Know the Room
One of the feeds I track on my home page is Wil Wheaton’s blog. Recently he put up a fairly long post following up on an essay he wrote for Salon about Christmas dinner with his parents. A political discussion turned emotional, and when Wil wrote about it, his parents thought he was being unfair, so he tried to set the record straight. I read the post on Wil’s site, and then noticed that he had cross-posted it as a diary at Daily Kos. It’s kind of fascinating to see the difference in the comments sections. At Wil’s site, the focus tends to be on the emotional content, talking to Wil about the pain he clearly felt, the mistake he felt he had made, and the effort he was making to atone. Since Wil’s readership includes some conservatives who disagree with his politics, there’s also a certain amount of effort to continue the “let’s try to understand each other” theme of the followup post, and a few posts that try to engage the political debate. Over at dKos, it’s a much more charged and partisan atmosphere, which includes some posters criticizing Wil for backing down from his parents and letting himself be emotionally manipulated and others telling Wil that regardless of his protests to the contrary, his father is, in fact, a wingnut.
Some of this is no doubt tied to the different natures of the two communities. One is a personal community built around fans of Wil Wheaton. The other is a community of charged partisans. But that provides an example of how the contexts that we put ourselves in can shape the perceptions that we form and the responses we make. Which suggests that we should not get so commited to them that we react with anger and vitriol when we’re faced with disagreement.
But then again, I don’t want to seem like I’m being so wishy-washy that I don’t think there’s ever such a thing as being right in a discussion. There’s a certain amount of intellectual gymnastics you have to go through in order to simultaneously hold a position and try and convince someone else it’s the right one while you also leave yourself open to being convinced to go the other way. From time to time the effort makes me a little dizzy, but I believe it’s worth it.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
Wednesday, January 4th 2006 at 3:08 am |
Y’know, I have a hard and fast rule about political discussions at the dinner table. If said dinner table is at my house, then, quite simply, I won’t have it. Seriously. I know that sounds a bit fascist of me, but given how much of my job time I get to spend hearing about politics, anymore I honestly have no desire to discuss it at home, especially not at a family gathering which is incredibly rare in my home due to different schedules. I’m not going to have those rare, fleeting moments ruined.
At someone else’s dinner table, I’ll usually just politely sit back and let everyone else carry on the discussion. If someone has to ask me what my opinion is, I give it to them: my opinion is that I doubt anyone really wants to hear my political standpoint at the dinner table. My family and my wife’s family tend to use me as the “go-to” guy when they need someone with a differing opinion to rail against since they’re all usually joined in a right-leaning lockstep. If I know someone’s just waiting for a chance to try to shoot me down…why would I hand ’em the ammo?
And before anyone’s eyebrows shoot further up their skulls, there’s a very real reason I do this, and it’s nothing to do with intolerance of differing opinions: I have enough trouble with my gastric plumbing processing food without a heated political/religious/work-related discussion acidizing my stomach juices. 😛
Wednesday, January 4th 2006 at 9:10 am |
I tend to employ the same rule. In face to face discussions, it’s easy to get caught up emotionally and start trying to “win” the argument, and that tends to get heightened for me with my family – similar personality types ramming into each other at high speed.
Plus, and this may seem kind of silly, at the dinner table I’m away from my computer, my bookcase, and my newspaper. So I’m dealing only with stuff I half-remember from previous reading, not with fresh information that deals with the issue at hand. That just leads to fuzzier arguments and the spread of not-quite-right data, and that doesn’t get anyone anywhere good.