Screaming Around the Turkey - Dealing With Differences at Thanksgiving and Beyond · 8:49pm Nov 26th, 2019
As we lead up to Thanksgiving and all the stereotypical conflict that surrounds the dining table, I am mindful of how intensely polarized our society has become. It is becoming harder and harder for people to remain friends, it seems. Recent days have reminded me how grateful I am for the friends I've made over the years, and the lessons we've learned from our own conflicts. I have decided to share some of these lessons with you, in the hopes that it will make your lives and the lives of those around you a little easier as we enter the season of holidays. Who knows, maybe the sentiment will spread. And stick around at the end for a short Thanksgiving message.
Two people walk into a room. They hold contradictory opinions on a critical aspect of life, society, morality, or politics. I leave it up to you to determine what that topic is. Perhaps it is the upcoming election, or the economy, or the environment. Perhaps it is a matter of life ethics or sexual morality. Perhaps it is a matter of religion or of conscience. Honestly, the topic is unimportant here. All that is important is this:
That the topic is significant, and that the two people disagree.
Now, the most basic principle of logic, the Principle of Non-Contradiction, guarantees that one of these people must be wrong. (Technically, both can be wrong, but let us assume that only one is). Non-Contradiction dictates that two differing matters cannot both be true simultaneously. If my car is 100% blue, it is not also 100% red. To suggest otherwise is to deny reality.
Having established our scenario, let us take it a step further. I want you to place yourself in the shoes of one of these two people. But not the one you think is right. No, I want you to place yourself in the shoes of the person who you think is wrong.
I want you to imagine that, all your life, you’ve been raised to think that what you (wrongly) believe is the only logical way to live. That no rational person could think otherwise. That no ethical person could, upon hearing the ‘truth,’ act any differently than you do.
Now I want you to consider the other person, the one who, in real life, you think to be correct but who, in this scenario, you ardently believe to be wrong. That person will now try to convince you of his or her own position. This can be done one of two ways, and I want you to genuinely consider each.
In the first method, your conversation partner listens to your position. They consider all your points, go out of their way to understand why you believe what you believe, and, when they respond, they do so in a way that speaks to your particular beliefs – they don’t just lump you in a group, they respond to your reasoning. When you raise objections, they answer calmly and specifically. If they don’t know how to answer your particular question, they do their best to provide a basic response while noting where you might both look for deeper answers. They respect you, even as they disagree with you. They approach the entire conversation as someone who simply wants to do good in the world and to do right by you. They’re not trying to ‘win’ an argument – they’re sharing the truth they hold dear with you because they want you to be happier and they want you to join them on the right side. Even if you end the conversation disagreeing with them, they maintain their respect for you and are open to continuing the conversation later. They might even want to be your friend or, if they already are your friend, they see no reason to change that. They don’t want to force you to change your mind – they want to invite you to change your mind.
In the second method, your conversation partner tells you what you have to believe. They couldn’t care less why you believe what you do – they only care that you believe what they order you to believe. If you resist, they might belittle you, insult you, even yell at you. They call you a bigot and say that you only think what you do because you’re an idiot, or a monster, or hateful, or part of a demographic incapable of understanding. There is no respect for your story, for why you think what you do. You are not treated like a fellow human being who happens to be wrong, but as a dissident voice who must be crushed and put in your place. It is not an invitation to change your mind – it is an imposition.
Tell me honestly, which of these two people is more likely to win you over?
Now let’s flip this around. Let’s assume that you hold the correct position, and the person you’re talking to is the one who’s wrong. Which method do you think is going to get through to them: respecting them enough to understand them and invite them into the truth, or forcing them into the truth at social gunpoint? Which do you think will actually change their heart, their mind?
Most of you have probably laughed at this somewhat extreme example and replied “the first one, of course.” And that’s great. You’re right. True conversion comes from conscious choice, not from threats.
But I want you to ask another question of yourself, one you may find unpleasant:
“Which method have I used?”
The last time someone held a view that you believed to be wrong, even abhorrent, did you try to understand why? Did you ask yourself what led them to that point? What rationale they used?
Folks, I have studied war and genocide for the better part of two decades, and I can promise you that every mass act of tyranny and injustice in all of human history had rational people behind it thinking they were doing the right thing. Oh, the level of mental gymnastics it took for them to get to where they could justify evil to themselves varied from case to case, but they all had logical steps they took to get where they were. Sure, they were working with imperfect data and flawed logic, but people who commit such evil acts for truly no reason are in the astronomical minority.
Which leaves us with an uncomfortable realization – if people can do bad things for understandable reasons, then doesn’t it follow that I could have believed the same thing if I’d been presented with the flawed logic at the wrong time in my life?
“There but for the grace of God go I” is an expression for a reason.
The good news in all of this is that, since most people act based on some measure of rationality, it is possible to change the hearts and minds even of those deeply entrenched in wrongful ways of thinking. I am mindful here of former slave owners who became abolitionists, of former criminals and drug dealers who now dedicate their lives to rehabilitating convicts, of soldiers fighting for armies of oppression who defected to the other side. It always fills me with joy to see the portrayals of such figures in both fiction and non-fiction – everybody loves a good redemption story.
Having said that, do we contribute to those redemption stories? Do we reach out to people we think are wrong? Do we engage with them in respectful conversation so that we might understand them and, hopefully, help them see the light? Do we make that effort?
I can guarantee, my dear readers, that I hold views on certain issues that many of you would believe, vehemently, to be wrong. I can likewise guarantee that some of you hold views that I ardently believe to be wrong. If we were to take everyone who read this and sit them down in a room together, we would have difference upon difference between all our respective views on life.
And, folks, that’s okay. Getting a group of people with differing views of life together, sitting them down, and respectfully exchanging views is how we progress as a society. It’s how hearts are softened and beliefs change.
It’s how we learn to share a planet with people we oppose.
In my little writing group where I go for editing and advice, there are two Catholics, two different varieties of non-denominational Christian, a Mormon, an Agnostic Unitarian, and an Atheist. At the table are wildly differing views of sexual ethics, morality of life, politics, war, family values, and about every other major issue you could name.
Yet we’re friends. And not just friends who don’t talk about these things – we talk about them. Sometimes, we talk about them so long that we barely spend any time editing each other’s material. None of us have shifted that much in our views, but we’ve all learned a lot of lessons from each other. We’ve learned the reasons for our differences and, of equal importance, all the ways we’re the same in spite of our differences.
Folks, I’m a professional advocate on an issue that takes a lot of heat (and, no, I won’t say what. I leave work at work). My full-time job involves me getting yelled at while I fight for a polarizing moral principle. And yet, there are people who I am good friends with (sometimes for many years) who come down on the other side of that same issue. Our culture tells us we should be enemies… but we’re not. Because we don’t have to be.
This is my challenge to you – the next time someone has a view that’s different than yours, find out why. Seek to understand before seeking to be understood. Be respectful to everyone even if they’re not respectful to you. Be the bigger person and reach out that hand of conversation.
Some people will slap that hand away. That’s just going to happen. And, of course, if you are in a genuinely dangerous position, don’t be an idiot (and I don’t mean the ‘danger’ of being exposed to challenges to your beliefs – I mean you might actually get stabbed). Take care of your safety. But don’t let fear of other opinions or fear of conflict keep you from interacting with your fellow human beings. Keep that calm tone, that laid-back body language, that openness to discussion.
I think you’ll be surprised by how many ‘unreasonable’ people will treat you with respect if you respect them first.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. May you find peace.
As a special Thanksgiving message, I offer you wisdom my father taught me: if you want peace, you must be grateful, because we must recognize all the many goods in our lives if we are to unburden ourselves our disquietude. If you want gratitude, you must be humble, for in humility we see how little we control, and how many blessings have come from people and circumstances we had little or no say in.
If you want peace, take a few minutes each day to write down one thing you accomplished that you're grateful for, and one thing you had little or no control over that you're grateful for. It can be as big as finishing a contract or as small as making your bed, as grand as a gesture of tremendous generosity from a friend or as small as a pleasant breeze or a polite nod from a teller at the store. Practice this daily before you go to bed, and look back in a month to see the effect.
One thing I'm daily grateful for is all of you kind readers who have brightened my days for the last couple years. God bless you all!
By the way, if down in the comments section people find a difference of opinion and want to have a real conversation about it, that’s great, I’m all about it, please do, but I’d respectfully request that you not do it here. I dislike getting notifications for someone else’s conversation. Again, please have these conversations, just in someone else’s proverbial living room. I’ve got to relax somewhere.
Always a pleasure to hear from you, you've a good head on your shoulders.
5160774
Thank you. I've been privileged to be surrounded with people of wisdom who taught me how to use my faculties, and I've been fortunate to have made educational mistakes. I just try to pay it forward.
I think in cases like this, self-awareness and a sense of perspective help tremendously.
An obvious example is history. It's natural to read about what some people did in history and respond with "What evil barbarians!" or "That old-fashioned system was obviously going to fail!" or "Who would be stupid enough to believe that?" But... obviously, someone did, and brushing it off with words like "stupid" or "old-fashioned" or "evil" clarifies nothing except your own attitude towards it.
Each and every person, you included, lives in a particular place at a particular time surrounded by particular people in a particular mishmash of cultural influences with particular personal experiences and after particular histories and developments have led to them existing exactly as they are, with their perceptions and thoughts and feelings and desires and behaviours changing and interacting with each other in any given, complicated moment. Even in the unlikely case that you sat down and academically worked out every single one of the causal factors and influences - every single one - to explain how and why someone else did what they did, it probably looks very different when lived and experienced from the inside than when examined by someone from the outside. That's not just a case of temporarily imagining you - as in, you as you are - being put in that moment; it's a case of imagining, at the very least, a you so completely moulded and formed by every single factor and influence at the time, with a completely different memory and life story - in effect, you as a completely different person.
And of course, the big point about all this is that "you", right here, right now, are no exception. l'm no exception. No one who's ever lived has ever been an exception. (It's not enough to say that and sound high and mighty; the hard part is getting your mind to grips with the sheer immensity of what that would mean for your entire life.)
That's probably the hardest part of the whole thing, because it's tempting to assume you're more enlightened, reasonable, intelligent, or moral than (most) anyone else in the room. That in turn can tempt you to think you've not been "influenced" (or have had only or mostly good influences) on your views, whereas "they" have obviously had some factor tampering with theirs.
Yet look at how politics, religion, morality, art, languages, and so on have changed over centuries and differ in other countries. What's common sense to you here and now probably would look wildly radical at another time and place... and if you'd been born in that time and place, that version of "you" would agree!
Make a genuine effort to ask yourself what you'd have been doing a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or on another continent surrounded by completely different people. Heck, you don't even have to be so extreme (though that's a good way to get the point across). What would have happened if you'd been born to a different family down the street, or to a different branch in your own family? What would have changed you, how, and why? Would you be just as confident that you'd be more enlightened, reasonable, intelligent, or moral than anyone else in the room? How about you a hundred years in the future? A thousand years in the future?
It might just be the case, though it doesn't always have to be the case, that you don't have all the pieces to the puzzle yet. Or that maybe some of your pieces are a little skewed. Or don't fit as well as you thought they did. That, even, there might be more out there that you need.
I'm not saying that kind of perspective's the pathway to agreeing with - or even liking - what you see, especially when dealing with people who get your emotions running. But it should at least give pause. The long view is usually not kind to overconfident narrow-mindedness that takes itself for granted.
Sage advice my friend, thank you for posting this. Reminds me of what one wise priest taught me. When someone offers their opinion, even if it is completely false, don't tell them they are wrong. Instead ask, "Tell me why you think that?" It lowers barriers and opens doors of conversation and potential conversion. God Bless you!
5160779
What a fantastic turn of phrase. I'm grateful that you've seen fit to pass along these mistakes for our education and betterment, whether presented as naked lessons or masked by pastel pony pastiches.
5160843
Clearly you too have considered this.
Indeed. This is especially true of chronological snobbery - the assumption that we now know better than people did back then. For one, it fails to account for the fact that our current world had to evolve from past successes and mistakes. For two, it fails to account for the times where the past knew better than we do now. Even if, when we step back and analyze our own positions, we remain convinced we are correct, that step back is necessary for empathy, perspective, and surety.
5160961
Speaking of wonderful turns of phrase, 'pastel pony pastiches' is one.
5161188
One common issue in these debates is when people forget that the moral frameworks, political systems, and economic models also evolve, and are part of the technological progress of human society. Blaming whole cultures for stuff which we now would find abhorrent can be as absurd as asking why they didn't communicate using cellphones.
I also disagree with the idea that "only one of the two people debating must be right". In my experience both sides tend to be right by degrees, often reaching close to 100%. It is just that the amount of variables in the world is so unfathomably large, that we are often looking at completely different situations.
5161311
You're absolutely right. Societies change over time and it's ridiculous to equate, say, modern Italy with Italy of the 1570s. Similarities exist, of course, and many of the same core traits remain functionally identical, but they're still different.
In the 100% example I'm referring to things which are moral absolutes or which are mutually exclusive (i.e. slavery can't simultaneously be morally acceptable and not morally acceptable). I recognize that not all issues can be so clearly explained in black and white terms because, even if the underlying issue is clear cut, the application is often a matter of debate.