The Scientific Summary Of Civil Discourse

What makes a good conversation? How do we disagree without becoming uncivil about it? This is a question that was sort of brought to the table in the last @helpie audio chat. It's an important question for all who engage on any social platform to answer, because we all know how easily and how fast online discussions about "hot topics" can devolve into a shouting match in which the winner is the one who verbally "destroys" his or her opponents.

_{source: Pixabay}

Civil discourse is engagement in discourse (conversation) intended to enhance understanding.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Much in the manner in which posts about crypto's and investing are prefaced with their usual disclaimer, I'd like to cover my ass here a bit by saying that none of what I'm about to say is to be taken as the absolute truth. What I'm about to say about human interaction is just the way I see things now, and how I would prefer to see us going forward. And I would love to see your perspectives, as you find the holes in my reasoning :-)

Something that @meno mentioned in the last @helpie meeting got me thinking about this again. You can listen to it here. It got me thinking about communicating in a meaningful, honest and effective way with each other. The ability to exchange thoughts and ideas effectively and honestly, is what glues us together, and failing to do so is what fractures society. When our opinions and ideologies are based on lies, or the lies we tell each other, or when we fail to find common ground, a common starting point from which to begin formulating our plans and ideas for a common future, that's where we start drifting apart and find it ever harder to understand where the other viewpoint is coming from.

And that's the first thing to realize, I think. There will always be differences between all individuals; that's the first thing we all have in common. Our uniqueness may be our greatest binding property, as long as we always recognize the truth of it in ourself as well as in each other. In discussions this means we can never assume that our discussion partner has the same inner understanding of words or phrases you understand perfectly for yourself. A "liberal" is something completely different for an American than for a Dutchman like myself. And it meant something completely different 40 years ago compared to what it means now.

In real life we have the luxury of being able to immediately correct or elaborate on these differences of basic understanding; when we say something that means something different than what our discussion partner thought we meant, we see our partner's puzzled face and react to that. When discussing online it's therefore a good practice to be exact in your formulations and explain as much as possible what it is we mean to say, in terms that have the smallest chance of being misinterpreted by the one(s) on the other side.

That brings us to the second thing to keep in mind, which is what @meno said in the meeting yesterday; how much is lost by not being physically in the same room as your discussion partner. A large part of our communication is nonverbal; much of the message we try to convey lies in our body language, tone of voice and facial expressions. I remember from a long time ago the 7%-38%-55% "rule" of communication and I looked it up:

Albert Mehrabian (born 1939 to an Armenian family in Iran), currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA, has become known best by his publications on the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages. His findings on inconsistent messages of feelings and attitudes have been misquoted and misinterpreted throughout human communication seminars worldwide, and have also become known as the "7%-38%-55% Rule", for the relative impact of words, tone of voice, and body language when speaking.
_{source: Wikipedia}

_{source: Pixabay}

It must be said though that this rule cannot be applied across all type of conversation: these numbers were found in a study "dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike), and that the above, disproportionate influence of tone of voice and body language becomes effective only when the situation is ambiguous." But then again if it's about liking or disliking the discussion partner, I keep in mind how some opinions are so thoroughly internalized, that attacking them feels like a personal offense. I have some of those strong convictions myself and often find myself having to apologize for coming on too strongly when defending them. And that's in real life, with all the benefits of getting 100% of the message and being able to respond immediately.

Which brings me to my final point, and that is the common ground I feel is necessary for any discussion to have any meaning at all, and combines with the second point of missing out on direct visual and audible cues. There are, in my opinion, two things we can do to keep online discourse meaningful and civil by finding that common ground. The first thing is to summarize your discussion partner's point of view in a way that he or she agrees with. "So, if I hear you correctly, you mean to say that...." Or something like that should be the start of an answer to any "hot topic" discussed online. Knowing how ideological or religious convictions are sometimes intimately intertwined with the actual person holding them, and knowing about all the limitations of text-only communications, it's even more important to make sure we understand each other's starting points. Summarizing the other viewpoint, and making sure your understanding of it aligns with the other's understanding, shows your genuine interest in the other side, that you're open to be convinced by genuine arguments. Without this step there's a real chance of misinterpretation of each other's intentions and the first step toward another shouting match has been made.

