I had one of those comments exchanges the other day -- you know the kind. I say something clearly and crisply, and someone else says... well, something opposed, also clearly and crisply, and even though we might well be allies on some issues, it begins to degenerate.
I'm fairly new to the whole comments exchange thing -- less than a year in the public arena of national publications -- but I learned something long ago which helps. When things begin to escalate, you look for the truth in what the other person is saying, and go there. Then you go deeper into your own truth, and explain what matters to you. In that not-so-materialist dialectic, you can see each other.
It sounds so simple, but from what I observe, hardly anyone actually does it. It occurred to me (after he responded; his response was lovely, and made me feel good for days) that there are reasons. One is obvious: people might not know how. I was a speech teacher -- but I shouldn't assume everyone learned it in college, just because my students did.
One reason should have been more obvious, but I really had to look for awhile. The nature of the internet is that it's duck and cover. In comments, there aren't even smiley faces. The subjects are usually enormously important ones -- war, discrimination -- and we all care passionately.
There's a third reason, which is the existence of trolls, but I'll save that for another post. What I want to posit here is simply that we are seduced by the structure of things and our own experiences into the horizontal hostility so many of us know so well.
(Horizontal hostility, for those folks who haven't encountered the term, simply means that groups which experience oppression tend to turn on each other, instead of making common cause and turning on the oppressor and the oppressive structure. The 95% does it fairly naturally. Hostility has to go somewhere, and the experience of powerlessness is that it's easier to resent globally, attack locally.)
The danger of a conversation is that, if it's with strangers or other people whose opinion isn't going to affect your life much, we can hone our argument like a sword, use it to cut, and destroy the value in the process.
In the department where I studied, a rhetorician named Douglas Ehninger had taught years before. You understand, this department was proud of its ability to train its students to go for the throat. If you couldn't stand up and fight the best and snarkiest professors in the country on their own ground, you weren't likely to make it past a master's.
But Ehninger must have been an oddity, because he came up with a metaphor concerning the argument of the stick and the argument of the lover. (Please forgive me; I have no access to the necessary data bases on line, and had to eliminate most of my books to fit into my apartment, so this is all from memory.)
This is its basic: the argument of the stick, quite simply, is to beat your opponent into agreeing with you. Evidence, anecdotes, the machine of argument, have one purpose -- to win. And likely you may win. The opponent may concede, not liking being hit with that stick much, for various reasons.
The problem with that kind of persuasion is that it's likely to disappear when you're gone. Agreement is provisionally based on fear. It's a victory, but not necessarily a success.
The argument of the lover, on the other hand, presumes that your opponent (though that's no longer the right word) is someone you care about, even someone you love. What they think and feel matter as much as what you think and feel. So argument is negotiation: it's truthful. Which inevitably means you take a risk when you argue; not only how you expose yourself to the argument, but what it might mean if you lost.
Ehninger's vision has its limits. If you are any kind of progressive at all, in the sense that you believe there are power imbalances which must be addressed for change to occur, you will immediately see that arguing with, say, the White House as a lover will get you almost nothing. It doesn't matter even what the intent of the Executive Branch might be; because of the systemic difference between them and you, understanding simply will be insufficient for change.
But I think it has wonderful implications for understanding how to bring about change. Horizontal hostility obviously perpetuates the status quo; if we don't trust each other, or resent whatever victories any of us get, cooperating to undermine the system -- let alone overturn it -- can't happen.
In the light of my post on the working class and their actual commitment to progressive ideas, it seems to me worthwhile to address the ones who have more faith in regressive ideas and figure out why. Otherwise, the movement is teeny-tiny, and doomed.