Discussing High Conflict

In my congregation’s 4th Principle Dialogue Group, we discussed the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, by Amanda Ripley. We found it to be a good source for understanding community conflicts when they turn polarizing, and here are some resources if you want to run your own book discussion or just learn about the book on your own.

Concepts & Terms

The book High Conflict has several concepts and practices that seem like pure gold. In particular, I have seen looping lead to productive dialogues on hot topics that are otherwise impossible to discuss.

Fourth way. A way to go through conflict that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent, the three usual paths. Leaning into the conflict.

Illusion of communication. The extremely common and mistaken belief that we have communicated something, when we have not.

Looping for understanding. An iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said—and checks to see if the summary was right. Developed by Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein and detailed in their book Challenging Conflict. 

“Tell me more.” Simon Greer’s ground rules were: “We’re going to take seriously the things everyone holds dear”, “We’re not going to try to convince each other we’re wrong”, and, “We’re going to be curious”. The phrase “tell me more” embodies these rules, and it’s a handy response whenever someone says something that you don’t know how to respond to. 

Magic ratio. When the number of everyday positive interactions between people significantly outweighs the number of negative, creating a buffer that helps keep conflict healthy. (In marriage, for example, the magic ratio is 5 to 1, according to research by psychologists Julie and John Gottman.) 

Crock pot. A shorthand term for the issue that a conflict appears to be about, on the surface, when it is really about something else (see Understory). 

Understory. The thing the conflict is really about, underneath the usual talking points (see Crock pot).

Online Resources

Here is a link to Amanda Ripley’s list of discussion questions. Some of them you can answer from your personal experience with conflict even if you haven’t read the book. 

https://www.amandaripley.com/blog/discussion-questions-for-high-conflict

Here’s a solid review from the NYTimes (no paywall).

https://nyti.ms/3OsHdLl

Session Schedule

Our format ensures that everyone gets to speak. Our goal in the Dialogue Group is not just to discuss valuable topics but also to develop the skills and habits of good dialogue. 

7:00 welcome, settling in

7:05 introductory words, intentions, ground rules, do-not-disturb, chalice lighting

7:10 opening comments. 2 minutes each: introduce yourself, questions or comments about the chapters we’re discussing, or for that matter what you’d like to say about any part of the topic

7:30 suggestions for topics and questions to discuss (might be obvious)

7:35 forty minutes of open conversation (alternatively, 50 minutes with a 10-minute break in the middle)

8:15 last words, 1 minute each for closing comments or thoughts about future sessions

8:25 closing words

8:29 optional group photo

8:30 done

“High Conflict” in Unitarian-Universalist Communities

Ever since 2017, the UU community has been in “high conflict” over the national leaders’ political agenda, so for us this book is timely. The section on gang violence is interesting but doesn’t much apply to our experience. The section on conflicts within a liberal Jewish community, on the other hand, parallels our own experience in a lot of ways.

More Resources for Better Dialogues

See also this post: https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2022/03/resources-for-better-dialogues.html

Mothers’ Helper

Zoom’s whiteboard = playtime

Over the last several years, I set up weekly meetups with little kids as a way to give hard-working moms a break. Mostly they’ve been in person, and for the last couple years they’ve been online. My own kid is grown, and hanging out with kids has been a rewarding way to stay in touch with the next generation. If you’re not currently managing kids, maybe you have some spare time to hang out with a kid or two. Modern parenting puts a heavy burden on moms and dads—especially moms. For what it’s worth, here’s my experience hanging out with kids.

A younger friend of mine has two daughters, and I would truck over to their place once a week to distract and occupy the older one. The stay-at-home mom appreciated having one fewer kid to worry about, and a couple hours a week doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice on my part. The daughter is shy, but she warmed up to me, and the mom appreciated it. The real payoff was seeing the two girls have fun when they showed up at parties at my place. Since they were both used to me, they felt secure around a bunch of people they didn’t know. 

