Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.

I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is best known now as a New York Times ethicist columnist.

He's long been a renowned philosopher who studied how deep social change happens across time and cultures.

There's something hopeful to me in imagining in an age of cultural standoff that the kind of quiet, sustained culture shift he describes

in our relationships close to life can simultaneously be happening.

This is Becoming Wise. I'm Krista Tippett.

Music I'm Krista Tippett. You're using the word conversation as something larger than words that pass between two people.

Exactly.

Define conversation, first of all.

Well, those sort of, you know, you're sitting down with a friend in a bar and you're chatting and it's about the Super Bowl or, you know, you're not talking to your friend about the Super Bowl because it makes any difference to what happens.

The Super Bowl is over.

You're not changing anything.

Nor is, you know, I came into this studio with a Steelers cap on as it happens, which I confess before the nation. But I'm not

expecting them at the end of the conversation to say, you're right. You know, the Steelers are

definitely the team I should follow. They're definitely the better team.

The object of the exercises discuss it, talk about it, not to come to some kind of agreement,

not to change each other, just to be together, enjoy one another's company.

And if you have that background of relationship between individuals and communities

that is in that sense conversational, then

when you have to talk about the things that do divide you, you have a better platform.

You can begin with the assumption that you like and respect each other, even though you

...