If we treat other human beings as people, not as problems, we’ll be able to disagree more productively. Image Credit: johnwoodcock/Getty Images

In this installment of a series on liberalism, Benjamin Klutsey, the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, talks with John Inazu, the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion and professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, about his new book, “Learning To Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences With Empathy and Respect.” They discuss why you shouldn’t try to be a First Amendment hero, treating others as people rather than problems, how to be patient when change is slow, when not to engage in political disagreements and much more.

BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: Today we have a returning guest: Professor John Inazu. He is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion and professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. His research and scholarship focus on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly and religion and related questions on legal and political theory.

The last time he was on this series, we discussed his book “Confident Pluralism.” Today we’re discussing his latest book, “Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences With Empathy and Respect,” which will be out officially on April 2.

Thanks for joining us, John.

JOHN INAZU: Ben, it’s great to be with you again. Thanks for having me.

Cultivating Empathy

KLUTSEY: Sure thing.

Now, most of us think of the practice of law as adversarial. I think what you’re trying to do here is to get us to reconceptualize that and perhaps come to think of the practice of law, and maybe the rule of law itself, as maybe a system that provides nuance and empathy.

You take a wild case like Dudley and Stephens [chuckles] to make the point that, while cannibalism is abhorrent and evil, we still had to look at the context in which it occurred in this case. Ask questions, consider hypotheticals, place ourselves in the moment and in their shoes. I guess the point you’re trying to make is that this applies in the practice of law, but it applies outside of that, too. Am I on the right track here?

INAZU: Yes, I think the key point that you started with is that the practice of law is adversarial, but part of being a good adversary is a deep understanding, and really even an empathy, for the other side’s argument—if only to knock it down. And that law has a whole lot to teach us about better engagement across hard, nuanced, complex issues. And that that application is for all of us—not just people practicing law, but people dealing with contentious neighbors or hard workplace disputes or maybe family challenges. And that when we hone in on what we’re actually doing in legal education and understanding law, that these are deeply human skills that have much application for the rest of us, too.

KLUTSEY: This might be a bit philosophical, but how do we cultivate empathy? Is it like practicing consistently putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes?

INAZU: Well, I mean, that’s part of it. I actually liked your verbs quite a bit: “cultivate” and “practice.” In other words, this doesn’t come naturally to most of us; that we do have to create opportunities for ourselves to work on this.

Really, one of the things I point out in this first part of the book is, you can’t actually put yourself fully in someone else’s shoes. If you’re discussing a case about cannibalism on the high seas, where people are starving to death, unless you’ve actually been starving to death on the high seas, you don’t know what that experience is like. There are limits to our empathy in our lived experiences, but those limits might point us toward asking more questions and slowing down some of our judgments.

This isn’t a push toward relativism, but it’s to say, let’s pause a bit on our instinctive reactions, perhaps with the recognition that we can’t be fully empathetic. That itself is a step toward empathy.

A related piece to this is to pull back and realize that all of us are human beings who are fighting very human battles, regardless of our professional identities or partisan positions or whatever they are: that we’re still people who eat, sleep, work, play, laugh, cry; and that that common connection is a key part of building empathy.

Don’t Be a First Amendment Hero

KLUTSEY: Yes.

One of the points that you make to first-year law students during orientation is not to be “First Amendment heroes.” I find that phrase to be really interesting, and the idea is that just because you can say anything doesn’t mean you should and that empathy lies at this intersection between civic responsibility and civic grace. Can you unpack that?

INAZU: Yes. I sometimes talk to students who are trying to make a point or score a win by describing something in outlandish or provocative terms—in other words, exercising their First Amendment muscles. They have the right to say something, so they’re going to say it and they’re going to try to be offensive and try to garner attention. Usually what I say is, “If you’re really trying to convince somebody about your position or to persuade them to understand things differently, it’s seldom the case that the most flagrant and most offensive way of putting it is going to win you friends or allies.”

There’s something about a kind of self-imposed restraint that is more prudence than cowardice. I think we have, in a lot of circles, this concern about “I don’t want to be shut down in my speech” or “I don’t want to be chilled.” I’m not talking about that, but I’m talking about a commonsense approach to discourse and dialogue with other people, other human beings, that is seldom going to call for that most outlandish kind of statement.

There’s also some real-time adjustments here. If you say something in your own voice that comes across hurtful to someone else, then maybe the first step is not to insist on your right to say it, but it’s to say—it’s to think—“Maybe there’s a better, more effective way for me to say this.” It doesn’t mean you’re policing everything you say, but it is to say you’re paying attention to context and to other people around you.

KLUTSEY: You say it also very succinctly—I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but you say, “Don’t be afraid to express your honest opinions, but treat each other kindly.” I find that to be very instructive.

Does this resonate with first-year students? How much of this “First Amendment hero” thing is happening, or are you seeing, across campus?

INAZU: There are always—not always; there are often a few outlier students who still want to make the point and don’t listen, but I think there’s almost a commonsense appeal to the sorts of things I’m saying. I often deliver this message to all of the first-year law students sitting together during their first week of orientation. I think it does resonate. Intuitively, they’re thinking, “I am going through this experience with the people around me, who are going to be not just my classmates for three years but my professional colleagues for the rest of my career, and how I treat them and how I engage with them is going to matter.”

There are always one or two people who still just want to go at it on their own and do their own thing, but those are not usually the people who end up making great lawyers. Good lawyering is about coalition-building and about being able to persuade others around you. One of the points I tell my students is, “This is a great time to start learning those skills before your job or your client is on the line.” I think we can—at its best, law school and legal education will be the place to help cultivate those dispositions.

Problems vs. People

KLUTSEY: One of the interesting stories that you—all the stories in the book are really interesting, but you talk about this encounter with a lady, Ms. J, at the county records office. And it had been a frustrating experience for you trying to find your easement records, but you finally meet her, and I think the way you put it is that she saw you as a person rather than a problem to address, and that really resonated with you.

Do you think we’re seeing each other as problems rather than people?

INAZU: I think many of us are. I think the lawyer personality doesn’t help things. Those of us who are over-tasked and efficiency-driven often see people as interruptions to our day.

This story, and part of the message of the book, is—for me as much as anyone—it’s to slow down and remember the people around us. This particular story, as you noted, came at the end of a very frustrating day for me. Part of this experience was, I had already been in the process of writing this book when this experience occurred. I was thinking about it real time within the frame of the book and then realizing that I am making the same mistakes in this moment that I’m trying to counsel others to guard against.

It was the surprising recognition that in the midst of my very frustrating day, this person who I just thought, or assumed, was another cog in the bureaucratic wheel was actually the person who was going to be in my life at the end of a frustrating day and just give me a little kindness and offer me some professionalism of her own—that was remarkable and that I was not expecting.

Then I wanted to ask myself, “Why am I not expecting that? Why am I not attentive to the people I’m encountering?” If I can reframe my engagement closer to the way that Ms. J treated me, then I will be not only a better person, but I’ll also be able to attend to better what is going on in other people’s lives.

I think the related point here is, when we encounter disagreement or when we bristle at a comment someone’s making, sometimes what’s behind that comment is a substantive position or something we don’t understand, but sometimes it’s just because the person’s having a bad day or something bad happened to that person. I think the reminder that we’re all fighting a great battle in our own lives, and none of us know possibly what else is going on fully with the person we’re encountering briefly in our day—that we might have a little more patience and compassion for the people in our lives.

KLUTSEY: Yes, a little bit of patience and compassion and grace—I guess they go a long way.

On Patriotism

KLUTSEY: You no longer swear oaths and pledge allegiance to the flag, because you don’t want to give them too much significance, even though—and I think the audience should know this—that you served in the military, you served the country in uniform; so did your father.

Is there a healthy approach to patriotism? If so, what is that?

INAZU: Yes, so on the back end of my—or in the second part of the book, I talk about the connection between religious faith and patriotism and make some observations about the tight connections, and sometimes embeddedness, of a deep faith and a deep patriotism for the country. So I don’t think patriotism is bad in and of itself. As you noted, I was in the military, and I have some very fond patriotic memories.

But patriotism and love of country has to have its place. It’s very dangerous when it becomes the idol or the most important allegiance in one’s life. In my own practices, I just pay attention to the words that I’m asked to say in a pledge or an oath. I don’t say those because I don’t want to express unqualified allegiance to a political order or a nation-state. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about these entities or that I’m not loyal to them or wanting to invest in them, but it is to say that my ultimate allegiances lie elsewhere and that the words that I say and the actions that I take—I want those to be consistent with what I believe and where my allegiances lie.