Before the pandemic, once a week I would pick up a grade-school kid from school. Mostly I hung out at the school’s playground while he played with his peers, and eventually we’d go back to his place. My big contribution was to give him some unsupervised play time with his peers, something that kids don’t get enough of these days. When school was out, we switched to me taking him to the grocery store once a week. We would walk together from his place to the store, do some shopping, and walk back. He had money to spend at his discretion, and we talked a lot about how to make good money decisions. He also got to see me struggle in the sun carrying too many groceries up the hill, an object lesson in reaping and sowing. 

During the pandemic, I met weekly with a kid in another time zone. We used Zoom’s collaborative whiteboard to draw zany adventures. The features seem designed for business, but the whiteboard works as an impromptu play space. The graphic tools let me draw myself and then pick up that drawing and move it around the whiteboard. That way, the kid could see me climb the stairs into the attic, or whatever the adventure was that day. Our adventures were mostly about me getting hurt when my parents are away and I break every safety rule. The graphic tool let me distort my image, so I could turn left and right , and when I fell down the stairs I flipped the image upside down. I could also get squished flat, which happened. We also talked about stuff, but mostly it was play. 

Some of my attempts to set up online hangouts failed to take hold. That was no fun, but it was all right. It can be hard to keep a kid’s attention in a Zoom room, so now I know to lead with a whiteboard or some other way for the kid to meaningfully collaborate with me.

Now I’m married to a mom with a kid, and I get all the reward I need helping her out. Maybe when my wife and I are empty-nesters, I’ll find some other kid to hang out with. 

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Samson the Old-School Terrorist

Philistines are going to starve

When my daughter was little, I wanted to tell the story of Samson to my daughter orally, as it was originally told, instead of reading it out of a “Bible story” book. To get the story right, I opened the Bible and read about Samson. Turns out that his big claim to fame is massacring Philistines, most of them civilians. 

To the Hebrews, Samson was a folk hero, someone who killed their enemies by the thousands. He killed a lot of people, most of them civilians, whose crime was that they were Philistines. Today we expect more than that from a hero. 

Here’s how Samson’s first heroic act goes. He marries a Philistine, and then he challenges thirty Philistines with a riddle, betting them “thirty sheets and thirty change of garments” that they can't solve it. When they solve his unsolvable riddle, Samson knows that his wife has given them the answer. To settle the score, he collects the sheets and garments by killing 30 Philistines...

“And the Spirit of YHWH came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of garments to those who had solved the riddle.”

Later, he torches fields, slaughters Philistines, and kills a thousand with the jawbone of an ass. He dallies with a harlot in Gaza, and then falls in love with Delilah, who betrays him. He’s captured and blinded, but eventually he pulls the Philistines’ temple down around him, killing three thousand more people on his way out.

“So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”

I never told the Samson story to my little daughter. By modern standards, this guy isn’t a hero. He’s a terrorist.

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Resources for Better Dialogues

Open Mind Platform is one of
several programs for better dialogues.

This page compiles resources for fostering better dialogue. I compiled these items to share with friends, and I’m making them public because these days more and more people seem to be talking about dialogue.

Books

The first two are highly recommended in general, and the third is great specifically for the issue of how to deal with “high conflict” (usually about politics, religion, or identity).

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler

Game-changing. Even just reading the chapter titles helps you think better about conversations. An important point is that you and the person you disagree with should agree on a shared goal for the conversation you’re having, such as understanding each other better.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
Eye-opening. We think mostly with our feelings, conservatives and liberals feel differently, and our differences are heightened when they fall along differences of group identity. An important point is that adversarial positioning, such as in a debate, makes it harder for people to be open-minded. See also Open Mind Platform, below.

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, by Amanda Ripley
A close look at conflicts as they are playing out these days, including a Jewish congregation that was nearly divided over political issues. A big idea is that when you are in “high conflict”, the things that seem like the right approach, such as hosting a debate or referendum, usually make things worse. 

