We Do Understand
"This is not another book
about civility," Deborah Tannen promises in the first sentence of The
Argument Culture . "Civility," she explains, suggests a "veneer of
politeness spread thin over human relations like a layer of marmalade over
toast." Instead, Tannen has written something less: a book about other books
about civility. Quoting from Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz,
political scientist Larry Sabato, and others who have studied the rise of
belligerence in politics, journalism, and law, Tannen spreads their insights
thin over all human relations, painting a general theory of discord. The whole
is less perceptive than its parts and more pernicious.
In her
previous books-- That's Not What I Meant! (1986), You Just Don't
Understand (1990), and Talking From 9 to 5 (1994)--Tannen carved out
a niche as the nation's pre-eminent intergender translator and couples
counselor. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, she transformed
the comparative study of male and female conversational patterns from a
linguistic subdiscipline into a self-help movement. Until recently, though,
Tannen confined her analysis to conversations among dysfunctional individuals.
(For an illustration, click .) But in The Argument Culture , she takes
her movement one step further, peddling the elixir of mutual understanding as a
remedy for the whole damned dysfunctional country. This is necessary, she
argues, because "contentious public discourse" not only poisons the political
atmosphere, it also risks infecting our most intimate relationships.
Tannen, like some grandmotherly creature from an Aesop
fable, admonishes us to recognize what is good in the work of others, and it is
only fair to extend her the same courtesy. Here's what's worth gleaning from
her book:
Don't just quarrel; listen
and learn.
Don't nit-pick other people's
ideas; build your own.
Don't argue for the sake of
arguing.
Truth and courage often lie
in the middle, not the extremes.
Many issues are
multisided.
Focus on the substance of
debates, not on strategy, theater, or the opponents' personal flaws.
Don't fight over small
issues.
Don't obstruct good ideas
just so you can win.
If you
portray everything as a scandal, no one will care when something really is
scandalous.
All this is sage advice--for couples, for
families, for bosses and employees, maybe even for book reviewers. But when she
applies her precepts to our great national conversation, Tannen gets confused.
She conflates belligerence, divisiveness, polarization, titillation, jealousy,
incivility, aloofness, ruthlessness, cruelty, savagery, contempt, glibness,
cynicism, anomie, partisanship, obstructionism, and gridlock. She makes
culprits out of answering machines, electronic mail, campaign money,
malpractice litigation, HMOs, corporate takeovers, and the demise of house
calls by the family doctor.
"When
there is a need to make others wrong," Tannen argues, "the temptation is great
to oversimplify" and to "seize upon the weakest examples, ignore facts that
support your opponent's views, and focus only on those that support yours." In
her need to make the "argument culture" wrong, she succumbs to these
temptations. She blames the mainstream press, not just the paparazzi ,
for torturing Princess Diana and driving Adm. Mike Boorda to suicide. She
compares to the propaganda of "totalitarian countries" (because falsehoods are
spread) and to the dehumanization involved in "ethnically motivated assaults"
(because reporters hound politicians). She blames communications technology for
obscene and threatening phone calls made by former university President Richard
Berendzen and former Judge Sol Wachtler.
Tannen's main mistake is failing to appreciate the
difference between two distinct social spheres: the sphere of snuggle and the
sphere of struggle. Some people--say, your spouse or your kids--you should
snuggle with. Others--say, Saddam Hussein--you shouldn't. Tannen's antagonism
toward antagonism makes sense in the former case but not in the latter. Among
her illustrations of belligerence are William Safire's "kick 'em when they're
up" philosophy of journalism and the media's use of war metaphors to describe
Alan Greenspan's policies against inflation. To which one might sensibly reply:
Good for Greenspan and Safire--and for us. The Federal Reserve's war on
inflation and the press corps' scrutiny of powerful people safeguard the
country. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things are worth
fighting.
Vigilance
and combat are particularly essential to law enforcement and foreign policy,
which must deal with thugs and tyrants, not thoughtless husbands. Tannen
laments that cops and soldiers have been "trained to overcome their resistance
to kill" by trying "not to think of their opponents as human beings." She
neglects to mention that our safety depends on the ability of these officers to
kill their adversaries. Comparing Vietnam to World War II, Tannen focuses
strictly on the soldiers' social experience. In World War II, she observes,
they trained, served, and went home together. "Vietnam, in contrast, was a
'lonely war' of individuals assigned to constantly shifting units for year-long
tours of duty." She ignores the more important difference: In World War II,
they were fighting Hitler.
Tannen doesn't trust in the power of good
argumentation to keep society honest, much less correct itself, because she
rather shockingly insists "" that people can distinguish lies from the truth.
Nor does she trust our competence to manage unfettered communication: "E-mail
makes it too easy to forward messages, too easy to reply before your temper
cools, too easy to broadcast messages to large numbers of people without
thinking about how every sentence will strike every recipient." Lexis-Nexis is
an equally unwelcome troublemaker: "Technology also exacerbates the culture of
critique by making it much easier for politicians or journalists to ferret out
inconsistencies in a public person's statements over time."
