My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #50, June 15, 1998

ARGUABLY BETTER

When my brother was in charge of housing inspection in his town, he was amazed that so many of the calls he got were simple neighbor to neighbor complaints--untended lawns, or litter on a neighbor's property --the kind of thing you would think people could just talk to each other about. And I wonder if maybe we ask neutral, official third parties to solve our problems because we don't know how to talk to each other about them.

If so, it could be because we see so few examples of reasonable adults dealing with conflict in constructive ways. What we see on TV, night after night, is pundits and politicians tearing each other up, making vicious personal attacks. They don't care if the other guys have a valid point here and there, because they're in the grandstanding business, not the solution business. What they want to do is score political points and impress their voters and contributors. They can't afford to be seen working with people they're going to be calling hypocrites and thugs in their next fundraising letters.

If you're a bystander, it leaves you feeling kind of queasy--and perhaps afraid that, if you complain to your neighbors, however graciously, that's what they'll do to you. Maybe it's no wonder we ask housing inspectors to make our neighbors cut their lawn, and animal control agents to make them leash their dogs.

What we need, it seems to me, is a better model of how to discuss, negotiate, and even argue, while still leaving each other intact, and while still remaining friends. You see, argument doesn't need to be destructive. If we abide by some reasonable ground rules, it can be a process that leads to better solutions than any of us came up with on our own.

Start with the idea that nobody owns the truth. I think of truth as manna; when it fell from the sky, everybody scrambled and got a few sizable chunks of it (except for the haters, who must have been holed up in a cave someplace). We all bring different knowledge to a discussion, and, since we are each affected differently by it, a different perspective on the problem.

Take the issue that has been cast as a conflict about the spotted owl. Lumber companies that want to cut down old-growth national forests can't do it, because the endangered spotted owl, lives there. If the lumber companies can't cut the wood, their employees are out of work. This is, then, a simple case of spotted owl against jobs, right? Progress versus tree-huggers? Simple businessmen trying to do their jobs, stymied at every turn by rule-bound bureaucrats?

None of the parties to this quarrel is being honest about what the issue is. The lumber companies say nothing about HOW they're cutting the forests. If they were cutting a tree here, a tree there, nobody would be fighting--a forest cut that way can regenerate itself. What they are doing, however, is clearcutting, bulldozing patches of forest and stripping out everything growing there, and forests don't recover from that. Satellite photographs of land that was clearcut and replanted 40 years ago reveal a land still desolate and barren.

Those who are fighting to keep their jobs do not acknowledge that, once all the old-growth forests are cut down, the jobs will disappear then. This is not a case of jobs versus spotted owls--it's jobs lost right now versus jobs lost in a few years when there are no trees left.

The environmentalists are also being disingenuous in the way they present this issue. They know perfectly well that the real problem is not spotted owls, but the entire ecosystem. The roots of old growth trees hold the earth in place. Without them, soil slides into streams, destroying the habitat of salmon and other fish, and endangering the recreational and commercial fishing industry. Homes and highways have also been destroyed by mudslides. But instead of talking about that, environmental groups use whatever bits of law are available to them, in this case the Endangered Species Act, as a club to force the lumber companies to halt their operations, however temporarily.

This is an issue that has been oversimplified by warring parties. In fact, many people have a stake in this, and all of them should come to the table to help solve it, because they all have pieces of the puzzle the others don't know about. We need biologists sitting at that table, along with lumber company officials, fishermen, geologists, the Forest Service, and the state government, which has to consider the interests of all its citizens. Some of us ordinary Americans need to be there, too, because, let us not forget, we OWN those national forests, as do our children and generations not born yet.

One of the ground rules of civilized argument is that you start by assuming that everyone is negotiating in good faith. True, you may find out otherwise in the course of the discussion. But without a climate of mutual respect, you cannot have an open discussion of all the issues--people need to believe they will get a fair hearing. All participants should have a reasonable amount of time to present their view of the problem, and their evidence.

Next, there needs to be a discussion of what the real issues are, what everybody's goals are, and whether there are any underlying points of agreement. Spotted owls and jobs are not the real issues in this case; clearcutting is. If we separate our goals from the particular strategies we believe will get us there, we may find there are other ways of achieving them--in the case of the lumber companies, the means may be clearcutting, but the goal must surely be long-term economic survival. If there is any underlying point of agreement here, it's that, if the forest is destroyed, everybody loses.

No matter how impassioned the argument, there can be points on which mortal enemies agree. Ideas can't be generated when your only goal is to say NO louder than anybody else. But once you are no longer warring parties, but members of a team working together, ideas have a chance to get born. Now you can can brainstorm ideas, and look at how other people have dealt with your problem. You can bring in experts to answer your questions, and assign members of your team to research specific problems or possible solutions.

It may well be that some members of this team will have to abandon not their goals, necessarily, but their original strategies for achieving them--all the reasoned evidence suggests that lumber companies must stop clearcutting. But in that case, the team may be able to help them come up with alternative ways of doing business, because they are in fact performing a service we need, providing lumber for our houses and paper for our copy machines (and when was it we were supposed to have achieved the paperless society?).

If lumber companies have to change their strategy, they should be able to feel that they lost fair and square because the preponderance of the evidence and the interests of the state and nation were against them--not because they were bullied by environmentalists waving spotted owls at them, not because the other side successfully portrayed them as greedy evil industrialists. People deserve a chance to lose and still feel good about themselves. But without gracious winners, there will be no gracious losers--you cannot sit on the bench the entire fourth quarter making fun of the team you're beating up on without making enemies who will never forgive you.

I remember a theater professor at Northwestern directing Pygmalion in the final scene, when Henry Higgins had fully expected to bully Eliza Doolittle into coming home with him. When she stands up for herself, matching his jibes point for point, for the first time, he begins to see her as an equal, not as his eternal student. To get the actors to FEEL this respect between equal antagonists, the professor had them shake hands after every verbal jab, as in "Oh, jolly good hit!"

This is the way my son and I argue. We don't think all that much alike, but he knows all kinds of things I don't, especially about economics and statistics, just as I know a lot of things he doesn't. Our amicable bickering generates ideas--as he points out flaws in my solutions, I come up with improvements, and so does he. We pool the best parts of each of our ideas, and make something better. It works because we respect each other. And since we both can be pretty funny, the argument rarely gets too passionate, because we'll both crack each other up from time to time. Not only does laughter relieve tension, it's also a time out, a chance to redirect an argument that was going nowhere.

I recommend this technique to our politicians and pundits. They wouldn't raise as much money, maybe, as they do by pretending that anyone opposed to them is an evil scumbag. But if we saw them working together, trying in good faith to solve our national problems, we might be willing to trust them again. And if we tried it ourselves, our neighbors just might fix their property without us having to call in the housing inspectors.