What We Lose When We Can't Talk to Each Other
The past 10 years have done major damage to our social fabric.
Polarization is at an all-time high. It can feel daunting—perhaps even misguided—to engage in meaningful dialogue with those holding starkly different views. What does it mean to champion pluralism in such a moment? Persuasion’s new series on the future of pluralism, generously supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, features essays and podcast interviews that make the case for civic dialogue and highlight inspiring examples of it in practice. You can find past installments here.
When I was a graduate student in England 25 years ago, I fell in love with the novel White Teeth. It was written by a woman named Zadie Smith, and I thought it perfectly captured the music of pluralism. Smith basically fictionalized the neighborhood she grew up in northwest London. It was a neighborhood of genuine diversity—there were rich and poor, middle class and working class. There were longtime residents who were white English Anglicans and atheists, and more recent communities of Jamaican Evangelicals and Pakistani Muslims.
From her perch in a council estate (which is the British term for a housing project) Zadie Smith wrote about the friendships and feuds, the romances and reconciliations, of this motley crew of friends and neighbors, a motley crew she clearly loved.
One of my favorite scenes took place in a playground. Zadie Smith sets it up like this: “It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.”
My research was in London, and every time I passed a playground, I found myself looking for those characters—looking for children of different backgrounds whose identities were supposed to be on a collision course, even internally, and yet who were instead coming together to form that most precious of human creations—a community.
Here is how Zadie Smith described this signal achievement in human civilization: “we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort.”
White Teeth was a blockbuster success. Think of it as the Hamilton of its era. Zadie Smith found herself a global figure, taking up university positions and writing fellowships in different parts of the world.
In 2016, Smith returned to the old neighborhood. She came to tend to a family member who had an illness. One of the first things she noticed was that the playground she had immortalized in her first novel, the one which held together those children whose names were on a collision course, had a new fence around it, a fence with tall bamboo slats between the bars that blocked views from the outside in, and the inside out.
She started seeing fences all around her old neighborhood, around the entire city of London, in fact. Mansions had fences, public schools had fences, religious communities had fences—actual, physical barriers.
We all remember the divisive election that took place in the United States in 2016. There was a British version of that: the Brexit referendum.
Smith noticed that Brexit revealed a different kind of fence, an invisible fence, what she started calling the fence of “Right Opinion”—too tall to climb over, too thick to see through, sometimes electrified, making it ever so easy to caricature the people on the other side, and so hard to actually talk to them.
It was a situation that occurred at a playground which brought this truth home, the very playground where Zadie Smith had based that scene from White Teeth. Zadie’s little daughter was playing with another mother’s little son. They seemed to be quite enamored of one another. When Zadie went to engage with the boy’s mother to suggest a playdate between her daughter and the other woman’s son, she noticed right away that the woman was about fifteen years younger, and white, and working class. There was a high likelihood that they were on the opposite sides of the Fence of Right Opinion with respect to Brexit.
In a real-life moment so fraught with tension that it could have been a scene in a novel, Smith and this other mother put their respective children in their respective strollers at the same time, and trudged up the hill to their respective houses virtually side by side, all in silence. Smith watched as the woman turned left into the very council estate in which she had grown up, while she turned right into the new development full of fine, large houses, including one with the shiny black door belonging to her. She felt the withering stare of the other mother: You live in one of the big houses. You are one of those.
And Smith had a sudden realization—the people with whom she disagreed, the people on the other side of the invisible fence, had their own version of Right Opinion.
The playdate never happened. Smith did not know how to start the conversation. The master novelist of pluralism was unable to find the language to climb over or see through the invisible fence.
Perhaps that irony struck Smith as much as it struck me, because a few months later she published an essay called “On Optimism and Despair.” It’s an essay that gives us a way forward by pulling a trick out of the writer’s magic hat—she changes the metaphor.
Instead of talking about people as being on opposite sides of the electrified Fence of Right Opinion, she talks about all of us as “complex musical scores.” It is the job of the conductor—whether a novelist or a civic leader—to coax out the melodies that, as she puts it, create “a finer music,” the music of pluralism.
It is a very similar metaphor to the one that the American inventors of cultural pluralism—Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, John Dewey and Jane Addams, to name a few—used. They were making the case for pluralism in the face of two other dominant models: the melting pot, which did not properly respect distinctive identity, and what Kallen called the Kultur Klux Klan, which wanted to destroy those identities. As I’ve written previously:
[The Kultur Klux Klan] was based on the violent anti-black, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, and adhered to the view that “true Americans” were white Protestants and that everyone else was an alien. … The melting pot idea was that everyone could become an American—you simply had to change your name, stop speaking your native language, eat different food, and blend in.
Against these two models, Kallen held that our identities have value, those identities can be thought of as instruments, and together “the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”
That is the commitment we need to make in our civic institutions now, from small community-based organizations to large research universities. We need to be the people that others can count on to invite diverse instruments to the stage and to teach them to make music together.
By the way, your opinion may well be right—let’s assume it is. And the disagreement you have with another person who has a different right opinion is no doubt significant. And yet we cannot live in a society where two mothers whose children are enamored of one another find it so impossible to communicate that they can’t organize a playdate for their kids.
So let us see people as complex musical scores. Let us commit to coaxing out the melodies from each one and braiding them together into a beautiful song. And let us encourage as many people as possible to sing along.
Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
This essay is adapted from Eboo Patel’s keynote address at the 2025 Interfaith Leadership Summit, delivered to an audience of college students, faculty, campus administrators, and civic leaders.
Also by Eboo Patel:
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Correlation is not causation, but we should consider that the world has gone to shit as educated females have moved to dominate positions in society and the economy.
I have my own theory based on the science and observation that is rooted in evolutionary psychology... how females and males behave differently within group dynamics. Males are direct likely because they are stronger and more of a risk to each other, and thus they pound their chest and exhibit overt narcissism. There is a level of trust in that orientation. Females, probably because they are weaker and cannot directly challenge a male, have adopted covert narcissistic traits and strategies. The most difficult are those that bleed to vulnerable narcissism. It is common behavior that most husbands will identify... in a fit of rage she goes off on her husband and when he calls her on her bad behavior she cries and says "I am a terrible person" so that the husband hugs her and tells her she is a good person. This passive aggressive victim mindset approach is common in all female behavior. The problem is that there is no trust. Nobody knows exactly what the real agenda is. There is a two-faced presentation and hidden agendas. Politics is played in the backroom.
In my long corporate career managing workgroups dominated by both males and females, I have experienced this difference consistently. I am having to mediate conflict of feelings with the female workgroups. The males tend to work it out between themselves.
I believe the decline in our ability to talk to each other is because we have made the mistake to adopt a matriarchal house replacing the previous patriarchal house. We no longer trust each other. The agenda is hidden. Backroom politics has replaced honest and direct communication. Hypersensitive people have moved to the head of the class and replaced those with thick skin and high coping skills.
Hard times create strong men that create good times. Good times create weak men that create hard times. I believe we are living in a time of weak men and that is why things are not going well.
A Pepsi commercial from 1970? This is your answer to white supremacy – it being the greatest threat to the US, according to Joe Biden and his Secretary's of State and Justice?