Nevertheless, most of us are oblivious. We're likely to think of "bias" only in connection to racial matters. We go on accepting reasoning at face value -- or, at least, we go on accepting our own reasoning (or that of our designated spokespeople) that way. We certainly can see the cracks in the reasoning of our opponents while blind to our own foibles and fallacies.
A recent dust-up within an ongoing discussion group of friends has led me to focus on how we argue.
Or, I might have said, on how to argue.
I might have asked how we argue in groups. But we're humans. We're always in groups of one kind or another.
If not externally, than internally; we all carry around our internalized families and society.
When it comes to key ideas and positions, we often permit minimal deviation. If we are inclined toward the political left, for instance, anything closer to the center, let alone rightward, is suspect, and if we are right-leaning, what's further leftward is enemy territory.
This way lies polarization: you're either for us or against us.
We tend to label individuals in the public sphere as either good or bad. Jordan Peterson. Adam Schiff. Mark Zuckerberg. Same way for courses of action: either all beneficial or entirely harmful, as though those plans of which we approve have zero drawbacks, while those which we disavow are devoid of benefits.
Group cohesion presses us toward simplistic moral positions. Nuance is discouraged. That can mean thinking is discouraged. Thinking is likely to get you into messy middle territory and heretical positions.
Looking at ourselves is off limits. Thus it happens that if two contingents are together, they will confine their critique to a third party or group who is not present.
The pressure against self-examination makes observing how the group works a no-no as well, hence the difficulty of looking at group dynamics, that is, the group process and what is happening right under our noses and between ourselves.
The solution? Talk, each articulating our ideas as well as we can.
Find a group that has norms against personal attack and that values hearing a range of ideas. Or develop one: a group that goes beyond being "nice" yet that cares about its talkers; a supportive group.
No doubt, any ideas off the center will sound off-balance, even in such a group. Convention and ideological conformism is the expectation. There will be rebuffs. You may be bruised.
Note: a male may in part push through his ideas on the basis of volume and size, that is, by a display of physical power, whereas a similar display by a woman would backfire, coming across as pushiness, stridency or the like. Or schoolmarmish and on the brink of tears (thinking Elizabeth Warren in the penultimate debate). No; a woman does best on the merits of her argument and without other recourse, a la Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And so does a man.
If the push-back knocks me down, I hope to get up and go back to the drawing board as soon as I can. Go home, think, regroup. Find a way to articulate what I want to express. Try again.
Adam Schiff's ability to keep on track despite blow-back did not emerge fully formed overnight. I'm speaking here of the impeachment hearings and trial, of course. That ability is a skill. It had to be developed, honed. Nor are we all RBG.
According to a January 27 New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, practicing that kind of skill in conversation was once encouraged. Groups that supported such talk for ordinary people became the norm all around the country in the 1930s and, according to Lepore, saved democracy.
Hard to believe now. What an inspiring article!
It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to argue about it.
The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.
Nobody praised calling names. The trouble is that once we call somebody out, we make them into somebody we would never speak to.
With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together....
I wish we would do that. Sounds so good!
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