives. We had a Civil War, where
we went to armed conflict with ourselves. In the 1940s, we were
interning Japanese-Americans and putting them in camps. The '60s was a decade
full of tumult and riots and political assassinations. So we have had very polarized
times throughout our history. But it feels worse today. And I kind of want to get
it that a little bit today. Why? And to help set the table
just a little further, our Institute has been working
with a bipartisan group of pollsters over
the past few years to track American's attitudes
on the issue of civility in politics. How bad do people think it is? Who do they blame? How much do they
even really want it? Our last poll, we
were in the field one week before President
Biden's inauguration. He had announced the
theme of his inauguration was going to be unity,
America United, so we wanted to see what he was up
against as he took office? In the middle of our being
in the field with the poll, the insurrection took place. So it was a really fascinating
time to gauge this. We asked voters to rate
the level of polarization in America on a
scale of zero to 100, zero being no division and
100 being brink of Civil War. In the first week of January,
the mean response was 76. The average American
thought we were 3/4 of the way to Civil War. That's the highest it's
ever rated in our poll. But there's a little
bit of optimism. When we ask people to predict
one year into the future, where do they think it will be? The mean response was 65. Not great, but
certainly trending in the right direction. More than half of
Americans believe they're optimistic that
President Biden can restore a sense of
unity in the country. 56% say they believe he
will be at least somewhat successful in restoring a
sense of unity in our politics. A full nine in 10 Americans
want the president and Congress to work together to solve
our most important problems, and 63% think they will be
at least somewhat successful, including 44% of Republicans. Again, remember the time
period, early January. But as I looked at those
results, and the ensuing weeks and months,
I keep coming back to that whole question about
unity, what the president said he wanted to do is restore
a sense of American unity. And as I watch the
news since then, and all the fighting, and
his political opponents crying foul saying, you are not. You are doing anything
but restoring unity. You ask them why? What does the word "unity"
mean, whether you ask them or whether you ask people
in the White House, and you get all sorts
of different answers. So it occurs to me that's
a good place to start. I'm just going to throw this
question open to the group. Anyone can jump in. What does unity mean in
American political society? I can start calling on
you or, Irene, go ahead. IRENE MONROE: OK,
so it's interesting. I don't necessarily
use the word "unity," but this is what I think here. I think that if we're going to
use that term "unity" that we are crawling more towards
a multicultural democracy in a participatory government. So how do I see this moment? So it's very interesting because
you were asking the question-- it feels worse than certainly
the historical events that you certainly laid out. But to me-- and see
I think that's where social location and
positionality and multiple identities and all of
that plays into it. But when I look at this moment--
and I need to just say this. I'm not the most
hopeful person, but I feel hopeful because I think
we're in a third reconstruction period, the first one being
clearly after the Civil War, and we get what we call the
reconstruction Amendments, 13th, 14th, and 15th. I'm a beneficiary of what I
call the second Civil War, which is the Civil rights
movement of the '60s. We get the Civil Rights Act of
1964, the Voting Rights Act, and we can even go to
Mildred versus Loving, 1965. We're in this moment, which
I call a third reconstruction because when I look at
the panel, the mere fact that it is diverse. We are now voices
that clearly back when I look at the first
and second reconstruction, we didn't have that. So I'm optimistic in
that as we enfranchise more and more people, we're
becoming what we ideally have written on the page. So I'm hoping that a couple of-- this is how I feel
as if the pastor. I may not be able to change
the hearts of people, but the laws will
change the behavior. So as an LGBT, as
a lesbian, I can get married not only in the
People's Republic of Cambridge, where I reside, but down
in the Mississippi Delta. So I'm hoping that
as we move forward, we will pass more laws that
reflect marginalized people. MO ELLEITHEE: Irene, I got
to hang out with you more. I need more optimistic people
and hopeful people in my life. All right, anyone
else want to weigh in on what unity in
American politics means? AMANDA RIPLEY: I just want
to point out that-- oh sorry. MO ELLEITHEE: No, no. Go ahead, Amanda. AMANDA RIPLEY: If
I could go back to what the Reverend
Monroe said. In the very beginning
she said, I don't really use that word "unity." And I wonder,
could we get a show of hands for which
of the panelists used that word "unity" on
the regular, as a goal? None of us? IRENE MONROE: Yeah. MO ELLEITHEE: So why not? Why not, right? We're talking
about it every day. The White House is
talking about it. Why don't we or
why shouldn't we? AMANDA RIPLEY: Well, I'll
go and then I'll open it. I want to hear everybody. I think that's so interesting. Here are people who all look
at divides in different ways, and none of us use
the word "unity." So for me, I spent
the past four years following people who were stuck
in really, really difficult conflicts, personal, political. And one of them was
a conflict expert, named Gary Friedman, has
helped probably 2000 people through really hard conflicts
as a conflict mediator, and one of the leading
experts on conflict mediation. And he doesn't use the
word "compromise" either, in his office. So this is in labor strikes,
ugly custody battles, all kinds of human misery-- doesn't like the
word "compromise" because it feels
like a surrender. And in his experience,
if you give up the thing you hold most dear,
it will come back to haunt you. So the whole-- most of what
he spends his time doing is trying to help people
figure out what that is. So if I think about my
relationship with my husband, unity is nice, but
it's not my main goal. You know what I mean? So you think about it,
because sometimes he's wrong and sometimes I'm wrong. So unity is-- is a phase
you want to be in sometimes, but it's not the goal. So for me the goal
is good conflict. The goal is where we can
be in heated disagreement and still be curious and
have dignity and treat each other with humanity. So that's slightly
different, but maybe I'm getting hung up on
the word smithing. What do you all? MO ELLEITHEE: No, no, no, no. But I think it's important. I think what you're
talking about is important. And the title of
this conversation is Polarization, which
I wanted to start with taking Irene's
cue here, start with the hopeful
optimistic ideal, but then get into the
bigger issue, when you talk about good conflict. Peter, I want to turn
to you because you've got a book out about
toxic polarization. Not all-- to Amanda's point, not
all disagreement is bad, right? Not all conflict is bad. There's a good conflict
and there's a bad conflict. Talk a little bit about that. PETER T. COLEMAN: Can I
quickly weigh in on unity? MO ELLEITHEE: Yes, please. PETER T. COLEMAN: I have
to say, I'm pro unity. Because, I mean,
again, it depends on what we're talking about. But if we're talking about
the United States of America right now, creating unity out
of diversity is the ideal. It is what Aristotle
saw as the ideal. That we come together
as a diverse people, we negotiate our interests,
and we somehow achieve unity. So unity doesn't mean that we
collapse and give in and allow white supremacists to take over. Unity is coming
together enough that we can shape our destiny
together and move forward. And so that I
support as an ideal, and it's a really hard thing
to do under conditions of what I call toxic polarization. So to answer your
question, polarization is a natural thing that
happens in science. It's one-- you've seen magnetic
poles and filaments that are either attracted to
or repelled by these two different poles. And that's a natural
phenomenon in science. And in politics
polarization, to some degree, is necessary and healthy. It helps us to
check and balance. So that we have
certain people that believe in tradition
and stability and order, and others that champion
change and reform. And to some degree we need both. Every society needs some sense
of stability and coherence, and needs to keep
learning and changing and growing and
becoming more inclusive. So polarization is
when those things start to split off,
become autistic, and not speak to each other,
and develop a sense of-- toxicity is poison. So that's the problem today is
that we are in the context of-- to this day, and as
you said historically, the US has had other
major challenges. But this current
trajectory of polarization started in the late
'60s, I suspect. And we have evidence of
this, and bottom-up evidence of communities, and attitudes,
as well as top-down evidence, looking at what's
happening in DC. And it gets to a point
