A few weeks ago, my friends and I were sitting in a pizza place at 3 a.m. When our order was ready, two of my friends immediately sat down; at the same time, my other friend and I got up to go. You see, the other two wanted to stay there and eat, while we wanted to eat at home. We were at an impasse. The tension was thick. Who would win? Then one of us said, “How about we eat half here and half at home?” Genius! All four of us agreed. Suddenly, what had been a deadlock was now a unanimous agreement. No, this isn’t magic. This is compromise.
Human societies move forward in one of two ways: coercion or compromise. Either you force someone to agree with you, or you meet each other halfway. We were all rational human beings who realized we had more to gain by working together and much to lose from fighting about it. We also had something else going for us: we’re friends. We trust each other. So we compromised and all walked out of there alive. Had one of us been unwilling to do so, we might have never agreed. We might have burned that place to the ground.
Americans are a lot like customers in a pizzeria. We all want a slice of pizza, but there’s only so much to go around. How do we decide what kind of pizza we want? Who should be able to get the pizza? Should people on no-fly lists even be able to buy pizza? What is pizza anyway, and can’t we just give it to everyone for free? Up until recently, we Americans, the customers, trusted each other.
Even though we knew the guys on the other side of the vending machine liked a different kind of pizza, we trusted that they were willing to make compromises so that all of us could get at least some of what we wanted. After all, we were all in this restaurant together, right? We knew we had more to gain by working together, more to gain by the give and take of pragmatic compromise, than mindlessly feuding with each other over our differences.
Slowly, over years, we could build a pizza that our children would like to eat, one that we could be proud of ordering. That was the dream. God bless America.
But things have changed. People no longer trust each other. On both sides of the aisle, insurgent candidates have discovered that people want more than compromise. They want complete capitulation by the other side. Much ink has been spilled and breath expended reporting on the increasing polarization of the U.S. community. And as we have retreated to our partisan citadels, our non-political social life has also broken down.
In his book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” Robert Putnam writes about the decline of U.S. participation in team and community-based activities, most notably, bowling leagues. This breakdown in community has sowed seeds of distrust in the U.S.’s disparate communities. Social media and its lovely algorithms have fed this fire, by giving us complete and unfettered access to every person who has ever agreed with us and allowing us to block out those who don’t. Increasingly, the U.S. has become a country of people willing to burn the restaurant to the ground.
Compromise is not a dirty word. Compromise is an effective tool of political life. It is absolutely essential to non-violent conflict resolution. We must get past these tribal relationships, past dogmatic, unflagging resistance to compromise. We must learn how to work together again. We need to teach our kids to be rational, that we have more to gain by working together; that yes, those other guys on that side of the aisle aren’t perfect, but they’re people, and you know what? They’re not that bad.
And if we do that, then maybe we can all leave this place alive.