Disagreement

There is nothing more frustrating in an argument than realizing that the person you are arguing with doesn't understand your position. The counterarguments offered up seem jarringly nonsensical, off topic, shallow, misleading, disingenuous, and a whole slurry of other maddening adjectives. We all want to be understood by one another. Those we argue with want to be understood by us as much as we do by them.

So how do we bridge the gap?

The first thing that must be done is to find common ground. A discussion on a topic is pointless if you are not talking about the same things in the same terms. I will illustrate with a conversation that my dad and I pick up and put down from time to time: same-sex marriage. I have found these discussions to be very fruitful, despite being inconclusive.

The main point of confusion is what is meant by the word "marriage." It can really be seen in at least three, distinct but connected, ways: legally, socially, and religiously.

• Legally, marriage is simply a set of rights granted by the government. It's a contract.
• Socially, marriage is how we treat the relationship among ourselves and others generally. Calling my wife my wife, rather than my girlfriend brings to mind a certain level of commitment and seriousness.
• Religious definitions vary more, but in the context of the United States, it's a predominantly Christian system that dominates. Within this context, marriage is defined semi-biblically, with the idea of one man and one woman being the most important aspect.

These are crucial distinctions. When I argue for a legalistically based form of marriage, my ears are not open to counterarguments from a religious perspective. Likewise, my arguments for the legality of the thing don't make a dent in any of the religious underpinnings for what he is saying. This is a terrible place for the conversation to end because we are both frustrated and nothing has been accomplished. It ended there between my dad and I for a long while.

A breakthrough occurred when we started talking about civil unions instead. It's a beautiful term because it separates out the legal side from the religious side. We were finally talking about the same thing! The conversation quickly shifted to become more interesting and meaningful, and I feel like we've become more similar in our thoughts on the subject. We changed each other's minds, at least on the legal front. We still haven't come to terms on the social side of things--I think that "civil union" is an unequal term to "marriage" in a social context; he thinks the opposite. The key is that we're talking about the same things now.

Expanding that thought out to a more general sense can help us lay the basis for other friendly disagreements. It is critical to take turns explaining and questioning each other until everyone there is a basic, agreed upon set of principles and terms. Then the rubber can hit the road.

We can never hope to understand another's thoughts without first finding where they intersect our own. Only then we can see where our ideas diverge and really grow as people, rather than finding ourselves dissatisfied with our disagreements.

Your Mother Tongue

They say that the typical human infant is born with the ability to learn any language.  When we came out of our mothers’ wombs, we had the potential to learn fluent Mandarin Chinese, Castilian Spanish, Navajo, Kikuyu, Icelandic, or any other of a number of diverse languages.  As we age, our ability to learn does not disappear, but certainly dramatically decreases and our chances of making someone believe we are native speakers is abysmal. 

Babies make all kinds of crazy sounds as they are exploring their vocal chords, tongues, lips and breath.  Apparently, as infants are picking up the nuances of pronunciation for the language they are learning, they disregard the sounds that don’t have a place.  If the child is learning English, those interesting guttural sounds that we hear in some places, or the clicking noises used by others just fade away into non-retrieval as the child ages.  

Have you ever had the experience of hearing someone say a word in another language that you try to say back, but when told you have not said it correctly, cannot hear the difference?   My mother-in-law tries to teach us some words in Chinese.  This is a language that is particularly reliant on tone to pronounce a word.   Put the emphasis on the wrong syllable and instead of saying what you think is “beans,” you’ve got the other person sniffing her own armpits because you’ve told her she’s got body odor.

When I think about this phenomenon of language acquisition, I also think of languages that are not so literal.  In a country like the United States, where there is such a diversity of experience and circumstance there are many who speak the same “language” but don’t really understand each other at all.  What I think it may come down to, is that people grow up with different experiences of their reality.  We grow up in particular communities, with particular expectations and beliefs.  If we are never exposed to different ways of seeing the world, we slowly lose our ability to understand how it could be any different from the way we’ve always experienced it.

When I have discussions with people who see the world differently than I do, sometimes it seems like I can’t get the other person to understand what I’m trying to say and vice versa.  We’ve grown to understand different languages.  How disorienting it is to travel to a place where you don’t understand a word someone is saying.  It can be exhausting to spend a day, let alone a number of days trying to navigate the streets, restaurants and hotels of a country (or another person) by any means possible, usually involving a lot of hand gestures and still not be sure that you’re where you thought you were.  That’s not to say that one is right and the other is wrong.  It’s just the only way we know how to talk. 

Apparently, babies who grow up in bi-lingual or multi-lingual families have a lifetime advantage in their brain’s ability to learn more languages, perform complex multi-tasking and a host of other desirable traits.  Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could learn to speak some other “languages” than the ones we’ve always used?