where we get sick. We start to develop stress and
anxiety and alienation from one another in our relationships,
in our families, in our communities. And it scales and our
society gets sick. And we see this on
so many dimensions. We see it, in terms of affective
polarization, loving our group and despising, feeling
contempt for the other groups. We see it in what we call,
ideological consistency, which means that Pew-- the Pew Research Center tracks
10 different issues over time. And they look at
the degree to which people have different
opinions on different issues. Well our understanding
of those issues is collapsing within tribes. Which means we're
not paying attention to really complicated
issues, we're just following our
tribe's point of view. So intellectually,
cognitively, emotionally, and probably more important
physically and structurally we're starting. You see sorting in
rural urban differences. And the Times had a
piece two weeks ago about sorting within cities. You look at urban areas. You see neighborhoods in
pockets that are red or blue, and we're clustering. So we're physically moving
away from each other. And again, when
that becomes toxic is when it starts
to make us sick, our family sick, and in
our society less capable of tackling major problems that
we have to come together on-- inequality, increasing
exponential inequality, climate change, racism,
and police violence against Black and brown bodies. These are epidemics that
we're facing as a nation, and yet we can't come together
sufficiently to address them. MO ELLEITHEE: So I'm going
to jump around a bit, looking at both some of the
root causes and challenges we face, but also try to weave
in some positive examples. This is not one of those times. Archon, let me turn to you. Because I'm very curious,
as a lifelong partisan-- and I don't think there's
anything inherently wrong with being partisan. Waking up every morning,
believing in a worldview, and fighting for
that worldview, I don't think there's anything
inherently wrong with that. But we have a two-party system,
and that two-party system has served us wellish throughout
the course of the Republic. But today, given some of the
sorting that Peter is talking about, and some of the other
structural challenges we face, can we get past
toxic polarization within our current
two-party system? ARCHON FUNG: I don't know. And it does go, I think,
to the unity issue. When President Biden and
candidate Biden said, unity, I think people were
reading what they wanted to into that word. It's a big, big word. And I guess I think one kind
of unity is really important, and another kind of
unity I don't expect. In a marriage, in a football
game, in a soccer match it is about contestation
a little bit. And people have
different perspectives and have different
goals, and that's good. And democracy is like that. It thrives because people
want different things and have different ideas
about how to move forward. But what makes a marriage work,
what makes a football game work, what makes a
soccer match work, is that there's some underlying
agreement about how we work out those differences and what the
rules of the game in the road are. If I'm in a marriage and
we like to watch movies, one way to do it
is to alternate. Like this Saturday we'll
watch something I'm more into, maybe next Saturday we'll watch
something you're more into. But once I start insisting that
every Saturday it's my movie, things start falling apart. A football game, people
are trying really hard to beat one another. But if one side thinks, oh,
face masking rule, that's a stupid rule,
I'm going to start yanking on that
guy's helmet, then things start falling apart. And part of what's
going on right now, that is very terrifying,
is disagreement about what the rules
of the game should be. And going back to Irene's
second reconstruction, I think that the fight
over who gets to vote and who gets to participate
in the United States has not been this intense since
the Civil Rights movement. And you see this in
Georgia, Florida, Texas, many, many other places. And that's a-- that's a really
terrifying threat to unity. We should be unified on the
idea that every American gets an equal voice in the
political system, at least at the ballot box. And 100% of people participating
is a little bit better than 90%, which is a little
bit better than 80%, which is a little bit better than 70%. And when we start
disagreeing about that, when I start thinking,
well, 50% is better participating than 90%
as long as my 50%, then that's going to be a problem. That's like when one side
thinks, oh, like face masking. Yeah, let's start doing that. And so I think that's the kind
of-- that disunity disagreement over what the rules
of democracy are, and what the rules of
the road that we're seeing in a lot
of places, I think that's a real, real problem. And I think it's, in your
historical span, not new. We've seen it in
different decades, but I think in the last
40 years or so, it's-- now it's kind of
peaking in a way. And then to the-- and that's related to
the two-party issue. Right now, if you look back
in the 1970s, 90% of Congress was in between the
left most Republican and the right most Democrat,
in Congress, like 80% or 90%. All of Congress is
purple, basically, if you count purple,
that's what purple is. Now it's zero. Nobody is between the
left most Republican and the right most Democrat. So the parties are
perfectly sorted. That's like an indication of
congressional polarization, and it kind of goes into
the rules of the game issue. I don't think it's just how
we're treating each other, and how we feel
about each other. We really disagree a lot
more than we did about what and where America should go,
and what good public policy is. Mo, I don't know how long you've
been involved in politics, but compared to
right now, I think the difference
between either Clinton and either Bush is minuscule
compared to the difference between-- forget about Bernie and
Trump, like Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The distance is wide. And I think you were
there, but imagine in the first or second term
of the Obama administration. You would've walked into
the West Wing and said, hey you guys, what do you think
about a universal basic income, or Medicare for all, or
how about a wealth tax? People, I think,
around that room would have snickered
at you, and then they would have-- you go
on for about 10 minutes, they would have yanked your West
Wing pass and escorted you out. Because back in those
days, polite policy debate was a much narrower range. And if the Republicans
and Democrats don't disagree about
very much, there's not that much to be
polarized about at least in the issue space. But now the issue
space is really-- some people want
to build a wall, and other people
want a wealth tax, and there's a huge, huge
difference between that. And we don't have the muscles. Unlike a lot of
societies, we don't have the muscles to deal
with that intense level of disagreement. Because basically, since 1970
until the end of the Obama era, I think the policy disagreement
was within a very, very narrow range. And now, it's
really, really wide. And I just want to-- I'll end by-- you asked
about the two-party system. I think it's really
hard for two parties to deal with this level of
disagreement because they just-- especially our
two parties-- they just keep spinning out an out
and out into a tribalism and into more intensely
polarized policy positions. And I'm just going to
show you this chart from a great book by
Lee Drutman called, The Two Party Doom Loop. And this is a figure that shows
a bunch of different countries, that are Democratic countries,
and how many parties they have, effective parties they have. And as you'll see, the US
is a way, way, way outlier in terms of just
having two parties. Almost everybody
has like 2 and 1/2. Some people have way
more parties than that. And so I do think the
state of our Republic is in a sufficiently divided
such that we should consider big, big structural reforms,
more than two parties, that would allow us to work out
our disagreements in a more-- in a more reasonable way. MO ELLEITHEE: You
know, it's interesting hearing you talk about the
differences between them. For most of my
life, and probably for a couple of
generations above me, the dominant fissure in
our political dialogue was over the size of government,
with the right believing that there should be the most
limited form of government necessary, and the
left arguing no there can be a more expanded
role for government in helping everyday people,
that left versus right paradigm. Now I've been arguing, and
you may or may not agree, but I've been arguing that
outside of the beltway, that paradigm has shifted. The left versus right paradigm
isn't what's real anymore. It's a front versus
back paradigm that most people operate on. It's between the people
at the front of the line, and the people who feel stuck
at the back of the line. And the challenge, I think, is
that almost everybody believes that they are stuck at
the back of the line, and the people at the front of
the line are holding them back. Whether you're talking about a
black voter in the inner city or a rural white voter,
they believe that the system is rigged against them. And it's become a sense of