Online Resources
Two online programs that I’m familiar with.

Open Mind Platform
This program puts into practice the theories developed by Jonathan Haidt and others. The solo introductory program is worth doing on its own. The program features guidelines for various sorts of communities, such as congregations. 
https://openmindplatform.org

Braver Angels
This program brings together people with differing views and fosters dialogue in a variety of formats. I’ve done one of their forums, and their structure works well. 
https://braverangels.org

Previous Dialogs
Here are recordings of a few moderated dialogues that I’ve participated in.

Christianity: Good and Bad
A “better debate” hosted by Seattle Atheists. I moderated this one.
https://youtu.be/3AoG5gIt6uI

Religion: Good and Bad
Another “better debate” among atheists, this time with me as a participant. 
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/seattle-atheists-podcast-596599/episodes/valerie-tarico-and-jonathan-tw-24102396

White Privilege
A Unitarian-Universalist future minister (Justin Almeida) talks with an ex-UU friend of mine, with me as the moderator. Both interlocutors said that they felt heard. How often does that happen in a conversation like this? 
https://youtu.be/wboY_DPR6v4

Foot Poll
One way to get a group of people to share their opinions without a few voices dominating the discussion is to conduct a “foot poll” or a “walk-and-talk”, which I blogged about back in 2015. 
https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2015/07/walk-n-talk-discussions.html

Take-Away
Dialogue between people with different perspectives can be wonderful, but usually it’s terrible. When done popcorn-style, with one speaker popping up at a time, forums and Q&A sessions get dominated by people whose desire to talk exceeds everyone else’s desire to hear them talk. Fortunately, a little structure goes a long way in helping dialogues be more productive. 

Guest: Hanania’s “Tears”

My friend Casey Jordan would like to get feedback on this summary of an Internet pundit’s recent essay. (Here’s that essay.) If you’re familiar with the essay, how good do you think the summary is? If you’re not familiar with the essay, Casey hopes that reading this summary is better than reading the original. In either case, what do you think? I’ll pass comments on to Casey.

Richard Hanania’s essay, distilled

Casey Jordan

Way way back in February of 2022, Richard Hanania (political ponderer? podcast provocateur?) wrote an essay that got some traction around the web. It explored some surprising ways gender functions in this, an era that claims to be gender-blind.

I find some of his observations fascinating, and wish they could be considered, discussed, and held up to the light by more folk - especially by people who’d be skeptical of the conclusions he draws, so they can give reasoned pushback. 

Alas! Hanania’s prose style is, let’s say, a bit much. He’s needlessly acerbic; he picks fights even when it limits his reach. His essay is, for many people, almost literally unreadable.

Which is a shame: interesting ideas should be engaged (Hanania would probably say “attacked”) by all sides.

So, in the interest of getting more people to explore his ideas, I summarize them below, minus the punch. His original essay, I think, argues five big ideas. The fifth idea is mostly aimed at his in-group (conservatives), so I’ll leave it out of this. 

My apologies for anything/everything this summary gets wrong.

1: We have a double standard

On the surface, our society claims to treat men and women equally. But in at least one important way, this is a facade: for very (very) good reasons, we treat aggression toward women as a much worse thing than aggression toward men.

Probably this is something we can all get behind. Probably this is something we all should get behind. But in the fast-and-furious world of political debate and social policy, this leads to an unexpected wrinkle:

When a man and a woman disagree in public, the man has to tread exceedingly carefully - or the audience will view him as the aggressor, and disregard his ideas.

Hanania cites a bunch of examples of this, but here, let’s consider just two situations:

Situation 1

You’re a man. You find yourself confronted, publicly, by another man. He’s screaming at you, cursing, and crying. What can you do?

If you escalate, you risk the situation spiraling out of control. You may come to blows. Others may intervene. If you de-escalate - say, by walking away - you risk losing face.

Both of these are bad, but, well, dem’s the breaks. At least they’re better than the other situation.

Situation 2

You’re a man. You find yourself confronted publicly by a woman, acting in a similar way. What can you do?

You certainly can’t escalate: even raising your voice is likely to be seen as an implicit threat of violence. You’ll turn onlookers against you. You can’t de-escalate, either - if you walk away, you’ll appear heartless, and turn onlookers against you. You lose the argument, regardless of how you react. 

In sum

Just to repeat the obvious: it is for excellent reasons that our society treats aggression against women as much worse than aggression against men. However, this creates a no-win situation for any man who finds himself arguing against a woman who’s willing to employ a full suite of emotions.

Is Hanania saying that men and women can’t argue publicly? Not at all! He points out that people of any gender can debate with cool-headed logic and reason, and that the majority do. But, predictably, the outliers can have an outsized effect.

Is Hanania saying, as one person put it, that “it’s unfair women can scream, if men can’t slap”? Not at all!

Men who are outliers tend to express their full suite of emotions through physical violence. Our society has developed ways of dealing with this - for example, jails! Women who are outliers tend to express their full suite of emotions through screaming and crying. We haven’t yet developed a way of dealing with this.

(Keep reading for more on this.)

2: We’re in the darkest timeline

Given that women have been freed of the shackles that kept them out of the public sphere, there are two ways that the norms of public debate could work.

Norm A 

We decide the goal of dialogue is to find what’s true and what works, even though it means that feelings will be hurt. Thus, we urge people to keep their emotions in check when debating the issues of the day.

Historically, this has been seen as a norm of men’s discourse.

Norm B

We decide the goal of dialogue is emotional and mental well-being, even though that means it’s harder to find out what’s true and what works. Thus, we support people when they let their feelings loose in debate.

Historically, this has been seen as a norm of women’s discourse. 

(And historically, many people thought this was because men’s and women’s “natures” were different, through blood or genes or whatever. But we don’t need to accept any of that to understand that, culturally, these two norms were seen as gendered - and to remember that our society has held onto many old ideas.)

You might be imagining here that Hanania is one of those complaining that our society has shifted from Norm A to Norm B. You’d be wrong! Hanania thinks either of those situations would be better than the two-faced reality we actually live in: Norm C.

Norm C

We decide that men and women play by different rules. Men need to stick to Norm A: if a man expresses his feelings in a debate, he loses credibility. (This is actually true whether he expresses them in a stereotypically male way - by throwing a punch - or a stereotypically female way - by crying.) Women can, if they choose, take Norm B. And when arguing against a man, Norm B leads to victory.

3: We’re all hypocrites

Hanania argues that this makes hypocrites of the Left, Right, and Center. How?

The Left

People on the Left lean toward believing that gender differences stem from culture, not biology - and we should therefore deconstruct and dismantle them. (The gender differences - not people on the Left!)

However, they don’t treat men’s tears the same way as women’s tears. (Men’s tears are laughable, while women’s tears are allowable.) Hypocrites!

The Right

People on the Right lean towards believing that gender differences stem from biology, not culture - and we should respect and affirm them. (The gender differences - not people on the Right!) 

However, they don’t actually believe that men and women should play by different sets of rules. Hypocrites!

The Center

Hanania saves his greatest vitriol for people in the Center, who cheer on studies that argue that gender differences are, in fact, biological, at least in a statistical way - and then ignore that, and commit to treating everyone as an individual. Hypocrites!

[Summarizer’s note: I’m not confident I’m putting it properly here.]

4: We need to choose, and (A) works better

Norm C is terrible - it systematically works against the participation of men in public discourse. Assuming one finds that unacceptable (!), we need to choose between Norm A and Norm B, and Hanania challenges anyone to argue against the fact that Norm A works better in public discourse.

