This quote prompts a painful memory. Rebecca and I had just finished breakfast and had parts of the Omaha World Herald in our hands, she the front section and I the sports. A newspaper ‘in our hands,’ so it was years ago. Rebecca was reading an opinion piece about the Affordable Health Care Act and described the gist to me. As she talked my stomach tightened signaling to me disagreement and without a moment’s hesitation I immediately switched to my ‘Lincoln’ mode and began to counter each of the points made in the opinion piece.
I might as well have gotten up on the table and started “Four score’ing this and “it is for the living” that. Rebecca responded in a way most of you would predict. She got up and left for work, early as I recall. Later that day we talked through this incident, never wanting to let things fester. She talked and I listened. And I talked and she listened. Our ‘Lincolns’ (Rebecca admits she has a ‘Lincoln’ as well) safely tucked in the corner. Sanity prevailed.
I suppose it is the professor in me but I continue to think I can change someone’s mind by delivering a message. That was what I was doing with Rebecca that morning long ago, delivering a message. I think I can persuade someone through the brilliance of my analysis – that is my ‘Lincoln.’ And it never, ever works – that is my insanity, mindlessly repeating this mistake.
“Delivering messages does not work,” does not persuade, is the most powerful take-away for me from Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay’s insightful How to Have Impossible Conversations. In “Political Discussions 101,” I describe other useful tips for difficult political conversations. Why doesn’t going to our ‘Lincoln’ work, even when we have the facts and logic on our side?
Boghossian and Lindsay are so good at explaining the answer to this question, with evidence from lots of good social science. The following are two additional take-aways.
Facts never persuade because most political arguments are between people who do not share the same values. For example, an important value to me is fairness whereas for Rebecca it is efficiency. Instead of either of us going to our ‘Lincoln’ and delivering a message about why we like or don’t like the Affordable Health Care Act it would be better for each of us to ask the other what value leads them to like or dislike Obamacare or Medicare for All? Once we are at the level of values, we can move the conversation forward by asking why our partner believes this value is compelling.
If I am asked why the value of fairness is important to me, this forces me to do three things. One, it moves me away from my comfortable and practiced policy responses. Two, it prods me to consider my values and where they come from. And three, it suggests to me that my conversation partner also argues from a position of values, in other words, from a position of what h/she considers what it means to be a good person.
Each of these moves, away from comfort, deeper consideration of values, recognition that my partner also operates at the level of values, opens the door of doubt. And it is doubt that can lead to changing one’s mind.
Abraham Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address one month before he was assassinated, with both John Wilkes Booth and Frederick Douglass in the audience. I have unfairly used ‘Lincoln’ as the foil in my little essay, representing a perspective – our belief that we can change minds through the delivery of our message – that suggests an arrogance that was anathema to Lincoln.
Consider the following excerpt from what many consider to be Lincoln’s greatest speech where both refers to the North and the South. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God…let us judge not that we be not judged.”
When victory was within sight, what does Lincoln do? He extends a hand of reconciliation to the enemy through the language of humility.
If I could redo that ‘blah blah’ on Obamacare with Rebecca many years ago, I would keep THIS Lincoln close by. This ‘Lincoln’ acknowledges that she believes as she does because her intention is to be a good person. Neither of us knows the whole Truth, whatever its source. Doubt & humility are the great equalizers and I can help show the way by modeling them in the way I converse with others.
