In the United States, we're grappling with a difficult contradiction: even as the country becomes more diverse, public opinion has become more polarized.
We have more opportunities than ever to brush shoulders and exchange ideas with people who are demographically and ideologically different than us.
But for a whole host of reasons, our lives have instead grown more insular. Social institutions such as churches are shrinking. Public spaces, from brick-and-mortar retailers to movie theaters, are in decline. Algorithms are intensifying ideological echo chambers. The media environment is in a permanent state of financial crisis. And the pandemic has exacerbated a cultural shift where people simply stay at home more.
As individuals, we have more power than ever to curate our cultural and social experiences to our narrow tastes. It's easy to reflexively reject ideas and people who don't comport with our own point of view. We have to work harder to encounter — and consider — new perspectives.
Conflicting Views
The cultural and political milieu in the United States is such that two people can see the same event in real time and have completely different perceptions of what happened. We talked to storytellers about how we can better understand and handle this phenomena.
"When I talk to any two people after I tell a story, they have different things to say," says storyteller Elizabeth Ellis. "They didn't hear the same tale.
"Everything I say, the listener hears — not just with their ears, but with their entire life's worth of experience. What they take from the story is different because their life experiences have been different."
In her craft, Elizabeth keeps elements of her stories ambiguous to leave room for people to pour their own imagination into the piece. "If I was telling a story and I said the word 'dog,' what you would see [in your mind's eye] would be shaped by your lifetime of experience with dogs. So you might be thinking of your great aunt's Pekinese that slept at the foot of your bed when you were a kid. And I'm thinking about the dogs that were unleashed at the Civil Rights marches. That's not the same dog! Not even close."
Storyteller Sheila Arnold has a similar practice. "I don't give every detail of every part of the story on purpose so that people can fill in their own details in their own way," she says, referencing a story she tells about a dog called Old Jack. "Inevitably, people will come up and say, 'Oh my gosh, I can so clearly see that Golden Retriever!' And I'm like, really? I know for sure I never said that."
Projecting imaginative details onto a story isn't bad in itself, but most people don't realize when they're doing it. That can lead to misunderstandings or even conflict.
""Everything I say, the listener hears — not just with their ears, but with their entire life's worth of experience."
— Elizabeth Ellis
Meaning in Conflict
It wouldn't be constructive — or, for that matter, correct — to insist that an attack dog is in fact a Pekinese. Instead of smoothing over or stamping out that difference in interpretation, a better approach is to explore how the different interpretations came about in the first place. What life experiences might lead one person to view a dog as harmless and loveable, and another to see it as a threat? In this paradigm, disagreement isn't a barrier; it becomes a tool we can use to better understand each other.
Storytelling, like all art, exists in the space between the artist and the audience, where intention and presentation come up against interpretation and understanding. When we share stories, whether it's from a stage or with a stranger, the goal isn't necessarily to arrive at an agreement. It is merely to co-exist in a moment and (hopefully) walk away from the experience feeling enriched.