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I recently found a Joseph Heath blog post, which immediately became one of the most important things I’ve read. The post, On the problem of normative sociology, shined light on so many things I’ve seen in life that I had to sit down at my computer and begin typing (before I even finished reading it).
It’s about a problem with how people approach public policy debates; but really, it’s about how to ruin a conversation.
In the post, Heath describes how political correctness invaded our discourse decades ago and how it has ruined our ability to speak, think, or reason rationally. The problem is the intrusion of moral and philosophical ideas into simple factual conversations, and how that undermines our political ability to actually get anything done.
But what it reminded me of is relationships. Because this is the kind of stuff people do to each other at home.
Here’s a question. Why do men and women fight so much? For two reasons.
Because men and women literally live in different realities. Men (classically) understand the world through cause, effect, data, and logic. Men are mechanical. Women (classically) understand the world through motive, intention, emotive actions, and subtlety. Women are subtle. So when women accuse men of doing something wrong, men are often not just playing dumb — they literally don’t understand what they’ve done wrong. The same can be true in reverse.
Because a lot of fights not only begin, but escalate and snowball, when the two sexes try to do the impossible: to make these two realities reconcile with each other.
Women and men will always misunderstand each other; the best we can hope for is to slightly train each other to see either mechanics or subtlety more clearly, and then try to compromise on a case-by-case basis. I mean, that really is the best we can do.
In other words, men and women start fighting because they misunderstand each other, and then keep fighting because they’re busy trying to get the other to understand what they were upset about in the first place. A lot of the time, neither side ends up understanding the other’s initial gripe — which is why so many fights in relationships go unresolved.
The fight spirals so far out of control, so far into tit-for-tat nothings, that it becomes impossible to backtrack the conversation to what was even wrong in the first place. You end up fighting not about one thing, but about all the successive things you bring up to hurt each other or to win.
This is why you mustn’t go to bed angry. If you don’t resolve a thing now, it will come up again later. Because, emotionally, it must. It’s still beneath the surface, bubbling, and it will come up again later as an instrument for winning a completely unrelated fight. (Women are the world champions at this.)
One way to think of being a healthy couple is this: to keep your relationship in a state where you can argue about only one thing at a time. If you can do that, you probably have a good relationship.
Similarly, this is how you would hope to have healthy political discourse in a country. Unfortunately, in the modern U.S., this is pretty much unheard of. Every conversation is about everything. And most of it is moral, not factual. The reason we can’t talk to each other is because people aren’t willing to start the conversation by agreeing. About anything.
And the reason for most fights at home is that couples forget to start from either emotions or facts, but not both. You kind of have to pick one.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with moral conversation, and there’s nothing wrong with giving a name to emotional grievances. But those are not facts. The problem is when you try to refute one with the other.
Heath (and others) have used the term normative sociology to describe what has evolved out of political correctness. Normative sociology is a tongue-in-cheek term that means the study of what the causes of problems ought to be. People fall into the trap of imposing their own belief system onto a conversation and using that as their factual reasoning.
When it comes to public policy, social activism, economic programs, etc., the reason this becomes so dangerous is because it leads policymakers to attack problems that aren’t problems. Or rather, to place blame for a problem incorrectly and then try to fix the wrong thing. Heath’s examples are great, so I’m not going to try to one-up them; however here’s a different kind of example.
If you’re having an exhaust issue on your car, you start hearing that rattling or tapping that nobody likes hearing, you would really like the problem to not be your catalytic converter. Because that would be inconvenient. Replacing a catalytic converter is expensive, and paying someone $40 to weld your muffler isn’t.
So what do you do? You start looking for explanations. And where do you start? You start with any explanations that don’t include the catalytic converter being the problem. “If we could go ahead and make this problem a convenient one, that’d be great.”
Similarly, people who want to solve social problems (on the right or on the left) find it extremely inconvenient when the apparent causes of a problem don’t line up with what they would like to be the causes. That makes their agenda harder to fulfill and their belief systems less beliefable. “How can I get votes if people don’t rely on my explanation of things?”
So they just work around the facts and place blame where they think the blame ought to be. Morally or philosophically. If someone is against wealth inequality, the first place they’re going to look when picking apart any problem is how they can blame it on wealth inequality.
If this sounds laughably ridiculous, that's because it is. But we all do it. Me, you, and everybody else.
People want to simplify past the point of reason, and they also want to blame a problem that is convenient for them. (And that's why men want to argue with logic only and women with emotion only: no compromise required.)
Now these are complicated problems. But that’s kind of the point of public debate. I would argue that if you’re not willing to grapple with complicated problems, you shouldn’t be talking about public policy in the first place. You should be at home playing with action figures.
In relationships, this oversimplifying might look like a girlfriend telling her boyfriend that he has an anger problem — even though the main source of his anger is that she's always showing up late to everything they do together. Until she builds some habits to stop doing that, no amount of anger management is going to fix the relationship. It's convenient for her to just blame him, but that doesn't make blaming him the correct answer.
And that’s another way communication can go bad. Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship knows what a negative feedback loop is: you say the hurtful thing because they undermined you, but the reason they undermined you is because you said the last hurtful thing. Both in public debate and in relationships, it’s tempting to just blame the entire feedback loop on one person so that you don’t have to change your strategy.