identity for many people. And so Irene, you
talk about this a lot and you write about this a lot-- the impact. I'm curious what you think
the impact of identity and lived experience,
or historical experience for various communities, adds
to this sense of polarization? IRENE MONROE: All right. Let me-- thank you. Thank you. I want to say a
couple of things here. I totally agree we need
more than two parties. It would make our
household a little easier to live in here and stuff. I do feel that there are a
couple of things that I see it as, mm, we got to-- we got to address the
elephant in the room, which is race and class. So it's very, very
interesting because we say that race is
America's original sin, but class's is hidden. And the reason why I
say that, particularly given when you say white
rule and black urban, we tend to pit these
two groups together. And a classic example of
this was the Boston crisis. And the reason why I want to
bring that particular incident up is that you had
Southey versus Roxbury. And the truth is, is that
neither students need to go to Roxbury
High or Southey High because they both need
a leg up and a foot out of their situation. So one of the things
that we got to understand that complicates race, and why
urban blacks and rural whites, is because there's
an intentionally by the dominant white
culture to keep that group constantly feuding
with each other. But we got to talk about
race in this instance too because we're
talking about unity and that, if you pastor
church, you never get unity. You settle with the movable
middle and the gradualists. But what I've seen
here, when we see a sharp demarcation in terms of
polarization, I saw with Obama. And the interesting
thing that I've come to understand
with that is that as we see more brown and
black ascendancy, you will always
see a white lash. And you don't-- you see it
differently in this incident. So the interesting
thing is that when Obama was running we
saw the Tea Party, we saw the Birther Movement. We don't see that now. We don't see that now. So there is a level of
a comfortably about-- we may not like Biden, but
he's supposed to be there. So I think that one of
the things that we really have to do, and I say this
from a pastoral point of view, from an activist, is that yes,
we have to address racism, but we got to do it in a
multi-pronged approach. You can't heal the world
and the social ills, if you don't heal the
racism and the homophobia and the trans-phobia that
you carry in yourself because they will be-- they will
show up in these institutions. So I think it's wonderful
to say that we're going to create equity,
we're going to do this, because it's very, very
interesting-- like when I'm thinking about face
recognition, we say, well, that should be very unbiased. But you've got to think
of who's the person that's feeding that information in. So it has to be a two pronged. But I just need to say this. While we will definitely
need to talk about race, we also need to
talk about class. MO ELLEITHEE: That's
a great point. I want to move to-- because so often
these conversations seem so intractable. And based on my experience,
the worse it gets, the more local the conversation,
the more provincial the conversation, the
more heated it can be. They can oftentimes be
some of the most polarizing conversations. But there are examples of people
being able to get it done. Amanda you write,
in your new book, you tell a story about
wolves in Denmark, and how it created some
really passionate rifts within the community. But they were able to
get past those riffs. I'm wondering if
you could just give a brief overview
of what happened and what we can learn
from that experience? AMANDA RIPLEY: Yeah,
I mean, sometimes it's helpful to come at
the things sideways. So when it's your country
that's really divided, it feels really unique and
intractable and overwhelming, at least to me. But when you look at-- you take little micro
examples from other places, it's not the same, but
it can be-- it can expand our collective imagination. So I'll just tell
a very quick story and you can take it or leave it. But for 200 years no wolves
have been seen in Denmark. And then in 2012,
some bird watchers spotted a wolf trotting
along the countryside, having crossed
over from Germany. And soon a female appeared,
and then five years later, seven wolf puppies appeared,
which now qualified as a pack. And very quickly
people, as they do, started arguing
about the wolves. The farmers resented the wolves
for attacking their livestock, environmentalists
defended the wolves, didn't want anyone to harm them. And in a lot of places that
conflict was really healthy. It was a good conflict. Questions got asked. But as often happens these
days, the wolf conflict started to escalate
in some places and took on a life of its own. And it became an us versus them
conflict, and that collapse-- that complexity collapsed. Conspiracy theories
sprang up in Denmark. People said that a van had
crossed over from Germany and intentionally
released the wolves. And in France, 50
angry farmers kidnapped the head of a National
Park in the Alps, demanding that the
wolves there be killed, and just things got crazy. And then in 2018,
two naturalists were filming Denmark's
only female wolf, when a man drove by and shot
and killed the animal out of his window, which was
caught on video, which became a viral outrage inducing clip. An actual differences of
opinion about the wolves, which were real, became less
important than the conflict itself, which is where conflict
can get really unhealthy. So in this one little
town there were a couple of social
scientists who brought-- you invited everyone
to a meeting and tried going
into the conflict. So not avoiding it,
not just screaming at each other on social media,
but going into the conflict to get underneath it. Most conflicts at that level-- there's the thing we talk about
endlessly, and then the thing it's really about-- and trying to get
to what that is. So they had everybody
come together, and there was a lot of
anxiety and frustration, and people weren't sure
what they were doing there. And one of the things they
did was just get it all out. What are you worried
about with the wolves? And everybody-- there was
a broad range of opinion, even though it
have been portrayed in the media as an
urban rural conflict, there was a lot of
different opinions even within this rural
community, which was where the wolf pack was located. And then it was like, OK. And they wrote down
everybody's complaint. So one of the things I've
learned is that at least half of what people need
is to be heard. It's not enough, but it's
amazing how rarely it happens. And people do not feel like
they are heard most of the time. And there's a ton of really
cool research on this, but I'll skip it and
just keep with the story. So what they were
doing was hearing people about the wolves. And then after they
got all of that out, they asked people to imagine any
future scenario that would be better, the crazier the better. So they're trying now to widen
the lens on the conflict. And at first the ideas
were sort of small, but then they just
got really creative. People said, what if we
built a zip line that went right into
where the wolves are, and it could become
a tourist attraction and revive the local economy. And what if we have an app where
only the locals had the app, but it showed-- we put chips in all
the wolves so we could see where they were. And my personal
favorite was what if we could make the
wolves vegetarian? Problem solved. This went on and on,
and they ended up doing this for over a year,
having these meetings. It was hard. Sometimes when you hear
about these conversations it sounds very
kumbaya, and it's not. It is like an Iron Man
competition level of hard, and there have to be ground
rules to make it work, and they always started
every meeting with dinner, which is important. But the point is,
by the end of it they had they were
presenting to the community about their ideas. They brought in
national officials who use those ideas
and the wolf management plan that Denmark's working on. And it's not like the
problem got solved, but it shifted from high
conflict to good conflict. So that's one little
shoe-box diorama of a conflict that seemed
intractable and was not, at least in this place. MO ELLEITHEE: What I love about
that is everyone came together, and there was a baseline
conversation where you talked about facts and then-- where
they talked about facts and then everyone was heard. Deb, I want to bring you
into the conversation. And I think one
of the things that makes this moment more
polarized than normal, or than past periods
in American history, is this is the first
social media era. And the Wall Street Journal
ran this fantastic graphic, I'm sure many of you saw,
right before the 2016 election, that they called,
Red Feet Blue Feet, where they entered the same
keywords into a conservative's Facebook search engine and a
progressive Facebook search engine and saw what
results came up. And it was as if they
were living in two completely different universes. To Peter's point earlier about
how we're sorting ourselves, are algorithms
further sorting us? Are algorithms further