This is not for everyone; I understand that. I’m often in settings where I might be the only person in the room who’s not putting my hand over my heart. I’m still standing there respectfully, but I just want to come short of giving too much deference and too much authority to these entities that deserve some significance but not ultimate significance in my life.

Christian Nationalism

KLUTSEY: I note that your newsletter today talked about Christian nationalism. I imagine that that’s another sort of challenge that you’re seeing on the rise, and maybe people have a bit of an unhealthy relationship with the way that they consider faith to be and its role in the country itself generally. Anything you want to say about that?

INAZU: Sure, there’s lots to say. I suppose, though—you referenced my newsletter today, and one of the points I was making there is that there’s lots of terminology confusion around the phrase “Christian nationalism,” and nobody is being helped by overbroad uses of that term. There are some people today who think basically anybody to the right of them, or anybody whose ideas they don’t like, is a Christian nationalist. And that’s unhelpful and descriptively inaccurate.

But there is a segment of this country who ascribe to, and would self-identify with, a form of nationalism that very much wants a vision for a theocratic country, where Christianity is privileged under the law and other faiths face burdens and restrictions under the law. This is just fundamentally incompatible with a pluralistic democratic society, and that position is a real political challenge and political danger to our current form of governance. And it’s very important, I think, to pay attention to that and to resist it. But part of that effort is going to take people being clear about the terminology and not overusing that term in a way that waters it down to the point of being ineffective.

KLUTSEY: Yes.

Now, one of the things you talk about in the book is the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether, to your mind, this is what compromise and pluralism—this is what they look like. It wasn’t perfectly satisfying to either side; no side felt like they’d won 100%. But does this highlight for you the idea that reasonable and sincere people can have divergent views?

INAZU: I mean, it might. To me, the Respect for Marriage Act is an example of a piece of legislation that does result from coalitions and compromise, and that a number of people aren’t happy with it, but there are others on both sides of the issue who feel like this was pretty good and this was moving in the right direction.

Now, it’s not going to be the case that every political issue is susceptible to some sort of compromise middle ground, and this is what makes things really hard. At the end of the day, there are going to be political winners and losers, and part of the challenge when we can’t find compromise, or even the kind of compromise that we can all walk away with and feel good about, is figuring out how to live in a diverse political society as both winners and losers when it comes to the political process. Because odds are, in our lifetime, we are going to be in both positions around a range of different issues, and winning well and losing well are really important postures to cultivate, particularly when the people around us are experiencing those developments quite differently than we are.

Finding the Good

KLUTSEY: Yes. In the book, you talk about how you can be wrong without being evil, and we can embrace this presumption by looking for something good about the people we find most wrong. Here’s the sort of experiment that you said that we should try to run ourselves: Start from the political leaders you don’t like—try to name one thing they do well, one group of people whose lives they’ve improved, one way they have contributed to your understanding of human flourishing. If you can’t come up with anything, ask yourself if it’s because they need to change or you need to change.

Have you tried this yourself?

INAZU: I have, actually. Yes. No, thanks for asking. I love the question.

I have. I’ve tried when I think of—especially in politics, but even in the national media or discourse space—when there’s somebody who grates on me or gets under my skin, I start to think, “Well, what are the observations they’re making that are good?” In the political space, “What are the policies that this person is pushing, or helping to make possible, that actually do contribute to the strengthening of the social fabric or move us toward a greater proximate earthly justice or eliminate suffering among the vulnerable?”

In those cases, there’s almost—there are a number of things you can find with any major political candidate that are to the good. It’s not always easy to see, depending on what news sources we’re reading. Yes, so I’ve done that in my own life.

I find it probably more challenging, actually, when it comes to certain pundits or journalists, where I need to say, “OK, what are they getting right?” Because sometimes it feels like there’s not much.

[laughter]

Law and Fairness

KLUTSEY: Right.

Now, on fairness, I find myself struggling to define what “fairness” is to my kids, because to them, whatever it is they don’t like is “unfair.” What can studying law teach us about fairness?

INAZU: When it comes to fairness, I think there are at least two important insights from the law. One of them is the recognition that many things will not be fully or completely satisfying when it comes to an adjudication of fairness, when you’re trying to impose, say, a fair sentence or a fair settlement or resolution to a case. Fairness attaches both to the particular case before you but also, in a horizontal way, to how that case sits relative to lots of other cases.

