Conversations, Arguments, and Listening to Other People's Experiences

The other day I was reading a document by the Civil Conversations Project  and a sentence struck me. Under “Tools for Moderating”, they had written, “You can disagree with another person’s opinions; you can disagree with their doctrines; you can’t disagree with their experience.”

True. Doing so implies either that the person doesn’t know what’s going on in their own mind, or that the person is lying. Either implication is offensive. So this is a good rule to bear in mind.

You might think that this issue mainly comes up when conversing with someone whose life and experiences have been very different from one’s own.That is certainly an important time to remember the rule. However, even among family members and friends, people’s experiences differ in ways that create conversational blocks. That’s what I want to talk about here.

I’m going to start with something a friend told me. When she was a teen, she told me, she sometimes came downstairs and said to her mother, “I’m cold.” Her mother would reply, “You can’t be cold.”

Not an unusual exchange, but if we take the mother literally, she is denying that her daughter feels cold. By implication, either her daughter doesn’t know how she feels, temperature-wise, or she is lying.

Some mothers might not mean it literally. It might be short for, “I am astounded and mind-boggled to learn that you are cold, because I feel as if I am in a sauna,” or possibly “I think you are really saying that the house is too cold, but 68F is a perfectly reasonable temperature for winter, so go put another sweater on.” My friend was certain that her mother really did not believe that she was cold, and my friend found it infuriating.

Now, I do have to say a word on behalf of parents. When your child is a baby, she doesn’t know how to articulate what she is feeling. Gradually she learns to recognize what word describes what state of her insides, and also what the feelings mean about her body. (“I’m hungry—I need food,” “I’m too hot—I need fewer clothes or cooler surroundings,” “I have a pain in my toe—better see if it’s injured.”)

This learning process is not without error. I remember walking my daughter home from school when she was little and listening to her complain the entire way that her feet hurt, that she couldn’t keep walking,.. and wondering if something was wrong with her shoes. Or maybe something was wrong with her feet? Did I need to take her to the doctor? Then we got home and she went racing around the yard, foot pain forgotten. She hadn’t been lying, but she hadn’t been a very good judge of the condition of her feet, either.

Somewhere between our kids’ babyhood and adulthood, we have to accept that they are just as good at describing their own experience as we are at describing ours. Even if we can’t understand how it is possible that they are feeling cold/hurt/achy or have trouble believing that things could really have gone the way they say, we have to take them seriously.

Besides being insulting, attempting to disagree with someone’s experience is an attempt to deny reality. Denying reality is not a good start to a conversation, and it’s also not a good start to an argument.

I have in mind a situation from many years ago, when a group of friends somehow ended up on the subject of putting the toilet seat down. (Important policy discussion here.) Most of the group were female, if I remember correctly, and someone pointed out that if the seat is left up, women sometimes sit down without looking and fall in. Ick. Wet. And in winter, cold.

The one guy in the group found this impossible to believe. How could women sit down without noticing that the seat was up? He even tried putting a scrap of paper on someone’s chair when she left the room so when she came back and picked it up, he could say, “See, she looked before sitting that time.”

But the fact is, sometimes women do sit down without noticing the seat is up. It happens. You can’t deny the facts. Had he accepted that as a given, he could have gone on to consider the larger situation. He could have argued that even if women do get wet behinds now and again, that isn’t a good enough reason to insist that men put the seat down. Alternatively, he could have suggested that everyone put the lid down, so that both sexes would have to do something and no one would fall in, either. He probably could have come up with a lot of things to say, but instead he got sidetracked by his refusal to accept what we were telling him about our experience.

Finally, I want to add two things. First, I recognize people do sometimes lie or exaggerate. But you should be cautious about coming to that conclusion. Assuming that a person must be lying because what that person is saying doesn't fit your own experience can have terrible results. (For a drastic example, see the bit about car batteries and fishing in "What We're Fighting For", NYT.) Second, there’s a difference between knowledge of one’s own experience and one’s interpretation of other people’s actions. Why did my friend’s mother say that she couldn’t possibly be cold? My friend can make guesses, but only her mother knows for sure.

Till next post.