I’m Not Sure We’re Having the Same Conversation

Part two of a series on the ideas behind the woke movement

About a month into a semester I had hit a brick wall.

I was teaching a course designed to encourage students to reflect critically on their most basic beliefs and assumptions, entertaining the possibility that they may need to be revised. That’s a very difficult thing to do. Now that I think about it, it is perhaps surprising how often students were willing to enter into such an enterprise. 

I had taught the course many times, but with this particular group of students, that willingness was not much in evidence. Indeed, there was a tangible resistance and hostility to the readings, with some students vocalizing this quite forcefully in class. I was feeling stuck. The conversation was going nowhere. Arms were folded, minds closed.

This had happened once before, in the first course I ever taught independently. In that instance, the issue was never resolved. The students and I settled into a subtle antagonism that lasted the rest of the semester. Not a pleasant experience. 

Something needed to be done to change the atmosphere. But what? After spending some time praying and reflecting on the matter, I felt that God gave me an answer. You need to approach the students in weakness and vulnerability. That sounded right immediately. It is, after all, how God approaches an antagonistic humanity through Christ. 

So the next class period I started out by acknowledging the feelings in the room. I told them I knew that it was annoying to have your beliefs questioned and to be pushed to engage in their examination. 

I also suggested there are two obstacles that often get in the way of our engaging with those who disagree with us. We harbor an often implicit confidence that we’re members of the club of the smart and the righteous, and can therefore dismiss our rhetorical opponents as the dumb and the evil — people whom we need not take seriously. 

Obviously, it is asking a lot for anyone to admit that he has adopted this attitude. My suggestion that this might be going on would probably have just bounced harmlessly off of those firmly-crossed arms, if not for a good dose of weakness and vulnerability.

I told the students two stories. 

The first was about the time I had a conversation with an old high school teacher in the summer after my first year of college. I had taken a bit of philosophy and was priding myself on my cleverness in seeing a decisive problem with a particular view of his. Ironically, several years later in graduate school, I would be writing a paper explaining why the objection that seemed so devastating to my younger self was, in fact, entirely mistaken. 

Lesson: I’m not always the smart one. 

The second story had happened just a year or two earlier. I had been telling a friend about a survey I found myself taking in which the interviewer was asking me about my TV viewing habits. To question after question along the lines of, “Do you watch this sport?” I had answered, “no.” 

My friend listened patiently, commenting after I was finished, “Well, John, we don’t all use our time as wisely as you,” or words to that effect. I don’t think there was any hint of sarcasm in his voice, but it was one of those times when I felt suddenly exposed. In a flash, I saw the whole thing so clearly. I wanted to tell this story for exactly the reason he identified. I sought to demonstrate and shore up my own sense of righteousness by contrasting my behavior with that sordid crowd — you know, the spending-too-much-time-watching-sports-on-TV folks. Instead, I merely demonstrated my own ugly self-righteousness.

It was thoroughly ridiculous. But there it is. Such is the human heart.

Lesson: I’m not the righteous one.  

I closed with the admission that I still have a lot to learn and many areas where moral growth is necessary. I invited them to consider that this may be true for them, too, and that they might greet this course not as an enemy but as an opportunity for positive change. 

The effect of the weakness and vulnerability was remarkable. The arms unfolded. The hostility dissipated. It was a great class that finished the semester well. 

Lesson: it is not just the content of a conversation that matters. It is also essential to pay attention to the dynamics.

What does all this have to do with a series on woke ideas?

Our public discourse around this topic has its own dynamics that are worth noticing before diving into more substantive engagement with the ideas themselves. To make them easier to see, let’s consider a simpler context of difficult conversations: a marriage relationship. 

One of the biggest problems most marriages face isn’t conflict, but the ability to communicate well in the midst of the conflicts that will inevitably arise in any relationship. One of the first things I learned in this domain in the first year of marriage was the important difference between two kinds of conversations: the feelings conversation and the facts conversation.

Consider an example. A wife says to her husband, “I feel like you aren’t vulnerable with me. I don’t know what’s really going on inside you.” 

The husband replies, “I am vulnerable with you. Just this week I told you about how discouraged I was about that thing that happened at work. Remember?”

From this beginning point, things don’t usually go very well. The wife has kicked things off with a feelings conversation and the husband dove right into the facts conversation. The wife feels she isn’t being heard and that her feelings are being dismissed while the husband feels exasperated by her apparent inability to see the logic of his case. She thinks he isn’t being very loving, and he thinks she isn’t being very reasonable. 

Each has reasons to want to resist the conversation the other is trying to have. For the husband, he hears her as saying something like, “You’re not a very good husband,” and he feels instantly defensive and eager to make a case for his righteousness. For the wife, she hears her husband as saying something like, “Your feelings aren’t reasonable, which you could see if you’d only consider the evidence.” She, too, is defensive. Whatever their source, the feelings are real and, if he cared for her, he should want to explore them with her. 

And both have a point. The loving thing for the husband to do is to put aside his pride and need to defend himself for a moment and try to understand what his wife is feeling and why. It may be that, on reflection, he isn’t as righteous as he thought and there are changes he needs to make.

On the other hand, the facts conversation has a place. It is possible that he is consistently vulnerable but that she has unrealistic expectations about the kind of intimacy that is possible for him. She may need to make adjustments, too. 

In real life, it is usually a bit of each. 

Now let’s return to our culture’s conversation — if that label makes sense — around the issues connected to the woke movement, like race, gender, and sexuality. I’m obviously making a broad generalization here, but it strikes me that the basic tenor of the woke movement is that it seeks to have the feelings conversation, while its opponents typically counter with the facts one. 

Just as in marriage, this kind of collision usually doesn’t go anywhere. So as I try to wade into the conversation, I want to make a few things clear. 

First, I acknowledge that the feelings conversation is legitimate and matters. If we care about others, if we desire to actually live together in something resembling a political community, we owe them the willingness to listen to how they feel and take their concerns seriously. We don’t like to do this, for the reason noted above: it raises the possibility that we aren’t as righteous as we think, and that repentance and change may be called for. 

But I want to resist my own resistance. People feel discriminated against, targeted, dismissed, diminished, treated unjustly, and excluded. People are treated in those ways. People have legitimate reasons to be frustrated, angry, pessimistic, and so on. I am willing to listen, and if you, dear reader, want to say something to me along these lines, please write. 

Second, I want to contend that the facts conversation is also legitimate and matters. Feelings are not an infallible guide to reality and they are only a starting point. Getting to the bottom of what the issues really are and how to solve them takes careful thought and the willingness to submit one’s judgments to the scrutiny of others. Here, too, admission of misperception and change may be called for. 

In the posts that follow, I will be paying most attention to the facts conversation. One reason for that is my understanding of who my audience is. Another is my own sense of the contribution I have to make to the conversation. There is a division of labor in these things; the scholar who writes about macroeconomic theory engages in a very different way than the legislator who is thinking about particular policies applied to particular people in her district. Each has a role to play. 

Nevertheless, I wanted to make clear up front that I believe the feelings conversation matters, too, and I will be keeping these issues of the conversational dynamics in mind as I write. 

For your part, I hope you will also be keeping them in mind as you read. In talking about the facts, I do not intend to dismiss the feelings. But I am very interested in the question of how best to understand what’s going on so we can most effectively chart a course forward. 

Thanks for reading. See you next week.