I started reading Deborah Tannen‘s Argument Culture (Booksense) today because I am considering using it for my election-themed composition course this fall. Tannen’s view of the contemporary state of argument and debate is strikingly different than that of Gerald Graff, who basically advocates acknowledging and even embracing conflict. (Granted, these are pretty different projects: one on academia and the other on public discourse.) Tannen, by contrast, questions the prevalence of argumentative conflict to begin with, asking if it sometimes gets in the way of real understanding and, importantly for my purposes, the democratic process. At the end of her first chapter, she writes

Philospher John Dewey said, on his ninetieth birthday, ‘Democracy begins in conversation.’ I fear that it gets derailed in polarized debate.

In conversation we form the interpersonal ties that bind individuals together in personal relationships; in public discourse, we form similar ties on a larger scale, binding individuals into a community. In conversation, we exchange the many types of information we need to live our lives as members of a community. In public discourse, we exchange the information that citizens in a democracy need in order to decide how to vote. If public discourse provides entertainment first and foremost – and if entertainment is first and foremost watching fights – then citizens do not get the information they need to make meaningful use of their right to vote.

Of course it is the responsibility of intellectuals to explore potential weaknesses in others’ arguments, and of journalists to represent serious opposition when it exists. But when opposition becomes the overwhelming avenue of inquiry – a formula that requires another side to be found or a criticism to be voiced; when the lust for opposition privileges extreme views and obscures complexity; when our eagerness to find weaknesses blinds us to strengths; when the atmosphere of animosity precludes respect and poisons our relations with one another; then the argument culture is doing more damage than good.

I offer this book not as a frontal assault on the argument culture. That would be in the spirit of attack that I am questioning. It is an attempt to examine the argument culture – our use of attack, opposition, and debate in public discourse – to ask, What are its limits as well as its strengths? How has it served us well, but also how has it failed us? How is it related to culture and gender? What other options do we have?

…There are times when we need to disagree, criticize, oppose, and attack – to hold debates and view issues as polarized battles. Even cooperation, after all, is not the absence of conflict but a means of managing conflict. My goal is not a make-nice false veneer of agreement or a dangerous ignoring of true opposition. I’m questioning the automatic use of adversarial formats – the assumption that it’s always best to address problems and issues by fighting over them. I’m hoping for a broader repertoire of ways to talk to each other and address issues vital to us (25-26).

I hope to finish this book in the next day or so, but I’m already leaning towards using it.

Hey, you! Yes, you! Non-academic reader. This post is for you as well as my academic readers. What are your thoughts? Apropos of my previous post (and future ones), I like these paragraphs on the gap between scholars in academia and the general public from Gerald Graff‘s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education:

Part of the problem lies … in the peculiar difficulty of representing intellectual developments in the press. A vulgarized version of a theory or critical approach is inevitably easier to describe in the confines of a brief news article than the best, most sophisticated version of the theory or approach. A doctrinaire assault on ‘dead white males’ can be easily summearized in a column inch or two, whereas it would take many pages to describe intellectual movements that are complex, diverse, and rife with internal conflicts. Glib falsifications can always be produced at a faster rate than their refutations.

Then, too, few readers of the popular press are in a position to recognize misrepresentations of academic practices, a fact that relieves anyone who wants to debunk these practices of the responsibility to do their homework. So feminism, multiculturalism, and deconstructionism are understood not as a complicated and internally conflicted set of inquiries and arguments about the cultural role of gender, ethnicity, language, and thought but as a monolithic doctrine that insists, as D’Souza formulates it, ‘that texts be selected primarily or exclusively according to the author’s race, gender, or sexual preference and that the Western tradition be exposed in the classroom as hopelessly bigoted and oppressive in every way’ [‘Illiberal Education,’ Atlantic 267.3 (March 1991): 52] … [A]nyone who takes these views to be typical of academic revisionist thinking simply knows nothing of the reality…

There is still another reason why myths about the academy have flourished, however, and this is one for which the academy has itself to blame. Academics have given journalists and others little help in understanding the more difficult forms of academic work. As this work has become increasingly complex and as it increasingly challenges conventionally accepted forms of thinking, the university acquires an obligation to do a more efective job of popularization. Yet the university has been disastrously inept in this crucial popularizing task and often disdains it as beneath its dignity. If the university has become easy prey for ignorant or malicious misrepresentations, it has asked for them. Having treated mere image making as beneath its dignity, the academy has left it to its detractors to construct its public image for it. (34-35)

Well, I’m not sure I agree with the characterization of the academy as arrogant in those last few lines, but it’s true that if we largely ignore the image that the public has of what we do, we allow those who don’t like what they think we do to take control of that image.