polarizing us in our discourse? DEB ROY: Thanks, Mo. Actually, this whole time I've
also been thinking about unity. So let me-- and then tie it in. MO ELLEITHEE: Yeah, please. DEB ROY: I do feel like I
just, hearing everyone's views on this, that the optimist
in me feels like there is a moment where more
diversity than ever may flourish in the coming years
and decades in this country. And with that, the
concept of unity feels like, for me personally,
the less relevant word, and this kind of growing
need for a live and let live philosophy where-- and I really appreciate Archon's
analogy to the football match and the shared rules which-- maybe when we use the word
"unity," at least for me, the connotation of unity
is something more than just we agree to the rules. There's something
about shared values. And the more you
have true diversity in these different groups that
are able to find their voice-- I think the idea that
there is deep shared values amongst the groups,
as opposed to more of a need for somewhat
decoupled decentralized live and let live approach,
where the word unity doesn't fit for me in the same way. So there's something so
important about the underlying rules of engagement and
of those come undone, then everything comes undone. So certainly unity
implies at that level. But it's kind of
abstract, and it's sort of distant from most of our
everyday lives and experiences. That's why, for me, the word
doesn't come up often in my day to day, so I just wanted to loop
back to the beginning there. So social media-- you
asked about algorithms. I think algorithms,
yes they matter. They're playing a role. I think it's complicated
what exactly the role, because the algorithms
themselves are complicated and keep shifting. But we are roughly
one human generation into the world wide web and
the social media platforms that have arisen on top, which
have such a dominant influence, I think, on how we
understand one another. One of the properties of
most, I don't think all, but most of the
social platforms, they are designed to really
just leverage the speed and scale of the internet. And there is a natural bias
towards inviting everyone to be a broadcaster, and it's
a social broadcast network or these different networks. And most of us don't
want to be broadcasters. Most of us have
learned social skills for how to express ourselves
in non-digital environments when you grow up as kids. And when those
violations are broken, you tend to retract and not
express your whole-- you don't bring your whole self. I think on top of
that, if you look at the incentives
of the platforms, fundamentally it's to keep
people on the platforms. These are ad-supported
platforms. And so if you go back
to the early days, we used to call them
social networks, and today we call
them social media. So what happened
to these platforms? The idea that this is a network
where you connect with others, maybe people you know you want
to know and you want to follow, but if those people and those
sources that you connect with don't provide enough
content to keep you engaged, the companies, the
platforms, had a challenge. They had to find more
ways to keep you engaged and keep you on the platform. And so fast forward
to today, and you find a general pattern,
which is the content that tends to keep people
engaged most predictably is the most provocative content,
the most emotional content. So that's bad news for
truth because false news tends to be more provocative
and lead to more emotion. And in the moment, you're fast
responses of what to share or what to react
to are those most emotional pieces of content. And finally just to connect
it to this idea of being very different groups,
if our primary way to understand one another is
through these platforms, which are promoting the most
extreme and really the loudest voices that are often
reactive, they're not really connected to what's happening
in everyday life, this idea, as Amanda emphasized the
importance for us to be heard, most of us are not being
heard on these platforms. That's the great paradox. If you go back and talk
to the founders of all of these platforms, and the
creator of the worldwide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
and so forth, and ask what was your
assumptions going in? You'll hear over and over,
well, as we make it easier to connect and take more
and more friction out, people become more connected. So the idea that we've
actually created, in some ways, the ultimate self-sorting
machine where we can tune in to people we want to hear
from those who we don't. And the algorithms just
pick up on those signals and reinforce this
kind of self-sorting. And when we are
exposed to others, if we hear these provocative
extreme perspectives, it can actually accelerate
this sort of othering and grow a sense of caricature. I don't think all the platforms
have these properties. It's interesting. People forget LinkedIn is a
social platform with hundreds of millions of
users, and so it's interesting to look at what it
is about certain platforms that have these properties
and how we can look at where
things are effective and think about creating
new possibilities. ARCHON FUNG: Mo, can
I jump in just a sec? MO ELLEITHEE: Please. ARCHON FUNG: A little
bit of a counterpoint. I mean, I mostly agree. I guess I'm optimistic
in the 5 to 10-year frame about social media. I think it's still
kind of early days and I'm hopeful that I'll
get to a better place. And Deb, what you say
is certainly right that most of us-- that there's
relatively few voices compared to everybody on social
media that are getting heard. But the good part about it
is, or maybe a half good part, is it's a whole lot more
voices than were getting heard in the era of mass media. So the voices that are getting
heard in the era of mass media are responsible politicians
and officials, but mostly journalists who are trained
in the same elite institutions and share the same values. And so it was, for a while,
hard to get a word in edgewise if you are the Civil
Rights movement, or you didn't like
the Vietnam War. And so without social
media, I think, yeah, the Tea Party would have had
a lot harder time getting off the ground, but so would the
movement for Black Lives, and so would MeToo. And so it does introduce,
in addition to exacerbating that toxicity, it
does get some voices that would have been iced out,
for several decades, a very narrow, fairly homogeneous sense
of what counts as good news and information. DEB ROY: Totally agree, Archon. Thanks for-- I went into
Mo's question around some of the problems
caused by algorithms, but I should have said up
front that new voices have-- and actually some of my optimism
for the kind of diversity flourishing I actually
credit the social platforms, and they continue to do that. So it's such-- it is
such a complicated mix. MO ELLEITHEE: You're right. It is complicated. And on one hand, the Arab
Spring, Black Lives Matter, major social movements
are now taking off and new voices are
being elevated. But they're also being isolated. I mean, we're going
into these pockets. We're being sorted again. And if the algorithms
are only, my feed is full of a lot of
pro Black Lives Matter, whereas my neighbor
down the street may be getting a lot
of anti, and we're just coming at it differently. And I think your point,
Deb, about the model, like they had-- the
companies have to find a way to keep people engaged. It's not limited just
in a digital era. Traditional media also has
this as it has exploded and you get more and more
cable news networks and more and more digital publications. Now as they mentioned in
my bio, I'm one of the-- I'm a Democratic
contributor at Fox News. I don't go online, I don't go on
Fox to try to win an argument. I go on Fox because I want
people to pause and say, he's not what I thought he was. He's not a caricature that
others paint him to be. And I occasionally get some
feedback to that effect. But I also get an equal amount
of feedback, particularly my Twitter feed,
from people who say, I don't know why Fox hires you? You should go to CNN or
MSNBC where you belong. And it's that last phrase,
the where you belong part, that always gets me. I don't need your perspective
polluting my mind. I don't need your perspective
cluttering my ears. You go where your voice is
welcome, and leave us here. And I have Republican
friends who go on MSNBC, and they get the same
thing over there. And Amanda you have-- you've written about
the role of journalism and what journalists can do. What do you do when
the business model rewards this polarization? But journalism is a
form of public service. How do you reconcile? Those what can journalists
do better to address this? AMANDA RIPLEY:
Yeah, I mean I think there's a huge and growing
disconnect between what the public wants from journalism
and what journalists think they should deliver to the public. So I don't think that newsroom
conventions have caught up to the reality that we don't
control the microphone anymore. I mean, we know that
rationally, but what we need to do to be of
service has changed. And one obstacle to it
evolving is the business model, which you've mentioned. The attention economy
that plagues Twitter is the same thing that plagues
the places I write for, and Fox News and other places. But I actually think almost
as big a problem and hurdle are the legacy conventions and
traditions of many newsrooms. It is very hard to give up
control in any industry. But part of what I
think we have to do-- I'm curious what you all think-- is shrink the distance
between our institutions and the people. Because we have a
crisis of distrust. It's not even about,
do I trust the media? No, no, no. It's active distrust. So we will continue to live
in alternate realities that will not intersect, until we
work on this trust problem. So part of-- that's
a hard problem. I'm very interested in finding
solutions, if you have any. But one of them, I think,
is to shrink that distance, to really listen aggressively
to our audiences. How can we be of service? What do you want to know
that you don't already know? What are you curious about? What do you wish the
other side knew about you? What do you want to know
about the other side? Those are fundamentally
different questions. And there are
companies doing this. Like, Hearken is one that
works in 15 countries, 100 newsrooms all
over the world, creating the systems that help
newsrooms listen to the public. But the only other thing
I wanted to say about that is we keep coming back to this
theme of the need for rules of engagement, and
that's something we don't have on social media. And I will say that
while it's great to have all these voices-- when I was a staff writer at
Time Magazine for 10 years, there were a bunch of stories
that we worked really hard on and didn't publish because
of the fear of lawsuits and liability. And Twitter and Facebook
are protected from that-- and YouTube. That's nonsense. That doesn't make
any sense to me. And feel free to argue with
me, if you think I'm wrong. But that fear of lawsuits
wasn't always great, but it often did prevent
us from going with a story before it was really ready,
before we had done the work to make sure we
heard from everyone and turned over every stone. And if we didn't have
that, I promise you we would have run
those stories 100%. So there has to be some
regulations and some guardrails to help. Because right now, social
media, some of these platforms, it's like cigarettes
in the 1951. We don't have any
guardrails, so it's just-- that's a fixable problem. And so that to me,
this idea of having referees, having
rules of engagement, seems really important. And it is often, with
violent conflict, how you shift from high
conflict to good conflict. So I think that's a great
theme to keep coming back to. IRENE MONROE: I want to
say something about that. MO ELLEITHEE: Yeah, please. IRENE MONROE: Social media-- and I so agree with you
Amanda that it definitely needs a rule of
engagement and guardrails. But it really, in many
ways, democratized voices. It has really point to
subjugated voices and stories that don't normally
hit the news, and particularly with
certain demographic groups. So for instance, and this
is long before social media, when I grew up, we were not
reading the New York Times and I'm from New York. We were reading
the Amsterdam News because it spoke to
our particularity. It's one of the
reasons why we got the LGBT papers that we had. But what now, I see
with main media, and particularly like I'll
say The Boston Globe, where we couldn't get a story
about a black trans or trans woman of color being killed-- and we can get it in
The Boston Globe-- and unfortunately one was
killed over this weekend-- well, you would have to wait
until one of the LGBTQ papers came out, or a Black
paper came out, that said, listen, someone
in our community, these are the things
we need to do. So social media has
really, in many ways, created what I could best
call-- and I always say this, if you listen to me
on Monday mornings. It provides a kind of
intersectional engagement and activism, as well
as news reporting, that is just not in
the hands of a few who makes the decision of what
news should be and look like. MO ELLEITHEE: Yeah, I think
that's such an important point. That social media does
give everyone that voice. But can we make the
system work better so that more people are
hearing those voices, and it's not limited
to just those who constantly click like? Mainstream media might be seen
as more legitimate if there were more diverse voices,
and as editors as reporters who were making the
story selections and not just relegating certain
things to the Amsterdam News right? I'm sorry, Deb, you were
about to say something. DEB ROY: Sorry. I forgot the point. MO ELLEITHEE: I'm sorry. ARCHON FUNG: I wanted to
chime in on Amanda's-- MO ELLEITHEE: Archon-- ARCHON FUNG: Oh, sorry. Sorry. Go ahead. MO ELLEITHEE: Peter
in real quick. He just put his hand up,
and then we'll come to you. Peter go ahead. PETER T. COLEMAN: Well,
I was just going to-- I agree with what has been said. But I think it's
important to separate the technology of
social media, which I think is a
democratization process, and has opened up all kinds
of channels for dissent, for feedback, for
activism and organization, and I think that's critical. I think we have to separate
that from the business model that Amanda and others
have talked about. I'll tell a quick story. About two years
ago I was invited to a pop-up meeting
in midtown Manhattan by organizer of a
community activist group, and it was a meeting on
polarization on the internet. And I walked in at noon one day,
and there were major players. One of the founders
of Facebook was there, an executive from
Facebook, Jigsaw, Google, they were all there. It was an interesting thing. There was about a dozen
of us, and they wrote up on the whiteboard,
what kind of dialogue should we be having on-- a
virtual dialogue-- in order to create a healthy society? And so I said, well, what
do you mean by dialogue because usually
when we say dialogue we mean debate, which is more
of a kind of competitive game? And dialogue in my world
is not about debate and winning an argument, it is
about openness and discovery and learning about
myself and the other and the issues
and the complexity inherent in all of that. And so then there was
silence in the room, and the founder of Facebook--
not him, but somebody else-- said, oh, well, if
that's dialogue then there's no place
on the internet-- there's no major platform in
the internet that allows that. The internet is all about
competition, social comparison, contention, controversy. That's the currency of the
major platforms on the internet. He said, Zoom is one space where
you can have dialogue and learn and open up. But the business model is to
tap into our lesser selves, are more competitive
tribal selves, which is low-hanging fruit. And what research is showing
us is it's addictive. Outrage is addictive in
similar ways to heroin. They see in the brain
that when you're outraged, it lights up your pleasure
centers in your brain. And these business
executives know this. They understand this. Their job is to
make these platforms as addictive as possible. Like iPhones, like when your
thing goes off on your iPhone, it's like, oh. You get a little jolt. So the business model
underlying these things is the problem because
it's been so successful that you understand how
they refuse to change it. And so even when it's
weaponized in Myanmar and South Sudan, when they
are weaponized using these technologies to actually
commit genocide on people, it's hard for them
to pull back too far. And that is out of control. There's so much money. Facebook has so much money
that they can tolerate billion lawsuits at this point. So this is a runaway
train, and that's part of the
business-- the problem with the business model. The social media is still
a very young society. We don't have the
norms and guardrails. The government has to figure out
how to move in and demand that, or the public has to
rise up and demand that. And I understand the
possible consequences of excluding voices. I think we have to be
very careful of that because the technology
allows that. But the business model
is acutely problematic. DEB ROY: And I think just to
add to that-- back to, Mo, your question about journalism
as a public service, but most of journalism is of
course a for-profit enterprise. And exactly the same analysis
applies to the media industry, including most of what
we call journalism, is embedded in this
business model. And so much of the
content flowing through the social
networks are being fed by a relatively small
number of sources that are often the media businesses. So it is a-- the same analysis runs all
the way through the system. ARCHON FUNG: Can I jump in on-- MO ELLEITHEE: Oh. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Arc. ARCHON FUNG: Just on
Amanda's point in journalism. Amanda, I think your point about
the institutions moving closer to the people they serve
is so, so important. To problematize that,
I believe that part of the polarization
that we're experiencing is a polarization
of institutions as well, with mainstream
journalism-- mainstream media and journalism, and
selective higher ed especially cleaving left, and the military. And Reverend Monroe, you're
not in this, but much of religion cleaving
to the right. And this is how people
vote, large majorities of participants in those
institutions themselves are polarized. And then took a
journalism point. There is an analogy. The last big
technological shift was the rise of radio and
television in the pre-war era. And a lot of people thought
that those forms of media were instrumental to the rise
of fascism in Germany, in Italy, in Japan. And after World War two
there was a reckoning. A lot of people in Europe and
a lot of people in the United States says, how can we make
media safe for democracy rather than the
handmaiden of fascism? And in America, people
like Henry Luce, founder of Time Magazine
and other media people, participated in a kind of
corporate social responsibility to make media safe
for democracy. They took a big hit
to the bottom line, and they evolved
norms like, well, we have to have
journalists, and we have to pay people like Amanda
enough so that it's a profession and
that costs money. And people like
Amanda should try to get both sides of the story
and to try to get to the truth. And if Amanda writes
a hit, a piece that exposes the wrongdoing of
our biggest advertiser, we know we should probably run
Amanda's story because there needs to be a separation
between the business part and the reporting part. And these are norms and rules of
the road that aren't automatic. We had to create them
self-consciously as a society because we wanted media
to inform citizens to be able to do their
job in a democracy. It was a big muscular hard lift. And what I want to know is
where are the people trying to do that same lift
for social media right now because
that's what we need? MO ELLEITHEE: I'm going to
start to weave in questions that are coming in from the
audience and co-mingle them with a few of mine as well. And this first one I
find very interesting. I can't see it, but I
understand the chat on YouTube is very lively right now,
and so that's the context. And the question it says-- asks-- the irony tonight is
fairly significant in my mind. On one side of my
screen, the panelists are discussing pathways
to unity and solutions. Meanwhile, the chat feed
exemplifies the reality of polarization at
the grassroots level. As our moderator confessed in
the beginning of the broadcast, both sides of the
political aisle have targeted this
division because it's proven an effective means
for fundraising and winning primaries. How do we change
this broken system when the very ones we
elect are, in many ways, the very catalyst of the issue? Now I want to add to that
a secondary question. As a longtime
political practitioner, I oftentimes wonder how much of
this is coming from the leaders that the questioner is
talking about versus the people themselves? And I go back to the
poll that we did. Trying to understand
how much people really want to break through this
polarization we ask them, do you want more
civility in politics? And 93% say yes, although I'm
very curious who that 7% are. But then we ask them-- question it a little
bit different. Agree or disagree with
the following statements. First one, common
ground and compromise are noble goals we want
our leaders to aspire to. 87% of voters say yes they agree
with that, that common ground and compromise are a noble goal. Very next question. Agree or disagree. I am tired of leaders who
compromise on my values. I want them to stand up
and fight the other side. It's as if they are
saying, in many cases, oh, I totally want
common ground. Just come stand where I am, and
then we'll be on common ground. That's a tough line for
an elected leader to walk. Should I compromise, should
I find common ground, or am I supposed to
fight the other side? And so I think about that in
the context of this audience members question. What's the incentive structure? Is the incentive structure
for less polarization? Is it for more polarization? When you see people like
Marjorie Taylor Greene getting rewarded by grassroots donors
to the tune of $3 million for putting out conspiracy
theories, what's-- and people who do
compromise getting punished in their
party primaries, what is the incentive structure? I'll toss this one
out to the group. PETER T. COLEMAN:
So I'll quickly-- I'll quickly respond. I think the incentive
structure for many of us has to be to take a good
look at our life right now, and take a good look at our own
levels of anxiety and stress, at the tension that we
feel in our neighborhoods, when we go out, when we watch
the news, the addictive nature of outrage right
that we get drawn into watching and
following things that maybe we don't need to. I think the toxicity
in our life, and when that scales
up the inability, how it impairs our
decision makers to be able to do good
work against really difficult problems, is what we
have to unite to fight against. I've been informally
consulting today to the Biden administration
for several months. I know that Biden was
all about healing. And what we know from the study
of post-conflict societies, where you've had
open violent war, is that you don't
go in early and say let's heal, let's reconcile. You don't use that term
because people are angry and they're ready for a fight. And I get that. I understand that. I feel the same thing. So it's premature to say, it's
time to reconcile and heal. But what people will understand
is that this is making us sick. It's making our society
sick, our community sick, and our family sick, and
it's not good for us. And we have to find a way to
turn the temperature down, and to at least tolerate
and begin to start to hear-- not the extremes. Somebody told me recently
that 80% of Twitter is-- the content of
Twitter, 80% of it comes from 2% of
the participants. So you've got these
extremes that are filling us with this vitriol. It is time for the middle,
that's exhausted and fed up, to mobilize ourselves and
take back the discourse, and take back how we
communicate to each other, and how we work with each other. And the common enemy here is
the toxicity in our lives, in our families and communities. That's what we have to
learn to fight together. ARCHON FUNG: You know
I've been trying to find-- MO ELLEITHEE: Anyone else going? ARCHON FUNG: Oh, my analogy,
one analogy, is to the Cold War. And the reason is mutually
assured destruction. I mean both sides had
lots of incentives to build more and more
warheads, but at some point, everyone dies. And so let me put a challenge
out there to the panel and to the audience. So what do you do? It's a mutual de-escalation. You can't unilaterally
disarm because then you'll get crushed by the other side. So what does that look like? Would you have taken this deal-- Mo, would you have taken
this deal in January? Is, OK, you're a Democrat. The deal is don't
impeach President Trump if the Republicans support
the major pieces of HR-1. And HR-1 is a big piece
of voting legislation that would dramatically
enable lots and lots of people to vote. So I think of that is
that's kind of my fantasy is leaders saying,
OK, we're going to try to turn the
temperature down by desolating a little bit,
little bit, little bit. And most of my friends,
who are capital-D Democrats that I've talked to, say
no way I'd take that deal. It's just a fantasy. But it's like, how do we
think of ways to ratchet down just a little bit at a time? MO ELLEITHEE: Well,
look at Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney who is-- you don't find many more
conservative members in Congress than Liz Cheney. She kind of took the
converse of that deal. She said, look we lost
and there was no fraud. And she's about to get booted. Now, you can argue
that that's a DC thing, but if you look
across the country, grassroots Republicans
are punishing Republicans who stood up. And so again, it comes
back to this question like where's the incentive? What's the incentive for more
Liz Cheney's, if they're just going to get booted out? And whatever the equivalent
is on the other side? I'm sorry, I didn't mean
to cut you off Peter. PETER T. COLEMAN:
Well, I just want to say just a quick response. So during the Cold War, a man
named Charles Osgood put forth a theory called,
GRIT theory, which is about gradual reciprocation
in tension reduction. And what he said is what happens
when you're in a Cold War and an arms race is you start
to become crazy and psychotic and you become delusional about
the other side and our side. And that's where we are. And that when you're
delusional, that's the toxicity. And what you can do
is unilaterally create a strategy to de-escalate. So it's not tinkering and
just trying to de-escalate a little bit here and there. It's saying, this is
unhealthy for us as a society. This is what we're going to do. We are going to systematically
bring things down. We invite the other
side to join us because we think it's
good for the country. But we're going to do it anyway
because it's good for us. And you systematically
bring the tension down through a variety of
different strategies. But it's been argued
and done before. It was an influential
conversation during the Cold War. It should be an influential
conversation today. MO ELLEITHEE: Yeah, Irene. IRENE MONROE: Well, I
love the strategy, Peter, but the question is
that in deescalating, who are the people benefit? Who will be left out in that
deescalation, even the folks that are on your side? I'm always concerned about that. And I think the reason why is
that during the Civil Rights Movement King wrote,
Why We Can't Wait. And so I think that we
