The Read: Mónica Guzmán, I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Timies
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’m working my way through what I think of as a sub-genre of mainstream liberalism—the “we have to understand and make connections with people who think differently than we do about politics and society because that’s the only way we can bring about positive change” genre. This is a very recent entry to the genre.
Is it what I thought it was?
Pretty much, yes. It’s in some ways a how-to manual companion to Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land, offering a lot of well-meaning advice for sincere liberals and hypothetical conservatives who would like to be better people.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s a good critical foil for something I’m writing now. I also think it’s a fine book to hand anyone who shares the author’s commitment to staying in conversation across political and social divides. I don’t think it’s actually as concrete about the how-to and the experiential reality of conversations as it aspires to be—a lot of it reads like business writing, a set of top-level aphorisms and abstractions and a lot of Norman Vincent Peale-ish motivation-speak.
Quotes
“Coming from the field of journalism, I feel like I’m supposed to be rah-rah for information as the cure for everything. But I’m not. I’m tired of us throwing out links and throwing up our hands. Ranting to our people, who get it, while raging at those people, who don’t. I’m done, too, going along with the idea that if we could just rid the world of ‘misinformation’, everything would be fine.”
“I hope I can help you find your own powerful reason to have one more conversation with someone who confounds you, or ask one more bold, curious question.”
“To be clear: This book is not about converting people to your side. It’s not about persuasion or crafting arguments—though it will help you hear and be heard better than you thought possible.”
“I have said that we are ‘dangerously’ divided. One reason we’re dangerously divided is because when so many of the identities and preferences that matter to us line up with our politics, it changes how we feel our politics. It makes politics way more personal.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I still feel the moral and intellectual pull of the basic position that Guzmán takes up here. Her central argument is to position curiosity against division, essentially saying that everybody should be interested in and curious about other people (and their views) and to use conversation—not persuasion, not argument, not information—as the medium for focusing and expressing curiosity. It’s essentially a light rebranding of ethnography—be interested in people, don’t come to conclusions about what they think or why, gain a situated understanding of who they are, be inside their frame as much as you can be, get people to tell you stories rather than enunciate opinions. Prize honesty in what you say and in the cultivation of your own hearing. The problem I have is that I think that as a theory of why Americans are divided, it’s just wrong, and as a practice of how to undivide us, it suffers from the same issue as every other suggested mainstream practice: it is going to be followed by only one side.
In what feels like a lifetime ago, I was asked near the end of the first decade of the 2000s by an alumnus who had taken up a job with a new (relatively short-lived) web platform that was built around trying to cultivate “difficult conversations” between people with opposing views to host a model discussion of the kind the platform was aiming to build. I chose, perilously, to focus on abortion and reproductive rights. Pretty much everybody there was a real person, there was a lot of genuine ideological variety, and folks were willing to follow the rules I set out. So what I did was this: in the first round of the discussion, all you could do was tell a story about what your basic credo on abortion and reproductive rights was. Nobody could respond, nobody could argue, nobody could disagree. Everybody had a free paragraph or three to lay out what they thought. In the second round, all you could do was tell a story about when you came to think this, about the life processes that informed your credo. In the third round, for the first time, you could respond to someone else, but only this: you could ask one other person a question about either their stated beliefs or their life experiences. One question, no snark, no loaded questions. In the fourth round, finally, you could have an open conversation, but this time, it had to be about a particular stated credo as a formal statement, not as an individual’s beliefs. (E.g., I put all the belief statements together, created groupings, and asked people to discuss the similarities and divergences between them.) Only after all that could we have something more like a free-for-all, but at that stage, I asked people to say, “Based on what you’ve read so far, which of the people you’re opposed to on this issue in this group do you think you understand and appreciate best?” Basically this was very close to what Guzmán is calling for in this book. I’ve done what her organization, Braver Angels, is trying to model now. And you know, it worked, I think, in the sense that everybody stuck with it and it was a good conversation and maybe people came away from it less bitterly divided than before. All twenty or thirty of them, that is. But it took a ton of work and the thing is, nothing changed in the sense that at the end of the day this remained an issue that could only be one way or the other and somebody was going to have to accept policies or laws that they found unacceptable and violating. Understanding each other doesn’t by itself change that raw fact of democratic decision-making. On some level, what pursuing understanding feels like sometimes is just an attempt to placate the side that is expected to lose (or that has already lost), to manage the potential retaliatory backlash.