Not helpful.
And in relationships, you don’t get to be right about things like this. You can have a happy relationship, or you can be right about who started the feedback loop. But you can’t do both.
Or it could look like Don Draper from Mad Men. A man realizes his wife is unhappy, and he just wants there to be a thing to fix it. Just a thing he can do, now, immediately. Flowers? Chocolates? Finally taking that pottery class?
Again, he’s not only oversimplifying but also attacking the wrong problem. What his wife wants is to be loved — not through one big thing, but through all the small things.
And no matter how many times the women in Draper’s life bring up the fact that he’s a pig, that he’s missing obvious details, or that he needs to do more than apologize, he just doesn’t get it. And, predictably, he and every successive woman in his life have more and more trouble communicating.
Before you know it, there’s a roller coaster built on top of the actual problems in the relationship; the couple spends all of their time riding that roller coaster, up and down and around in circles, vomiting on each other, never getting off to get back to the original problems below. People like Don Draper keep their relationships alive by maliciously avoiding actual problems.
Every time one of the women in Draper’s life confronts him with something really difficult, he always seems to have some moment of vulnerability ready to weaponize against her. He has a quiet, heartfelt moment of opening up a little bit. Sometimes to distract, and sometimes to beautifully illuminate why he’s so difficult to be with, why he’s just so sad and broken.
Obviously, all of the women eventually realize that this is plain vanilla bullshit and they stop falling for it. Same kinds of things happened with Tony Soprano.
If either of these two guys had wanted to fix every relationship in their lives, it would have taken them 2 days. Total. But they just wouldn’t do it. And eventually, they ended up with exactly what they had earned: an entire world of people who didn’t want to talk to them anymore.
Another interesting note: where some people’s issue is trying to fix something mathematical with something moral, Draper’s issue was trying to fix something moral with something mathematical. Something intimate with something calculated.
Again, not helpful.
Another great way to ruin a conversation is by secretly importing goods into the conversation and treating them like legitimate goods.
Maybe once in a while you'll see an atheist having a debate with a religious person. Something that might happen (which I have seen happen) is that a religious person will smuggle God into the conversation. And they may not be doing this maliciously — they may not even realize they're doing it, because they don’t understand just how deeply rooted their assumptions about God are.
An atheist will say something like “well where do you propose that morals come from? How do we know what is right and wrong?” And the religious person will begin their response with “Well, in the Western tradition, we have always…”
And it takes a keen eye to see what has just happened: the conversation has moved forward one square without earning that move. The conversation went from “debate about morality from first principles” to “debate about morality from religious principles.” Because, as an astute observer would know, the entire Western tradition is based on Christianity.
Therefore, using that as a response implicitly assumes we’re starting from the idea “Christianity is a basis for morality,” even though that’s exactly what the atheist is saying is not true. That’s like being asked, “how did you invent this car” and responding, “with car parts.” The question, then, is “but what are car parts? You yourself invented the car. You can’t invent a thing by already having parts meant specifically for that thing. That’s a circular argument.”
The way a conversation ought to go, ideally, is:
Step 1. You name one problem. The lowest-level, most basic problem you possibly can. You discuss that problem. You come up with a solution or explanation that satisfies that problem.
Step 2. You either move on to the next individual problem in the series of problems, or you advance the conversation downstream one level and start to figure out things affected by your solution to step 1.
And so on.
What people do when they smuggle morality or emotions into conversation is they bring assumptions into step 1 that were not even agreed upon. They hide step 2 in step 1.
Now we see why it’s so hard for a man and a woman to argue. A woman, for instance, can smuggle emotions into step 1, what might be the fact-finding part of the conversation, and start making claims that the man never agreed to. Conversely, a man might smuggle logic into a simple emotional plea for validation.
This is is why it’s so important to learn to communicate in relationships — because you have to figure out not just how to avoid making things worse, but how to positively say things that are actually meaningful when your partner is open to hearing them. If you can’t figure that out, you have no chance. You’ll spend your whole relationship talking on different wavelengths.
For a list of the ways Heath thinks normative sociology affects public discourse, I strongly recommend reading his relatively short piece.
And in summary, here are the ways you ruin a conversation:
Simplifying the problem further than it can actually be simplified, in order to find a convenient solution;
Redirecting attention towards a different problem and then solving that (solving a fake problem);
Riding the avoidance roller coaster;
Picking one side of a feedback loop of mutual harm, and laying all of the blame on that side;
Trying to solve a logic problem with emotions, or vice versa;
Smuggling unfair assumptions into the conversation.
You don’t have to rigidly structure every conversation you get into in life. Because that would be ridiculous. You shouldn’t be at work saying “okay gentlemen, are we talking about facts or emotions right now?”
But if you want to develop healthy communication habits with your spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, friends, or family members, it might be helpful to develop a habit of segmenting a conversation. There are different phases that a conversation can have: “what is wrong,” “how do we feel about it,” and “what do we do about it?”
If you try to have all three of those conversations at once, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Drink some water and don’t admire people like Don Draper.
JR
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” - Thomas Pynchon