Mirah’s Reflections: Can We Heal the Divide?
Can the Right and Left Begin to Bridge the Gap and Unite?
Let’s start with perhaps the most passionate and most divisive issue in America: Abortion — a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
In 1989, Laura Chasin, a family therapist in Cambridge, created The Public Conversation Project, which has since become Essential Partners. Women on both sides of the abortion debate met with a goal of changing the way they communicate by getting to know one another over buffet dinners before identifying which side of the debate they were on. Chasin hosted eighteen sessions with more than one-hundred different women.
Then, on December 30, 1994, pro-life advocate John C. Salvi III shot up two abortion facilities in Brookline, Massachusetts, killing two and wounding five.
Following the horrific tragedy, six leaders from the Massachusetts Pro-life and Pro-choice movements, all of whom condemned such acts of violence, decided it was crucial that the two sides once again engage in dialogue. The first step, before any discussions could ensue, was an initially contentious defining of each side’s terminology. Pro-Choice activists strongly objected to being referred to as “pro-abortionists” and also objected to the use of “murder” to describe woman’s choice to no longer be pregnant. After long debates, labelling terminology was agreed upon and the group met in secret for six years. In the end, no one’s original beliefs were changed but there was a deeper respect for one another’s point of view.
Language is Critical for Defining and “Framing” Issues
Linguist George Lakoff’s The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, the international bestselling book on political debate and messaging is the sequel to his 2005 Don’t Think of an Elephant which has been described as the definitive handbook for understanding and communicating effectively about key social and political issues. Professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, Lakoff has been explaining how to counter propaganda and slogans since 1997 when he wrote Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.
Reframing issues linguistically, as I understand it, is about refraining from using the “other side’s” terminology to define an issue you are opposed to. Thus, the pro-choice movement does not use “pro-life” to define anti-abortionists because their agenda is narrowly focused on bringing all pregnancies to term without offering resources and supports for single mothers to do so, such as affordable day care and universal health care. Being truly and fully “pro-life,” many point, out would encompass opposition to the death penalty and joining the fight for sane gun controls to protect the lives of school children. Those who seek to defend women’s right to choose reframe the discussion by calling self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” instead as anti-women’s rights forced-birthers.
The language of “framing” issues was never clearer and more relevant than in the 2020 elections — nationally as well as locally. Racial tensions were at a high peak after the police killing of George Floyd which fueled a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), and the high-jacking of that nomenclature by others using phrase like “Blue Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter.” Then, BLM made what might have been the most serious error in political messaging ever, when they called for Defunding the Police. While Biden, and others running for state and local offices, stated they did not believe in and would not “defund” police departments, they never fully succeeded in countering anti-police rhetoric and anti-law-and-order propaganda, starkly illustrating the power of language and the potency of repeating lies.
This is especially true of Trump supporters who have been compared to a cult following because of their willingness to accept on face value information obtained solely from Trump’s tweets and reject any disagreement by mimicking his rhetoric of “fake news” and hoaxes without any investigation or fact-finding. How do you de-program such fervently staunch believers? How do we counter conspiracy theories about satanic pizza parlor pedophile rings or a string of alleged “murders” tied to the Clintons, or that COVID-19 is a hoax?
“Silence is death for any idea. An idea that is never spoken or written down dies with the person who conceived it. Ideas can only be remembered when they are repeated. They can only be believed when they are repeated. . .
“ . . . Before you can criticize an idea, you have to reference that idea. You end up repeating the ideas you’re hoping people will forget — but, of course, people can’t forget them because you keep talking about them. The more you repeat a bad idea, the more likely people are to believe it. . .
“ . . . The number of people who believe an idea is directly proportional to the number of times it has been repeated during the last year — even if the idea is false.
“Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy. As one Twitter employee wrote, ‘Every time you retweet or quote tweet someone you’re angry with, it helps them. It disseminates their BS. Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them’.”
Can we change minds? Can we alter strongly held beliefs?
Tali Sharot is a professor at University College London and author of The Influential Mind: What The Brain Reveals About Our Power To Change Others. In an NPR interview Sharot explains testing how people update their beliefs when confronted with new information. She presented statements to two kinds of people — those who believe that climate change is real and those who were deniers. She found that for both groups, when the statement confirmed what they already thought, this strengthened their beliefs. But when it challenged their views, they ignored it. This is the powerful phenomenon known as confirmation bias.
“Confirmation bias is our tendency to take in any kind of data that confirms our prior convictions and to disregard data that does not conform to what we already believe. And when we see data that doesn’t conform to what we believe, what we do is we try to distance ourselves from it.
“There’s four factors that determine whether we’re going to change our beliefs — our old belief, our confidence in that old belief, the new piece of data and our confidence in that piece of data. And the further away the piece of data is from what you already believe, the less likely it is to change your belief. . . [that] means that it’s really hard to change false beliefs. So, if someone holds a belief very strongly but it is a false belief, it’s very hard to change it with data.”
As I understand Lakoff, beliefs are stubborn to change with facts because they come from a different place — they are formed and driven by emotion, not logic. Those who are deeply imbued in group-think will often simply reject and refuse to believe facts that are contrary to what they have accepted as “truth.”
The Enigma of Reason by cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, likewise shares the concept that “reason’s primary strengths are justifying beliefs we already believe in” because it helps us cooperate in a social environment or with our chosen “tribe”, but it does not make us particularly good at truth-seeking.
