“Let’s build bridges, not walls.” ~ Martin Luther King
Weary of endless partisan bickering, more and more Americans are seeking a way forward. We hear about it increasingly in our media: community-based groups “bridging the divide” are springing up across the country; bi-partisan organizations are proliferating.
What these groups have in common is a dedication to promoting building bridges.
Various studies (including this one) have found that hyper-partisanship is fueled by a minority of the population — on the far ends of each side. These extremes are made up of those louder, richer, and more influential than the rest of us. The rest is the “exhausted majority” who are hungry for a path toward a calm, civil, and consilient kind of politics. How can we achieve that? By Building Bridgers.
Who are Bridgers?
Bridgers are those who recognize we cannot continue with the ever-polarizing politics coming from both sides. Hyper-partisanship is driving hatred, outrage and vitriol to new extremes. Bridgers see there’s a better way forward. They are willing to “leave their ideological bunkers,” a phrase coined by inspirational speaker Brene Brown. Above all, they promote viewpoint diversity — recognizing that reality can only be perceived through multiple sets of eyes.
Diversity is a popular idea today. But viewpoint diversity? Not so much. Bridgers expose themselves to different ways of seeing the world — and they’re ready to take other viewpoints into serious consideration. They cultivate intellectual, moral and emotional humility, willing to set aside their own positions, at least momentarily, to consider another’s point of view. (“Maybe the other side just does have a point!”)
Bridgers come to understand all sides of issues, why there is disagreement, and how ideology tilts perspectives.
Decades of research by cognitive psychologists has shown how humans are naturally predisposed to confirmation bias: the tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs. Evolutionary psychologists tell us we have “my side bias” — that human reasoning is more about being right than finding truth.
Viewpoint diversity is the only way to counter these innate tendencies: it helps us see our blind spots, which we can’t uncover by ourselves. By looking together from multiple vantage points we can zoom out to get a more expansive and clear picture of what’s going on.
And each vantage point is a necessary part of finding solutions.
Some people don’t support such bridging. They want to push through their particular ideological and political agenda in order to achieve what’s “right” in their own eyes, often expressing contempt for the other side.
There are at least two problems with this. The first is that neither side is 100% correct. The second is that ignoring, invalidating, and overriding the concerns of the other “half” of the country will only create more divisiveness. More divisiveness will create more hatred — and likely violence — as well as gridlocking the system by fighting over ideas instead of forging creative bipartisan solutions.
Bridgers learn how to stop being contemptuous and hateful. Instead of dehumanizing, they RE-humanize. Author Arlie Hochschild calls it “crossing the empathy wall.” Bridgers realize that viewing groups of people as all good or bad and right or wrong strips the humanity from those on both sides of the equation.
