Global Common Ground?
Are there things we all can agree on?
There might be some simple things. Something exists. Perhaps there are more.
David Mitchell illustrates this in his funny video on YouTube: There's a lot wrong with the world, isn't there?
Yep, that’s him above. The video short is pretty funny. Well, I find it funny.
There are 8 billion speakers on the planet. That means there is about 3 Quintillion possible pairs of speakers. How many dearly held concepts are there in common among all possible pairs? Very, very, very, very little. That is essentially equivalent to asking whether there is anything at all that we all agree on.
Finding global common ground, that is, finding the useful set of ideals or goals all agree on, where we discuss important things, is not an achievable goal. (But there are features we have in common; see this previous post.)
Global common ground in ideals might not be a reasonable goal or even an important goal or ideal.
But.
But, how do two who disagree communicate and understand each other? The answer hides in plain sight: two persons, not eight billion. Perhaps any two people on this planet are likely to find some things they agree on.
That might also apply to two small dissimilar groups. Even then, we can focus on a person in one group communicating with another in either group.
Essentially, when we look at pairs of individuals, we have an encouraging amount of common ground. Common ground might also be called...
- mutual understanding
- area of agreement
- "all of a mind"
- belief intersection
Does this one-on-one interaction really help in finding common ground? Can these interactions allow for an adequate common ground for partial understanding or a step to understanding?
I think so.
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Though there are few goals common among all people, there are some attributes that most of us have. See post We (most of us) are the same.