see this fierce urgency of right now for many
marginalized groups, as well as groups on
the right because they feel for some reason
victimized and not heard. so my point is, I see
the theory about it, but how, in application way,
how might how might we do that? And we're feeling we're
carrying everybody on this boat. PETER T. COLEMAN: I'll respond. MO ELLEITHEE: Go ahead. Go ahead. PETER T. COLEMAN: So
I recently tweeted out a King's letter
from Birmingham Jail because he talks about
this so beautifully. And he talks about
creative tension and constructive tension. And what we believe
needs to happen is what we call optimal tension. When tension gets so high
that people become psychotic, you start to see what
we saw on January 6. We see these delusional
things happen. That's not good for anybody. Ultimately we need to keep the
pressure on and the tension on particularly for
racial injustice, inter-ethnic injustice,
which is pervasive, and the exclusion of groups. The pressure has to stay-- but the pressure-- Gandhi and King were
about nonviolence. They were about taking to
the streets and mobilizing. And I'm all for that. I'm out there marching. I'm with you 100%. But when it gets-- when the
escalation gets to the place where it's toxic and psychotic,
we're in dangerous territory. So we have to find
that space in America where people are mobilized,
they're committed to reform, they see that there are-- the
masses are joining in service of those that are marginalized,
but we don't get to a place where we vilify all of
them and lead to Civil War. That's why 76% of
the population thinks that we're nearing Civil War. IRENE MONROE: Can I just say
one thing, Peter, to you though? So here we have January 6. So it depends on
how you look at it. I saw it sort of what King says,
the moral arc, the universe, of the universe is long, but
it's bent towards justice. Because early that morning we
saw two historic things happen. We saw, you know, Raphael
Warnock and then Jon Ossoff. And you're talking about in
the Bible belt both of them. And that's where I see that
intersectional activism. And I was thinking, oh, my God. King would be happy. And then we see later on
that afternoon, that moment. But to me it depends
on how you grow up. Because to me it's like, oh,
if you grew up in the South you understand that. Again, when you
see brown and Black and marginalize ascendancy, you
will always have a white lash. We used to see it
in form of the Klan, but I thought we got a sense of
that even in Charlottesville. It's sort of like when we
look at Charlottesville, we were expecting the JFK-- not JFK. Sorry. Forgive me. Oh, forgive me for that-- Robert F. Kennedy
statue to be taken down, we saw the night before a white
supremacist group come out. So I mean I kind of expect that. That it'll be this
kind of movement. It'll move like this, as
opposed to a straight line. So I saw January 6,
not so much hopeful, but that justice will prevail. MO ELLEITHEE: So we've
talked about this dynamic and this tension, as it
pertains to race a bit, as it pertains to
democracy a bit. There's another crisis that
we're dealing with right now is COVID, where we are seeing
quite a bit of polarization there too. And we did just get a question
from someone in the audience, asking how can we apply
this conversation to vaccine hesitancy where there is a
heck of a lot of polarization in the way people
are talking about it? Let we throw that out there. What lessons can we learn from
some of the more successful cases or pitfalls
that we've seen, some of the less
successful ones? I know a number of you
have written about this. ARCHON FUNG: I
think you got to-- well, one thing is you've
got to keep it local. You can't just lecture
people, and you've really got to listen to what
their perspective is. I had a friend of
mine who was in-- a health official. She passed away in the UK. And she said-- she was
dealing with vaccine hesitancy and autism there. And she said, you really
got to listen to people. I mean, maybe the person
whose vaccine hesitant is a mom whose kid has
autism, and she's trying to figure out--
she feels a great deal of guilt about that,
and she's trying to figure it out and
understand it and understand at that level. Or maybe the people
who are vaccine hesitant are people in
color of communities, who pharma and the
medical industry is not treated very
well in decades past, and maybe they
have a fair amount of institutional skepticism? And so take those
things seriously and try to have a real
conversation, rather than saying, hey,
the science is clear. Why don't you listen to
me and take this shot? IRENE MONROE: You know, I
so agree with you about that because I come from
a community that was very hesitant
at the beginning, given the Tuskegee study that
is very well known today here. And so-- and I had
hesitancy, and I'm responsible for a
group of people. But my spouse was
an ER physician. I told people very simply. I said, she's my
canary in a coal mine. If she doesn't wake up dead, I
assure you I will get in line. Now, it sounds
funny, but the point is that you have people in
communities that you respect. And if they go forth,
then by example, the will. And I also think
that the role out has to be also, particularly
in urban and maybe rural areas, I grew up where I didn't
have a library or access, and so we had this
mobile van that came, and everybody came out this
day to get the book and stuff. I think we have to make
it even more accessible, even though we say
it is accessible. MO ELLEITHEE: So we're down
to maybe the last 10 minutes or so. A member of the audience
asks, how do the parties begin to talk with each other,
if one side, Republicans in large numbers, won't
even accept the legitimacy of President Biden? I'd like to extrapolate
that question a little bit. Replace Republicans
and President Biden to the last
conversation people who don't buy the science on
COVID vaccines or masks, which was incredibly polarizing. Extrapolate it to race,
when one side won't even accept the notion that there is
some level of systemic racism out there. When you have some
truths and our dialogue-- when there's hesitancy against
fact, when there's hesitancy against expertise, when there's
hesitancy against academia or any of the
institutions that we used to go to just to
get the baseline of facts that we could then
launch the debate from, how do we begin to
talk to one another? Deb, do you want
to take this one? DEB ROY: One comment
is that I think that when I think about
a lot of conversations I've had with colleagues around
this, of course, facts matter and we're very worried
about when false information conspiracy theories take over. But I think there may be too
much of an emphasis on facts and not enough on sharing
of personal experiences. And I'll go back one more time
to this point of listening, and I heard in Archon's comments
about vaccine hesitancy, that hearing, listening to
the reasons for hesitancy sometimes, as I found
over the last few months in some of the work we're doing
around understanding vaccine hesitancy-- oh, there's a
very different experience people in some of these
communities have had. The source of distrust
make total sense. Of course you're hesitant. And taking the time to hear
someone else's lived experience can legitimize a point
of view that you may not come to agree with, and that's
very different than the facts. And there are a lot of facts. There's a lot of
truth out there. Which truth should we attend to? And what happens if, in a
divided country, half of us are paying attention
to one set of trues and the other half another? You have blue facts
and you have red facts. And if there's not very much
in common between those, just the battle over facts
and reliable information may be misplaced, if we
don't put enough effort. And this is where
I'll go back to some of the challenges
I see with relying on the social media as our
primary way of understanding others. That this is not a place
you tend to go and share your lived experiences. It's not a place to listen
and learn and speak and be heard in that way. So I think creating those spaces
is such an important element of how we get out of this mess. MO ELLEITHEE: But it's hard
when every input in my life is isolating me
from people who have had diametrically opposite
lived experiences from me. Because I live in a
community surrounded by people who are like me, I
go to work surrounded by people who are like me, my
social media feed is populated by people
who are like me, I get my news from places that
reinforce what I already think. How do we break through
and help people see each other lived experience? Peter? PETER T. COLEMAN: Well, I think
that we have to change that. We have to address
that directly. But let me just say quickly that
when you have a public health crisis like we have, we have
to remember how this started-- how this started and how it was
weaponized from the beginning. So COVID was not a
public health crisis that could have
united us as a nation and mobilized us together
to fight an illness. Then you have a much
smaller percentage of the population that are
anxious for their own purpose experiences, of the medical
distrust, of the medical field, negative experiences
