Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008
Kathleen Holt
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Not Rocking the Boat

Why polite conversation is destroying democracy

By Amanda Waldroupe

On a Saturday afternoon in Portland, people are working in their yards or heading out of town. A twenty-something woman walks through the neighborhood, clipboard in hand. Pausing at the beginning of a driveway, she looks down at her notes and then marches up to the door.

When the door opens, the young woman nervously introduces herself as an Oregon Bus Project volunteer canvassing for a local candidate. She then gives a quick back story about who the candidate is and where he stands on issues like health care, education, and the environment.

"But we're not just out here to tell you about the candidate," she says. "I'm also trying to get a sense of what issues you care about, so that your views can be represented in Salem. What issues do you care about?"

The man at the door pauses for a moment. "No one's ever really asked me that," he says.

The Bus Project, a Portland-based political nonprofit devoted to increasing the involvement of younger voters, regularly sends a bus full of volunteers to various parts of Oregon to canvass for candidates and political issues. Organizing Director Alex Aronson says that knocking on people's doors and talking about issues that are important to voters "are the very fundamentals of a working democracy."

"We're not looking to pick fights on the doorstep," Aronson says. "We're looking to engage in meaningful conversations." Aronson notes that once people realize the intentions of the Bus Project's volunteers, they are eager to talk about politics and take the opportunity to "really speak their minds."

The Bus Project's canvassing efforts have created an opportunity for political discourse marked by civility. Many scholars think that when talking about politics in a civil manner, individuals are able to exchange political views with one another and challenge their own presuppositions. However, these conversations are often coopted by conversations characterized by politeness, which may prevent us from genuinely understanding other political views and from questioning and defending our own.

Most people conflate the concept of civility with that of politeness. David Gutterman, assistant professor of political science at Willamette University, says that most of our political conversations are polite ones, in which people "are at great pains not to offend one another." A polite conversation avoids contentious political issues or heated exchanges because, as Gutterman says, "it's safer not to talk about politics in any meaningful way." The consequence is that we avoid talking directly about a political issue and airing our differences. As Paul Gronke, professor of political science at Reed College, says, "It is impolite to bring up political differences in polite conversation." Additionally, a polite conversation will exclude any kind of interrogation of another's political viewpoints. "Politeness means that you don't talk about things," Gutterman says.

But in avoiding such conversations, we miss the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of one another and to talk about politics in a civil manner. Gutterman says the essence of a civil conversation is a respectful exchange and critical assessment of ideas. These conversations go beyond the scope of polite conversations in that they give us the opportunity to interact with people who hold differing beliefs and opinions and to critically discuss and fully understand a political issue. In such conversations, we are not necessarily polite, but we do have respect for the other's political positions and opinions. Neither party thinks that the opposing view is necessarily illegitimate or flat-out wrong. Rather, each willingly makes an effort to understand the premises of the other's views.

Gutterman explains that because civil conversations are unpredictable and can incorporate viewpoints that are radically different from our own, they often yield insights that are closer to the truth than what we glean when engaging with like-minded people. When we converse with someone who disagrees with us, he says, we are required to be more rigorous and thoughtful about why we hold the political beliefs that we do. Subjecting our ideas to scrutiny in such a way strengthens our ability to form arguments, which, in turn, aids us in defending our beliefs. When we fail to interact with people who hold opposing views, we are missing out on an important opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of the world.

If not altogether absent, Gutterman says, civil conversations are few and far between. One of the reasons these civil conversations are rare, he says, is that participants assume that a critical assessment of ideas is, instead, an attack. "I think we're unnecessarily tuned to be defensive about our ideas," he says. "That prevents us from engaging with people unless we're sure we agree with them."

Another reason that the majority of our political conversations are not civil is because they require us to embrace and appreciate conflict. Jules Boykoff, assistant professor of political science at Pacific University, says people try to avoid interactions that question their most deeply and personally held beliefs. This aversion is paradoxical, considering the influence conflict has had in shaping American society and culture. "[Americans] have all sorts of tolerance for conflict as long as it happened a long time ago," Boykoff says. For example, we consider the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement to be important historical events that changed the course of society and shaped our identities as Americans. These events asked difficult questions of Americans, which, in turn, provoked discussions and the types of conflict that, according to Boykoff, "create social change."

But, says Alyson Burns-Glover, professor of psychology at Pacific University, people are not used to interrogating their own assumptions. "We avoid the idea that we would have to explain ourselves," she says. Burns-Glover notes that we avoid challenging our closely held beliefs because doing so strikes at the very core of who we are. "[It] is anxiety provoking," she says.

