Arguing rarely changes minds.  So reports Arthur C. Brooks this week, in The Atlantic magazine*.  Brooks begins, “What is the point of arguing with someone who disagrees with you? Presumably, you would like them to change their mind. But that’s easier said than done: Research shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult.”
 
Brooks goes on to describe disagreements as the “sorts of fights that might give everyone involved some short-term satisfaction—they deserve it because I am right and they are evil! — but” Brooks continues, “odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.
 
Brooks isn’t alone in that estimation. Social psychologists have long identified and continue to affirm the “boomerang effect,” finding over and over again that insults and degradation reliably deepen and increase the strength of opposing positions. Recent research on politically motivated argument suggests that those positions are often tightly aligned with identity and belonging, they are “tribal.” Disagreements, especially when they devolve to insult, are heard as threats to self, family, and community, to belonging itself. In addition to hardening positions, such threats are often met with life-threatening or life-ending violence.
 
Indeed, Brooks suggests, “Disagreements can feel like a war in which the fighters dig trenches on either side of any issue and launch their beliefs back and forth like grenades. You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.”
 
So why do people argue? I haven’t heard many people say that these kinds of arguments make any difference. Yet they happen over and over again, and get nasty fast. Last week at my local garage, I chatted lightly about politics with an employee I know pretty well. Overhearing our conversation, another employee came out of her office and started to shout about immigration, demanding I defend a position she assumed I had (she was right, though I hadn’t said a thing about immigration before she popped out of her office.) I responded with something like, I hear you’re upset, and backed out of the door.  It was clear to me that argument would get us nowhere.
 
Brooks suggests people argue for short term satisfaction, for some degree of affirmation of the rightness of each party’s position.  I suspect it’s deeper than that.  I suspect those arguments that feel like battles happen because the arguers are afraid, or enraged, or heartbroken – or all three.
 
I felt like getting into that kind of argument this week, I did get into them – in my head. I argued with Russian military leaders, with elected officials banning math books that dared to mention race, with those who would call me a pedophile and a groomer because I am a lesbian. I made fun of those folks out loud in fact, cavorting in the kitchen to make a young visitor laugh with me at the foolishness of that assumption.  I stepped it up, in the argument-in-my-head with the police officer who’d shot another un-armed Black man from behind at a traffic stop, with the union (I’m generally all about unions) who stepped up to defend him. With them, in my head, I screamed, I swore, I called them names.
 
I kept them in my head though, those arguments. I shared my rage and grief with three close colleagues. I cried with my partner. I channeled my rage and grief into writing, into the work of the ILI, which is all about driving the changes I demanded in those arguments-in-my head.
 
I don’t always succeed at that kind of discipline. I have tossed my share of verbal grenades. I have gotten better at calling out inhumanity without being inhumane myself, but it still takes work. I imagine it always will.
 
Fifty-five years ago this month, Martin Luther King spoke to a church full of people in New York, inviting them to choose between, “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.” He was talking about the war in Vietnam, making the moral case that the movement for civil rights join the movement against the war. I believe the choice he offered applies to argument as well. I have a choice to reach for nonviolent coexistence, or to verbally annihilate the other’s humanity.
 
For me, that choice is both simple and hard. It’s simple because I firmly believe that it’s strategically unsound to hurl insults in the service of a less violent future. It’s hard because I feel threatened myself; I feel afraid, and fear makes it hard to think creatively about how to engage difference.
 
At that same church over half a century ago, Dr. King declared, “We must find new ways to speak for peace.”    I haven’t got solutions to this argument conundrum to offer today, but I’ll keep looking for new ways to speak for peace.