When you introduce that horizontal mix into the picture, it becomes very difficult. This is why judging is hard and judges have really hard jobs: because the fairness between two people before you will inevitably be affected by, and perhaps in some tension with, those other cases that you’re trying also to decide equitably. Fairness becomes a very hard, not a black-and-white concept, not an easily resolvable concept in many parts of the law.

At the same time, we can’t give up on basic principles of fairness. Yes, when you and I are teaching our kids, the answer is not, “Well, fairness is really hard; it’s black or white; we don’t really know what it is.” There are times to say, “This is the fair thing to do; this is the equitable thing to do.” I think, as human beings, we only learn those instincts over time and with practice. When we think about teaching kids about fairness, we have to model it, and we’re not all in the complex business of judging or trying to decide things carefully under the law. Sometimes fairness is just about making sure that if your sister got the first cookie, you probably deserve the second one, and vice versa.

Limiting Principles of Pluralism

KLUTSEY: Oftentimes when I talk about pluralism with people—the idea that we can try to have conversations with people who have very different viewpoints, we have to learn to coexist peacefully amidst differences—the one question I get a lot is, “Where do you draw the line when it comes to pluralism? There must be some kind of a limiting principle; otherwise anything goes.” It’s a bit of a challenging concept for people.

How would you answer that, in terms of drawing the line?

INAZU: Yes, so a couple of different things. One: I think in the premise of your question is the important descriptive observation that there is no such thing as a truly pluralistic or completely pluralistic society; that every society is going to draw boundaries and say, “At some point that set of practices or that set of ideas is out.” That we’re not going to allow al-Qaida to exist in the United States or recognize the cult of human sacrifice.

And then the question, as you suggested, that becomes very hard is, “Well, what else fits in that outer intolerable boundary?” I think maybe the principle here to start with is, probably, especially in our contested, polarized society, many of us tend to populate that out-of-bounds category more fully than it deserves to be. Our tendency is to throw a whole lot of other people and beliefs and entities there when, in reality, in our very pluralistic, diverse society, they’re in bounds.

We might not like them. We might actually think what they’re doing is deeply harmful to society. We need to outvote them and win in the political process, but they’re within the boundaries of pluralism.

Now, this becomes, I think, a bit clearer when you get to the institutional level. When you have an institution, a board-governed organization or some sort of formal, recognized structure to what you’re doing, then you can define for yourselves what’s in bounds and what’s out of bounds—what’s the reasonable scope of disagreement and what’s not.

If you’re going to be, say, a Jewish day school, it’s perfectly fine and consistent to say, “Everybody who’s part of this community has to be Jewish.” You’re drawing a boundary that says, “Our boundaries of pluralism—we might have lots of discussions within Judaism, but we’re actually not going to talk about Christianity at this day school.” That kind of institutional line-drawing becomes very important. It also gives you internally a way to adjudicate what is reasonable disagreement and what’s outside the boundaries of this specific institutional focus.

KLUTSEY: That’s really, really helpful.

Justice and Forgiveness

KLUTSEY: On forgiveness, there’s an interesting story in the book of a Stanford University professor who read something in class that contained the N-word. He was confronted; he apologized, but then the protests continued and students sought punitive measures. They couldn’t let go. This is a justice-oriented crowd.

I contrast this with another story in the book about your grandmother, who received an apology from Ronald Reagan to Japanese Americans who had been interned, which included your grandparents. The note said that “no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important about this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

I contrast these stories because I wanted your take on why is one group able to forgive—your grandmother did, as you noted in the book—and the other having a really hard time to do so? Another question related to this is, Does that have something to do with faith? Without some kind of faith context, is it difficult to understand how forgiveness can take place?

INAZU: You know, I’ve wondered this question. I think it’s a really important question. I want to divide it in two ways. On a descriptive level, I don’t think there’s necessarily a faith component needed to recognize the imperfections of human justice. In other words, when we encounter in our lives, as we inevitably will, various injustices from different people and institutions and countries, there’s not going to be in this lifetime a way fully to remedy that injustice.

Law is actually a great tool to illustrate this point. Law is all about proximate justice and trying to get as close as we can to righting wrongs and restoring the status quo, but you never actually get there. If you steal my iPhone from me and the authorities and the courts make you give it back to me, that hasn’t fully repaired the injustice that you’ve caused by breaking the social trust between us and by, perhaps, giving me an experience of harm or violation that I wasn’t prepared for.