Mercier and Sperber echo Sharot and others who point out that this need to be part of social group also makes us fall prey to a number of cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, or the tendency to search for information that confirms what we already believe.
Politics, they point out, fosters the need for social cohesion instead of truth-seeking. Thus, belonging to a particular political party distorts our reasoning and lesson our ability or desire to seek the truth or any opposing facts.
Steve Rathje, Ph.D. student in Psychology and Gates Cambridge Scholar at Cambridge University, notes:
“Our desire to hold identity-consistent beliefs often far outweigh our goals to hold accurate beliefs. This may be because being a part of a political party or social group fulfills fundamental needs, like the need for belonging, which supersede our need to search for the truth.”
Sharing Clear’s views of in-person conversations with people who have different beliefs and even deeply disagree with each other can have productive conversation, is psychologist Peter T. Coleman who runs the difficult conversations laboratory at Columbia University. Coleman found that presenting information in a nuanced way, rather than in simple pro-con arguments, can lead people to have more complex and satisfying conversations about contentious issues and that building up goodwill and having more positive interactions than negative, can lead people to have more complex, nuanced discussions.
The concept of in-person dialogue, face to face, rather than shouting at one another and name-calling on social media further enforces the concept prescribed by Clear and others of breaking bread with those we disagree with to help unite us. Perhaps that is why the confluence of a global pandemic that mandated us to stay home and socially distance heightened an already divided nation and led even John Pavlovitz, author of A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community, reflecting on the lower-than-hoped for margin of win — the landfall — for Joe Biden, to wrote:
“We were wrong to believe that white people weaned for decades on supremacy, would suddenly embrace disparate humanity and make more space at the table . .
“We were wrong to believe that kindness and science and facts and truth and goodness would be found more valuable than the fool’s gold of sneering, star-spangled, American greatness.
“We were wrong to hope that more Republicans would cross party lines in order to defend their country from the greatest terrorist threat in our lifetime.
“We were wrong to believe that hope would rise up to cast out fear.”
Can we heal the divide?
The first step to meaningful dialogue is to listen and hear what is being said, not in any effort to find a flaw in one’s argument, but to understand the position held any why. Actively listening involves being silent, fully and attentively engaged, without judgment when someone else is speaking, paraphrasing or summarizing and reflecting back what you heard to verify that you understood it correctly. All of this must be done without formulating a come-back or response in your mind while you are “listening”.
Pavolvitz concludes, “maybe, [we] just have to wait to be right” while Clear says “be kind first. . . Develop a friendship. Share a meal. . . be right later.”
Yet, while sharing meals and developing lasting friendships brought greater understanding, it did not change any minds about abortion in Brookline Mass. Further, if developing friendship created changes in our convictions or values, why is it that such ideological rifts have destroyed some long-time friendships and torn apart families who have shared meals and the relationships of those who shared in the most intimate of manner (as I discussed in Moral Incompatibility is Tearing us Apart)? Or is Pavlovitz right that the most difficult thing is discovering that:
“ . . .we were wrong about people we know and love and live alongside and work with and study beside; about our parents, spouses, siblings, uncles, best friends, and neighbors: they are not the people we thought they were . . .”
If we cannot change minds, can we at least agree to disagree respectfully and civilly when even that is not possible singularly? Bullying is often best dealt with by killing it with silence as Clear suggests. In online communities this is known as not feeding the trolls by engaging in their hyperbolic, vitriolic, mean-spirited arguments. Ignoring them is the best defense.
I started with one of the most contentious and polarizing issues in America and illustrated how it was approached by women with the courage to give it their best effort. And I shared the results of their brave fortitude over time. Take from that story and all I’ve shared from experts on tough policial discourse what you choose. You can label it a success or failure. But I know the women who took part — who listened and heard one another — were enriched as a result and have gone on to keep teaching the lessons they learned at Essential Partners, the non-profit they formed to do just that.
Sometimes, virtually or in real life it is safer and wiser to create boundaries that protect us — at least temporarily — from points of view that are too extreme, too hurtful, or fearful. As Pavlovitz suggests maybe it’s a matter of patience and time to reach some mutual ground to hear and be heard, though perhaps less important to be “right.”
What is the Conclusion? I find Multiple Take-aways:
First, we all know that shouting at one-another in person and certainly not online resolves nothing. Beyond that, I think, we need to decide what our goal is — which, as in most all interactions — will vary based on our relationship to the person or persons with whom we disagree and the importance of that relationship. Do we seek to keep the peace, resolve differences, or to be right?
We may decide to avoid highly toxic, difficult relationships altogether. In other cases, biting our tongue and avoiding topics of disagreement may be the way to go. If we choose to attempt to persuade anyone to rethink their convictions, remember that they are emotion-based beliefs that help people feel part of “tribe” and that experts agree the best approach is by extending friendship first. Offer a welcome to a new group to feel part of. Open a door to a new paradigm of acceptance.
We know that love conquers hate and bias. We also know that hate and bigotry have their roots in fear and feelings of competitiveness and that there is not enough for all. And we know that bigotry is taught. We thus need to break the cycle.
The best hope I see for long-term societal healing is starting with including active listening and critical thinking in school curriculum at all levels. Also, worth emulating are programs such as The Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence. This Jerusalem-based program exposes Israeli children and Palestinian children to one another in intensive summer camp programs that aid in the children overcoming learned biases and seeing the humanity of and similarities they share with the “other.”
