Anne-Marie Slaughter
Says More…
This week in Say More, PS talks with Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department, CEO of the think tank New America, and Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Project Syndicate: In January, you highlighted a fundamental flaw in prevailing approaches to conflict resolution: in some cases, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the two sides “inhabit distinct, unbridgeable sensory worlds,” making the quest for anything more than a “cold peace” practically futile. How applicable is this insight to cases of extreme domestic political polarization, such as in the United States, where supporters and detractors of Donald Trump seem not just to perceive reality differently, but to perceive different realities?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: It is a very similar dynamic. Like Palestinians and Israelis, Democrats and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans consume different media – from news to entertainment – and perceive both their experiences and the information they receive through different lenses. They also tend to live in highly homogeneous communities of like-minded people, who share their habits and reinforce their worldviews.
My analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian divide was informed by the book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong. His point, which I think absolutely applies to US domestic divisions, is that our lived experience is determined significantly by the sensors with which we perceive the world around us. For example, because humans can see many colors but have rather weak senses of smell, the world we perceive is entirely different from that of, say, dogs, which can see in only two colors but have a capacity for smell that is unimaginable to us. So, even if we could talk to dogs, finding common ground, in terms of lived experience or perceptions of reality, would presumably be extremely difficult, if not impossible.