A few weeks ago, I found myself on a platform in Aberystwyth with Mererid Hopwood, one of Wales’ most distinguished contemporary poets, at the launch of a new Dialogue Centre at the University. Whenever Mererid and I meet, sooner or later we start talking about our common hero, Waldo Williams, schoolteacher, Quaker, pacifist and poet (he died in 1971) – especially about his repeated insistence on “recognition” as the core of poetry, ethics and religion alike. In Welsh it’s adnabod: a word whose meaning ranges from simply acknowledging that I’m familiar with someone or something, through to a deeper sense of shared vision or shared suffering. In a well-known poem, he wrote about this as “finding the one root under the branches”.

In the landscape of current debate, online and off, it seems as though anything like adnabod is the last thing that anyone wants to cultivate. It’s a sad commonplace to lament how easy it has become to make every disagreement a matter of absolute, zero-sum standoff. One person takes a stand for the rights and dignity of trans people, and is depicted as a crazed woke fantasist who wants to deny biology and to extirpate all traditional gender identities. Another expresses human concern for someone with a memory of trauma, who says they might feel unsafe with a trans person in what’s supposed to be a single-sex environment – and instantly becomes a transphobic fascist who’s refusing to acknowledge the trauma and exclusion experienced by people who are transitioning or have transitioned.

Standoffs like this assume that if you disagree with my moral judgement, we don’t share a moral world; we care about different and incompatible things. And the more committed we are to this assumption – the assumption that our opponent is not only wrong but bad – the further we get from recognising and dealing with the granular actuality of suffering, risk or stigma. It encourages us – subtly or not-so-subtly – towards the mindset in which I will listen to the record of X’s trauma or fear, but not Y’s. It allows me to be selective about other people’s suffering. Some count, some don’t. People like myself count, strangers (migrants, Tories, trans men, cis women, indigenous tribes…) don’t.

It’s a popular strategy. Sharp binary alternatives appeal because it is so unsettling to imagine that people who have similar (recognisable) thoughts, feelings and hopes to ourselves can still come to different conclusions. It’s much less risky to go for a world view in which I must be consistently right because my opponents are just wickedly, perversely wrong without qualification about pretty well everything. Think of the hideous nonsense that has engulfed politics in the USA. Disagree with me about gun laws, school prayers, abortion, socialised medical care, and it is an obvious conclusion that you eat babies and are planning the genocide of Middle America. Not that it doesn’t work the other way too: disagree with me about gun laws and the rest, and you are automatically a murderous, misogynist demagogue whose idea of a good time is Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.

This is not a plea for never taking a stand, never making a choice – empty Trumpeting about “very fine people on both sides”; God forbid. To be passionate about naming and trying to rectify injustice, to go where the wounds are and try to stop the bleeding, whatever it costs – yes, of course. Take sides by all means. But: two things to remember.

First, the people who disagree with you are not going to go away to oblige you. You may win this stage of the argument, but you still have to find a way of creating a stable environment you can share – which means working at what it is that you can recognise in each other’s moral world, learning to present what matters most to you in terms that make some sense to those you most disagree with. It doesn’t make for quick consensus, let alone total reconciliation. But it digs for those roots under the branches, the deep origins of people’s commitments and concerns, to see if it’s possible to build at least some mutual acknowledgement. You have to live with them when you’ve won; so what difference does that make to how you carry on a debate now?

And second, as this implies, people think what they think not because they have followed – or wickedly failed to follow – a plain course of rational argument. They think what they think because they’ve felt what they’ve felt, and suffered what they’ve suffered. That certainly doesn’t mean that no reasoned argument is possible; but it does mean that reasoned argument which never bothers with the question of how I and my opponent have actually learned to think what we think is going to be a failure. Tracking how we came to see things this way rather than that is part of the same exercise in building recognition, discovering we’re perhaps not after all from different planets.

One of Waldo Williams’ poems is about Christmas, gently satirising the “naivety” of Caesar Augustus’ imperial power as opposed to what’s happening in Bethlehem – which is a new poetic venture, a new moral reality that will be built up of assonances and echoes between words, between people’s lives and narratives, a testimony to recognition at the deepest level. Adnabod: a candidate for “word of the year” in the bleak midwinter of our conflicts.

Rowan Williams is former Archbishop of Canterbury