You could easily spend an entire workweek, forty hours plus, doing nothing but reading recent pieces about the increasing polarization of “American society,” the growing difficulty of any communication between rival factions (generally but not always with the onus on “the Right”), and so on, ad nauseam. These endless reports—most of them indistinguishable from one another—are not entirely the product of fantasy or ideological blindness; they often do describe, albeit in a highly exaggerated fashion, some aspects of our current moment. But even setting aside their mind-numbing repetitiveness and self-importance, as well as their air of imparting to us at last the Truth About Our Time, they leave out so much that contradicts the script they are following. Above all, they leave out the blessedly routine experience of learning from and appreciating people whose angle of vision on our common world is in some respects quite different from our own.