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Healthy Disagreement Requires More Than Workshops
We must go beyond discourse and speech.
Posted March 27, 2024 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Many people today don’t know how to disagree without dehumanizing others.
- Workshops on civil discourse aren't enough to foster healthy discussion.
- Real dialogue begins with these practical steps.
An article in the March-April 2024 edition of Harvard Magazine entitled “Talking About Talking: Fostering Healthy Disagreement” explains that since November 2023, the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has been conducting research and training to create an “environment where students feel comfortable and confident disagreeing.” Nearly three-quarters of the students surveyed “believed that the school [HKS] is not an environment conducive to expressing opinions on controversial issues,” mainly because of potential reputational and relational harm.
In light of this, HKS leaders decided it was “critically important to teach students how to disagree.” Tarek Masoud, Professor of Democracy and Governance, who has been “showcasing civil disagreements” in public conversations at HKS since the Middle East war began, remarked that Palestinian and Israeli attendees at the events have expressed appreciation that “instead of a faux polite conversation,” the arguments “had actually been had.”
I am the Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Real Dialogue in Vermont. We educate people about the psychology of polarization (e.g., perception, bias, stereotyping) and how to develop skills for humanizing conflicts. Our participants express gratitude, even happiness, to hear both sides of a difficult argument. We teach structured skills for individuals, as well as a method of facilitating others to have difficult conversations, and find that people feel a palpable emotional relief when they can remain authentic during stressful negotiations.
A month after the fiasco of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s testimony in Congress and her resignation in December, the University launched a week of Harvard Dialogues. These were hosted events across campus intended to create an atmosphere that “values debate and disagreement.” At the opening, Suzanne Nossel, Professor of Law (and former Dean of the College, University of Chicago), remarked that offensive speech can, indeed, be harmful, but also that some of the protections against imagined harm have “become chilling and silencing.”
Fostering environments for healthy disagreements and free speech is laudable, but I am convinced through my work at the Center and my long career as a couple therapist and a psychoanalyst that polarization and enemy-making cannot be transformed through workshops on civil discourse. These are not problems of discourse or speech. They are emotional problems of dehumanization.
Dehumanization means perceiving another person as though they are not human like yourself. You don’t recognize or experience their uniqueness, vulnerability, education, ancestors, or environment, but simply their appearance as a person different from you. In the extreme, dehumanization can lead to experiencing them as sub-human: Animal (they must be trained), Object (they must be managed), or Demon (they must be eliminated).
Humanizing our perceptions and practicing first-person skills for healthy disagreement require emotional and perceptional education, as well as facilitated training. The essential quality of being human is self-awareness that allows us to take responsibility for our speaking, listening and acting. No other mammal can do this.
On Public Television in 1964, the writer James Baldwin notably said, “When I talk about you, I am not describing you, I am describing me.” In attributing meaning and motives to you, especially if you are a stranger, I am describing myself. An ancient Zen story explicates Baldwin’s point: A simple monk is invited to an emperor’s palace because the emperor wants to learn Zen from the monk. Upon encountering the emperor, the monk bows and asks, “Who do you see?” Having some acquaintance with Zen’s peculiar ways, the emperor wants to impress the monk and says, “I see a pig!” Then he asks the monk, “Who do you see?” and the monk responds, “I see a Buddha. A Buddha sees a Buddha, and a pig sees a pig!”
Nossel noted that American students arriving at Harvard are ill-equipped for disagreement in part because they are “significantly segregated” in their high schools, typically not having related to anyone outside their own tribe or silo. Social segregation or conflict avoidance can lead people of any age to feel contemptuous or morally superior. When you meet someone who supports the opposite political candidate or position from you, who do you see?
Modeling civil discourse and offering workshops on free speech are useful for learning, but also like serving a fish to a hungry person instead of teaching them how to fish. To learn the self-awareness to hold up a humanizing mirror when you disagree or feel insulted, you first have to recognize that you (like me) are limited by your unique family background, your first-person experiences, and biases. Acknowledging your limitations, you may feel a need to challenge your preconceptions. To learn from others who see things differently, you don’t need to agree with them, but only to validate their perspective as human (it “makes sense”).
The keys to healthy, real dialogue
In real dialogue, you also learn to speak for yourself and use I-statements that take ownership of your own thoughts, feelings, and memories without blaming another for your experience—such as “You make me feel unsafe.” Taking responsibility for your first-person experience is just the beginning, but it is a good first step towards non-harmful speech.
The next step involves a type of mindful listening that lets you step into another’s perspective and tell them what you have understood from what you have heard. This is not parroting, as in, “I hear you saying blah-blah-blah.” Mindful listening takes account of your own listening, as in, “This is the way I am understanding you; did I get it?” Taking responsibility for our first-person experience in speaking and listening opens emotional space for curiosity between human beings who see, hear, or feel things differently, leading to different perceptions, beliefs, and memories.
I have facilitated countless hours of difficult conversations between partners, leaders, educators, and activists and learned more than I could have imagined about the worthiness of both sides. Because we are all captured by our unique first-person experiences, we will always be in conflict, but our conflicts can be treasure troves of difference, or they can be dehumanizing polarizations.
It’s up to us.
