Curiosity as an Act of Courage: A Conversation with Mónica Guzmán
What if staying curious — even when it feels risky — is an act of courage? In this episode of Nonviolence Radio, journalist and bridgebuilder Monica Guzmán joins us to talk about the power of curiosity in a polarized world. Together we explore how fear, pain, and technology amplify division, and how curiosity can become a nonviolent force that keeps bridges standing, even when crossing them feels impossible. Guzmán shares insights from her work with Braver Angels, stories of rehumanization across political divides, and why questioning — even our own side — takes courage. At a time when polarization tempts us to burn bridges, curiosity reminds us to keep them.
“Anything courageous requires risk. You’re not risking anything by attacking the other side. What’s really brave is calling out your own side for making the culture toxic.” ~Mónica Guzmán
Transcript
Stephanie Van Hook: Good morning everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. We are from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California, and we are really passionate about nonviolence in our world. We think that there’s no problem in our world that can’t be solved with greater love, generosity, kindness even in the face of severe repression. It sounds idealistic to some, but we believe it’s a science and that there’s really good evidence out there that shows that it does work. And that’s what we try to highlight on this show. So this is a show of hope and solutions-building and thinking through some of the toughest challenges of our time. Do you think I got all of it, Michael?
Micheal Nagler: Wow. I think you just pretty much wrapped it up. All we can add maybe is my recent theory that we’re at the end of an era, speaking very broadly in big historical brush strokes, we’re at the end of a big era in which humanity was regarded as separate physical objects. And because that era is breaking down, it’s at its end, it’s scary. And that accounts really for a lot of the violence that’s going on in the world today. And so, if we could make visible the new era that’s coming, it would make a tremendous difference. It would be a tremendous relief from the violence, from the fear. And the key to that new era is exactly what you were just saying, the discovery of nonviolence.
Stephanie: The discovery that each of us has that power within us and that we can use it both individually and collectively together to expand its forces. And just because you’re acting alone doesn’t mean that the force is smaller than acting in a group either.
Michael: Yeah. There’s nothing small about the human individual when you really understand what is within a human being. But as you say, once nonviolence has been discovered, and we can’t go back. Now Gandhi has been here, Martin Luther King, many others, they’ve been here, shown us how the thing works. We know that we can implement it, we can institutionalize it in social forms and in governments. We know that it’s possible to do that now. So as a friend of ours says at the end of our film, “What are we waiting for?”
Stephanie: Oh, Rivera says that, but I am thinking about how you mentioned King and Gandhi. The thing is, that we recognize nonviolence in them. And so that’s a start. That’s a good start. Or, anybody that you associate with peace and nonviolence, say, “hey, they have that capacity.” The next step is to say, “I have that capacity too!” Gandhi’s famous for saying “I’ve not a shadow of a doubt that anyone can do exactly what I’ve done, even more,” I’ll embellish a little on what he is saying, “given that they come to this with the same dedication and effort.” that he put into it. Treat it like a practice, like a science.
Michael: Yeah. You blew by one of the most important things, in the nonviolence attitude, Steph, and that is to recognize that your opponent, who might be threatening you or you might have really bad feelings about, that the same desire for peace and life that you are recognizing within yourself is within that person.
Stephanie: The reason I blew by that, as you say, is also, again, going to Gandhi today, this is starting off strong. Gandhi’s starting off strong, but I was reading Father John Dear’s collection, Essential Gandhi, where he went through the collective works and picked out some really nice quotes from Gandhi. And one of those is that when you become a practitioner of nonviolence in a serious way, you no longer have opponents. Gandhi said, you may not regard any person as your enemy. So the whole dynamic changes. Other people might see you as their enemy.
Michael: That’s their problem.
Stephanie: Yeah. But that’s not how you see them. That’s right. And so you blew by that when you were using those big words like opponent.
Michael: Yeah, I shouldn’t say that. But what I meant was somebody who is practicing some kind of injustice or some kind of attempt to inhibit your fulfillment, which is Johan Galtung’s definition of violence, and that has pretty much prevailed in the field these days. So that follows that to enhance another person’s fulfillment, to help them be fulfilled, is the definition of nonviolence.
Stephanie: Yeah. And that looks different in different situations, but I think what we see, especially on the larger scale of countries, is that there is so much violence inherent in the way people are divided and the way systems are set up that we can’t see people as necessarily the ones who are inhibiting us, but a system that stunts human wellbeing. And so we need to turn toward those systems and reevaluate and reimagine how we want to engage with the systems around us. How we go about our economics, how we go about our food security, how we go about just peace and security. All of these things need to be reimagined so that by focusing on how things are done, we stop targeting individuals, which can be a never ending cycle of blame, and never get us very far, though it might give us a little bit of satisfaction for short-term time.
Michael: Very superficial.
Stephanie: But as nonviolent practitioners, we are looking at short-term change as well as deep, long-term transformation of society and how do we get there and how do we shift the way that we see ourselves and each other and through all that. Now, I was thinking about the one thing I hear a lot right now is that in the US the current administration is, on its policies around immigration in particular, but on a lot of things that they say, the cruelty is the point, is what the kind of mantra that’s going around about that. If there’s cruelty in a way that they’re being, what are they calling it “Peace through strength,” the idea is to scare people and show that you’re tough, and so the cruelty is a point, and I was thinking, that would make the solution really simple, wouldn’t it? Do you know where I’m going with this?
Michael: I don’t think I do.
Stephanie: Oh, then if cruelty is the point of an administration, then our job is to make kindness the point. Go out of our way to raise the goodness is the point of what we do. Those kind of random acts of senseless beauty.
Michael:. It isn’t senseless though. Beauty and kindness are the meaning themselves. And so the trick is to be able to resist the injustice of, not an opponent, mind you, but a person, without being against the welfare of that person. In fact, in wanting to help and facilitate the happiness of that person by preventing them from exercising cruelty, say, “This isn’t who you are.” It’s a beautiful picture.
Stephanie: It is a beautiful picture, and it’s so wonderful to be able to explore that and to find it and to recognize it.
Michael: And as you were speaking, Stephanie, it occurred to me that as you’re well aware, before I got into this business professionally, I was a literature man. And one of the works of literature that meant a very great deal to me was in a collection called the Dubliners by James Joyce, who was one of our most brilliant writers of the 20th century, and in that collection, he has a story called “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” where some people have been out canvassing for votes and they’re trickling in to the committee room at the end of the day to debrief and so forth. The bottles of beer are warming up on the fireplace and so forth. What he brings out very clearly in that story is how the level of discourse degenerates proportionally to the number of people in the room. So when it’s a couple of people, they’re having a perfectly reasonable conversation, and as more people are added in.
The conversation gets more and more about push-button, canned ideologies and less contact with reality. And that seemed to me to be in a short compass, the allegory of what our biggest challenge is, how do we take the goodness within the individual human being and leverage that out, scale it up to a society that’s not susceptible even to the kind of cruelty that we’re seeing around us today? That’s the challenge.
Stephanie: We spoke with Mónica Guzmán yesterday and she’s amazing. And she sees curiosity as very much part of the answer to bridge building and to going to that place that you’re talking about, Michael. And I’d really like to share that interview that we did with Mónica because given how divided this country is, and really any space where there’s rising authoritarianism and conflict, there’s going to be division and burning bridges, and there’s going to be people looking for ways to not do that, to come together to understand each other. And so Mónica’s really big on this idea of getting curious. Having conversations that aren’t just about, “this is what I think, and I’m never going to change,” but “I could be wrong about something. And I came to my opinion based on my experiences. How did you come to your opinion?” and how does a conversation really become a dialogue, a dialectic, in the sense of we get to synthesize together something new, become something different. And we talked about that, we talked about this kind of manufactured conflict and division in our society and how curiosity and conversations really help build that bridge to something better. She calls herself a bridge builder. She’s also a journalist and an author. She has a bestselling book called, I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, and she was featured in the New York Times, the Glenn Beck podcast and Reader’s Digest, and the book was named one of the 10 best books to read before college by US News, which is pretty cool. I just want to talk a little bit about some of the things that she’s doing in the organizations because they’re really great and a lot of people that listen to our show maybe have heard of these or other organizations she’s part of. And if not, definitely go check them out. She’s founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, where she works to build a world that sees itself. And she’s an advisor for Braver Angels, the nation’s largest cross partisan grassroots organization working to depolarize America. And she serves on the board of directors for The Viewpoints Project, which is a nonprofit dedicated to improving capacity for curious approaches to disagreement in educational settings. And she has a podcast called A Braver Way that in the runup to the 2025 election in the US equipped people with tools they needed to bridge the political divide in their everyday lives. She’s a Mexican immigrant, Latina and dual US/Mexico citizen and lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids, and she says she is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents. Aren’t you curious to hear from Mónica Guzmán Michael?
Michael: Bring her on.
Stephanie: Yeah, so we did interview her yesterday. I have to say it was a rush interview and my mic on the interview isn’t great, but I still think it’s worth listening to, just want to let people know that. Okay.