It doesn't have to be in this form exactly of course, but it's a good habit to always make sure you're talking about the same thing and that you understand each other's basic assumptions about the subject matter. The understanding of these basic assumptions is what gives us our common ground, so the second thing to do is to not make any ideological claims while defending or explaining your preferred point of view or even ideology. Instead use science and hard data to explain why your ideology is preferable over the other's. By this I don't mean we should all become scientists or should know all facts about life and human nature. I just mean that science is in my opinion our most effective tool to get to that precious common ground. If there's any common ground we should all be able to share, it's our shared existence in the real world.

_{source: Max Pixel}

And science is the best tool we have to come to a shared understanding of that reality. I think it was Sam Harris who made the comparison with a color-blind person. He said that we could disagree with each other individually about what color we see, but there would be an explanation, a scientific explanation about these diverging personal experiences. We all have our own private model of the universe in our heads, but we must be able to agree on there being a reality "out there" that's independent of our individual perspectives on that reality, or all discussions are pointless. Science gives us that basic playground and makes it as large as possible, as it only tries to get as close as possible to an understanding of that which we can all agree is real. I say it like this: we all have the right to our own opinions, but no one has the right to their own facts.

We all share the same reality, the same universe and the same planet, we breathe the same air, we all bleed, we're all capable of the greatest kindness and the greatest unkindness, intentional or unintentional, we all feel emotions and the most meaningful things to us trigger those emotions the most. Meaning is found in experience and emotion. We're basically the same much more than we are different; no matter if you're right wing or left wing, you hold your ideology or opinions because you genuinely believe they give all of us the best chance for a better future; there's really just a handful of people who just want to see the world burn, and there's a scientific explanation to be found in sociology, neurology and psychology for these psychopaths' and sociopaths' mode of thinking.

You may have noticed that after the introduction I never again used the word "opponent" here. Also I steered away from using the word "debate" entirely (apart from just now ;-)); looking around on YouTube, it's amazing how many videos are dedicated to showing how some public speakers "destroy" an opposing viewpoint or even the person holding the other opinion. Especially the so called "new atheists" and the "intellectual dark-web" (look those up, but Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins are among them) get this treatment a lot. Some examples:

• Sam Harris brilliantly destroys religious arguments Atheist Vs Theist
• Sam Harris Destroys Jordan Peterson's "Truth"
• Sam Harris destroys Reza Aslan - YouTube
• Sam Harris destroys Obama on Islamic terrorism - YouTube
• And vice-versa: Sam Harris gets Humiliated on TV by Hugh Hewitt - YouTube

This says something about the direction public discourse is headed, not so much about Sam Harris' intentions; he is a vocal advocate for everything I've said here, even if I strongly disagree with some of his opinions. And these intellectuals, Harris included, often fail themselves to adhere to these guidelines to civil discourse, as do I. A beautiful example of how even rational thinkers can completely fail to communicate effectively is the 2015 email-exchange between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky, in which Chomsky refuses ans invitation by Harris to a public discussion about post 9/11 U.S. policy. There is a YouTube video with the entire exchange in text-to-speech format; I might be silly, but I found this highly entertaining and enlightening, so just in case you're interested:

_{Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris - The Limits of Discourse PART1of5}

Really, there are hundreds, if not thousands of these videos with antagonizing titles like "X destroys Y" and "A humiliates B"... This is a sign of how "click-bait" is another aspect of online communication to worry about, but also how discussions are increasingly seen as a match to be won immediately with a clear winner and a clear loser. It's a sign of an ever more polarized society and shows that we don't discuss with each other with the intent of potentially being convinced by rational arguments, but rather that we always want to be the one to do the convincing even if our arguments aren't rational at all. This is the very opposite of an open and honest discussion.

There's no use in starting a discussion if your mind is already made up, if you're not willing to be convinced by, or even listen to rational arguments and plausible scenarios proposed by your discussion partner; that's why it's so important to first show you've understood, really listened to what the other has to say. Even if it's just to prove to yourself that your reply is going to be meaningful at all, and don't make an ass of yourself in public. Make sure you're on common ground first and foremost, and don't always try to get the high ground.

Having said all this I must admit that it's nigh impossible to always keep all of this in mind while texting and tweeting, so don't take this as some sort of definitive guide to online discourse walhalla, it's certainly not. It's just my attempt to make sense of it all and my opinion on how we could improve our new online reality. I'll be the first to admit that I fail to adhere to these guidelines often enough. But I try. It's not an easy thing, for me at least, to get used to new ways of showing understanding and empathy in direct communications by text only, and for a medium like text-chat in Discord for example, I'm also way too slow on the keyboard; that's partly why I almost always have something to say during the voice hangouts, but rarely am active in the text channels. Maybe I'm just old fashioned like that. Or just old. :-)

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