Why Are We Yelling?

Buster Benson wrote Why Are We Yelling? in 2019. It is yet another book about conflict resolution, with a special focus on politics. Like the others I have read, the prime takeaway is that I already follow the advice rather well, but it does me no good if no one else is doing it. Unlike the others, this book worded things in such a way that I wonder whether I went quite far enough before giving up. Benson seems to have found some success where I failed in part because he had resources I didn’t, such as a large number of friends and a house to host a pot-luck in.

Buster writes of having four goals of conversation: enjoyment, connection, growth, and security. Growth happens when we learn something and security happens when we “win” an argument. He writes of four voices inside us that serve to direct us to these purposes: possibility, avoidance, reason, and power. The voice of possibility is always asking questions. Avoidance tells us to withdraw engagement even while we are unconvinced. Power tells us to intimidate and launch ultimatums. Reason appeals to shared values between the participants, but is utterly useless when conversing with someone of different values. The biggest problem with avoidance, power, and reason, is that even when the conversation is over, the “roots” of disagreement remain, causing the same issues to sprout up again and again. Only by mutually pursuing the voice of possibility can we learn enough to reach a shared understanding.

What Buster does not mention is that such a thing is impossible without sharing reason first. To even discuss this arrangement of voices and goals requires reason. Reason underlies everything, and without it, there is nothing.

Buster also writes of cognitive biases and mental heuristics. He casts them in a mostly positive light, explaining that without the bias toward the familiar, we would be overwhelmed by all the information pouring in our senses. We engage in mental shortcuts because we often have too much information, too little time, too little resources, and too little meaning/relevance to keep us interested otherwise. Because biases can’t be completely avoided, the best strategy for dealing with them is to hold everything lightly.

Buster also writes of many strategies for dealing with disagreements:

1. Pay attention to whether the disagreement is one of the head, heart, or hands. Is it a disagreement over what is true, what is meaningful, or which strategies work best? This is generally good advice, but it only works with people who are also following it. Some people entangle concepts or play bait-and-switch.
2. Pay attention to your anxiety and the anxiety of others. This points the way to where there are things to be learned. I find it odd that Buster thinks people need to be told this. You’d think the anxiety would speak loud enough.
3. Focus on what life experiences caused you to have the biases you do. Exchange stories to better understand each other. I find this advice very odd too. When it comes to politics, most of what is discussed do not pertain to anything specific that happened to me, but stances on the issues are easy to formulate by being educated on the statistics. For example, I have neither aborted a pregnancy nor been aborted, but that doesn’t stop me from having an opinion.
4. Let people speak for themselves. Hear them out so you know your impression of their position isn’t a straw man. Things can’t be changed from the realm of wishful thinking and willful blindness. This is great advice, but it only works if they will patiently explain their positions to you. So often it happens that I get called a racist or a homophobe for no other reason than not having heard the latest gossip and thus being unconvinced of their conclusions.
5. Cultivate neutral spaces where all are welcome. Invite those of different perspectives again and again. Ban people only as a last resort. That makes sense.
6. Food. Allegedly, eating food together makes people less likely to hate each other. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on me. I am fully capable of hating people I eat with – especially if they chew loudly.
7. Ask better questions. Instead of asking yes/no questions such as: Are ghosts real? Ask what experiences led people to their current beliefs about ghosts? Instead of asking what gun-control measures we might be willing to endure, ask: What is the endgame for the gun-control debate? Ask questions like these: What formative events in your life brought you to this belief? What’s really at stake here? What’s complicated about your position here that people don’t usually notice at first? If what you believe was proven conclusively true to its staunchest opponents, what would happen? What would have to be true for you to change your mind about this? What other possibilities might we be missing that would change how we each thought about this? Imagine a world where this is no longer a problem. How did we get here?
8. Inspire aporia. Looking it up, I find that the word aporia can be either a logical contradiction, or a rhetorical device to get the audience to fill in the answer the way the speaker wishes, but Buster uses it in a third way: the emotion that occurs when one finds out they have been wrong. I love this feeling. It’s the reason I love twist endings in spy novels and science fiction movies that question established physics. When people are motivated by aporia, they will seek out new perspectives and not feel angry at those who disagree with them.

Buster has had a similar story to mine. He was frustrated by unending disagreements and reached out to those he knew to settle them. At first, he got nowhere. He tried meeting for “debates” in a public setting, online, in private groups, and one-on-one. Most people were not interested. Finally, he hit upon hosting a potluck with the promise of “stimulating conversation.” First, everyone ate together. Then they shared life experiences pertinent to the issues. Then they broke into smaller groups to produce solutions to the issues. Then they all met together so that others could poke holes in their solutions. They all left with the impression that things are just too complicated to solve, but that things aren’t that bad anyways. That sounds a lot like the theme of my book, When Nothing Seems To Work.

Since my experience with groups up to that point had been that everyone talks over everyone else, and that a single statement can send multiple people down multiple tangents, it never occurred to me to try anything other than one-on-one. I did not see the possibility of the structured discussion. I had wanted to learn what my acquaintances based their positions on, where they got their information, and how they came to deem them reliable sources. I wanted to submit my ideas so they could find flaws in my reasoning. I wanted to know their underlying values so we could find areas we agreed on and build strategies together from there. Most of all, I wanted to know why the arguments of the other side didn’t work on them. My goal was primarily to learn. When absolutely no one had any time for me, yet continued to spew offensive nonsense at work and online, insulting me for not sharing their ideas, I kind of gave up. Should I try again?

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