A New Way of Communicating

Conversation serves many purposes.  It’s a way of getting to know people or of giving and receiving emotional support. It’s an enjoyable activity in and of itself, whether you’re joking with people or waxing philosophical whilst drunk.

Say, however, you’re having a debate about whether capitalism is good for the world or not.  I actually have this debate a lot and I’m not just doing it for fun; the debate I’m referring to is part of a serious effort to understand the world and the actions I should take as a person within it.  Unfortunately, the debate often goes like this: “Industrial capitalism is bad and needs to be destroyed.” “Okay, what do you mean by industrial capitalism, what do you mean by bad, and what do you mean by destroyed?”  These questions usually get me a look–people think I’m joking or being an asshole or trying to sound smart.  I’m being totally serious though; this issue dramatically effects the lives of everyone on the planet including me and as such demands serious thought.  But it doesn’t get that thought, it gets 45 minutes tops.

There’s a problem here, a problem with the way we communicate when our purpose is to actually generate new understanding about the way the world works.  The root of this problem is the fact that we try to create conversations that are self-contained entities–in other words, whatever quest for knowledge you happen to be on should start and end in the breadth of that one conversation.  The result of this is that we shortcut our way through the process of laying out our premises (ie. we never say what we think is good and bad), we shy away from debates that seem impossible to resolve (for indeed they are when you only plan to give them 45 minutes worth of your time), and we usually walk away feeling like we didn’t accomplish much.

I propose a simple solution.  With people that you often find yourself debating/discussing with, view your individual debates as pieces of a larger pursuit of understanding.  Debate/discuss methodically with the goal of making incremental progress rather than trying to resolve large and complicated issues all in one go.

The other problem I see is that people discuss without giving thought to the best means by which to come to new understanding.  A simple and very effective structure is one in which you lay out your basic premises, then discuss whether they are true, come to a consensus, then derive some implication of these premises, discuss, consense, then derive an implication from these implications and so on.  It’s simple logic (I think.. I’m not formally trained in logic).  If debates last over many sessions, then it’s much easier to be methodical like this.  Even if you’re just having a one time debate–say with a person next to you on the airplane–if you can quickly lay out your basic premises then I think it resolves a lot of confusion.

Now I’m not saying that this is the best or only way to come to new understanding when you discuss.  I definitely do, however, think that it works a lot better than the way most people discuss now.