talk and the talk is about the
polarization of society in the United
States and in Britain and what we can do
to try and resolve that it’s about the
growing divide between different groups
of people in America and it’s about the
breakdown of consensus it’s about how
there are fewer and fewer people
inhabiting the center of public
discourse because it’s in the center
where people can come from more extreme
views they can converge on a center
ground and they can debate their
position and they can compromise and
eventually reach agreement but in
America different groups of people are
starting to hold much more extreme views
and they’re congregating around the edge
meaning that the space for consensus and
agreement is becoming less and less so
the talk is in two parts and the first
will sketch out the problem and the
second will try and identify solution in
the first part I’ll talk about the
polarization that’s happening across
attitudes towards immigration race and
also talk about the physical division
that’s happening and the physical
separation that’s happening between
different groups of people America is
called the United States of America but
of course it’s increasingly looking like
a dis United States of America because
increasingly there is no cohesive nature
to the debate and the conversation
that’s taking place because people are
beginning to hold such divergent and
such polar opposite views and I’m going
to look at how social media accentuates
this because it encourages us to
congregate and mix with people who look
like us who feel like us and who think
like us but if we do that we’re very
rarely coming across opinions which were
challenged by and were very rarely been
put in a place where we have to debate
and reach consensus with different types
of people I’m going to talk about the
divisions in the United States and then
look at one possible model for trying to
reach an agreement and the model that I
look at will be Columbia and I’ll talk
through how over a period of four to
five years through talking across tables
in Havana that country managed to reach
across 50 years of conflict of anger and
animosity and at least reach an
agreement of sorts so the question for
the United States is is time running out
is there time for in the United States
to have the conversation they need to
repair the damage that has been taking
place over the last 30 years as people’s
views and opinions become more extreme
and more different from each other and
one of the best examples of this
partisan divide is a piece of work done
by the Pew Research Center the Pew
Research Center is one of the largest
organizations that investigates social
attitudes in the United States and it’s
been doing it since 1994 and what
they’ve done is they’ve asked groups of
Republicans and Democrats how they feel
across a range of different different
topics and I’d like to choose three to
illustrate just how divergent and how
different those opinions are becoming so
in 1994 the Pew Research Center asked
Republicans and Democrats whether the
government should do more to help the
needy in 1994 40% of Republicans said
the government should do more to help
the needy Democrats were asked the same
question and six
percent of them said that the government
should do more so there was only a
20-point difference in how Republicans
and Democrats felt on this issue fast
forward to last year the same question
to a similar group of Republicans and
Democrats by now only 24% of Republicans
thought the government should do more
but in contrast 70 percent of Democrats
thought the government should do more so
what had been a 20-point difference
between Republicans and Democrats by
last year had become 45 points
difference so the space for an agreement
is much much smaller and the space for
disagreement is becoming more pronounced
similarly let’s look at where attitudes
to race again in 1994 different groups
of Republicans and Democrats were asked
if racial discrimination is the main
reason why many black people can’t get
ahead well 25 percent of Republicans
agreed with that statement in 1994 and
40 percent of Democrats so have 15-point
difference in how they assess the impact
of race on inequality last year the same
question two groups of Republicans and
Democrats by now only 15 percent of
Republicans think race is an element in
preventing black people in America from
getting on economically
conversely Democrats now feel that 64%
of Democrats now feel that race is a key
factor in holding back black people in
America so the difference now is a 50
point difference from 15 percent to 65
percent
it was 15 points difference in 1994 in
terms of what people felt the impact of
race was in America that has grown to 50
points by last year so again the space
for agreeing on something as fundamental
as race relations in the United States
has become much much smaller
finally on immigration the same groups
of Republicans and Democrats in 1994
were asked do immigrants strengthen the
country with their hard work and taxes
in 1994 Republicans and Democrats were
in pretty much total agreement 30
percent of Republicans and Democrats
agreed with that statement so there was
very little to distinguish between them
by last year the difference had become a
40 point difference 85 percent of
Democrats felt that immigrants did
benefit the country only 40 percent of
Republicans
so the space for disagreement on
something again as critical as race
relations at a time when President Trump
is wishing to build his war has become
even more pronounced and look at the way
people get their news and look at how it
influences what people think and how
they feel about these kinds of issues
so a poll taken last year by another
large media organization in America
called serve a nation looked at how
Democrats and Republicans respond to a
news source as a trusted deliverer of of
news versus President Trump and so they
asked Republicans would you be more
likely to trust President Trump or CNN
the the news channel well 90% of
Republicans said they would trust
President Trump over what they heard on
CNN
they asked Democrats the same question
95% of Democrats said they would believe
CNN over president Trump so you know at
a time when you have something like the
Russian inquiry happening in America and
president Trump is appealing over the
heads of news networks by a Twitter you
can see how there are two completely
different factions in the United States
in terms of what they believe 90% of
Republicans will believe Trump over a
news source like CNN 95 percent of
Democrats will believe the CNN over
president Trump so how can they reach
agreement if there are such extreme
views being taken in such extreme
positions having taken and the worry is
that it isn’t just about attitudes it’s
also about geography because they report
last year and by the economic innovation
group looked at where jobs were being
created across the United States
and they did it in fine detail
county-by-county and what they found was