Given
this oddly paternalistic (or maternalistic) diagnosis, it's not surprising that
Tannen should wish to cover our ears, filtering out strife, deception, and
debate. She assures us that all reasonable people can agree that disseminating
birth control and sex education is the best way to reduce the abortion rate;
that stiff sentences for small drug offenses don't reduce drug abuse; that
global warming is producing "disastrous consequences." Partial-birth abortion
is "surely not" a "very important" issue, and Congress should not have let the
Republican "politics of obstruction" defeat President Clinton's health care
proposal in 1994, given the "broad bipartisan and public consensus that it was
desperately needed." The "view of government as the enemy" isn't worth
debating; it's just "another troubling aspect of the argument culture." Indeed,
Tannen embraces a colleague's claim that "right-wing talk radio" deploys
phrases "similar to verbal manipulations employed by propagandists in the Nazi
era."
Tannen finds it particularly unseemly that reporters and
independent counsels treat the nation's ultimate father figure with such
irreverence. She complains that Clinton's weekly radio address "is followed
immediately by a Republican response," which "weakens the public's ability to
see leaders as leaders." A reporter's skeptical question to Clinton "broke the
spell" of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's remarks upon being nominated to the Supreme
Court, thereby injuring citizens' "sense of connection" to "our judicial
system." The investigation of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was
excessive, the campaign against former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was
"cruelly unfair," and the Whitewater investigation--led by "a prominent
Republican known for his animosity toward the president"--is, in the words of
Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, "the result of the nastiest and most successful
political 'dirty tricks' campaign in recent American history." Is Tannen a
Clinton apologist? She rules that criticism out of bounds. "The very fact that
defending our nation's elected leader makes one suspect--an 'apologist'--is in
itself evidence of the culture of critique," she writes.
The First Amendment, in
Tannen's view, has often become "a pretext to justify the airing of just those
views that make for the most entertaining fights." As an alternative, she
offers Asian authoritarianism: "Disputation was rejected in ancient China as
'incompatible with the decorum and harmony cultivated by the true sage.' "
Similarly, "the minimal human unit in Japan is not the individual but the
group." Instead of the American practice of having two guests debate policy
questions on TV news programs, she suggests a Japanese format, which "typically
features a single guest." (Click to learn how she puts this into practice.)
Tannen
even wants to protect us from the possibility of unpleasant confrontations in
the courtroom. "The purpose of most cross-examinations" is "not to establish
facts but to discredit the witness," she asserts, as though the two objectives
were unrelated. Thus, "the adversary system ... is inhumane to the victims of
cross-examination." She simply assumes the very thing the trial is supposed to
prove and what cross-examination might disprove (if this is, in fact, the point
of the trial): that the witness is a victim. Conversely, she assumes
that the defendant cannot be a victim. While objecting to cross-examination of
alleged rape victims because "it is easy to distort events so that a rape can
appear to be consensual sex," she ignores the reverse implication--that it is
easy to make consensual sex look like rape. She complains that when Anita Hill
accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, "Framing these hearings as a
two-sides dispute between Hill and Thomas allowed the senators to focus their
investigation on cross-examining Hill rather than seeking other sorts of
evidence." Did the dispute not have two sides? Should Hill not have been
cross-examined?
Instead of the American system, Tannen proposes
consideration of the French and German systems. Under French law, after
Princess Diana's death:
The photographers were
held for two days without charges being filed and without being allowed to
confer with lawyers. ... The judges do most of the questioning; though lawyers
can also ask questions, they cannot cross-examine witnesses. Guilt ... need not
be established 'beyond a reasonable doubt' but simply by ... the judge's
intimate belief, or deeply held sense, of what happened.
Likewise,
Tannen recalls the trial of a Canadian man who had denied the Holocaust. The
defendant's lawyer interrogated concentration camp survivors, asking whether
they had seen their parents gassed. The adversarial system permitted such
questions to be asked and answered--admittedly a vexatious experience for the
survivors but one that does entail an airing of the facts of the Holocaust.
Tannen, however, treats it only as a display of the "cruelty of
cross-examination." She raises no objection to the Canadian hate-speech ban
under which the defendant was prosecuted. Would Tannen argue that the United
States should adopt such a law, along with, say, a ban on the cross-examination
of accusers? If so, she'd be wrong. But hey, so far, it's still a free
country.
If you missed the links
within the review, click to read: 1) an illustration of ; 2) Tannen's that
American journalism is just like propaganda from totalitarian regimes, plus
William Saletan's disclosure that "several of these propagandists now infest
Slate "; 3) the for her contention that there is no evidence that
people can distinguish lies from truth; 4) and an example of how Tannen from a
one-guest format on TV and radio talk shows.
