Toxic Talk – Is There an Antidote?

(October 24, 2021) 

    One usually thinks of science as an arena in which differences of perspective are handled in a cool, dispassionate, and civil fashion.  Researchers gather empirical evidence, test their hypotheses using commonly accepted methodologies and make corrections as fresh information or more plausible explanations emerge.  Science operates on the basis of provisional truths, and thus requires its practitioners to maintain an open mind.  One would suppose, then, that there would be little tolerance for the sort of stubborn rectitude and partisan sniping that has become a commonplace in our politics and the culture at large.

    Alas, it turns out that even highly regarded members of this empirically oriented community sometimes succumb to an all-too-human failing.  Take, for instance, the ongoing debate over what killed off the dinosaurs. Was it the sudden impact of a six-mile wide asteroid in the Yucatan, a centuries-long series of climate-altering volcanic eruptions in central India or a combination of both?  The first theory has held sway for several decades now, and its leading proponent, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, has defended it stridently and, at times, pugnaciously.  

    Alvarez, as Bianca Bosker reported recently in The Atlantic magazine, has disparaged dissenting colleagues as “not very good scientists” who “publish scientific nonsense.”  Confronted with suggestive and potentially disconfirming evidence from the fossil record, Alvarez offered this condescending rejoinder: “Paleontologists,” he sniffed “are more like stamp collectors than real scientists.” 

   This kind of denigration, practiced by a person of significant scientific stature, has had an untoward effect.  Some dissenters have quit the field, afraid of being embarrassed or of jeopardizing their careers. “Thus,” Bianca Bosker writes, “the sudden impact theory solidified and alternative theories were largely abandoned.”  But not completely, for tough-minded researchers like Princeton’s Gerta Keller have refused to fold.  “The more people (like Alvarez) attack me,” she told Boskar, “the more I want to find out what’s the real story behind it.” 

    To be sure, such skirmishes in the world of science are mild and relatively rare compared to what we have been witnessing in the culture at large.  These days, differences of opinion and perspective quickly degrade into ad hominem attacks and, where the mandating of facemasks is concerned, physical assault.  As a result, we are threatened with the loss of any sense of shared vision or common purpose, even on an issue as elementary as public health.  One would think that, as Americans citizens our needs and interests still converge at certain points, but identifying them has become more and more difficult. Trust between and among Americans has suffered serious erosion, compromising our ability to communicate with each other or coordinate our efforts except in a state of dire emergency.

    There’s been no shortage of commentary on this subject in recent years, much of it – like UW Madison academic Kathy Cramer’s book, The Politics of Resentment - focused on the feelings of America’s rural and small-town residents.  “It’s gotten downright nasty around here,” Cramer observes about outstate Wisconsin.  

People, in casual conversation, are treating each other as enemies. This in a place where people are notoriously nice.  Seriously nice.  But times change.

  They certainly do, and in this respect Wisconsin is hardly exceptional.  Cramer contends that Wisconsin’s political movers and shakers have played a leading role in fostering and fomenting this cleavage.  The “seeds were sown over long periods of time,” she writes, “and the political elites reap the benefits of the divisiveness they help create.” 

    The Donald Trump phenomenon is simply the Wisconsin experience writ large and shorn of all pretense. Both before and during his occupancy of the White House, Mr. Trump reveled in the incivility and trash-talk that have long been his stock-and-trade.  At one rowdy rally during the 2016 campaign, the candidate encouraged the crowd to root out and expel any “dissenters” among them – which they gladly did to chants of “USA, USA.”  “Isn’t this more fun than a regular, boring rally?” Trump shouted above the din.  “To me, this is fun.”  

     But the truth is, Mr. Trump anticipated, and found, a receptive audience for his demagoguery; or, what his supporters admiringly call his “tell it like it is” bravado.  The culture has been shifting, coarsening, and we may not have seen the worst of it.  Lilliana Mason, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, has been watching the trend line and doesn’t like the direction in which it’s headed: “I’m worried about violent conflict across party lines,” she admits, “and I haven’t seen anything that’s stopping that outcome yet.”  Two and a half years after Mason expressed that concern, a belligerent mob descended on and breached our nation’s capitol. More than one historian has observed that the country has not been so deeply divided since before the Civil War.  

    Internecine conflict has always figured prominently in American’s relationships with each other, politically, religiously and culturally.  But it didn’t always translate into the kind of rhetorical excess we’re seeing today.  Consider, for instance, the run-up to the 2000 presidential election. Commenting on a Republican primary debate held that summer, Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham groused that, “There was nary a sharp comment or challenging question uttered the entire evening.” 

All six contestants clearly wanted to be seen as nice guys…and they were all careful not to insult one another or give way to wild or angry words. (that was just two decades ago)

    Nevertheless, what’s happening today may seem unprecedented, but by historical standards it isn’t.  Both before and during his presidency Abraham Lincoln endured a steady stream of abuse from the press, the pulpit and even from his fellow Republicans.  One prominent New York City attorney likened Lincoln to a “barbarian, yahoo and gorilla.”  The celebrated preacher Henry Ward Beecher offered this rebuke: “An unshapely man…lacking in refinement.” And the well-born George McClellan, commanding general of the Union Army, voiced the opinion that his superior was a “coward and an idiot.”

    During the McCarthy era, Red-baiting threatened the livelihood of teachers, novelists, screen writers, scientists, labor leaders, civil servants as well as public office holders.  Those so charged were guilty until proven innocent and often a mere accusation sufficed to heap disrepute upon one so targeted.

    One might imagine that religious leaders would show greater restraint, and serve as models of brotherly and sisterly affection.  Unfortunately, that’s not always been the case either.  Read the records of the early church, and you will find priests and bishops fulminating against their theological rivals.  Martin Luther, instigator of the Protestant Reformation, was quick to pin the label Antichrist – meaning a human agent of the devil - on his opponents, both sacred and secular.  

    Even the Gospels are less helpful in this regard than one might hope.  To be sure, Jesus counseled his followers to “Love their enemies” and, if offended, to “turn the other cheek.” He also inveighed against hateful speech, declaring that “Anyone who says, ‘you fool’” to another is inviting hell-fire. 

    Sadly, the Gospels are hardly consistent on such matters.  Elsewhere Jesus himself berates his opponents as “blind fools,” “vipers,” and “hypocrites.”  Don’t bother “casting your pearls before such swine,” he admonishes his disciples.

    It seems, then, that incivility has enjoyed a long and lamentable track record throughout history. So, here’s the perennial challenge we are now asked to face: can we create a culture of healthy partisanship – a partisanship free from the felt need to demonize the opposition?  It’s not an insignificant issue and words do matter. Ninety years ago, the great American educator and philosopher John Dewey warned that, “A democracy that has lost the art of public communication is a democracy on its way toward chaos.”  

    Before entertaining possible remedies, it might help if we had a better handle on the etiology of this illness.  What forces have been at work in the larger culture, sowing discord and normalizing incendiary discourse?  With a firmer grasp of their source, we can then consider how those influences might be mitigated. 

    There seems to have been, in the first place, a general loosening of standards in the vernacular.  Some of us are old enough to remember George Carlin’s seminal stand-up comedy sketch entitled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”  Carlin introduced it in 1972, when the Television Code still imposed strict limits on what could be said or displayed on the air.  Profanity, sexual innuendo, irreverence, graphic violence and negative depictions of family life all transgressed the “bounds of common decency” and were suppressed.

    Needless to say, once the Code was abolished in 1983 things began to change.  Producers tread cautiously at first but over time Carlin’s seven words crept into the mainstream and have staked their claim in popular music, film and casual conversation.  The long and short of it is that many of us are less careful these days about the language we use, the way we express ourselves, especially from a platform like the Internet that affords both security and, if the individual chooses, anonymity.  Even here in the upper Midwest where politeness has long stood as a cardinal virtue we’re less circumspect than we once were. 

    It’s also true that we may be more easily provoked than in the past and thus more given to incivility. Some of this – and especially with respect to political issues – has to do with the transformation of our politics into a “zero-sum game”: either you win or you lose; either you’re for me or against me.   An epithet Donald Trump frequently employed was to dismiss his critics as “losers,” and he has a habit of describing his own achievements – such as they are – as “big wins” or even “humongous wins.”  

    The substance of these “wins” didn’t appear to mean much to the President as long as he came out on top.  But as a larger-than-life figure, Mr. Trump only reflects and reinforces a commonly held sentiment.  “We live in a society where it’s all about the will to power, the will to dominate, the will to conquer,” Cornell West recently observed. As a result, “We no longer have dialogue. It’s all monologue.”    

    This isn’t an outlook confined to politics.  As Red Sanders, former head football coach at UCLA famously declared, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” – a line often wrongly attributed to Vince Lombardi.  Winning matters a great deal to a scientist like Louis Alvarez, and to a predatory capitalist like Chicago’s Paul Singer or Tesla’s Elon Musk. As an outlook, it also adds fuel to the fires of resentment.  Many of the rural and small-town Wisconsin folk Kathy Cramer interviewed felt that they and their communities were “losing” in the struggle for attention, power and resources.  Urban dwellers, they insisted, were prospering at their expense, even though the data didn’t always confirm those accusations.  But, as Cramer writes, “perceptions, not data, are what matters.”  

