What is needed to create the kind of conversation that will help us to be a strong, inventive society?
One answer is that we need something we share. What would that be? Lots of suggestions have been made, although in so large and multiple world many of them seem small. People have put forward language, but we need to be bigger than any one language. People have offered values, but the question of which values seems intractable. And heroes are everywhere being questioned. All these things can exclude too easily. It has to be something more fundamental.
Perhaps the most hopeful thing we share is curiosity, an interest in how things are. “All humans by nature desire to know,” Aristotle observes.
Perhaps we should work on valuing each other as ways of knowing.