Nor could we quantify in dollars what you should owe me to fully restore that relationship. Although I’d give it a try, I guess, [chuckles] if I wanted some cash from you. The point is, human justice, human attempts at justice, do not actually alleviate injustice. So descriptively, I think people can see that point, whether they come from a faith perspective or not.

The harder question is, what do you do about it? Here I do think that resources grounded from faith traditions that recognize some form of transcendence, or something bigger than this life, can point toward notions of ultimate justice or ideas of forgiveness that allow us in a, and maybe the only human way we can, to diminish the power of a wrong done to us or an injustice that we have experienced.

You don’t have to be a person of faith to do this. I think Nelson Mandela is a good example of someone who didn’t have a particular faith frame, and his very public acts of forgiveness. In general, and especially at a broad social level, that faith frame really helps with narrating the significance of forgiveness or apology.

The examples that you gave, particularly the example, I think, of my grandmother and what apology and forgiveness meant in that situation, I think is a pretty powerful illustration of how you can encounter a very grievous injustice and still move forward in life in a way that is not going to let that define or limit you in perpetuity.

That’s, I think, part of the hope about what an understanding of ultimate justice, or the role of forgiveness, can do. I would say it’s very much guided by faith and strengthened by faith, and whether that’s possible outside of a faith context—I’m not entirely sure.

Balancing Justice with Other Virtues

KLUTSEY: Yes.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is this idea of justice and how there are a lot of people now who are—especially across campuses—who are energized around the issue of justice, and especially folks who are looking for meaning and their place in the world and how to advance some good causes.

My concern has been that there’s a kind of justice, sometimes it’s retribution, that is being advanced, and society doesn’t thrive on justice alone. You need justice, but also you need to balance that with other virtues like prudence and wisdom and mercy and all kinds of other things. Part of what you are maybe helping us to understand is how we balance all of these things, maybe imperfectly because we’re human, but we make the effort to balance and put all of these virtues in the right perspectives.

Am I onto something?

INAZU: Yes, I think that’s part of it. I think especially in the higher education landscape, the challenges we’re seeing are often failures of leadership. You’re right to note that, especially among the student population, there’s this real frenzy and desire for justice and an emotional attachment to a need for justice.

That’s nothing new, right? Students have been doing this for—I don’t know—maybe since Socrates, and this intensely emotional student desire for justice, or to do something, I think is often a very good thing. I’m actually often inspired by, and convicted by, some of what I see students doing.

They don’t always have the tool kits or the perspectives to channel that well, especially for the kinds of long-term change they really desire. If you’re an 18-year-old college kid, there’s only so much you can do as you delve into a deeper understanding of what injustice is or the structures that might contribute to it.

You want to see change. Sometimes the answer is, “Go work really hard for the next 10 years, and then you can start to work toward change.” To have people, mentors and role models and exemplars, who can say, “Here is how you can begin to think about the complexity of injustice and what you might do about it. And it might be that much of your life, if you really care about this, if you’re really going to devote your life to justice, it might be that you are going to have a life of challenging work that is often unrecognized—of impartial and incomplete efforts toward justice that you might not even see the results of in your lifetime.”

That’s a very heavy burden for lots of people to carry. Not everyone’s up for it, frankly. Some people will want the rewards and the goodies far sooner.

I think the call to justice is, (1) probably needs to be defined with particularity in any given context. (2) It’s not for the faint of heart. Part of what an educational system can do, at its best, is help cultivate people toward a better understanding of what the cost of justice is and then how to go about doing it well and effectively, which is going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort.

Change Is Slow

KLUTSEY: On that, I’ll just mention your previous book, “Confident Pluralism,” where you highlight three civic aspirations, in addition to some of the constitutional commitments that we have, which are toleration, humility and patience—that sometimes these things take a very long time.

I remember I was talking to a group of students at McGill. It was maybe not too long after the Dobbs decision was made. They were concerned that there are institutions that are oppressing people. They were taken aback that the United States didn’t think that some of these questions are just settled and that we’re still arguing about these things.

I did offer your three civic aspirations, and patience in particular: that, obviously, young people want to see change fast. You also have to consider what the law, or the previous iteration of the law, what it meant for a certain group of people. They probably felt oppressed by it as well. It took all this time to change it. It might require patience to also flip it the other way, and all the work in the coalition-building and all of that that needs to take place. It’s a matter of patience. Sometimes change doesn’t happen right away—regardless of where your views are and your philosophical commitments are, every kind of change that you want to see will take a long time.

