Wikipedia will save the world. Information is tolerance. When the internet succeeds and all humanity finally has egalitarian access to all information everywhere, a new era of enlightenment will dawn.

Oh really?

We’ll just weigh all available evidence and come to reasonable conclusions about how the world should be, right? Or, I’ve got it this time: the real problem is that we all grew up in isolation. We never met a Muslim until we were seventeen, we never saw a picture of the whale that’s going extinct five thousand miles from our home. The internet will fix this. When we can get the true numbers on starving African children with a flick of the wrist, we will suddenly care. On the day that Israelis and Palestinians begin to IM each other about the new coolness on YouTube, there will be peace.

Humans do not seem to be naturally talented at bridging disagreements. Suppose you put a bunch of people with diverse opinions into a room. They discuss. When they walk out, instead of converging towards some sort of moderate position, the individuals often come out with more extreme views. This is called group polarization. Or, take someone who already believes in capital punishment and show them supporting evidence. Their conviction strengthens. Fair enough. Show them contradictory evidence. Their conviction still strengthens. What the fuck?

We are not built for reaching consensus, and probably a lot of what we hold dear is arbitrary anyway, which is to say that no principle of nature will ever really referee our disagreements over what is right. What we are built for is unclear, but pattern recognition seems to be important — we more readily see the patterns we’ve already recognized, which makes us much more likely to see evidence that already supports our beliefs. We  also respond peer pressure, because we have to live with the people that we have to live with. And we like to divide us from them at all scales, maybe so that we can hog all the good bits for “us”, but maybe just because it’s more fun to believe we’re better. Those guys are dweebs.

This is why I believe that mere communication — up to and including the global awesomeness of the internet — is not enough. Talking about it, getting everyone to the table, the deliberation of deliberative democracy — well, when we run the experiments, good discussions aren’t enough. They do seem to get everyone thinking about things in the same underlying framework, but usually still disagreeing. That is, talking about it lets us agree on the terms, such “left” versus “right” in Western politics or even “Muslim versus West” in global politics, but it doesn’t often produce a consensus on what the world should look like.

It is interesting to me that there are people whose entire life is brokering agreements: moderators, diplomats, those who work in conflict resolution of all kinds. It makes me wonder how successful they are, and what they know that I don’t. Turns out you can get an entire degree on this subject, for example. (Or at least read a book?) Anyway, I think this is probably an important thing to know. The internet is so new and so exciting, it’s easy to forget that we don’t actually know how to use it.

I was doing very well for myself. It was not until my early twenties that I really failed at something I wanted. I had no friends who weren’t much like myself — white, well educated, happy childhoods, culturally Western.

A woman named Crazy Kim disabused me. She runs a bar in the seaside town of Nha Trang, but that’s now. One night she told me about her student days in communist Vietnam, the way she used to get out of mine clearing duties by pretending to be sick. On the day before she was to graduate, she set out to sea in a small wooden boat. She was lucky; she got picked up by a passing freighter bound for Holland. Twenty years later, she had to apply for a Vietnamese passport to return home, so thoroughly had her birth country forgotten her. Now she uses the revenue from the bar to fight pedophile tourists who come for the young girls.

She was the first person I’d ever met with real problems — not problems like getting a job or wishing someone would call you back, but problems like surviving on a boat at sea and starting a new life in a new country. She’d overcome all of this, and talked about it like it was normal. It was normal to her, the only life she’d ever known, and after all that she’d decided that what she really wanted to do with her days was help other people out. I felt like she was living more life than me. My heart went out to her. After a few more shots, my heart went out to everyone in her little bar, tourists, locals, all of them. I leaned into my neighbor and told him that I loved everyone I’d ever met.

The epiphany outlasted the hangover. Why shouldn’t everyone in the world be happy? Why shouldn’t I extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone I meet? Hell, we all want the same things, right? I began to see that peaceful people before me had scratched “LOVE” into wooden surfaces everywhere. The guest-house guest-books were filled with “all we have in this world is each other” and “live life today!” and “We are One!”

It’s the basic realization of compassion.

What astounds me is that I’ve heard it over and over again from people of all cultures. A stoic Ethiopian on a bus told me about his principle that all humanity is united. A passionate journalist from Dakar has expounded to me that we cannot afford to see ourselves as different. Over tea on the streets of St. Louis, a young mullah explained to me patiently that all are equal in the eyes of Allah. And of course I’ve been on the other stool so many times now, with a drunken Thai or Nigerian or Russian all but drooling on me in their eagerness to explain that they’ve realized something amazing: we are all merely human!

And you can look into their eyes, the eyes the person across the table from you, across that gulf of experience and education and culture and attitude that you just can’t bridge, and you know you’re supposed to feel a deep human connection somehow.

Then the bastard shatters it by asking you for money to beat his wife. Or something.

Because I don’t really know what to say to that Lebanese guy who talks about his African servants as “idiots.” I was astounded at how often the Hong Kong Chinese wouldn’t take my order if I couldn’t speak Cantonese, and more than one Moroccan man once told me to “go back to your hell!” For every beautiful soul I met along my way, there was an asshole who wanted nothing more from me than whatever he could get.