    Politicians exploit these sentiments, but the media have also been complicit.  Too much poll-driven political coverage focuses on who’s winning and who’s losing at any given moment. This only raises the emotional stakes, as voters over-invest in the candidates of their choice.  “We need to tone down the winning versus losing,” Lilliana Mason insists, and focus more on what government is supposed to do, rather than who’s going to win” the latest skirmish.  

    Zero-sum politics can also be subversive, as those who lose begin questioning the legitimacy of the outcome and the fairness of the system itself. Today better than half of all card-carrying members of the GOP are absolutely convinced that the last election was “stolen” and that Joe Biden usurped the presidency. This does not bode well for the future.   

   Furthermore, the increasing tendency for Americans to self-sort into groups whose “moral narratives” mirror their own serves to harden people’s positions.  Whether they assume the form of on-line communities or coffee klatches at the local Denny’s, such collectives reinforce their members’ sense of righteousness and dispel their doubts.  “Our politics is groupish, Jonathan Haidt observes, “and when we strongly identify with a particular group, its enemies become my enemies.”

    This “groupishness” exacerbates the zero-sum game, for the stronger the connection, the closer the identification, the harder it becomes to recognize outsiders as anything other than enemies governed by evil intent.  As political scientist Jeremy Suri notes in The Impossible Presidency, today’s rabid partisanship “defines compromise…as appeasement of evil” and thus precludes collaboration.

    So, what is to be done?  If we find the current state of affairs untenable and increasingly dangerous are there strategies we can adopt that might improve our political and cultural climate?   

    One obvious step is to step out of our comfort zone. This doesn’t mean turning the channel to “Fox & Friends.” It’s about physical presence, inviting face-to-face interaction with folks who don’t necessarily share our moral or cultural narrative.  For instance, a couple of years ago I started attending a black Baptist church on my free Sunday mornings.  Why?  Because it had become clear to me that I hadn’t had enough direct exposure to Madison’s black community to appreciate its concerns. 

    I went there to sit quietly, listen closely and to experience for myself the discomfort of being both white and non-Christian in a place where devout people of color defined the faith and made the rules.  As Cathy Kramer discovered after repeated visits to some of the North Woods communities she studied, such encounters help restore trust and to soften the hard shell of our assumptions. This can lead to what sociologist Peter Berger calls “cognitive contamination,” a greater receptivity to foreign points of view.  When that occurs, Berger suggests, “It becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the beliefs of others as perverse, insane or evil.”

     In closing, here are a few further suggestions that might improve the quality of our conversations – especially ones we are drawn into with people of competing viewpoints.

    First, think like a good scientist, which means holding onto one’s convictions lightly.  Learn to be comfortable with provisional or tentative, rather than final truths.  Understand that there is as much value in “not knowing” as there is in “knowing.”  As Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson advises “…don’t be afraid to use words and phrases denoting timid uncertainty – “apparently,” “seemingly,” “raises the possibility of,” “may well be.”  

    “That’s not sloppiness,” Wilson assures us, “It’s just good professional conduct and true to the core of the scientific method.”  We could all profit, I think, from a little more intellectual humility as we try to engage others in challenging conversations.  

     Second, and related to the foregoing, be curious.  Make a point to ask questions rather than share convictions, then listen carefully to what you hear.  As the 20th century playwright Eugene Ionesco once said, “It’s not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”  I have found that people are more receptive to being asked, than to being told; not interrogated, mind you, but queried in a way that suggests you really are curious about what another person thinks and why they think that way.

    Third, be patient, or, as the Dalai Lama puts it, “forbearing.”  The Tibetan word for this is “so pa” and it denotes an ability to sit with our discomfort and uncertainty until we have achieved a greater measure of clarity. It takes time to establish a rapport, much less a meeting of the minds. Thus, we need to be committed to a relationship and not just a conversation. It’s not about winning, but instilling mutual respect.

    Fourth, cultivate self-awareness.  As an interviewer, Kathy Cramer kept track of her body language. Folded arms suggests defensiveness and withdrawal and, along with other mannerisms that might betray bias, is to be avoided.  Tone is also important; is it inviting and friendly or aggressive and challenging?  The words themselves will scarcely register if there is even a hint of disapproval in one’s inflection. 

    In his teachings, the Buddha admonished his followers to practice “Right” or “Skillful” speech as a spiritual discipline.  Such speech, he taught, is “truly noble, is untainted, elevated and guided by compassion…. It is a crucial element on…the Path that leads to eternal bliss.”

    As a society, we’ve become lazy and undisciplined in our speech, so following the Buddha’s advice takes some doing. Thus, my last point is this: we need to practice – striving to become more mindful in our everyday discourse with colleagues, customers, family members – with members of our own “tribe,” as it were. Chances are, we’ve all been affected to some degree by today’s toxic talk, so we are overdue for a refresher course in civility. “This work is very hard,” Lilliana Mason admits.  But it just may be the sort of work that saves the republic and restores our communities.