Once upon a time in book club . . .
I was surprised when a person in my book club expressed an anti-feminist sentiment. I had forgotten that this person had problems with (or, perhaps more charitably, misconceptions about) feminist politics.
Imagine that the person in my book club habitually, rather than infrequently, expresses views that I interpret as anti-feminist. If it were not for book club, I likely would not choose to spend time with them. That’s not how I want to spend my down time.
But this is book club, and the point of book club is to talk about books together. The books bring us together, even if we don’t share much in terms of beliefs, lived experience, or taste. Our diverse opinions and disagreements make book club more engaging.
Dialogue across difference
My surprise in book club reminded me of a question someone asked of me and my collaborator, Dr. Rita A. Gardiner, following a talk. We described Hannah Arendt’s view of politics as something people do together. Politics is animated by unique people coming together across their differences to shape a common world.
Someone asked: How do we appreciate, and talk with, people who are not like us? It’s a good question. I can easily and unreflectively be with people like me. Who look like me. Who think like me. Who share a similar social position or background.
Perhaps my surprise in book club says more about what I share with the other members than what we don’t share. I expected a measure of commonality and got difference.
I have another friend (not in book club) with whom I disagree fervently about books. Our chats can become heated. Sometimes the pitch of my voice rises! But even when my opinion on a book doesn’t change, it’s always enriched. Perhaps the closeness between us, a closeness which is not shared within book club, enables us to disagree with less risk of reducing the other to a type (i.e., the anti-feminist versus the feminist).
Not sharing a world
Lacking trust
If politics, as Arendt describes it, requires a robust appreciation of difference, the ease with which I can envelop myself in sameness seems to make public dialogue seem like an unattainable dream. I must first encounter difference to appreciate it.
The agonism that Arendt admires partly seems unattainable because so much political talk is instrumental. Consider, for example, Mitch McConnell’s shaky arguments for rushing a Supreme Court appointment amidst a presidential election, a move he argued against during Obama’s presidency. This example is almost too simplistic because of the overt instrumentality and self-serving nature of McConnell’s arguments (and the mainstream position of the Republican party).
But even in our everyday actions, there can be a lack of trust. People can use the mantra of ‘respectful’ discourse to mask racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, and xenophobic views. Being “nice’ or ‘polite’ too often becomes a way for people to sneak in hateful speech. What matters, according to this approach, is not what you say but that you say it nicely. Given the failure of many White folks to take seriously the harms caused by racial microaggressions, it’s not surprising to me that trust in public discourse seems like a dream.
Given the tenuous nature of trust in public discourse, how can the ability to have a genuine, though perhaps not easy, dialogue across difference be fostered?
Lacking common ground
The way in which speech can be weaponized was a theme in a conversation on the On Being podcast between two American religious leaders, the Episcopal Bishop the Most Rev. Michael Curry and Southern Baptist Dr. Russell Moore. Their context is religion, but they speak to the challenges of meaningful public discourse. Host Krista Tippett asks them this question:
I think all of what it boils down to, there’s so much that comes together, to me, in the question of, how can we now proceed with common life or something like healing, in the absence of what feels like any common ground to stand on? So people have said, “We can’t even agree on facts. How can we converse?” “How can I be in relationship with people who have been demeaning to me or threatening to me or what I’m about in the last years?”
Tippett’s question converges on a feeling I’ve often heard people express: It seems like we don’t share a world with those who disagree with us. Yet it’s only through sharing a common world that political discourse can happen.
Stories as common ground
One way in which Moore answers Tipett’s question is to point to human psychology; Curry points out that we share the Earth (even if that is somewhat short of a world). But both make a more provocative claim: we share stories, and we build up from there.
Moore says:
I think of, for instance, the way Jesus is often using parables to go around people’s defenses to get at the heart of what it is he’s saying to them, or the prophet Nathan with King David, who comes in and goes around that self-protective sort of a conscience, in order to talk about a man with a ewe-lamb that’s been taken from him by someone wealthier. I think we can find those places and then move forward as human beings who disagree, including about some really important and significant things, and are willing to have those conversations without suggesting that every point of disagreement is necessarily weaponized.
And Curry adds, after sharing a few stories about the power of story:
My daddy used to say, don’t judge a book by its cover, read the book, because there’s a story there.
And that story becomes some common ground. A friend of mine said, one of the reasons God told Moses to take off his shoes, in Exodus 3, he said, because God was about to tell Moses his story. And whenever someone reveals the story of their life, that ground on which they’re standing is holy ground. That’s the common ground: we’re human, and we’ve got a story. And if I listen to yours, and you to mine, we won’t agree on a whole lot, but we’ll understand each other. And that produces common ground.
Too much optimism?
Now I admit, I can be a bit rosy about story-telling. I find narrative to be a powerful tool to bring people together, to prompt reflection, and to cultivate empathy. Yet I’m aware that this is idealistic. Stories might aim at agreement rather than disagreement. We might tell stories that we think our interlocutors want to hear. Stories can fail to challenge our assumptions, re-center our own subjectivities instead of encouraging engagement with another, or model harmful beliefs or behaviours.
In addition, as Hilde Lindemann reminds us, not all stories are morally good. She explores a marvelous example of (a hypothetical) Billy who takes seriously the claim that reading literature can expand one’s moral horizons. He buys the first book he sees, a “bodice-ripper.” He enjoys it, and models his behaviour according to what he learns, lessons which often ignore or minimize gender-based violence and consent.
Stories and world-building
At a certain point, I do think we need to agree on facts to make headway. Perhaps this is a way of putting Lindeman’s point that not all stories are good ones. We can share stories as a beginning for conversation, but stories may need to be challenged and disrupted.
But at least the story has brought us together. If our common ground is that we each have a story, we have to respect the other person’s humanity to receive that gift.
One important thing about stories is we not reduce people to types. But, we also shouldn’t ask them to abstract away from their lived experiences. In the interview, I interpreted Moore as suggesting that we might need to remove ourselves from our “tribes” (his term) to engage in some conversations across difference. I don’t believe this is entirely possible for some of my identities, insofar as I cannot remove gender or race from my experience. Yet, like with the person from my book club, we can try to listen to others with an awareness of how our identities shape listening. Once I listened, I understood that his complaint was not with feminism, but with the lack of political will to address a pressing social issue.
After taking a healthy dose of realism about the potential (limitations) of story-telling, it seems to me that stories can help build trust for public engagement. When we share nothing else, we can come around a story as a beginning for a conversation. When it seems impossible to engage with someone with whom we do not share much in the way of background assumptions (or in philosophy speak, we might say “first principles”), stories are there.
Photo by Rain Bennett on Unsplash