Again, this doesn’t mean that stereotypically male norms are better. In fact, the excesses of these norms are obviously worse - when left unchecked, they lead to robbery, murder, and war! But the fact that these excesses are so obviously bad means that societies have spent millennia evolving ways to check them (think prisons, anti-bullying campaigns, international war crimes, and the general social stigmatization of violence).

During that time, women have been confined to the home, kept out of the public space. Female norms have only recently entered the public sphere - societies haven’t yet evolved ways to check these kinds of excesses.

Also, this doesn’t mean that male norms are better in all (or even most) contexts. Much of the time, we should adopt female norms, privileging mental well-being over the search for truth. (“Don’t be a jerk” is important life advice.)

To put it all together

Folk on the far Left, Hanania consoles, have long argued that Western institutions are sexist to the core - we all need to accept that they’re right. Public debate was built on stereotypically male norms, and it works better this way. 

Folk in the Center, Hanania argues, have tried to hide this fact. We should drop the facade. We should be honest about how our society works, so we can make it work better.

In a public debate, it’s not okay to throw a punch to get one’s way. We should acknowledge that it’s just as unacceptable to cry.

Please comment on Twitter.

MLK & UU Timeline

For over twenty years, I’ve been a Unitarian-Universalist, and I didn’t know most of this stuff until I started researching MLK two years ago. If you haven’t listened to his speech “The Other America”, follow this link and do that instead of reading my blog post. 

[youtube]

Are Schools Anti-Racist?

 

tl:dr Our school system is both racist and anti-racist, and it’s evidently more anti-racist than it is racist. 

It’s well understood that the US schooling system is racist, in the sense that it perpetuates disparities between more privileged students and underprivileged students, who in turn are disproportionately African American. More privileged kids go to better schools, and underprivileged kids go to worse ones. With the racist nature of schooling agreed on, we can consider whether the school system is also anti-racist, and indeed it looks as though that’s the case. 

Can a racist institution be at the same time anti-racist? Alternatively, to think that an institution can be only racist or only anti-racist is to engage in either-or thinking. Tema Okun famously identified either-or thinking as an aspect of “white supremacy culture”. I’m no expert on critical race theory, from which we get the “white supremacy” theory, but I sure agree with Okun that either-or thinking is bad news. It’s categorical thinking as opposed to empirical thinking, and it’s a recurrent cognitive bias and popular logical fallacy. If we reject either-or thinking, then it makes no sense to describe our school system as either racist or anti-racist. Any system that wide-ranging can easily have multiple results, some racist and others anti-racist.

With the inegalitarian failures of the school system in mind, can we think of anything anti-racist about the system? Imagine what would happen if we shut down the public school system tomorrow as a way to fight disparities between racial groups. If “school” is only racist, then “no school” would be anti-racist or at least less racist. If schools make things worse, then shuttering schools would make things better. Do schools make things worse? Without public schools, racial disparities would be even bigger than they already are. Parents with more privilege would use their resources to get their kids some education, one way or another. Underprivileged parents would have fewer such options or none, and the disparity in reading, math, and other basics would get wider, not narrower. Shuttering schools would make racism (that is, disparity) worse. 

The school system is imperfect on an institutional level, but even with these imperfections it still reduces achievement disparities compared to what those disparities would otherwise be. If schools—relative to no schools—reduce racial disparities, then to that extent the system is effectively anti-racist. Can we compare the degree of racism in the system versus anti-racism? It’s hard to measure, but it’s easy to agree that underprivileged kids are better off with the system we have than they would be with no such system or alternative system in place. This thought experiment leads to the conclusion that schools are more anti-racist than they are racist. 

Still, compared to a hypothetical school system that’s not racist at all, today’s system looks pretty bad. Everyone would benefit from the nation having a better school system, and to get there we need to understand the system we have now. Our challenge isn’t to dismantle a system that’s anti-racist, full stop. Our challenge is to build up the elements of the school system that are already anti-racist and to make the school system work better for the students who aren’t getting what they need from it. To reform schools effectively, we need to recognize the anti-racist side of the system.