Let’s start with something less charged. What about a baby hippo and a century-old turtle?

In late December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India spread its shockwaves across the ocean towards Africa. Eight hours after an earthquake ruptured the ocean floor, thrusting it forcibly upwards over 130 feet and releasing two centuries of tension between the Indo-Austalian plate and the Burma microplate into the salty water, the resulting seismic wave–which had already completed its destruction in Asia–arrived on the eastern shores of Africa. A few days prior, unseasonably heavy rains had washed a family of hippos down a local river in Kenya and into the ocean. Nearby residents had attempted to impel the family back up the estuary to no avail. When the tsunami hit, focus turned towards saving friends and neighbors. The following day, miraculously, the baby hippo of the family was spotted teetering on the reef. Dr. Paula Kahumbu, general manger of Lafarge Ecosystems, describes what happened next:

Hundreds of people came to watch the efforts to rescue the hippo. It took ropes, boats, nets and cars –though the hippo was tired he was still fast and slippery. It took a brave rugby tackle to finally capture him, and the cheering of the crowd could be heard over a kilometer away.

Lafarge Eco Systems agreed to provide a home for the baby hippo and I rushed to Malindi to collect him. Tangled in fishing ropes, angry and tired, the hippo did not seem to appreciate our rescue at all. As we left for Mombasa, the crowd unanimously agreed to name him ‘Owen’ in honor of the volunteer who tackled him to the ground.

Exhausted, confused and extremely frightened, Owen immediately ran to the safety of a giant tortoise when we released him in Haller Park. Mzee, our 130 year old tortoise, just happened to be nearby and he was very surprised by Owen’s odd behavior cowering behind him as a baby hippo does to its mother. Mzee quickly came to terms with his new friend and even returned signs of affection.

Dr. Paula Kahumbu, general manager of Lafarge Ecosystems, which runs a sanctuary in Mombasa, Kenya on NPR’s All Things Considered, July 17, 2005

The two unlikely friends continued to spend their days in and around the park’s pond talking walks together or nuzzling, a fleshy barrel-shaped mammal nestling against the shell of one of the longest-living animals on earth.

Friendship against seemingly insurmountable odds. The best kind of love story. We humans love stories like this. Or do we?

The uncrossable chasm of friendship these days seems to be partisan polarization. A Pew Center Research Report from August, 2022 found growing numbers of people from each party now “describe those in the other party as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans.”

The report continues:

Perhaps the most striking change is the extent to which partisans view those in the opposing party as immoral. In 2016, about half of Republicans (47%) and slightly more than a third of Democrats (35%) said those in the other party were a lot or somewhat more immoral than other Americans. Today, 72% of Republicans regard Democrats as more immoral, and 63% of Democrats say the same about Republicans.

The pattern is similar with other negative partisan stereotypes: 72% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats say people in the opposing party are more dishonest than other Americans. Fewer than half in each party said this six years ago. Large majorities in both parties also describe those in the other party as more closed-minded than other Americans (83% of Democrats and 69% of Republicans say this), and this sentiment also has increased in recent years.

Pew Research Center, August 2022, “As Partisan
Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two Party System”

Even worse, if even worse is possible, members of both parties rated those of the opposing party as less evolved, placing them far beneath any other ‘other’ group on the “ascent of man” scale. Beyond mere disagreement, we have come to a place where we regularly dehumanize those with opposing political viewpoints (not to mention too many others.) In that landscape of delusion, where we have simultaneously layered multiple dimensions of identity atop partisan identity,

Democrat’s and Republicans’ inaccurate, overly negative stereotypes of one another are to some extent self-fulfilling, leading partisans to adopt more divisive, conflictual views then they would if they saw each other more accurately.

Robb Willer, Stanford sociologist, quoted in Thomas Edsall, “The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold”, The New York Times, May 31, 2023

Seeing more accurately and getting to know an other’s “deep story” has been the work of Arlie Hochschild, sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. As she explains:

…in 2011, I realized that, already, the country was falling apart. There were increasing divides between Democrats, Republicans, left, right, and that I didn’t understand those on the right and I was in a bubble. So I determined to get out of my bubble and come to know people that were as far-right as Berkeley, California was left, and to try and climb what I called an “empathy wall” to permit myself curiosity about the experiences and viewpoints of people that I knew I would have differences with.