The stereotypes are what killed me most. I wanted to keep an open mind; I was enlightened and I knew that the terrible things I’d heard were the rantings of bigots; they couldn’t possibly have any truth to them. So it was with some dismay that I began to see that Germans really are uptight, that Indian merchants would lie to my face if it made them a buck, that Africans would heap scorn on Africans just one shade darker then them. (Also, the Chinese really are atrocious drivers.) These aren’t universal principles, of course. Like all stereotypes they are no substitute for looking at the person in front of you. Yet I found myself with opinions–

And you discover you’re wrong about what’s important. My mother always told me that everyone in the world wants the same things: family, food, shelter. No. It’s not true. The things that drive us differ. Depending where you live, the most important thing in your world might be allegiance to your father, or Allah, or ridding the province of Pakistanis, or making enough money to buy an air conditioner. We are not all one.

The first step is always to ask, why can’t we all just get along? This the is the moment where you take to heart the idea that everyone is deserving, at least in principle, of your love, compassion, and good will. You suddenly see that this is what peace and cooperation are, that civilization itself is built upon extending humanity and generosity to others. I am with the sages and the hippies in shouting from the rooftops that this is a Good Thing. But it’s not enough, because not everyone wants what you want. In fact, a great many people aren’t even remotely similar to you, and in ways that will probably upset you.

There has to be a form of compassion that embraces the world as it is, not as we wish it was.

It’s not like that on the ground. Jody sleeps under a mosquito net and has never been on television, as far as I know. It’s a maddeningly hot, humid night in the ever-sweltering lowlands of Gambella. Tomorrow morning Jody will get up and walk along mud streets to the little three-room PACT office. Gambella has a history of tribal conflict, and…

How to describe a place I don’t understand myself? She drew a little chart for me once, all of the ethnic groups and sub-groups here, all of the shifting and diffuse allegiances. Sometimes you can tell a Nuer from an Anuak by the facial scars — three thin lines across the brow for Nuers, traditionally — but often not. But it’s a small town, right? Everyone knows everyone else, or at least their families. Everyone’s on some side of some line. Or lines. To be neutral is to be without identity.

Jody’s job is “peace building.” She works for an international NGO called PACT. Check the old news on Gambella, what you can find of it — it would have been utterly buried before Google, I’m sure. In January 2004 there was a massacre, said to be Anuaks killing Nuers. The Anuaks in question were maybe retaliating against previous killings by government peacemaking troops. That in turn was retaliation against the killing of eight highlander (government) personnel in a land rover a few months prior. Maybe. I don’t know exactly what happened. Nobody knows exactly what happened. There aren’t any newspapers in Gambella, and not many people could read them if there were. So it’s all heresay, and it all depends who you ask. Two hundred people were killed. Maybe raped.

It was originally about the placement of new camps for Sudanese refugees streaming across the border. Or it’s a traditional animosity between Nuers and Anuaks. Or there are valuable mineral rights in the region and the Anuaks want to retain their formerly dominant political position. Does it matter? There were months of gunshots at night.

Things finally settled down.

The Ethiopian staff of PACT Gambella thought that a faranji — a Westerner — might be a good mediator. An outsider would be seen as neutral. White people tend to be respected anyway, symbols of a rich and peaceful world that no Ethiopian will ever have the cash or visas to visit. Jody accepted and signed a multi-year contract to live in this unpaved place. Raw cinderblock houses are going up by the dozens, but it’s still mostly corrugated metal shacks and goats wandering the street. The river provides no relief from the heat, only breeding ground for the mosquitos. Everyone brings bars of soap down and bathes in the brown water, but you have to look out for crocodiles.

Now Jody gets up every day and heads to the office. Everyone says hello on the street; there really aren’t that many white people in Gambella, and all of them work in the aid business. It’s rather interesting work. She goes out into the field a lot. She talks with all sides, scheduling private meetings, moderating discussions at more formal gatherings. She does HIV/AIDS education and tries to find other employment for those who make a living doing female circumcision. She works roughly within the “people to people peace method” that PACT developed in Sudan; but every place is different, and the ground shifts under her feet with every new rains, as rivers flood and erode and farmers gain or lose irrigation — or their houses.

Her job is to build a lasting peace. I have no idea how she does this.

“Look for the strengths,” she told me. “This is a beautiful place. The people are very cool. They have a rich culture. Unfortunately it’s much eroded now.”

She also does classic development work, trying to raise the hopes and fortunes of the local population. The hypothesis, she explains, is that “economically marginalized groups will decrease conflict if their economic situation improves.” So she oversees eduction programs (especially for girls), business and trade training, microcredit programs, cross-border trade and stability. Reality meets political fiction here: Jody isn’t allowed to cross into nearby Sudan, but the locals do it all the time.

How? I press. How do we make peace? What are the mechanics of your job? But she says there’s no master plan for how to get people to stop fighting. “I’ve learned from PACT Sudan, and the people to people method, but also just from all the things that make sense. We try something, and we see if it works.”

This is her profession. This is how peace is built. From the ground level, at the community scale, by trial and error. “I don’t think anyone in the world has the answers,” Jody tells me. “The academics don’t. We don’t. The government doesn’t.”

“But,” she says, “people here want something better.” And you can actually work on world peace as a day job, if you want to.