I recently had a falling out with a friend that I have known for many years. My friend had strong opinions and felt comfortable sharing them. I’m not known for my lack of opinions either. A fair amount of unspoken frustration had been building over various issues. We didn’t agree on a great number of items that our country now seems comfortable listing in the issues of the culture war.
My friend and I live far apart so most of our communications existed on social media. Eventually there was the infamous back-breaking straw and I ended our digital connection. I didn’t like what they had to say nor how they believed they needed to say it. There was a quick back and forth that was more than enough for me to remove their access to my platform of choice. This led to intense name calling on their part and short derisive follow ups comments on my part.
I don’t call people my friends lightly and considering how powerfully demeaning my friend’s responses were, I believe they were genuinely hurt by me shutting them out. Nobody won anything, and we both lost something.
I wasn’t proud of my part of the escalation and so I felt it was a positive step to try to learn how to better understand why arguments happen and how they transform into combative situations. Sense one of my vocations is teaching martial arts, I felt an added responsibility. Somebody once said, the best way to win a fight is not to have one. With this in mind, I felt arguing well was an important thing to study. Learning more about how to have a disagreement without creating an enemy would be helpful on a number of levels.
Buster Benson’s book Why Are We Yelling? Was the first book I competed for 2020. It helped me understand my own tendencies as well as increased my awareness of how other people are moved. Here are a quick set of notes from reading his important book.
-3 categories of argument: Head, Heart, and Hand. Sometimes we are arguing about very different categories. If we can’t identify what perspective we arguing from, then nothing can be resolved. Being right doesn’t change a persons heart. Not being able to appreciate where someone is coming from emotionally means we are blind to the reason they feel so moved by their point of view. Focusing on what is useful usually comes second to trying to change someone’s mind.
-4 voices: Power, Reason, Avoidance and Possibility. The first three are our go to reactions. Power rarely solves the problems, but sure does make us feel safer. Reason makes us feel smarter, but facts can, no matter how many you find, don’t change minds and most figures and statistics can be argued to support a different point of view. Avoidance seems helpful when we are just tired of the same items of conflict that never change, so why bother, just ignore them. This leads to a festering issue that often becomes to big to handle. The last voice, Possibility, tries to move beyond narrow concepts of truth and tries to discover the person behind the argument and examining the unique events and personal experiences that lead us into positions we are compelled to stand our ground, even if that ground is quicksand.
-Cognitive Biases: There are 200-plus and they corral our brains ability to see past our own limited reactions to stress. You can’t escape them but you can learn to understand how they shape our patterns of thinking.
CBs are mental strategies that help us deal with too much info and not enough time in a world where the more choices we have the poorer our decision making faculties seem to preform. Rather than trying to discuss every single CB, Benson groups them in away that allows for us to see that CBs work as sets.
-Benson covers big issues: immigration and gun control as well as abstract concepts like the belief in ghosts. He talks about creating safe spaces for discussion and the power of generous listening. And while it might seem obvious in bares repeating, the way a question is asked places us on better footing for the journey toward understanding what the best answer might be. The more open ended the better. Yes/No questions are moe likely to cause issues than they are to help resolve conflict.
The book covers a lot of ground. Way more than I have glossed over here. I feel that whatever your personal opinion maybe, you owe it to yourself and the people you care for to consider how you might be wrong about needing to be right. Certainty isn’t as useful as actual problem solving. Being able to avoid deciding who is right allows to get to what will work. How is it we go about setting aside our need for a stark contrast of black and white and discover the world is made up of shades of grey?
Just last night a friend and I were talking about climate issues and I listened carefully to the words he used to describe those who disagreed with him. Much of what he thought about the people o the other side of the issue limited his capacity to work with those others who would be needed to make actually make the changes we all very desperately need.
Much of the ammo we use to deride the other side comes from media. The media isn’t designed to make us better at solving our problems. One might argue that no matter what side of the argument you fall on about whatever argument you are having, most of our reasoning is given to us by a system that profits from escalating our differences into fears that produce conflicts that keep us from working together to help one another.
Most of our talking points are not sought out to transform us, but to confirm what we already think. Every opinion we have deserves to be examined with an awareness that we are afraid to be wrong. Benson’s book asks if we are brave enough to accept information that transforms how we think of ourselves.
Ultimately we have to ask: what is the point of the argument? Isn’t it about being able to share the world we live in. Isn’t about living in a world that is worth sharing. Sometimes there may be no way around a fight, but before we get there, let's try to make sure we did everything we could to avoid it.
I don’t believe mot of us want to make enemies, nor does anyone want to lose a friend.