Mónica Guzmán: I’ve been thinking a lot about not just the connection between truth and trust, but the barriers people face when they even think about doing the work that I talk about and a lot of the work that you talk about. I got an email from a reader today that basically said, “how am I supposed to talk to the other side when they keep hurting me and they don’t even know that they’re hurting me, and they don’t realize that they’re causing the suffering that they’re blaming on my side?” And this came from one of the two political sides in America. But I’ve heard the same sentiment from both. And so it’s funny because I think sometimes where I sit is a place where I can see the pain, where others mostly see the politics. Yeah, it’s frustrating. It can be frustrating.
Michael: I think the politics very often comes right out of that pain, especially the pain of feeling disregarded and disrespected and there’s so much irrationality that happens that doesn’t need to, if only the human to human connection would be made.
Mónica: But we find so many reasons not to make the human to human connection, lots of really good justifications for a sense of threat, fear, harm that is inevitable. And what we end up often doing is reinforcing misperceptions that we can’t even tell are misperceptions or projections. But again, it’s so scary to get closer that we don’t. So I’m sorry to strike such a sad note. In some moments I’m a lot more vivacious, but this has the whole range though, doesn’t it? You go from feeling moments of tons of hope and you see what people are capable of and then, I don’t know, you walk away from somebody who just has so much despair and you carry some of that with you, and so that’s what my life is like doing this work.
Stephanie: Now we have something in common. And that’s also a tool that you teach too, is look for those spaces of commonality. But I have more liberal views and I come from parents who don’t have those views. And I’ve come to the decision that I’m not going to let that get in the way of my relationship with them because my relationship with them is more important than anything else to me. And, having conversations about political divides in the US right now, I find it interesting, the kinds of assumptions that are made or the way that people break down those relationships very quickly. If we don’t agree politically, then we can’t be friends anymore. We can’t sit at the same table anymore. And you’re actively teaching people how to think differently about whether they need to make that decision or not. And I wonder if you could talk about that in your experience there.
Mónica: Yeah, that is one of the most severe decisions we make, and my concern is that over the last several years, it’s become too easy to make that severe decision and that we exist in spaces that are so like-minded, that there’s not only a reinforcement of that narrative, you know, that if you don’t share this or that, or if that person believes this or that, then whatever relationship you’ve had can’t and shouldn’t survive, the meaningful difference now between you and in fact, to be a good person, you need to get distance. And to be well, you need to take that toxicity and put it way over there, to fight for the things you fight for, to adequately and morally hold to your convictions you need to push others away. There’s a decal I saw in a coffee shop once that’s been with me for a long time, and it said, “May the bridges I burn light my way.” And instantly, I related to that because there’s a sense of rugged individualism. There’s a sense of let’s make our boundaries, really truly, let’s make sure that each of us can walk in this world in a way that we can fully express ourselves and be confident. And I think that sometimes that tramples on an also beautiful virtue around community and around learning from each other and around vulnerability and humility. And those two things are in a very beautiful tension. But when you add the polarization of our time, it’s just this perfect storm of burned bridges all over the place.
As I often say, I’ve met plenty of people for whom I agree they made some choice to be very distant from someone where there’s a political difference, but it adds up to something much worse, unfortunately, like a severe non-acceptance and a horrible kind of almost abuse. I agree with those decisions, they may be there. But boy, I’ve heard of so many where I thought, I think this was avoidable. I don’t think you needed to break that bridge, but I’m not going to tell you. I can’t tell you that. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that, but I’m going to work on trying to cultivate a world that has more of a sense of its own skills when things get hard across difference, because in those places where things get difficult to cross difference there is so much room for discovery and growth and learning and transformation, but we get so scared of the narratives that tell us that all we are going to face is hurt and harm and pain or the judgment of others, and that just keeps us away. But if you never get close enough to realize that the person you think is a monster, is not the monster, then those misperceptions are going to rule so much of our lives. So it’s a very tricky thing. It’s a very personal thing, but as I often say, the most important thing to do with a bridge is to keep it. Not to cross it, just keep it. Sometimes that’s courage enough.
Michael: Yeah. Mónica, something dawned on me while you were talking just now, and that is that this desire for a diverse discourse environment grows out of nature itself. The principle of life in nature is unity in diversity. And when nature becomes uniform, it loses the ability to respond to stressors, and things die. So that’s not just an analogy I feel somehow. It’s a very deep rooted principle. So you are really onto something.
