Difference and civil societiy

Sidling up to Difference with Kwame Anthony Appiah

This morning's installment of Krista Tippet "On Being" features her conversation with Appiah, a wise philosopher who has written Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.  He helps us go beyond superficial infatuation with novelty to think deeply about how to bridge real differences between people. 

Here is a tantalizing bit in which Appiah responds to Tippet's request that he define "conversation" and ends up discussing democracy.

Mr. Appiah: Exactly. Well, those sort of — you know, you're sitting down with a friend in a bar and you're chatting and it's about the Super Bowl or it'll be about Egypt. You're not talking to your friend about the Super Bowl because it makes any difference to what happens. The Super Bowl is over. You're not trying to — you know, you're not changing anything. Nor — I came into this studio with a Steelers cap on, as it happens, which I confess before the nation. But I'm not going to have — if I talk to somebody who's a fan of those other guys from Wisconsin, I'm not expecting them at the end of the conversation to say, "You're right, you know, the Steelers are definitely the team I should follow. They're definitely the better team." Obviously, they discuss it, talk about it, not to come to some kind of agreement, not to change each other, just to be together, enjoy one another's company.
If you have that background of relationship between individuals and communities that is in that sense conversational, then when you have to talk about the things that do divide you, you have a better platform. You can begin with the assumption that you like and respect each other even though you don't agree about everything, and you can maybe build on that. And you can know that, at the end of the conversation, it's quite likely that you'll both think something pretty close to what you both thought at the start. But you might at least have a deeper appreciation for the other person's, um, point of view, and that turns out to make it easier to accept the outcome, whether it's the outcome you favor or the outcome the other person favors.
People who've been heard and whose position is understood — this is one of the great virtues of democracy when it's working — tend to be more willing to accept an outcome that they wouldn't have chosen because they feel they've had voice; they've participated in the process. One of the reasons why those who say that we might have done a better job with abortion if we'd settled it through the legislature rather than through the courts is, I think, because if we'd settled through legislatures, we'd have had to have kept, as it were, talking to one another. Whereas, if you declare something to be a constitutional right, that's sort of a conversation stopper.

 That bit I put in bold reminds me of a reason that democracy as a system of decision making by voting requires democracy as feature of social life: because voting is not an essay question.  When we vote, we strip the decision of its reasons and its complexities and sometimes even of its consequences for both winners and losers.  Appiah's approach to difference calls for us to meet as people who have ideas and commitments rather than to allow ideas and commitments to prevent us from meeting.

He also addresses the persistent issue of how electronically mediated social contact effects the quality of our interactions.  (See the transcript or listen to the pod-cast.)