INAZU: I think that’s right. Also, it reminds me, too, that patience, and the application of patience, requires a kind of discernment and judgment as well. Sometimes the people in power will say, “Just be patient.” Sometimes the response to that claim or request is actually to be more prophetic than patient. But all of that requires a tremendous amount of judgment and discernment.

If you find yourself too passive and always defaulting to patience, then maybe what you need in your life is a little more courage to act. If you find yourself always impatient and prophetic, then maybe what you need are more voices and spaces to slow down and to think longer-term about what you’re trying to do. I think some of us fall in one direction more than the other at various times.

When To Walk Away

KLUTSEY: I think that’s right. There’s also, knowing when to not engage in a difficult conversation or when to walk away: I think a good example is in your book with your golfing buddies. One is your colleague, who is a professor, and the other one is, I think, a friend from church. They disagree on issues, but just sustaining that friendship is important or that family relationship is important, rather than delving into the issues.

Not every issue has to be—part of learning to disagree, perhaps, is that we don’t have to talk about every single thing that we disagree on every single time we get together, so that we all have to be on the same page, right? [chuckles]

INAZU: Yes—I think to me this is a really important part of the argument I’m trying to make, and I see it unfolding on two levels. The first is in our public engagement. I’m thinking, particularly, for many of us, this is going to be social media. The world doesn’t need to hear from us on every single issue that annoys us or inspires us. Sometimes, probably most of the time, it’s OK to let things pass or choose not to comment publicly on something.

This is something that I’ve had to discipline in my own life, because I’ll see lots of things out there by people, arguments I think that are wrong or need someone to weigh in. Then I can pause for two seconds and realize: There are a lot of smart people that are going to respond to this argument, and the world doesn’t need to hear from me, and it’s probably best for everyone if I just go have breakfast with my kid or something instead of being spun up to respond on social media.

That’s in the public sense. Then, in the relational sense—and this is, I think, also crucial to the point you were making—our fundamentally human relationships depend on, not only these deep connections over things that matter, but very ordinary human interactions. And, in fact, I would venture, for most of us with our deepest friendships, we need to build in a lot of downtime just to be sitting around or sharing a meal or watching something on television or taking a walk or engaging in some common activity.

If all you’re doing with a friend is sitting down and having very deep, intense conversations about disagreement, that might check a box for you in a way. It’s going to counter efforts to deepen a real human relationship, because as human beings, we thrive on a whole lot of ordinary interactions. One of the points I try to make in some of these vignettes in the book is, “Look, these are very human things, very ordinary things. We all could stand to build more of those into our own relationships.”

Two Calls to Action

KLUTSEY: Now, as we wrap up, I was wondering whether you had a call to action in your book: something that you wanted people to rally around and maybe think about each day as they go about their businesses. How they think about ways in which we’re divided and how they’re trying to play their own role or play a part in fostering—in trying to bridge these divides.

INAZU: I think I would say the best thing you can do is to work on this in relationship with other people. Have conversations and serious discussions about your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to disagreement. And the best way to do this is in a series of discussions that unfold over time, that give you breaks in between to think about what’s been said and to come back and ask more questions.

This is why nobody is going to change postures or habits by watching a TED Talk or going to a half-day seminar. I do think when you start to build in these repeat relational touch points, get people together with food, keep the group relatively small and talk about these things and give permission to reengage on them the next week or the next month when you get together …

I’ve got in this book, at the end of the book, a reflection guide. The point of this is to encourage groups of people to talk about these ideas together. But don’t try to do it in one sitting. Give yourself and the people around you space to do it together over time.

KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, obviously we are in an election year and so we’re going to see the ads, we’re going to see the battles and we’re going to see more polarization. Are you optimistic that we’ll get to a place where we can learn to disagree better?

INAZU: [chuckles] Well, not with that premise. I think—this actually makes me think of another call to action, which is, for many people, it will be “get offline more,” right? We’re not going to beat the algorithms, and the algorithms in the next six to eight months are going to push us into harsher and less nuanced channels.

Get offline, figure out how to get inputs and news sources from a broad range of people, and prepare for the—especially the online world to get worse before it gets better. It’s going to be a massive challenge for us individually and societally, but we’re not going to be able to avoid the efforts to engage differently.

KLUTSEY: Well, I think that’s a good place to bring this to a close. Thank you, John, for joining us for this series. Really appreciate it.

INAZU: Thanks for having me. It was great to talk to you.