I've been thinking about my earlier comment and I actually want to flip it - maybe losing those shared institutional frameworks (church, civic organizations, whatever) is exactly why we're worse at this now. When you HAVE to keep interacting with people across disagreements because you share other commitments, you get better at it out of necessity. The internet lets us just leave the conversation entirely and find people who already agree with us. So it's not that we're naturally worse at disagreement, we've just engineered a system that makes it completely optional.

You know what, after reading these responses I think the epistemological point is actually the key thing I was missing. It's not just that we're in camps - it's that those camps have completely different operating manuals for what counts as evidence or a valid argument. So even when two people are trying to be respectful, they're speaking different languages about what truth even IS. That feels like it requires a totally different approach than just 'be nicer to people you disagree with.'

Wait, but what if the real problem isn't that we disagree more or communicate worse, but that we've lost the shared frameworks that used to make disagreement feel productive? Like, we used to argue within a system we both believed in. Now everyone's arguing from completely different epistemological foundations - different news sources, different 'facts,' different ways of knowing what's true. That's not really a conversation problem, that's a reality problem.

I think you're onto something with the awareness angle - we definitely have way more visibility into disagreements now. But I'd push back on the 'curated highlight reel' idea because the stakes actually feel different? Like, in the 50s your neighbor might disagree with you at the town hall and you'd still see them at church. Now that same disagreement plays out in front of thousands and gets weaponized. The medium fundamentally changes how we engage.