Institutions of understanding

Understanding among diverse social groups will spread only when people in general, the population at large, know how to listen and engage in real dialogue. The bad news is that such experience is sadly lacking; but the good news is that it is more common than ever before, and it is developing rapidly.

For centuries we have developed habits of dealing with strangers at arms' length -- making deals with them, but not trying to see things from their point of view. But over the last half-century, there have been an increasing number of organized situations that help us get inside others' minds and cultures. Now, more than ever before, most people have at least some experience of trying to stretch towards another perspective. A short list of these developments might include:

• Elementary and secondary schooling, which have moved quite a long way over the last few decades to incorporate the idea of understanding different cultures from the inside, and have encouraged dialogues across powerful boundaries of ethnicity and religion.
• Higher education, which has become (since World War II) a mass experience that brings together very different people in intense shared experiences that create lasting bonds, pulling them out of their limited local communities.
• Self-help books, which have become ubiquitous from Massachusetts to Kansas, and which have largely adopted the new mindset: rather than telling people to follow traditional rules and to act with consistency, they usually encourage people to explore different paths, to seek out new experiences, to widen their horizons in the search for true identity.
• “Anonymous” groups, which create a structured context in which all are encouraged to speak of deep personal feelings and to empathize with others from all sorts of backgrounds.
• Social media like Facebook, where people interact with far wider circles than before (research evidence does not support the fear that people withdrawing into homogeneous groups).
• Structured community dialogues, which have just begun to be a popular tool for response to tensions among groups; they have recently been used in many communities to address racial tensions in the wake of the Ferguson troubles.
• Religious ecumenicism, deliberately creating dialogues that transcend orthodoxies.
• The “sharing” of music, art, cuisine and other aspects of culture and taste – leading to infinite varieties of mixing that pull together dispersed communities.
• Even reality TV attracts viewers by letting them see directly into worlds very different from their own. 

This is just a start. The level of invention is very high: new tools and organizations are constantly emerging, seeking better ways to connect groups that have long been divided. We’re still a long way from a society in which tensions are regularly resolved by trying to understand others’ perspective; but the encouraging thing is that we’ve moved a fair ways down the path in a fairly short time.