they've had with vaccines, that's normal and typical. But COVID was weaponized. And so the residual--
that's why we can't move towards herd immunity. We can't get to a
place where there are enough people vaccinated
that it doesn't matter. And so you can't separate
the political polarization and the politics of
COVID and the rollout, or the lack of rollout,
from the problem that we're dealing with right now. Regarding your other-- Amanda has written a tremendous
piece for journalists called, Complicating the Narratives. My book, The Way Out,
has a big section on complicating your life. And this is one of the main
findings from our research is that when things
become simplistic, overly simplified, very complicated
issues like health care and immigration, that are
immensely complicated, when they become build a wall
or don't build the wall, we're lost. We have to reintroduce
nuance and complexity into our world, which means find
three people on the other side, who think very differently from
you that you think are smart, and follow them on
Twitter, on the news hour, on wherever you want to. It doesn't mean you need to
listen to the insane fringe because that's
just crazy making. But find people that differ
from you, and listen to them. We have to actively
do this because we're physically separating
and virtually separating, so we're in these tribes now. We have to decide
to change that. ARCHON FUNG: Yeah,
I totally agree. And Mo, I think your story--
you're a great model. Going on to Fox News,
I think a key part of our civic responsibility
in this time of polarization is to put ourselves in
uncomfortable spaces. Because we are hard wired for
confirmation bias and to enter the tribe that makes
us feel comfortable and to disregard
information that doesn't confirm what
we believed before. So we have to-- I think there's a
responsibility to put ourselves in conversation with
people that disagree. And a great example
of this, people should Google PBS
and Divided We Fall. It's a one-hour show about-- a couple of friends
of mine made it-- about 12 Republicans
and 12 Democrats who are ordinary Democrats
and Republicans, and they hotbox
them for a weekend, and they make them
talk to each other. And by the end of it,
Irene, by the end of it, one of the Republicans
is like, says, hey, you know I really didn't
get the race thing before, but I really think
something like reparations, we need to explore that. Seriously. And the opening
questions are like, OK, what's a moment
that made you feel really proud to be an American? Everybody is the same. Oh, it was the Boston
Marathon, or it was 9/11 when we all came together. And then they asked, well,
what's the moment recently when you felt most
sad to be an American? And like 2/3 of the Democrats--
it was the Trump election. And you could kind of see that. But then for 2/3
of the Republicans it was Colin Kaepernick
and the football kneeling. And it's like, what? I just didn't get that. But that's the
beginning of trying to understand what somebody
else's world view is, and that's where the
conversation begins. And I think really,
it's that being willing to put yourself
in an uncomfortable space and trying to really learn. I don't expect to agree
at the end of the day. That's not the point. IRENE MONROE: But that's a
pointless position though. I need to say that. To put yourself in an
uncomfortable is privilege. So because you do that,
understanding nothing is lost to your person-hood. Now clearly, I wouldn't put
myself in a Klu Klux Klan meeting and say, let's
talk across our differences brothers and sisters. However, the problem
is this here. I can walk the
streets of Cambridge and be stopped for
walking while Black. Or Professor Henry Louis
Gates, a couple of blocks away, for just trying to get in. So I think that when we see-- and I so agree with Peter. We can't have pat answers. It has to be more
nuanced, but it also has to be contextualized. Also, given the person
who is doing this what we call cross pollination here. Now, I will send Peter
to go talk to the Klan, and the rest of you all the
talk to some of my neighbors so that they know that Thea and
I are not the clean up lady. We should clean our
house, but we not-- we're not the cleanup ladies. MO ELLEITHEE: Amanda, do you
want to weigh in on this? AMANDA RIPLEY: This is great. I mean, I totally-- I think there's a lot here. These are really hard problems. I feel like I got
some good ideas. I hope it sparks some
conversations and some thoughts or people. I'm sure it made some people
mad in chat or whatever. Luckily for us we can't
see the chat, so sorry. But I'd love to see it
later with a glass of wine. But yeah. I mean, I think one thing I
will say, I went into this-- I started right
about polarization like five years ago. And I was super skeptical, this
whole talking across divides. And I just felt like,
oh, come on now. That's going to work
for some people, but not-- you can't scale it. Come on. And I think it does
have to be done right, and it doesn't have to
be done thoughtfully, and there's a ton
of research on this. There have been 500
studies all over the world on contact theory. There's certain conditions you
have to meet to do this right. Don't do it at home without
reading that research, OK? But I will say this. I have now seen good
conflict in front of my face, and different kinds
across racial political. And it's not always
these dialogue groups. All different kinds. There are institutions and
families and neighborhoods who are doing this work-- churches, synagogues. And I have seen it in
front of my face, what this good conflict looks
like, so many times that I have to tell you,
you are missing out if you don't experience this. There is almost an
addictive quality to that. Once you experience
that sense of curiosity in profound difference and
division, it is transcendent, and you want more. And that's true
all over the world. Search for common ground
that does this work all over the world in
serious conflict zones, they said the same thing. Once you get it, you
get a taste of what that feels like to be
curious and to be surprise and to be open and to hold
to the thing you hold dear, it's just the coolest thing. There's a joy to it. And I'm not lying. I know it sounds Pollyanna,
but it is for real. So I would encourage all
of us to be as creative as we can be in finding the
spaces and places to do that really well. We need to fight
better as a country. We're stuck with each
other, you know what I mean, so we need to get smarter. DEB ROY: That's what I
have, one point here, which is what we're doing
in this conversation is so important. And Amanda, in her
book, makes it so clear to understand this difference
between good and bad conflict, I kind of equate the bad
conflict with Peter's toxicity, that recognizing
that it's the enemy, and making it
clear to all of us. And I found this can be
so powerful with our kids. I've got two young teens. Explain to them what
YouTube was doing to them, and that they were
being duped into being pulled into that toxicity. It made them mad. And they understood. And that little bit of learning
and stepping back and saying here's the systems,
and by the way, this toxicity is
bad for most of us. And there's a few people,
these conflict entrepreneurs as Amanda calls them, and the
rest of us are getting duped. And we're wallowing
in this toxicity, but there's stuff
we can do about it. I think having
these conversations and giving people
tools, I'm an optimist. There are ways to do
something about it. PETER T. COLEMAN: Can
I give one quick-- MO ELLEITHEE: So we're
going to have to give Deb-- one quick one. We're at-- we're past time. Go ahead, Peter. Yeah. PETER T. COLEMAN: It
connects to solutions, and connects to Amanda's
point of finding these groups. If you go to the Bridging
Divides Initiative at Princeton, there's a
map of the United States. And on that map,
what they've found are the 7,000 and counting
community-based groups, that are operating all over this
country, that are usually based on contact
theory, and again they do it in different ways. But if you're
looking for a place to go where they're
doing this systematically and thoughtfully,
go to that website and you'll find things
in your neighborhood that you didn't know existed. MO ELLEITHEE: I could
keep going for hours. I am loving this conversation. So we're just going to have
to do it again, at some point. Archon, Deb, Irene,
Amanda, Peter, thank you so much for sharing
your thoughts and your insights with all of us. I know I learned so much. I want to thank the JFK Library
for hosting this conversation. You all do such amazing work. You do such great programming. As someone that does
a lot of programming myself, with my
day job, it ain't easy to keep having
conversations like this, particularly in this virtual
environment that we've been in, and you guys are hitting
home runs every day. So thank you for hosting
us and picking and choosing this topic in this panel. And most importantly,
thank you to the audience for giving up part of
your evening to engage with us in this conversation. I cannot wait to look at this
lively chat later on tonight. Amanda, I'll pour a
glass of wine as well, and we'll enjoy it. Thank you all so much,
and have a great night. AMANDA RIPLEY: Good night. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