that all the best jobs were being
created in places like Texas Miami New
York San Francisco Seattle Portland
those are all cities that are around the
edges of America on the coastal east and
west coast and in the southern states
like Texas and Florida the places where
there were fewer jobs and the places
were people and fewer opportunities were
in the old and Midwestern and
northeastern industrial powerhouses and
why this is significant is because that
is a geographical distance which is also
becoming associated with a political
difference because increasingly
Democrats are piling up votes and
support in those coastal cities around
the fringes of America
and Republicans are piling up support in
the old middle scram out of America in
in the Midwest and so Americans are
actually dividing by political opinion
and you not only have groups holding
very extreme views at the edge would you
actually have people migrating
physically to different parts of the
country and of course this is mirrored
in politics the center ground in
American politics is all but disappeared
since the Clinton Democrats Newt
Gingrich weaponized politics in the
1990s and now you have a scenario where
there is almost no common ground for the
Republicans and Democrats to meet in the
center and have a negotiated settlement
and what blame might we attach to social
media in all of this well the problem
with social media of course is that the
kind of algorithms that are created tend
to provide people with opinions that
they’re going to welcome and they
provide them with a echo chamber and
hence they end up listening to people
who sound like them who look like them
and who will agree with them and it
filters out an opportunity to debate
your views or to have your views
challenged a very good piece of research
by The Wall Street Journal last year and
looked at what liberal and conservative
groups were reading on a range of issues
like President Trump
abortion gun control and of course they
found that liberals were being served a
totally different diet of stories and
views around those topics from the kind
of views that were being served to
conservative readers of Facebook so does
Facebook have a social responsibility to
not just present
different groups with opinions that
validate their own that encourage them
to think that theirs is the right
position or does Facebook have a
responsibility to create an algorithm
which creates more debate even dissent
as a route through to to agreement the
problem with these social media filter
bubbles is that they’re like walled
gardens and they protect the people in
seinem and it’s a cozy relationship that
you can have with people who look and
think like you but if there’s another
group over here with a completely set of
a different set of opinions how are we
going to create a bridge between those
walled gardens and allow debate and a
negotiated settlement to happen well one
example might be what happened in
Colombia it had to overcome 50 years of
civil war and they decided that what
they would do is that they would bring
all of the groups involved in that war
to Havana which was a neutral position
and they invited the FARC left-wing
insurgents the Colombian government were
obviously represented victims of
violence were represented and those were
victims of all kinds of violence in
Colombia from the Army too far from
narco cartels to right-wing militias and
what they did was they sat down for four
years opposite each other
FARC guerrillas commandos opposite
Colombian army generals who had
previously only ever met on a
battlefield were now sitting opposite
each other and in the course of a
documentary that I was filming we
interviewed 30 people who were in those
talks and they talked about the insults
they talked about the anger they talked
about the raised voices and we heard
about how far cat1 point we’re on the
verge of ending all discussions and
another point how the Colombian
government had all their bags packed and
were on the way to the airport only to
be called back by moderators who said
we’ve done a lot of the hard
and we can’t give up now so the
importance of what happened there was
that they took the time to talk and they
took the time to reach across 50 years
of anger and animosity and disagreement
to negotiate the really hard things that
were driving them apart but let’s
remember this wasn’t a deal that was
done in a TV studio or on Twitter it was
done with physical proximity and it was
done in touching distance of each other
and Carlos lazada one of the front
commanders told us what it was like to
be in that kind of environment and he
said in a negotiation in a negotiating
table it allows you to have a huge
capacity for tolerance and understanding
and to look for a rapprochement with the
ideas of the other side it’s a huge
exercise in patience and self-control
and most of all in analytical capacity
to try to understand how the other side
thinks it’s very demanding from the
point of view of reasoning so that gives
you an insight into what is involved to
reach an agreement after so many years
of disagreement and discord and that’s
what it took in this case to reach
across a divide of 50 years and it
wasn’t just the talking that they did in
Havana they also organized a whole
series of different reconciliation
events in Colombia which gave an
opportunity to for victims to meet had
the perpetrators of violence and for
those perpetrators of violence to ask
for the forgiveness of the victims and I
was only always going to be a really
crucial part of that negotiated
settlement because it gave people again
an opportunity to meet with people face
to face and to allow them to express
whatever residual feelings of anger or
remorse that they still had and so at a
time when the United States
is increasingly divided on issues like
race and immigration on abortion and gun
control how is it going to reach a
negotiated settlement to try and resolve
those issues and I started in the United
States and I’ll finish there because I
don’t think that Donald Trump is the
cause of the political and economic
polarization in that country that has
been developing for over 40 years
and it’s developed because the fruits of
the economic well-being haven’t been
distributed fairly and large numbers of
people in the United States have felt as
though nobody has been listening to them
while a small number of people in the
United States did very well
a large number were going backwards
economically but nobody was listening to
them nobody took the time to talk to
them and I believe the result of 18
months ago was their attempt to say we
have a voice we will be heard and we’ve
been overlooked for too long and so if
the discord and disagreement and
polarization in America has been 40
years in the making then how long will
it be for them to find an answer and to
reach an agreement and the question I
suppose is is the United States running
out of time to reach that agreement
which is why the answer has to be it’s
time to talk [Applause]