Additionally, people wrongly assume that the majority of those around them share their viewpoints on a variety of issues. "People are only listening to people who agree with them," Burns-Glover notes. "It's a cognitive error." Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the False Consensus Effect, in which we think everyone agrees with our viewpoints. By thinking we are surrounded by like-minded people, we are likely to be jarred by any conflict with those who disagree with us, and we are less willing to welcome and engage in conflict.

Burns-Glover thinks that we aren't merely trying to avoid conflict in our political conversations: "People are perfectly willing to confront one another. They're not willing to risk disconfirmation," which is the invalidation and rejection of the beliefs, values, and attitudes constituting the way we perceive the world and live our lives. Disconfirmation occurs when we receive information contradicting what we believe to be true. According to Burns-Glover, disconfirmation of our interpretations of the world and exposure to contradictory information create stress, affect our ability to reason, and present a serious danger to our mental health. As a result, people are unwilling to acquire information that cannot legitimate or affirm their own thoughts and may reject views that are different from their own.

A lack of truly civil political discourse can have serious ramifications. For instance, an individual's political views, once solidified, can become static as opposed to responsive and reflective, and, over time, outdated and thus inconsequential. Additionally, avoiding conflict and not engaging in civil conversation erode one of the fundamental pillars of democracy: that of creating an environment where people critically engage with one another, voice their opinions, and disagree with the establishment. When citizens are informed about all aspects of an issue through civil conversations, they are able to make responsible decisions about policies and elections. The impulse to be polite can dilute information and make it superficial and incomplete. As Boykoff says, "If you do not have dissent, you do not have a democracy."

Interestingly, opportunities for conflict and civil conversations are readily available on a daily basis through news media. Boykoff says that these stories often personalize and dramatize an issue, creating "one of the foundations upon which news becomes news." Carl Bybee, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, agrees, saying, "What the media are doing is creating a picture of the political world that emphasizes things like rough and tumble talk shows, Rush Limbaugh, and sensational kinds of political coverage, which makes it look like a circus."

This particular type of conflict is "surface level," by which Boykoff means conflict reduced to merely being "a difference of opinion." Such differences are commonplace in our cultural and political discourse. In the media, many stories purporting to focus on a contentious issue follow a format that ultimately boils down to the representation of two "experts" with opposing views. This kind of "he-said, she-said" model with no conclusion or new insight is all too common.

Often, political issues are presented simply as the content of bills and how politicians vote. News stories that focus on the "who, what, and where" of stories often leave the "why" out. For example, the media may not report on the implications of a certain bill on various sectors of society, leaving out important information that would allow an individual to understand the impact of policies on his or her life. "The media have the power to define what's political and what's not," Bybee says. "That's enormous power." Avoiding specific issues or covering them in a superficial way fails to trigger the deeper sort of conflict that in turn brings about change.

According to Bybee, part of the reason the media fail to provoke meaningful discourse is that in the last thirty years they have undergone a transformation of purpose, drifting away from their traditional roles of keeping an eye on the government and corporations. During that time, corporate entities, such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have gained control of the media. "We're now down to about five or six corporations that control more than half of what people see and read," Bybee says. As a result, "editors will say without any embarrassment that their first job is to make a profit." Yet, Bybee says, it's the role of the media as independent, objective watchdogs--rather than as corporate tools--to help make democracy work. "The media are not providing the necessary ingredients that have to be in place for a democratic culture," he says.

But there may be a glimmer of hope in the form of print and web-based alternative news media. As Gutterman says, an impediment to the creation of civil conversations is the lack of good models. "One thing that happens is that we have opinions," Gutterman says, "but we don't have arguments." These models, and the information needed to sustain an argument and defend our viewpoints, might be found online. Although mainstream media may be missing the mark on many levels in terms of providing in-depth coverage of events and their implications, blogs and ready access to the Internet make it possible for individuals to bypass mainstream media and seek out information on their own. In doing so, however, we must apply a critical eye. "Traditional media have to distill information," Gronke says. "Blogs are great, but they don't do much distillation." Individuals must do the hard work of separating the wheat from the chaff. Regardless of whether mainstream media undergo a renaissance, individuals still have the ability to inform themselves and pursue a deeper understanding of many different political viewpoints.

"We have to figure out ways to have civil disagreements," Gutterman says. To have such disagreements entails rejecting polite conversation, since that form of dialogue invalidates civil discussion as threatening, improper, and rude. Despite the fact that we may be seduced into polite conversations because of the lack of effort they require, it is the wrong road for us to turn down. "That's not the challenge of freedom. The challenge is to engage people with whom you don't agree," Gutterman says. "That's the challenge of democracy: It asks the most of you."

Amanda Waldroupe is a freelance writer living in Portland. Cutting her teeth as an intern at Willamette Week, she now regularly contributes to Street Roots and pursues other writing projects as they come her way.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities