Curiosity is an unlikely super power. For us and our species. It can help to bridge gaps. If we genuinely want to learn from the other, we are not likely to hate the other. We can appreciate the other and make it easier to learn from her or him.

If polarization is a problem, as many of us believe it to be, how can we address that problem? Here are some options Will Braun offered us in our class. Some possible strategies:

1. We can yell. Denounce. Cancel. Bash. We can be like the person holding a gun, gazing at the horizon, and as soon as they appear we can shoot them down. This is actually quite common. In what world are these strategies helpful?

2. We can argue and reason with the other. But when was the last time an argument from the other side convinced you of anything? When was the last time I convinced someone from the other side of anything?  Frankly, I can’t remember any successes. Evidence indicates that failure is common; success almost non-existent. Studies have shown the more facts you give the other side the less likely you are going to persuade them to change their minds. Argument seems futile.

3. Use sophisticated jargon. This is very common on the left, though it happens too on the right. The left has their language and analysis and so does the right. The left talks about bias, racism, exploitation and things like that. The right accuses the other of being woke, that is the latest way of dismissing the left. Again, this usually causes the other side to entrench and never come out again.

4. Fight like hell. You can try to be strategic, smart, learned, and effective and you end up being none of those things. Another exercise in futility.

5. Listen. Now this option has possibilities. Are you not curious about what the other will say and think and do? Curiosity can be a super power. Will Braun did not use this language. It is mine. If you go to the other side and say I want to learn from you. I want to hear what you are saying. For most of us this is very hard. Braun admitted it was hard for him. But something happens when you change to this approach. It really is a superpower. It often takes courage to make the first move to approach the other side with curiosity. As Braun said, “This can turn down the temperature.”

Braun said he has a friend who is a strong Trump supporter and lives in Texas. The two of them though can talk to each other, with the temperature lowered. They disagree with each other, but they do so respectfully because they remain friends. As a result, they are each less likely to demonize each other. Braun said, “Then you hold some tension. If instead you say, screw all those other people I am letting go, then the tension snaps like a rubber band.” It is gone. Then you go to your side and the other goes to her side. Does that create a better society? Braun argues that for the longer term it does not. It does not help the weak and vulnerable. They are not better off.

I know whereof Will Braun spoke, when he told our class about his trepidation about moving back to the Bible Belt near Winkler Manitoba. I had exactly the same experience, moving back to the south eastern Bible belt of Steinbach after 7 years of university. I dragged my lovely exotic French wife, Christiane with me. And she was fearful of what this move would mean. It was a big change from life in the big smoke. But she was brave and came with me.  She might not have realized how anxious I was about this move too. I had never intended to come back to Steinbach, but all of a sudden it just happened, when the local lawyer hired me right out of law school. I was not at all sure whether or not I would fit in either. Most of my friends were gone. Not many of us came back from University, at least so it seemed to me at the time. And just like Will Braun, the people here seemed strange, because they were so different from the people I have been living with in the past 7 years. But I was thrown into the deep end, as was Christiane, even more than I.

I think Braun had it easier than I did. He had kept his faith more or less intact, and both of our communities were places where faith, or lack of faith was vitally important. I kept my doubts more or less to myself and my close friends who understood this. My alienation was quiet but deep.  Here Braun and I were in similar conditions.

It took a while, but gradually I started to realize that I did not have all the answers about these people in the country—these people that were largely from the Bible belt.  I particularly felt this in Niverville a small town that at first seemed very conservative to me.  My boss had asked me to work there every Wednesday night.  Many of those people were from Paraguay or Mexico or other places in South America. They mainly spoke low German, a language I had to learn on the job. They wanted to speak low German and I tried to speak it. I was grateful when they did not laugh at my broken low German with German and English words mixed in. They liked it that I tried. That’s all they needed.

I got to know these people and I got to like them. We had different viewpoints but that did not matter. I realized they were good people. People I could trust. Of course, with some rare exceptions. We were not that different after all. They had much more conservative views than I did.  But I was no better than them. I still kept my views, as did they, but we could get along.

John O’Donoghue was right: “Part of the awakening of any life, is the arrival of contradiction within that life…It is sometimes in the most unusual places that you discover the gift of the beautiful.” These contradictions arrived in my life, and I had to accept them.

I remember many years later, after I had been working in Niverville for decades. I had worked there one day a week only because I had a busy practice in Steinbach.  I reluctantly came to realize I would have to turn that practice to another young lawyer who had more time and could devote his whole time and attention to the practice there. He has never looked back.

I remember too when that happened how sad my secretary was. She said she loved working with those people from Niverville. She was a town girl from Steinbach but she would miss them. I was surprised. But I realized I felt exactly the same way. The contradictions had melted away.

Our facilitator for the course Christiane and I took at Canadian Mennonite University, as part of their outreach to old people, was Will Braun. He gave us his opinions of to live a modern life in a fractured and polarized society. And he encouraged us to make our own thoughts on the subject.

A few years ago he and his young family moved into the southern Manitoba Bible Belt where he really felt in some ways out of place, even though he grew up there.

Braun moved back to his old home town and wanted to live in the country a little bit off the grid. They wanted to do a little bit of farming. Alternative living, grow your own food and live a simple life. The rural dream. He thought it was difficult because he believed he and his family did not really fit in. Most people had different values than he and his family had. He said, “it was hard not to feel judgmental and somewhat isolated.”

They had worked hard building up their barn that became the centre piece of their new rural life. Then one day, that barn caught fire and to him it felt their “ethical high ground went up in smoke.” He knew the smoke going up was a high dose of greenhouse gas emissions. And they were left with a big pile of toxic garbage. Their life reduced to rubble. It tore Brown apart and it was a low point of his life.

But then one day, his neighbours showed up. He had “considerable difficulty” with some of those neighbours, but here they were with their equipment prepared to help. “They didn’t even want a thank you.”  It’s just what neighbours do, particularly in the country. One guy he had trouble with brought him bales, without being asked. Braun began to see these people were not one sided. They were rounded, full, and complex. Not need for treating them like card board cutouts. Polarization had not place here. They were good people, even if not perfect. It did not matter that they have very conservative views. It was good.

Here was the arrival of contradiction, as O’Donoghue called it. Braun thought he had some things figured out, and these people were not part of that answer. Yet here they were. He still thinks these people had some things wrong, that he had right. This is a strongly held viewpoint. But he could not dismiss these people or write them off or think that somehow he was better than that. That was not possible.

Here Will Braun was feeling low, and vulnerable, and beat up, and he had to deal with big contradiction. This was the fundamental contradiction: People are good and bad at the same time. Just like me. It was no more complicated than that. And as well, Braun had to understand what O’Donoghue said, “It is sometimes in the most unusual places that you discover the gift of the beautiful.” For Braun, the arrival of contradiction was a precious arrival, just as O’Donoghue said it was.