How America lost its mind—and how to get rationality back | John Inazu

• "Move your guilty ass to Ferguson or shut your pie hole. Dave from Chicago." I'd written this article about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown—and I think Dave's response to me is part of a larger problem in our society. When we encounter ideas that we don't like, we shut them down or dismiss them instead of engaging with them. The question is: "What do we do about it?"

I'm John Inazu, and I'm the author of "Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference." The differences that we have don't just affect what we think, but how we think and how we see the world. This plays out all around our lives: Red states and Blue States. Whole Foods and Chick-Fil-A. Fox News and MSNBC. Our country faces two distinct challenges right now: The first is we're too quick to dismiss and insult other points of view. The second challenge, just as problematic, is we surround ourselves with people who think just like us and who don't actually challenge our ideas.

Imagine what my own writing would look like if I only shared drafts with my mom, who thinks everything I write is gold. One of the new challenges we face today is with social media. And it's not that the news is more partisan or that we have more echo chambers—we've always had those—the challenge I think, though, is that the volume of what we're hearing has just ratcheted up. When I was growing up, I would get the news maybe twice a day: I'd read the morning paper, and I'd watch the evening news. Now, I'm getting news updates every three minutes on my phone. And that's reinforcing what I think; that's making me angrier at the people I don't agree with, but I'm not challenging my ideas.

So one of the things we need to do is put a pause on the instant updates and find the spaces where we can actually reflect. "Confident Pluralism" is a framework for engaging across difference. Confidence doesn't mean arrogance or certainty; it means being secure enough in your own beliefs that you aren't afraid to engage with others and have them challenged. Through confidence, we can better embrace "pluralism." Pluralism doesn't mean relativism or pretending like our differences don't matter; it means recognizing the reality of our deep differences and working toward common ground.

One reviewer of my book suggested that it was "doomed to immediate irrelevance." And I don't think that's true. I actually have some optimism that we can move forward, and one of the reasons is that we've been here before. We've long had deep differences in our country, and sometimes even against great odds, we've found a way to maintain a modest unity.

So what can you and I do in our daily lives in our interactions with other people? Rather than demand acceptance, we can choose tolerance. And instead of insisting on moral certainty, we can engage others in humility. And rather than resorting to outrage, we can cultivate patience. Every one of us can choose to modulate our social media practices. We can choose to diversify our news feeds to make sure we're hearing more than one side of a story. We can choose to reach out to someone who's different than us to share a meal or a conversation.

I seldom find someone who has nothing to offer me. But actually, even the people who disagree with me the most have some insight, or some perspective, or some bit of wisdom that's going to make me a better person, a better citizen, a better friend—and I learn best when I'm open to listening to other people. We're not always going to bridge ideological differences, but we can start to bridge relational differences, and we can start to see each other as human beings.