Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Are Americans too argumentative? In her earlier books, such as the big bestseller “You Just Don’t Understand,” Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, showed herself to be a shrewd and sensitive student of how people use language to communicate and, often enough, miscommunicate. Now she shifts her sociolinguistic lens from the personal to the political. You know how people sometimes talk past each other and find themselves doing more misinterpreting than communicating? Remember the girlfriend or husband or colleague who just didn’t want to do anything but argue? That is modern-day America. “Our public interactions have become more and more like having an argument with a spouse,” Tannen says.

Too often, in her view, American culture engages in “agonism”: ritual verbal combat, in which people reflexively boil down complicated questions to two crudely polarized positions which are set in conflict with one another. The impulse to criticize and oppose has become knee-jerk, thoughtless and ubiquitous. The result is “a pervasive war-like atmosphere that makes us approach public dialogue, and just about anything we need to accomplish, as if it were a fight.” Thoughtless antagonism is nothing new, she acknowledges. But lately it “has become so exaggerated that it is getting in the way of solving our problems. Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention--an argument culture.”

But society is not like a conversation, any more than an economy is like a job. To indict “the argument culture,” it is not enough to show that some people are too argumentative (of course they are) or that there are many arguments (there may be a lot to argue about). Tannen must show that public discourse is becoming dysfunctional and that runaway disputatiousness is the cause rather than the symptom of what is wrong. In meeting this burden, her method is to look around. Wherever she sees negativity--in White House press conferences, in courtrooms, on TV--she condemns it as knee-jerk antagonism.

The peculiar result is a book that is itself as reductive and bipolar as the sort of talk it deplores. Show Tannen a polarized debate or a sharp public dispute, and she will show you a mindless ritual or a campaign to obstruct progress or sheer cussedness. She declares that global warming is a settled fact and that skeptics are oil-company shills. (She lists global-warming doubters right alongside Holocaust deniers.) She chides abortion opponents for stubbornly insisting that abortion is intolerable when they would get further by “increasing education about and availability of contraception” to reduce the number of abortions. She views the “tragic demise” of President Clinton’s health care plan in 1994 as “a dramatic example of the politics of obstruction.” She sees persistent criticisms of Clinton and other leaders as “rituals of attacking a leader.” She cites controversies surrounding various public personages, from Lani Guinier (Clinton’s failed civil rights nominee) to Joe Klein (the author of “Primary Colors”), as gratuitous campaigns of vilification.

Awkwardly, however, the people whose criticisms so gum up society’s works often believe they are right. Abortion foes are stubborn because they believe that millions of human lives are at stake. Global-warming skeptics urge caution because they believe that a rush to judgment may waste many billions of dollars, and would divert attention from more pressing environmental problems. Opponents of HillaryCare believed it would cripple the health system or the government or both. Many Clinton critics believe that renting out the Lincoln Bedroom is genuinely disgusting. And it is not unheard of for the critics of public personages to believe that their targets have done something, or will do something, immoral or dangerous or stupid.

Now abortion opponents, global-warming skeptics and the rest may in fact be wrong, but there is only one way to find out: Argue each case on its merits. To hunt for mistakes--one’s own and other people’s--is the highest intellectual duty in a liberal society. Looking for mistakes means comparing and debunking ideas, which means pitting them against each other. Certainly there are other more circumspect and supportive ways to talk. But the exchange of public criticism--the requirement to submit our beliefs to checking by others--is the only reliable and efficient way to sort good ideas from bad ones.

Criticism, of course, need not be nasty, but it can be. In the heat of argument, claims are overstated, integrity is impugned, positions harden, fur flies. Do people go too far? All the time. As each debate matures, however, the wackos and firebrands are marginalized because being unreasonable is a bad way to convince people. In the end, reasonableness pays, even in politics (ask Newt Gingrich). And, in the end, nastiness can pay too, at least from a social point of view. The philosopher of science David L. Hull, in his indispensable book, “Science as a Process,” notes that one of science’s best motivators is pique, the desire to “get that son of a bitch.” Time and again, he says, “the scientists whom I have been studying have told stories of confrontations with other scientists that roused them from routine work to massive effort.” A critical culture’s greatest genius is to channel differences of opinion into research agendas and campaign ads, instead of into creed wars and political coups. And it is no coincidence that the world’s most rambunctiously critical society--America--is also far and away its most intellectually productive.

Tannen would reply that she is all for reasonable criticism; she’s just against inventing bogus dichotomies, demonizing the other side, reflexively turning every discussion into a debate. “I object only when criticism and opposition become automatic and exaggerated, and fly out of control--as they are doing in our political lives today,” she writes. She merely wants to redress the imbalance between overly aggressive criticism and reasonable criticism.

But she seems never to have met an argument she likes, and there are many arguments she thinks we would be better off without. She speaks of “the benefit of limiting debate on an issue that is known to be inflammatory, like a couple who learn over time to avoid discussing issues that they know will lead to rancorous confrontation with no resolution.” That is a reasonable rule of discourse for a dinner party. It is a deadening rule of discourse for a society and, ultimately, a dangerous rule because if we do not argue, our disagreements do not simmer down, they boil up.

In one of her earlier books, “That’s Not What I Meant!,” Tannen remarked that “[t]he public tragedies of social discord and injustice, and the failure to reach international understanding, are large-scale manifestations of the failure of communication that plays itself out in private homes.” A critical culture knows better. It knows that deeply rooted differences of belief are the causes, rather than merely the effects, of public disputatiousness; it knows that those differences can easily lead to violence or schism; and it knows that thrashing them out argumentatively is the solution, not the problem.

In a liberal society, which is not like a marriage, there can be too much personal rudeness, coarseness or hatred, but there can never be too much public criticism, argument or debate. That is why I have sharply criticized Tannen’s book. Not for the fun of it, or because I expect to profit by being perversely antagonistic, or because it never occurred to me to use some other approach. Rather, because her book takes a sweet-natured swipe at the very premises of a liberal intellectual culture and because her good intentions do not make her any less wrong.