Mónica: No, that, that’s very well put. It really is in nature. When we say diversity is strength, there’s many different types of diversity, and diversity of thought is one of those. But you’re absolutely right, it is nature. There’s a resilience in the capacity to be around difference. And who was it? John Stuart Mill who said “he who knows only his side of the case knows little of that.” You know what I mean? When you stop questioning or interacting with folks who think differently from you, it’s not just that you don’t understand them, you then cease to understand yourself because we’re all in a world of many things and we have to figure out our relationship to that world. And if we only are surrounded by like-minded people, we fail to even see ourselves.
Stephanie: I wonder how much technology plays into all of this, specifically the internet, in terms of keeping us in siloed communities and not rewarding us for thinking differently or even tolerating conflict in some ways. I watched the talk that you gave 13 years ago, or 15 years ago now. It was about taking a day off from technology and replugging into your community, but things have really escalated over 15 years too, so I bet you’ve been thinking about that.
Mónica: Quite a bit. I feel like we’ve been gifted by nature this amazing toolkit to communicate, and we say the word communicate glibly but when you really think about it, each of us carries so much meaning and story and narratives, all these things. And just the fact that I can even transfer any of that to you. We use this imperfect technology called language, but we don’t just use language. You’re looking at me and you can see my gestures and my smile, and you can see hopefully some signs of goodwill, right? There’s laughter that breaks the tension. You just laughed. It’s our gestures, it’s our body, it’s our tone, it’s our voice. The internet squeezes all that down to words and emojis, maybe really short videos to fit into tiny little attention spans, to fit into economic models that use attention as currency to fit into how easily we gravitate toward things that give us dopamine and a sense of pleasure that is quick and so subconscious as to be beyond our notice that this is the world we are in. The internet is a non-place that makes us into non-people. And I’ve seen it happen. I’ve talked to so many people who when I meet them in person, boy, they’re every bit as complex as you’d imagine, and they’re so amazing and they’re wonderful, and you go and look at their Facebook even they will tell me, I’ve talked with folks like, “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I said that.” On that online platform, and it’s a performance, it’s a panopticon. We’re on display for so many people to see and we desperately want to belong and ugh. And so it’s not impossible to have great conversations on social media about complicated things, but it is harder because you have to translate every single thing that the human body can communicate into words, and we’re not built to do that very naturally. We don’t have that practice. And like you said, the reward mechanisms of the attention economy don’t prioritize nuance.
Michael: That’s an understatement. The science has now enabled us to talk about nonverbal communication on much deeper, much more concrete levels. And for example, we discover the fact that the human heart radiates electromagnetic field and it goes out for about eight feet, so that when you’re within eight feet of a person, you’re sensing them on a level that is absolutely impossible when you aren’t in so close. But brains are just, they’re just amazing things that are constantly broadcasting to one another.
Mónica: I had no idea. I’m also not surprised though. I just have this sense that science hasn’t come close to understanding all the ways in which we show up to each other in person.
Michael: Yeah. But it’s getting a little closer.They have better tools and more imagination going on now.
Mónica: Yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness for that. I go through phases and right now I’m in a no social media phase. I posted a video some months ago on my Instagram going, “it appears that I’m slowing down, Bye everybody.” And that was that. And so this summer has been quiet in those places, but I’ve felt the volume turn up around my kids and my friends in the world and the places that I’ve gone to, and it’s been wonderful. But I don’t think it’s necessarily, this is what’s good and this is what’s bad. I think it’s mostly, people have to know themselves and what they need and what they value and where they want to deploy their own attention. The worst thing about what technology’s done is not that it’s given us so many other places that could be harmful to us to deploy our attention. It’s that it’s led us to lose our own agency around our attention. That’s all. If you can recover your agency, and I really enjoy logging into TikTok, I especially enjoy it before bed or in the morning, or it makes me really happy after lunch. Great. But actually ask yourself that. And a lot of us don’t ask ourselves that and so we end up being like pawns in other people’s games. And we’ve got to be really careful with that because the author, Amanda Ripley calls them conflict entrepreneurs. There’s people making money, lots and lots of money over our division, and it doesn’t make us happy and it doesn’t make us whole people who are happy at the end of the day. Do you know what I mean?
Stephanie: That’s what I’ve been curious about with your work too, how bringing people together is really pointing to the fact that there is a manufacturing of division. And how people respond is by rehumanizing each other, moving from dehumanization to rehumanization. Can you talk about your work of bringing people together to hear each other’s stories and these kind of rehumanization processes that you engage with?
Mónica: Yeah. What I’m for is curious conversation. That’s what I’m for. A lot of times people have something that isn’t quite conversation, something that is not open and messy and vulnerable, something that people try to control. Something where people just want to emerge the victor, and none of these things allow for real exchange. I find that when two people are in conversation or allow that possibility to emerge, you’re seeing what’s at the border between you and it’s revealing the border to you. It’s showing you about you, and it’s showing them about them. And you ask questions. What a concept, right? You ask questions. A lot of us, it’s as soon as we hear something we don’t like from someone, the reaction comes up and that reaction, we end up caught in the response that we make or we interrupt. We go, “No!” or we make it about us really quickly. It’s remarkable how little time we spend actually hearing each other out. A lot of folks, as soon as they hear something they don’t like, they’ll either shut down and they’ll stop listening and they’ll start planning their response. They’ll start figuring out their exit strategy. If they’re more aggressive, they’ll just interrupt and say something back. But none of these things allow us to learn from each other. So that’s what it’s really about, is can we engage the posture of curiosity? Even when our emotional reactions would have us do something different, and that takes a lot of mindset change. It takes the embrace of certain truths that we don’t remind ourselves often enough. For example, each one of us right now is dead wrong about something. We just don’t know what, you know what I mean? Every now and then, I remind myself of that because if somebody has a different opinion, then I don’t get to get away with Just stating my opinion and moving on my own way. Now I get to explore my opinion with a witness that is coming from a different place. That’s a really cool opportunity for me, and we haven’t even brought up persuasion. Like our society traffics in persuasion. The whole theory of a democratic republic is that people are able to exchange ideas, but it has to be done in a good faith enough way where, you know, people are receiving each other.
If we’re not receiving each other, we’re just waiting for our turn to yell. That’s not going to uphold anything that the founders intended or that any of us really deserve. But persuasion only works if we’re receptive, if we’re as receptive to each other’s convictions as we want them to be to ours, like it makes no sense that we all want to be able to speak our minds and speak our truths, but if we don’t practice giving other people real room to do that, then how do we expect them to do it for us?
Michael: One of the many things I love about what you’re saying and your work, Mónica, is it’s what I call a stealth mechanism. You’re actually changing politics without letting the politicians know. In other words, if you could change the human to human interaction and change the discourse environment, that would be a huge political move. But it wouldn’t seem like one at first.
Mónica: Yeah, exactly. And to be more specific too, to Stephanie’s question about my work, I’m an advisor at Braver Angels, which is an extraordinary organization, just cross partisan grassroots, more than a hundred chapters across the country, co-led by conservatives and liberals. All about coming together across political difference. Not so they can change their minds on the issues, but so they can change their minds about each other and be able to talk about the issues constructively at all. This organization has helped people heal relationships. It’s helped communities get unstuck where polarization has just stuck them, in small communities and bigger ones. We’ve done workshops for members of Congress in DC like all up and down, but these are the opportunities that are more and more endangered. And so we have to remind each other that we can do this – and that’s one of the best things at the end of many of our programs, people are asked, “What did you take out of this?” And so many times people will say, “I just didn’t realize that people on the other side were generous, smart, that they agreed with a lot of my values, that they were capable of listening to me.” All of these things over and over again, they’ll say this, and it’s correcting the signals we get in our media and the concoctions of our own imagination in a polarized world with the reality of actual human interaction with people who are different from you. So that’s also it is just, I try to amplify opportunities to do that, and motivate people in their own lives to do that. Even if you don’t know someone who voted for the other person, you probably know someone who you are just assuming, agrees with you on everything but doesn’t. Not really, because we’re all kind of covering up those things in ourselves just to be liked and to get along because we’re so scared that the truth is something unacceptable. And I don’t think we can have a real honest society if our truths are unacceptable.
Stephanie: I’m also wondering about people being able to disagree with, say I identify with a certain political party, to be also able to disagree with that political party. Sometimes when I was younger, I would feel that because I identify as liberal, I therefore need to agree with every single issue that is being pushed as a liberal issue without having thought it through fully. And I see that when we’re having conversations across divides, I think what we’re really hoping is that people can question whether just sticking to a party line is helpful and fully humanizing for ourselves. And I wonder if you’ve come across that as well in your work of being able to question even your own political assumptions.
Mónica: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, when it comes to the labels and the parties have really, boy, they’ve got our attention, and they would love nothing more than for everyone to be in lockstep. That’s the way the political machine works, and that’s not supposed to be the way the public political consciousness works, but in the last, I don’t know, 10, 20 years, it’s become more and more of the same thing. There’s like this grip, and I would say that’s largely because of the threat of the other side, the perceived threat of the other side. This last election, both sides heard if the other side wins, that’s the end of our country. That’s the end of our democracy as we know it. So the stakes were driven up so high that nuance becomes not only unproductive, but dangerous. Questioning the convictions of your own side becomes a distraction and harmful. We need to be completely focused on defeating them. Don’t you ask questions! We just got to unify and fight. So that is part of what is in the air that makes it seem punishable to ask questions of your own side. People do it of course, but they’ll do it more privately than they will loudly, because who knows who’s going to come after them. And that’s really interesting though because you also see what’s going on. The number of registered independents has just skyrocketed, right? So people are sensing a kind of exhaustion. They know that this is not sustainable and that this can’t work, that they’re going to need some freedom from these labels one way or another. So I see a lot of things coming up in media and politics and general civic life, where people are just staking a claim for independent thinking, and I think we’re doing a really lovely kind of correction right now. I’m hopeful that’s happened. The last thing I’ll say is just that I think that right now there’s a little bit of performance art that happens, especially online, where it’s perceived as brave for one side to attack the other. It’s not brave. It’s not brave. Anything courageous requires risk. You’re not risking anything. You’re getting points from your side for attacking the other side. That’s not hard. That’s par for the course. Where what’s really brave is calling out your own side for making the culture one that becomes more and more toxic for our entire discursive health and political health. That’s what takes courage and when I see that, I get really happy. That’s where there’s risk.
Michael: I really liked this statement of yours that I pulled out of some conversation where you said we have to reject what the world tells us about who people are. And I‘ve got to take that down to a very deep level. That the world is telling us that we’re consumers and we’re material objects and we’re separate from one another, especially in the commercial world. And that’s such a travesty of who we really are. We really all want, as St. Augustine said, we want the widest possible community with one another that we can possibly have.
Mónica: Yep. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. There’s philosophical and religious traditions going back thousands of years that talk about one of the roots of evil is just separation at all. Really fundamentally, we really lose something when we think that we have nothing in common, that we don’t share something. And it just doesn’t take long for people to be present with each other in just a calm neutrality, for them to realize that this person that I suspect, they’re also just pouring themselves coffee and they just smiled talking to somebody, and maybe I can sit and smile with them too.
And I don’t mean to dismiss the very real consequences of giant political divides and issues where, for some folks, it’s not just a headline, it’s not just a debate or an opinion. Some people live with the consequences of our debates much more than others, and it’s natural for folks to feel that the stakes are much, much higher for them. And then to work as hard as they can to share their perspective and say there’s something that folks are missing. And all I can dream of in that scenario is that we just stay curious because curiosity is the craving for knowledge. And in order to be curious, you have to know what you don’t know. You have to know that you don’t know, and if you stay in too much certainty about the world, you’ll never ask questions. You’ll reach conclusions without even opening yourself up. So listening, true listening is impossible without curiosity. True learning is impossible without curiosity. So it takes humility, it takes all of these things, and that’s hard enough in a world that is so uncertain and therefore so uncomfortable, that manufacturing certainty becomes one of our coping strategies. And so in order to be curious, we have to resist that, and that’s a big tall order for a lot of folks in a lot of situations, and I recognize that.
Stephanie: We’re here at Nonviolence Radio, we were just listening to a conversation that Michael and I had with Mónica Guzmán, bridge builder, author of “I Never Thought of it That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.” And boy, Michael, , we had that interview with her yesterday, which we just shared and I was just taking note after note to take things that I heard differently or heard again, or heard more deeply. And, just let me look at my notes here. Beautiful things. She’s talking about the attention economy, when we cease to understand others we cease to understand ourselves, that there’s a resilience in our capacity to be around difference. And she’s working for a world with a sense of its own skills. Anything courageous requires risk. She’s so brilliant and, and what a brilliant teacher to have in these, as she calls it, “dangerously divided times.” And I look forward to studying this show again with people because there’s just really a lot in there. I do want to go over some of the tools and tips that she did give us about curious conversations.
Michael: I completely agree. She is brilliant, and it was like one insightful idea after another. Bang, bang, bang. And so it will take time for us to really assimilate all of that. And I think the more we do, the better off we will be, the better we’ll understand the situation we’re in and how to tunnel our way out of it.
Stephanie: Yeah. I took notes just in terms of what tools has she given us for curious conversations. So you have some notes too. Let’s see if we come to any agreement or if you can think of any that I didn’t write down.
So the first is, first of all, commit to being a bridge builder. That’s the first thing. I want to get beyond these divides, I’m committing to a practice of it in some way. And even if I’m not building bridges, at least I’m not burning them. Okay, so that commitment starts.
Ask questions of people. Don’t interrupt them when they say something that you disagree with. Keep listening when they say things that you disagree with.
Be receptive to other people’s convictions and truths, which gives people room to also be receptive to yours. So if you’re asking for receptivity to what you believe, you really have to offer that to others too.
Look for agreement, look for places that you can agree. Remember that people have more in common than we realize. That’s what she’s found throughout her work is that people go through this process from dehumanization to rehumanization, where they come together and realize that, hey, we actually can agree on things. So if you go into a conversation knowing that there’s some things that you have in common and that maybe you don’t know them yet, you’ll discover them later.
A funny thing that also is a key is don’t argue on the internet. The internet is not a place for conflict conversations, really, because the human heart, the human interaction is so much more rich and diverse when we’re in person.
Reclaim your attention is also reclaiming your agency around your attention. Know where you’re putting your attention. Make choices on your own. Don’t be pushed around by the attention economy.
Don’t attack others. Remember that nuance is not dangerous for rehumanization. In fact, nuance is dangerous for conformity.
Be humble and recognize that you don’t know. There’s things that you do not know, and there’s something that we’re all wrong about somewhere.
There’s a lot in there and I’m sure that there’s more. Did I miss any that you came across?
Michael: Oh one thing that she touched on that I found kind of essential is where she was talking about decisions in the political realm that were not based on evidence, they’re based on feeling, and, that led me to realize how often I have thought listening to political discourse, such as it is going on these days, that it’s all about push buttons and emotional reactions. And not about decision making. That’s where our democracy is falling down. Democracy is supposed to be a communal decision making process, not a struggle for power, for advantage of one side or another. And notice how close she came to making the same point that I was trying to make about “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” That the more, and you made this point too, that the more people get together in a group, it’s all about defending that group, which quickly becomes defending my group against another group, and bye bye discourse. And another thing that occurred to me somehow, this came out of all of that conversation, re-listening to it today and listening to it yesterday, was how, in the long arc of history again, which is kind of the modality I’ve been thinking in recently, what we have been doing one age after another is trying to sanitize violence instead of resolving it, instead of converting it back into the raw energy of compassion and the desire for community that we were talking about with Mónica. In the ancient world as an attempt to escape war and random violence that could break out and destroy whole communities, they tried to institutionalize it into animal sacrifice.
Stephanie: You’re getting deep on us here. Michael, you’ve gone pretty far. You’ve gone down the rabbit hole. Yes.
Michael: Bear with me.
Stephanie: Bring us out.
Micheal: Okay. Slowly working my way out. In order to continue this process of sanitizing or masquerading violence we then, in the Roman era, we have these gladiatorial combats.
But people have noticed, like our hero, René Girard, have noticed that it’s the same dynamic, repackaged. And then we get into sports. And I got some very interesting news items that I might have time to bring up in a bit. And what we’ve been doing age after age is finding cleverer ways of disguising violence without resolving it. And that’s why I think we’re really at the end of an age now. We’ve got to stop putting it on the shelf. We’ve got to stop pushing it aside. We’ve got to confront it and convert it.
Stephanie: We got to study war no more, Michael.
Michael: Amen
Musical Interlude
Stephanie: That was quite an appropriate little interlude there. Michael, so why don’t you transition us into some hopeful news and we’re quite curious about the Nonviolence Report, what’s happening in your world of nonviolence that you’ve been following, and share some good news with us for a bit, Michael.
Michael: Yeah, let me try to do that. There is some. And we do sometimes overlook it. Let me start with a kind of negative good news that the world is rising up. There are something like 56 active conflicts going on in the world…
Stephanie: That’s all? Only 56?
Michael: Out of 135 countries. Where’s the rest of you guys? And in one way or another, nation after nation, group after group is trying to put their foot down and say that this conflict in Gaza has got to stop. In other words, there’s some recognition that even though this is a relatively small geographical area, something is happening to the human spirit in there, which affects everybody in the world. So people are starting to back out of that and, oh, in one case, the Italian football association wanted to keep Israel out of the World Cup. So that’s a negative way of responding. But in fact, there is, it’s a legitimate question here, why the organization banned Russia over its invasion and occupation of Ukraine, but has not banned Israel for what is going on in Gaza. And of course, the reason is that behind Israel is the military and political clout of the world’s remaining superpower, the United States.
Yet in Israel itself, a nation of close to 10 million people. About the size of New York City in terms of population. Not a whole lot bigger in terms of footprint either. In that relatively small land, 30,000 men and women (and both are draftable in Israel), 30,000 men and women have left the country. Or announced their refusal to participate. Now why are they refusing to participate? They could be doing that partly because they don’t want to risk getting hurt in combat, but I think a lot of them are doing it as a statement of protest, which goes very far in Israel because of the intense pressure of “security.” Somebody who doesn’t shoulder their responsibility, (I almost said, “shoulder their rifle”), to help defend the country is regarded as a kind of traitor, and on an existential level given what happened in Europe in the second World War. So the fact that these people are standing aside and saying, “no, I won’t do this,” is starting to mount up to a great deal of pressure, both within and around the country and throughout the world, to saying that this slaughter has got to stop and one would hope, I’m hoping that, A: this effort succeeds and the war on Gaza has to stop, and B: we sit back and think, “Gosh, how did we get into this situation and how are we going to get out of it?” As our friend Kazu Haga says, “I’m not just opposed to this war or that war, I’m opposed to war.” And the only way to end it is to build a robust regime of peace based on nonviolence.
Stephanie: I like the friend’s bumper sticker that says “I’m already against the next war.”
Michael: Yeah, that’s a good one. Shifting over to some other things that are going on in the United States, for example, Rivera Sun has a Nonviolence News research archive, which has a lot of material. This week, for example, there are 66 articles including one on how a radio program in Nigeria, which was a child-led program, doesn’t that sound fun, that they’re offering vision and healing after years of insurgent violence in that country. And there’s an interesting analysis of how resistance practices differ between the first presidency of Trump and the second one, which leads me to think that there’s a kind of local learning going on, which I have always felt, and I do still feel is the key to how nonviolence has got to proceed. And that is by learning and feedback which doesn’t often happen, but it’s starting to be recognized more and more. There are a number of organizations that have picked up the ball now. One of them, of course, is Indivisible, which has an ambitious new initiative called One Million Rising, strategic non-cooperation to fight authoritarianism. Now, as usual, I have a little bit of a, what shall I say, a minor problem with this…
Stephanie: That should be a section on this: “I have a problem with that.” We need to have a part of your new section. Some kind of noise or something we make.
Michael: Yeah, I have a problem with that.
Stephanie: What do you have a problem with?
Michael: With the emphasis on numbers and of course they do play an important role. A protest of 10, a hundred people is a lot easier to ignore than a protest of 1 million people. On the other hand, a protest of 12 million people was ignored in the runup to the Iraq war, and more and more people are beginning to recognize, and this is part of the learning process that I referred to, they’re starting to recognize the need to learn from and improve, to take in feedback, to ask ourselves what were the best practices? Where did we go wrong? So that’s One Million Rising. And then there’s an effort called the Horizons Project on how civil resistance can undermine the pillars of authoritarian rule.
Stephanie: That’s a great newsletter, by the way, the Horizons Project they send out a newsletter once a month. That’s just so rich of “Here’s what we’re reading, listening to.” It’s a really, really rich and thoughtful and curated newsletter. Sorry. Interruption.
Michael: You are forgiven. And I want to just close with recognition that I usually include of one of our favorite organizations, which is Nonviolent Peaceforce. They are working all over the world. They’re helping the Yazidis in Iraq, the Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They’ve, of course been working in South Sudan for a long while, and just a whole list of them. Let me mention too, very briefly, this one called Protection in Isolation. Individuals, children in particular, young people, have been under threat in Myanmar, which has the military dictatorship, and they’re partnering with local church networks to protect those young people. They’re enhancing food security through protection.
And finally once again they are helping the Yazidis and a direct quote from a Yazidi woman named Dima, “Before, I didn’t have any responsibility toward my community, but now I feel that my community is my home and I have the confidence that I can change it for the better.” That is a classic example of the change in consciousness that a little bit of nonviolent intervention can create.
Stephanie: Were there two? Was there one more?
Michael: Let me see, there was the Myanmar one and the Yazidi, actually there were three, if you don’t mind, but who’s counting?
Stephanie: We’ll be good. Alright, Michael, thank you so much for that Nonviolence Report.
It was very interesting and we definitely have more over at our website at mettacenter.org. We want to thank our guest today, Mónica Guzmán. And she’s the author of, “I Never Thought Of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.” We want to thank our mother station, KWMR. Isn’t community radio a wonderful thing everybody should support? And we want to thank everyone who helps make the show possible including our friends over at the Pacifica Network and at Waging Nonviolence, and you all of our listeners. We do want to also do a shout-out to our friend Sophia Pechaty, who has been on the Metta team for a couple of years now, and she’s moving on to bigger and brighter horizons and we’ll miss her very much, but hopefully we’ll see her again and maybe even have her on the show in the future. So until the next time, everybody please take care of one another and be curious until the next time.