Branching Out

The news about Brexit brought to light a challenging issue that I’ve occasionally thought about, but never really given the time or energy to actually reflect on. This issue isn’t directly related to any of the typical Brexit talking points like economics or how to get an Irish passport now that Brexit is presumably happening, though I have put some thought into the latter- if Trump wins in the US and Britain declines more than it has this week, I’m not above taking advantage of my Granny Pauline’s Irish citizenship, but I digress.  Instead, what I’ve been forced to think about more this week is more conceptual: how does a person have a constructive discussion with someone with a different point of view?

I don’t think this question is reflected on enough. It’s definitely not the first thing that came to my mind when I learned about the Brexit decision and the ugly campaigning that led up to it.  Initially I was just annoyed by the Leave voters. How could they be so ridiculous? How could they, the people of Britain, a nation that took the majority of the world by force, be upset about, among other concerns, the immigration of people looking to benefit from the wealth Britain amassed?  I was slightly proud of my relatives living in Britain, because in the run up and aftermath of the referendum, they were very adamantly Remain supporters. But I realized my initial thoughts weren’t the best way to approach the referendum results.  I can’t claim this realization came from my own intuition.  It actually came from a facebook post (see below) that a good friend of mine shared.  The post essentially said that if you’re a Remain supporter and you haven’t had a single conversation with someone who supported Leave, then everything you know about the other side’s arguments have arrived to you with the spin that your side has put on them to make the other side’s arguments seem stupid or bigoted.  And if that’s the case, then you’re part of the polarization.

It’s so true, and I can see it happening in American politics and in my own life as well.  I’ve lived in a small town in Alabama for the majority of my life.  Everyone that I interacted with in my 10 years there, aside from 4 classmates, was a staunch, Fox News-watching, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military, (and a little Islamophobic and racist even if they tried not to be) Republican. And then there was me, a foreign-born leftist Muslim with an accent and an aversion to everything I thought these people stood for.  And for a while I was guilty of what liberals are often guilty of, a specific brand of condescension that’s very interlinked with classism.  I had the same thoughts that liberals across the country have. I thought I knew better than Republicans as to what these communities needed.  I thought liberal policies would help these uneducated rural people, if only they’d concede that fact. I didn’t want to actually have a political conversation with people who weren’t already self-professed liberals, because I assumed the majority of people had already been brainwashed by Fox News, or would end up attacking me personally.  After all, I am everything I assumed these people hated: an immigrant, a Muslim, a left-leaning person, and until recently not even a citizen of the US.  I won’t say my reasons for being averse to these conversations were entirely invalid.  There were definitely a lot of hateful, judgmental comments made towards other more vocal liberals at my school, but I think with the right approach, there was opportunity for understanding, and I didn’t take those opportunities.

I think the way I posed the question at the top of this post is important.  How to constructively interact with a different viewpoint.  Different, not opposite.  I don’t think it’s helpful to frame things as “opposing” views, because that just sets the two of you up as if you’re working towards drastically different goals. At the end of the day we have a lot in common. Most people favor stability over chaos, and peace over conflict.  Success is encouraged, but so is sharing.  Poverty and hunger discomfort us, but so does gluttony.  But somehow these aspects of human nature go out the window when we think about politics.  But if two people come into a conversation with these basic commonalities in mind, the conversation has the potential to go deep and go more smoothly.

There are so many barriers to constructive conversation. Almost everything spins the facts a certain way, regardless of how objective you think your sources are. The dominant narratives put forward by news media and history books provide people with easily digestible understandings (misunderstandings?) of an issue.  They often promote distrust of the motives of people with different views.  I’m inclined to think that the core motives of people are good, but that the policies they end up advocating for are often misled.  I think before we advocate for a certain action, we should really reflect on what we’re actually concerned about and consider all the causes of those concerns, all the while trying our best to question what we’ve been told is the cause, and question all the buzzwords we’ve learned from the media.  It’s a lot to think about all at once, but if we all did this, it would be a lot easier to have discussion. But if we’re already polarized and adamant about what’s causing our problems, it’s harder to come to any agreement as to where to go from here.

Take the “immigrants are taking our jobs” example.  I think this argument often gets pinned as racism, but I would venture a guess that most people who believe that immigration is a problem aren’t very concerned with the race of the workers.  Instead, they’re concerned about their own career and livelihood.  Job insecurity is a HUGE problem in the US.  I’m really not looking forward to entering the job market because of it.  But is immigration to blame? …Not from what I’ve seen.  Most of the immigrants I have met end up filling job positions in the US that no one else will fill.  For example, my family is only in Alabama because the town we’re in was considered “under-served” in the field my dad worked in. But anyway, if liberals write off this argument as racism and don’t treat these financial concerns seriously, then liberals are failing the class of people they claim they want to help.  If we go on and on about how the government needs to help the working class, but then we also sign trade deals that send working class jobs overseas… we’re messing up.  And for whatever reason, “immigrants are stealing our jobs” is heard much more frequently than “transnational corporations are sending jobs overseas because they don’t want to pay the kind of salaries that American workers require to survive.”  But one of those arguments is easier for liberals to laugh off than the other.

Another big barrier to constructive conversation with someone who thinks differently from you boils down to how you two have learned and experienced history.  While deciding where we go from here is probably always going to be a challenge, it would help if we could at least agree on the past. If two people come together and at least have a relatively accurate and fair understanding of history, they have some kind of common ground that they can build off.  But history is taught so many different ways and with so many omissions that this issue of different historical narratives has actually been my primary obstacle in having productive conversations with many people.  If a conversation with someone will first require me to explain my personal understanding of a long and complicated history behind an issue, it’s a little off-putting because that’s a lot of extra time and energy to add this necessary preface.

Maybe my biggest personal barrier when it comes to potentially controversial conversations is my natural aversion to conflict.  If I think the two of us are pretty far from each other in terms of political views or in terms of historical understandings, I’ll probably take the easy road and just not talk to you about it.  But a lot of this aversion comes down to the fact that it’s hard to create a nonjudgmental space for constructive, nuanced, honest conversation to occur.  I don’t really know how to fill that need and create that space, but I think it’s now very necessary that we figure out how to get back to challenging each other’s views rather than retreating into our shells or only hanging out with people who think the same way we do.  Personally, I know I need to get over this bump in my own life.

But for now after a lot of reflection this week, here is a jumble of thoughts that shape how I understand people:

• It’s very easy to be disheartened by the way people are talking about each other (click for examples) in today’s political atmosphere, but being perpetually disappointed in humanity isn’t particularly useful and will only bring you down.
• If you don’t make a serious effort to understand why people think the way that they do, you’re not going to get very far in a discussion.
• People are naturally empathetic, but if they’re continuously told that they deserve more than what they have, then they’re less likely to be able to act in the interest of others.
• People are very motivated by fear, and they’re prone to having their fears manipulated by people who can attach these fears to a certain narrative.
• Demonizing people for their opinions is counterproductive.  Everyone wants what they believe is best. Most people don’t intend to make life hard for other people.
• Treating people with respect goes a long way.