I think that’s my first problem with Guzmán (and others who see this whole issue the same way), which is that she rightly asserts that more information (or less misinformation) is not the key but then she assumes that we do not have accurate or meaningful information about one another across our divides, that we are too devoted to “sorting”, to being with people like us. And also that our politics is too personal, too much about feeling. The first thought is I think in many cases simply wrong, that if we are sorting more and more in various ways it is an experienced reaction to our lives—that we’re quite knowledgeable about the people we mean to avoid, who might be people we grew up with, families and neighborhoods we mean to escape, people we deal with at work (whether co-workers or clients), and so on. The assumption that people lack knowledge and need to be curious is itself incurious in its way.
The second thought—that we feel our politics too much, care about our politics too much, and thus let it direct our feelings about other people—is just such a classic (and flawed) kind of liberal thinking—that politics is sort of speech act, a thought, a theory, something outside the self, and that ideas and speech can just interact in a public sphere separate from the private sphere and nobody needs to feel personally at stake in that process. I just really hate this approach because we should feel our politics. Our lives are at stake in politics, our happiness is at stake in politics. Everything that we are and hope to be is at stake in politics. There’s such a mismatch in the book between the most potent examples of learning about how people think and the actual content of our politics, affective or otherwise. Learning that the rain can have a beautiful sound is great, but it’s not the same thing as learning that someone has a murderous hate for women because he believes they are withholding sex from men.
Guzmán also does the usual thing of locating an era of American consensus where somehow people didn’t sort and didn’t feel their politics quite so much, and as usual it’s from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. I’ve come to really dislike this standard bit of reasoning both because it doesn’t grapple with what was inside and outside of that consensus—it was a consensus of white men, for the most part—and because it brackets off a narrow period of postwar American prosperity from the entire rest of American history, in which there have been many moments where people felt their politics. Guzmán mentions that it’s great to think like a historian, but uses that only to say “America has pulled through some seriously divisive periods. Like the turbulent civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s, and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s”. What does pulled through mean here? Did “America” do that? Did “America” pull through those divisive moments by not sorting, not othering, by curiosity and engagement? No. Here’s how we “pulled through” civil rights: by passing laws that many white Americans bitterly opposed and never stopped opposing, to the point that the Supreme Court recently effectively cancelled the protections of some of those laws because that opposition had never gone away. There’s no “we” that “pulled through”. How did we “pull through” McCarthyism? The myth of the Army hearings notwithstanding, we really didn’t pull through it as much as slowly slink away from it half-heartedly, with much of the conceptual frame of it intact. How did we pull through the rise of the Klan in the 1920s? I dunno, ask the men who were lynched for several decades afterward. Or go look at the statues and monuments that the Klan and their Lost Cause allies erected all over this country.
It’s a problem to frame a book that’s a call to curiosity and honesty that sets that call out as a kind of pious commandment while the book and its author is located in a kind of duck blind, looking out at all the people who are sorting and othering. It’s the usual view from nowhere, with the usual sense that there is nothing actually at stake in opinions, knowledge, politics; the only thing at stake is having a kind of “viewpoint diversity” that is perfectly balanced and a mirror of the national society. I feel as if I would like to establish a moratorium on retellings of the Robbers Cave experiment. I feel as if anyone who wants to tell us what to do as if we are an “other” needs to make that personal and situated, to be in a conversation with readers rather than rattling off conventional social science. I think anyone complaining about silos needs to not be making that complaint from another kind of silo, one so recognizable to me (both in its invocations of social research and its rhetorical forms) that I could predict at almost every moment of the set-up in the book what was coming next. Oh, here comes Cass Sunstein, what a surprise. Jonathan Haidt, of course. The thing is that the book is calling for something like an ethnographic credo but its social science is the abstracted, theoretical, model-based or lab-derived thinking of economics, social psychology and political science. It’s not out there in the world, in a difficult conversation. It doesn’t do what Guzmán is calling on people to do, and for the most part, she herself doesn’t model or demonstrate what that call looks like in its particulars. The details of the anecdotes get sanded down to make them fit the generalities of the call to conversation and curiosity: nothing goes awry, nothing discomforts or fails, nothing feels dangerous or unpredictable. Anybody who has done ethnographic research—or struck up the kinds of conversations with strangers she exalts—knows that sometimes you just have a strange and unsettling conversation. Sometimes you learn things you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes you don’t know what exactly is going on in a discussion. Sometimes you hear lies or contradictions; sometimes you think someone is just trying to please you or get something from you. Sometimes a person turns out to be just as bad as you feared and all you’re doing is adding information to an accurately formulated intuition. Sometimes a person surprises you pleasantly, or you do learn that your own biases and assumptions were wrong. What Guzmán wants to happen does happen, absolutely. I think it’s good for us as human beings when it does: your conception of the human broadens and deepens. But there are a lot of other things that can and do happen, and they’re nowhere in this book. (It’s hard not to compare it to Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land and find it wanting precisely because all the difficult and confounding aspects of conversation are in Hochschild’s work in a meaningfully specific way.)
I also just think that Guzmán never grapples with the problem that you are only going to hear the call that she issues if you are already coming from a political and epistemological position that prizes really understanding people as they are and believes in pluralism as a ethical and personal commitment. There’s some idealistic material in the book about bringing declared conservatives into the framework of the conversations she and her colleagues are convening, and I don’t doubt that they’ve been able to recruit some. But I don’t think this book is going to be read by anybody but liberals, by and large. I suppose this is why I react to it as strongly as I do: I’ve done what she calls for, earnestly and ardently, for much of my adult life. In a few cases, I made real connections with people that I came to understand as people. In most cases, all it meant is that I was a person who could be used to help move the Overton window one more nudge, that I would provide some cover of legitimacy or acknowledgement in a conversation where my curiosity was something to exploit. At some point, you have to stop trying to kick Lucy’s football. If I react strongly to the book’s advice, it’s because I think it’s basically right ethically and morally: be curious, be humble, be able to be wrong, say “I don’t know” when you don’t know, be open to the real stories of other people, and so on. I just think it comes too easily in this book, too piously, too disconnected from the reality of what it is actually calling for. Atticus Finch may be all for walking a mile in another man’s shoes, but that doesn’t by itself get rid of injustice and he’s surrounded by people who are going to stay in their own shoes, come what may. Sometimes stories don’t connect people, sometimes understanding another person creates new divisions. “Everybody has their reasons”, but some reasons are wrong, and some of what people do in the world hurts and destroys other people. A commandment to curiosity that is sure that what we will discover in other people is always comprehensible, relatable and connectable is a sign that the person making the commandment hasn’t really done very much of what they call for yet—or is choosing only to remember the times the experiment worked as planned. In a way, I think what she’s describing is a good way to relate to other human beings and a terrible way to do or be political in a world where politics has consequences.
More of the problem with the view-from-nowhere is that this entire approach ends up making values, beliefs, and even experiences so completely equivalent and interchangeable that it effectively denies that they have meaning beyond the life of an individual. E.g., I have my experiences, my values, my beliefs, but they’re only me, and your only reason for listening to them is to learn some new possibilities for yourself and to keep the peace with me. I’m hard pressed to think of a point in the book where Guzmán talks about what values, beliefs or politics actually do in the world through collective decision-making, democratic institutions, and so on. The only consequence she’s interested in the presumption that the more divided Americans become, something bad will happen. But even there it’s mostly about ourselves as individuals, about a program of self-improvement. You’ll be a better person if you’re curious! If you have a “I never thought of it that way” moment every day. What happens if we’re all better people? What happens if we keep being worse people? In terms of this book, I don’t know, because that’s not really discussed.