Silence isn't golden when it comes to free speech

It's perhaps the mutual incomprehension that is the most worrying sign of things to come. The echo chambers of modern life allow us to segregate ourselves pretty consistently from those who think, live, and vote differently from us. We live in suburbs filled with people of similar incomes and political leanings and consumer choices. We create and re-post memes that aim, not to convince, but purely to reinforce people's sense that their own convictions are unimpeachable and their opponents' baffling and reprehensible. The limitless smorgasbord of online news shrinks in practice to silos of selective reading or, alternatively, "hate-reading".

No wonder that those who disagree with us become distant, indistinct, an undifferentiated bloc of idiots or reactionaries. Every time we find ourselves starting a sentence with the immortal and deeply satisfying phrase "I just don't understand how anyone could..." - followed by anything from "vote Liberal" to "vote Green" to "still participate in organised religion" to "think that vaccines are harmful" - alarm bells should be ringing internally.

To declare that a significant minority (or in some cases, a majority) of my fellow Australians are simply incomprehensible to me - to airily dismiss them with a convenient label ("racist", "leftie", "elitist", even "stupid") - is an admission of defeat or, more precisely, surrender in terms of the whole enterprise of living together peaceably and productively.

The growing social and political segregation of our lives, then - how easy it has become to surround ourselves with people who are pretty much like us - is a big deal. Political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell have written about the phenomenon they've dubbed the "Aunt Susan effect" to describe the comfortable diversity of American religious life. Because of intermarriage and other demographic factors, most Americans have traditionally known personally (or even been related to) someone of a different faith (for our purposes, read: political allegiance, sexual orientation, take on the current hot-button issue).

That makes it a lot harder to demonise them. We chuckle at the moment in the 2009 film The Blind Side when Sean Tuohy turns to his wife (Sandra Bullock) after they've just hired a high school tutor and says bemusedly, "Who'd have thought we'd have a black son before we knew a Democrat?" Yet how many of us count people with significantly different views to our own among our friends?

Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner: to understand all is to forgive all. The proverb is hyperbolic, of course; entering with empathy and a genuine effort at impartiality into the reasoning of someone whose ideas are alien to us won't necessarily lead us to agree with them. But it will almost certainly help us to judge them less harshly, and to hold our own opinions more humbly and less aggressively. It will make it impossible for us to write off vast swathes of our countrymen and women as blind and bigoted. It will encourage open debate instead of angry calls to silence opposing views, because those who hold them will seem worth trying to convince instead of trying to exclude and bully and coerce. Even, perhaps, worth listening to.

After all, none of us is infallible.