Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Polite Chunks

We use chunks as shortcuts in conversation. Certain bits of information are assumed as known so that we can move forward to discussing other things. One of my high school maths teachers, Mrs Chick, used to describe Maths as a tower of building blocks. The foundation had to be solid and almost automatic before you could go to the next level. First you learn to count. Then you learn to add. Fast forward, fast forward, Calculus, fast forward, super fast forward, String Theory.

This works well in maths. In philosophy and language less so. We assume we are using words that have meaning to others because they have meaning to us. The Curse of Knowledge makes it incredibly difficult to empathise and explain a concept to someone because we forget how we thought before we understood. It gets even more complicated than that though. If we know that someone can fight with some material with us not being there and afterwards they will think the same as us, that is one thing, but what about when that is not certain?

Source: Wikipedia

There are several very complicated, very emotional topics that continue to divide people. Yesterday, I spent six hours reading through a more than 300 comment thread on Facebook on the topic of Veganism. More specifically, the question was posed:

A note to my Christian friends,
As hard as it is to see posts from friends about the meat/dairy/eggs on their plates, I struggle the most with those that come from Christians.
Correct me if I’m wrong; Is the Christian life not meant to be guided by compassion? If so, how can you be okay with the fact that you support a system of brutal cruelty? How can you salivate over the flesh of a fellow earthling? Can you really call yourself a compassionate Christian, and support an industry that can only be called an animal holocaust?It took me many years to undo the societal conditioning that makes us feel okay about using and eating animals, and I get that for most people, this process takes time. But I beg you, please think about the principles you try to live by, and follow them to their logical conclusion.
[Constructive comments/questions/discussion welcome; trolls won’t be entertained.]

For the most part the thread was very constructive. I was reading it from the perspective of looking at how people actually talk to each other about difficult topics. As soon as someone feels attacked, I think they tend to clam up, go on the defensive or disengage. Here are a few examples of things that once said are unlikely to get the person you are arguing with to listen very hard...
'I think you are missing the point'
'That isn't a very strong argument'
'I am not sure where you are going with this. Let's get back to the topic.
'You point is weak and repeating it over & over again will not give it more merit'
'If you can believe that you can believe anything'
'I am really sorry you are incapable of grasping'
'That point has been so thoroughly disproved elsewhere I don't think it is worth disputing'
'If you are a Christian then I have to say you have very little understanding of the bible'
At this point, the comments hadn't descended it into name calling, and then name calling was actually rather brief, before things recovered. My point is just that in working toward things improving and the world becoming a happier place, there are lots of very thorny topics we need to work through where we are coming from very different places. Sometimes words we think mean something to us, e.g. Christian, God, Muslim, mean very different things to different people. Words are powerful. Questioning things requires a lot of patience.

The frustrating thing for lots of people is that they don't understand how a 'good person' could possibly disagree. It makes them mad when they explain what seems like something obvious, and the penny doesn't just drop for the person they are talking too. Jonathan Haidt has written a fantastic book on this subject. It is tempting to just not talk about these issues. To keep politics, sex, religion, and in this case food habits out of polite conversation. The problem is most of these issues are very serious. They are not just a preference for vanilla or chocolate ice-cream. Before we can sort them out though, we need to get better at talking to each other.

No comments: