Eboo Patel on Pluralism

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Eboo Patel discuss how interfaith work can serve as a model for engaging productively across differences. Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Patel also served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eboo Patel discuss how the dominant diversity paradigm in many institutions divides individuals into oppressors and oppressed; how universities can draw from the intellectual tradition of pluralism to encourage mutual respect and cooperation; and how university leaders can alleviate the deeply polarized atmosphere that prevails at many institutions around the country. This conversation is part of a new Persuasion series on the Future of Universities. Universities are in crisis—losing public support, shaken by internal divisions, facing angry donors and alumni, and increasingly straying from their core mission of intellectual curiosity and open inquiry. Persuasion's new series about the future of universities, made possible by the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, will consist of a collection of longform essays and podcast interviews aimed at helping higher education tackle this crisis. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I kind of had to confront this head on when I was winning a New York time story five or seven years ago that opened with the line.
0:07.6	It was a story about Mostar and Bosnia Herzegovina.
0:10.6	And Mostar is not a city in hot conflict, right? And yet it's a city in this kind of cold civic
0:16.3	peace, I think you might call it, but it's far from ideal. The story begins with the line
0:21.6	when there is a fire on the Catholic side of the city of
0:25.0	most are the Muslim fire department does not respond and when there's a fire
0:29.4	on the Muslim side the Catholic fire Department does not respond.
0:32.8	And it just so happened that I'm reading the story
0:35.3	when I'm in Bend, Oregon, on a family vacation with my family,
0:39.7	and there's like literally fires on three sides of us,
0:42.0	you know, wildfires, and I have this
0:43.8	realization, oh my gosh, there's all of these people fighting these fires and
0:48.4	keeping my family safe and I don't know how they voted. I don't know how they pray.
0:53.5	And they probably disagree with me on lots and lots of things.
0:56.5	Right. I'm like in some ways a quintessential urban, highly educated progressive.
1:02.0	I live in Whole Foods America and yet we have a
1:05.3	nation because we fight fires for everybody. We pick up garbage for everybody.
1:09.7	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. editor at Persuasion. And I wrote a piece recently called What Small Towns
1:24.0	Taught Me. It's a reflection on my time as a documentary producer and the view that
1:28.3	gave me of different parts of the country. And then it's an analysis of the
1:32.0	problems that the Democratic Party has in connecting to the American heartland.
1:36.0	The argument is that the Democrats have a reckoning coming for them sooner or later.
	...

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