When Truth and Love Differ

I do not charge for subscriptions but I welcome the occasional tip. I am very grateful to anyone willing to Buy Me a Coffee.

“Can we find common ground without shared reality?” Kate Cohen asks – and answers – that timely question in yesterday’s Washington Post. Cohen, like so many on the center and the left, is fed up with repeated exhortations to show compassion for (and curiosity about) Trump voters. In her op-ed, Cohen interviews Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, whose new book makes the case that American left and right need to find new paths towards comprehending each other.

Cohen’s scorn is clear: “He (Gray) still believes that listening to each other’s concerns is our only path toward mutual understanding… He might be right. But who’s got time for that?”

Those last two sentences are not promising. They also reflect a sentiment I hear often from my friends and family. Enough with the listening to bigots and nincompoops! Enough with the effort to grant credence to fetid conspiracy theories! Once the economy crashes and they realize that ordinary MAGA types are bearing the brunt of the pain, then maybe they’ll see the light and come crawling around to admit their errors. Until then, I’m done. As the crude contemporary vernacular has it, Cohen and her ilk are “all out of fucks to give.”

At the risk of sowing your fuckless field with horseshit, let me suggest that making time to listen to other people – including those not of your tribe – is a fairly important part of what it means to be civilized. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: you cannot shun people into transformation. You cannot spark a moral epiphany by withdrawing your affections. You may not be able to love people into changing, but you damn sure can’t change people by leaving them. My generation of parents understands you cannot correct a child’s misconduct with a belt. Indeed, we understand (correctly) that physical abuse breeds only rage and resentment, not remorse. We do not yet understand that cancel culture – disguised on both on an institutional and individual level as merited “consequences” – works exactly the same way.

But how, Cohen wonders, do we start conversations with people who believe different facts? How do we create common ground with people who do not share our realities? Cohen finds Professor Gray’s suggestion that we practice empathizing with their pain to be too time-consuming and energy-draining. It’s Cohen’s right to say it’s too much work. We live in an era where pop psychology recommends estrangement as a valid path for healing. Downsize your circle to a very loyal few. May the economy of your affections be parsimonious! If your field is so barren it has only a few fucks left, best not to waste any except on those who moral compasses are perfectly calibrated to your own. (I don’t have an editor to stop me from writing sentences like that.)

The solution is story. I am a writer by accident, but my calling was to be a teacher and a youth group leader. And if there’s one technique two decades in the classroom – and nearly that long shepherding various teen church groups – taught me, it’s that you build connection through relentless, non-judgmental curiosity about people’s stories.

Let’s imagine Uncle Wilber wants to repeat a rant he heard on Fox News. You ask Wilber who his favorite Fox host is, and then immediately follow up by inquiring who his favorite newscaster was when he was growing up. Every political statement can and must be treated as a trailhead into the personal. Push for a story. Did Wilber’s parents listen to the news on the radio? What was the first news story he remembers? Even people who believe lies have unimpeachable personal experiences to share. And the sharing of those experiences – storytelling – is the best way I know to build trust and intimacy.

In 1988, when I was a junior at Cal, I was in charge of a committee that brought outside speakers into the “co-ops”, a kind of communal student housing. Very ambitiously, I decided to host something called “Life and Choice Night,” featuring a debate between a representative from Planned Parenthood and one from the anti-abortion outfit Operation Rescue. Several of my friends told me it was a dreadful idea, but I secured the funding, and used all the manners and charisma I had on loan from my ancestors to convince two very suspicious groups that such a debate could be a very good use of time. Long story short, we pulled it off, and I floated around on that success for years.

What I will never forget is that when I introduced the two speakers to each other – both women in their thirties – the initial handshake was awkward. Then the Planned Parenthood rep, considering the unusual Italian surname of the Operation Rescue rep, asked an unexpected question. “Are you related to Peter (unusual Italian surname)?”

“He’s my brother!”

What followed were a few remarkable minutes of conversation, as the two women --- both native San Franciscans -- discovered that they knew (and liked) many of the same people. Several times, one or the other would say, “This is so crazy.”

I stood at a respectful distance, feeling like the proverbial canary-swallowing cat. Even at 20, however, I knew better than to attribute this surprising moment to anything I had done. It was the willingness to ask the question about a rare but familiar last name that had sparked the exchange. And however warm that exchange had been, it did nothing to bridge the ideological divide. Abortion is the great high-stakes issue of our time, and it would be reckless and stupid to assume that a cordial conversation with someone on the other side, replete with shared recollections, would be sufficient to change a heart or a mind. But maybe, just maybe, it softened the heart towards someone who was of a very different mind.

We debate to change minds. We ask questions to understand. The great tragedy of the modern world is that we assume that the issues are so fraught and the stakes so high that if we cannot change the mind of someone on the other side we should abandon a relationship altogether. We assume that our greatest responsibility as citizens and human beings is to the “truth,” and that when we encounter someone who adheres to another version of the truth, it is feckless to allow them to persist in their error. We make friendship contingent on their adoption of our understanding of reality, and if they refuse to accept our basic premises, then we must sever ties.

I mention, with inordinate pride and a lot of wistfulness, my time as a youth leader. In that capacity, I learned to ask one question over and over again: “How’s that working out for ya?” It wasn’t a poorly disguised rebuke. It was genuine curiosity, a curiosity that centered a teen’s experience and invited them to consider the efficacy of their own choices. The assumption was that through conversation with a non-judgmental and compassionate adult, a teen going through a rough patch could calibrate their own compass.

Genuine curiosity, liberated from ideological or theological presupposition, is one of the most important gifts we can give people. Tell me your story, we need to say. Tell me not what you believe, but of the experiences you’ve had that led you to believe them. The goal of listening is not to look for weaknesses of argument. The goal isn’t to collect ammunition to demolish the other person’s poorly constructed intellectual fortress. The goal is to connect with another human being. Story isn’t a means to an end – story, as I sometimes tell my clients, is an end in itself. It is one of the most fundamental things we do together as people – and when we make the active effort to elicit story from each other, we heal something. Maybe even a nation.

In The Common Life, W.H. Auden offered a poem for his life partner, Chester Kallman. It is a poem about the sacrifices and joys of marriage (or its facsimile). Marriage is a building block of society, not merely because some marriages sometimes lead to babies – but because the devotions and tensions and compromises between spouses point to the larger devotions, tensions, and compromises required for a society to flourish. Auden knew this well. The poem finishes:

The ogre will come in any case:
so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit,
fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
the Spirit we die, but life

without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.

The ogre is already here, or so many believe. There is more fasting than feasting ahead. But though there may be an absolute truth – about God, about the universe, about the 2020 election – the existence of that truth does not imply that we comprehend it. And when we are forced to deal with people whose understanding of reality is so different from our own, the poet suggests that truth should give way. Truth and love may never really differ, but part of being human (as any married person can tell you) is that they will frequently “seem to.”

If you insist on being right, you will probably end up alone, a proud surveyor of a fuckless field – and a dismayed observer of yet another lost election. Or, alternatively, you could say this: Truth is important, but there is something even more important. And the way I show honor to that more important thing is by asking someone to tell me a story.