Arlie Hochschild, in On Being interview, April 18, 2018

Hochschild came up with an idea she calls “the deep story,” the “narrative as felt.” A deep story is “what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you. You take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It’s what feels true.”

In our long-standing elevation of the rational over the emotional, we have forgotten that the two are inextricably intertwined. We like to believe we are too rational to react based on our emotions, that we are free of emotional bias in our outlook and decision-making. And yet…let’s imagine you have tickets for an NBA final basketball game. A snowstorm hits the day of the game making it almost impossible, and certainly risky, to attempt to go cheer on your favorite team. The outcome of your decision here will be made based on a logical weighing of potential risk versus enjoyment and exceptional nature of the event, correct? Well, as it turns out, no. A person is more likely to go to the game if she paid for the tickets than if she received them as a gift. (Arkes & Blumer, “The Psychology of Sunk Cost”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1985) And it isn’t just a one-way emotions-influence-decisions street. We also conveniently ignore that our beliefs and our deep stories (of which we may not even be aware) are products of our experiences. So, Hochschild got curious, took off her alarm system, and went to Louisiana with no agenda to change people’s mind or their politics or to provide them with the ‘right’ facts, and for five years, she really got to know people who she may have considered the other. By keeping in mind the dignity of all people, she listened carefully for their deep stories, and it “enlarged me as a human being.” It enabled her “to imagine myself with a different heart.”

I was talking to a family member the other day who mentioned the school politics of the parents of a child in my son’s class. “Knowing how ‘out there’ they are, how they publicly shared these views about schools and everything…I would not want to go into their kitchen and sit down and have tea with them anymore if they invited me in.” “But that’s the whole problem,” I retorted quietly. “That’s the whole problem in our country right now.”

We can’t even sit down with our neighbors, it seems. The thing is those who are able to climb the empathy wall and take off their alarm systems and stop demanding to be ‘right,’ are “less likely to have extreme attitudes and develop stereotypes of the other side.” This, according to Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute (quoted in a Washington Post article), who conducted a study of friendship in America.

So, can a donkey be friends with an elephant? It does happen. By way of example, Elizabeth Pipko, a twenty-something Republican-leaning white woman who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign spoke to the Washington Post about how she has maintained friendships across this divide:

[Elizabeth] estimates that most of her friends lean to the left. While she’s lost longtime friends over a mismatch in politics, she’s maintained those relationships where she and her pals can understand where the other person is coming from. When discussing the Black Lives Matter movement with a Black male friend last year, Pipko remembers her friend telling her: “The only thing I want from you is just to listen.” They sat and talked for hours, Pipko says, and he looked at her as a friend, not as a Republican. “It was nice when he spoke to me as Elizabeth, not as whoever might happen to lean right and disagree with me.”

Bonos, Lisa. “Republicans Have More Friends across the Political Divide than Democrats, Study Finds.” Washington Post, 3 July 2021, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/03/how-politics-divides-friends/.

I find writing this entry difficult. Not because of the required empathy, nor because I too disagree with the political positions of those across the aisle from my side. Rather, my frustration lies with the seeming simplicity of it all, that all we really need from people is to withhold judgement and practice authentic listening …but really it is much more complex than that. I had a friend when I worked at a local college whose office I frequented with daily visits that, depending on my workload, could last up to an hour at a time. We talked about everything from parenting to art to the state of the world. During one such wide-ranging conversation, it bubbled to the surface that she had voted for Trump and felt he had done a really good job righting the country on its path. I remember being caught off-guard. Most people who work at institutions of higher education are, unfortunately, left-leaning. There was a brief moment where I felt some concern over our friendship, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. But then I remembered how she would wander the halls in the late afternoon delivering freshly sliced mango to me and others, how we spent hours pouring over her gorgeous photographs (photography was a serious hobby for her), how she would drive me in her car to lunchtime yoga if it was raining, how she got down on the floor and embraced my 1 year old son like family when he visited me at work, and how tender and voluminous her state of listening was. I knew she had grown up in China and I felt there was much I did not understand about the experiences that had shaped her thinking.

All of which is to say, yes, it is far more complex to overcome this divide than we give credit to because it is not about the facts. It is about a story that we construct based on our own experiences, learning, and environment, and then co-create with others in a shared narrative. It is about a mapping of the interior of our selves with an external world and looking for overlaps where we can make meaning out of chaos. It is about narrating our emotional lives into something that feels like a belief state. As Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang recently explained it on The Huberman Lab podcast: “what we are really learning across the sciences right is how incredibly social and interdependent our species is. Our biology is inherently a social one. We are directly dependent on other people for the formulation of our sense of self, and we interact with one another and construct and co-construct a sense of self and a sense of meaning via those cultural spaces and [it is] those nuanced ways of accommodating each other mentally and physically that lead to a feel of us.” We map external reality to our feelings, creating our stories, the stories whose threads guide us through the world, and unless we begin to uncover those stories about each other, we truly will be lost in an othering, dehumanizing feedback loop. As a white woman, am I aware that 3/5 of young black Americans feel they are under attack “a lot” in this country? And what stories develop out of those feelings? How is that feeling mapped onto the world to make meaning of things? How does it shape their encounters with institutions, social structures, or others? As many elites denigrate those of other social classes onto which political leanings have now been lain, am I aware that many in the blue-collar class are, as Hochschild explains: “furious at it. ‘Look, we’re the daily workers. We are climbing the telephone pole to repair your telephone wire. We’re paving your roads. Who are you to put that down?’ There’s a lot of humble pie to eat here.” And if we are curious about their fury we could learn that anger, as it turns out, seems to fuel a sense that others are the problem:

[A]nger scores high on the dimensions of certainty, control, and others’ responsibility and low on pleasantness. These characteristics suggest that angry people will view negative events as predictably caused by, and under the control of, other individuals. 

Lerner, Jennifer S., et al. “Emotion and Decision Making.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 66, no. 1, 3 Jan. 2015, pp. 799–823, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043.

Thereby, the polarization builds higher and higher walls.

Some have felt we could reduce political polarization by making the facts clear, unmasking the falsehood in disinformation, or even providing sufficient exposure to more reasonable, less extreme candidates from the other party. However, as usual, it is more complex. A research team at Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy Challenge Project found that:

reduced polarization doesn’t necessarily translate into a safeguard against antidemocratic attitudes, encompassing voting for undemocratic candidates, a willingness to sacrifice democratic principles and support for political violence. Those who participated in the “friendship” and “misperception” interventions as part of the study showed no reduction in their appetite for political violence or antidemocratic attitudes.

Similar approaches can also reduce support for undemocratic candidates, says study co-author and Stanford University doctoral student Jan Gerrit Voelkel. We tend to be exposed to only the least palatable political rivals, which means even if our party’s candidate holds undemocratic values, we’re slow to cross party lines. A voter tends to filter out all but the most extreme views from the opposite political party and ignore any trace of undemocratic values from their own party. Crossing party lines, as a result, tends to be a rare occurrence. “Being exposed to more relatable candidates from the other party reduces the need to vote for undemocratic candidates,” Voelkel says.”

Novak, Sara. “Making Friends with Political Opponents Doesn’t Improve Support for Democracy.” Scientific American, 31 Oct. 2022, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-friends-with-political-opponents-doesnt-improve-support-for-democracy/. Accessed 5 June 2023.

In a recent commencement speak titled “Go Forth and Argue,” editorialist Bret Stephens wrestled with the problem of “the herd of independent minds.” Essentially, we all think we are thinking independently when, in fact, our political and other conclusions align with millions of others, our herd. He urges us to possess the courage to say no to those in our ‘ideological tribe’ when we disagree. However,

most people just want to belong, and the most essential elements of belonging are agreeing and conforming. Would-be belongers engage in what’s known as “preference falsification,” pretending to enjoy things they don’t, or subscribe to ideas they secretly reject. They go along to get along, because the usual emotional companion to intellectual independence isn’t pride or self-confidence. It’s loneliness and sometimes crippling self-doubt.

Stephens, Bret. “Opinion | Go Forth and Argue.” The New York Times, 2 June 2023, http://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/opinion/free-speech-campus.html. Accessed 5 June 2023.

It is hard to be a person and harder still:

being a person in a society. You have your needs, your wants, your whims, your dreams, your appetites, your fantasies, your frustrations. But — unless you are a castaway or a sociopath — you have to square those things with the needs of some larger group. More likely, multiple groups. Which means you must follow the rules. What rules? So many rules! Laws, norms, mores, superstitions, sentence structures, traffic signals — vast, overlapping codes, written and unwritten, silent and spoken, logical and arbitrary, local and global, tiny and huge, ancient and new. Some rules are rigid (stop signs), while others are flexible (yield signs) — and it’s your job to know the difference. Not to mention that the rules are never fixed: With every step you take, with every threshold you cross, the rule-cloud will shift around you. It can change based on the color of your skin, the sound of your voice, your haircut, your accent, your passport. Sometimes even the thoughts you supposedly have in your head.

Anderson, Sam. “Tim Robinson and the Golden Age of Cringe Comedy.” The New York Times, 3 June 2023, http://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/magazine/tim-robinson-i-think-you-should-leave.html. Accessed 5 June 2023.

Litigating these rules or norms of society maps over our past experiences, our emotional lives, our deep stories, our need to belong.

Can we go back to the hippo and the turtle for a minute? So much simpler, it seems. But where is the simplicity in all of this complexity? On a recent Freakonomics podcast, host Stephen Dubner interviewed uber-agent Ari Emmanuel who has developed the following rules to live by:

don’t be indifferent. The other one is be curious. The other one is be comfortable in the uncomfortable. Another one would be show up — meaning half of my success, like that phone call I took beforehand is — do I want to take that meeting? F*** no. But I want to get to this. I’m going to take that meeting.

Ari Emanuel on Freakonomics podcast, May 31, 2023

And his lessons are thought-provoking, but as you can see from the last one it has been generated out of his personal experience, what has worked in his life, what has guided his success and thereby created his meaning.

At the end of the interview, Stephen Dubner added this postscript:

When we sat down to talk, I didn’t know what to expect from Ari Emanuel. For one thing, I’d been warned multiple times by multiple people that he doesn’t like interviews, that he gets bored easily, and he might just get up and leave after 20 minutes. The conversation you just heard was an edit of a conversation that lasted around an hour and 45 minutes. But I had no way of knowing at the outset. In fact, right as we were sitting down, before the mics were rolling, he waved me closer — like, c’mere, c’mere. Based on everything I’d been reading about him, my first thought was: what’s he going to do, slap me? I know he likes to fight, so, I don’t know, I didn’t move closer. He waved again. I still didn’t move. His waving got more animated. Finally, I leaned in. It turns out he just wanted to pull a loose thread off of my jacket. He wanted to clean me up! It made me think of that old folk tale about the mouse who pulls a thorn from the paw of a lion. But wait a minute: he’s supposed to be the lion. His name, Ariel, means lion of God. It was yet another reminder that it is a good idea to sit down with people you don’t know and see what actually makes them tick.

Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics podcast, May 31, 2023

If only we can become bigger than ourselves, or perhaps far far smaller, can we hope to hear the deep stories. Or maybe we could all admit how delusional we are. What would happen, though, if we pressed our fleshiness against the hard shell of another? Could it possibly turn out to be an understanding turtle? It has to come back to the listening which, in some form, Mzee had to have done in order to tolerate and then embrace Owen. And so a turning towards. As Karl Menninger, the well-known American psychiatrist, has said:

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

Let us hope for a great unfolding to allow for our shared expansion.