It’s a damn miracle that people ever understand each other.
A recent episode of the This American Life podcast provides ample illustration. Entitled, What We’ve Got Here is Failure to Communicate, the podcast tells several, mostly discouraging, stories. (Click here for the source of this phrase.)
One story describes special challenges due to the covid pandemic. In a Chicago high school where many of the students are not native English speakers, the teacher has a particularly hard time communicating with her students. They experience a common problem in classrooms around the country: everyone is masked, muffling people’s words. And the classroom has a noisy air purifier to counteract the spread of the virus that makes it even harder to understand each other.
Two stories deal with communication problems in families. In one story, middle-aged siblings happen to learn that they have a 62-year-old half-brother, Ernie, who they never knew about. They ask their father, Stephen, about Ernie, who he readily acknowledges as his son. The siblings reach out to Ernie and invite him to visit them for a family get-together. They try to get the father to connect with Ernie but to no avail. Stephen is an entertaining story-teller, but he has no interest in listening to others’ stories. Ernie looks “bewildered and heartbroken” that his father didn’t want to learn about him and his family.
Another story about poor communication in families is more upbeat. It is about a woman who was somewhat estranged from her mother and had a kind of reconciliation. The narrator, Elna, is from a Mormon family, and she left the church, moving to New York City to become a comic. The family had a pattern of indirect communication, and this story describes an extreme version of it. Ten years ago, Elna hosted a show called The Drunk Show, which horrified her mother because Mormons don’t drink alcohol and she feared that Elna was becoming an alcoholic. The mother thought that Elna wouldn’t pay attention to anything she said, so she posted pseudonymous comments on an article about the show. Much of the story was a conversation between Elna and her mom in which the mom explained her reasoning in posting the comments. It was her way to avoid conflict. Elna and her mom had become closer in the intervening ten years, which made this conversation possible – and which, itself, improved their communication and relationship.
The last story is a particularly sad reflection of deep distrust by Republicans in our political life. It’s about how Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator in Michigan, tried persuading his constituents that the 2020 election was not stolen. He chaired a state committee that investigated claims of election fraud in Michigan, and the committee concluded that there was no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud. McBroom patiently talks with his constituents as long as they want to talk, explaining that his committee investigated the specific theories they asserted and the committee found that there was no truth to them. This made zero impact on the constituents, who remained unpersuaded. Here was a Republican from their community who carefully reviewed evidence and listened respectfully, but many constituents’ belief systems were so deeply entrenched that no communication could alter their beliefs.
This last story reminds me of a prescient article that Lisa Blomgren Amsler wrote in 2006: When We Hold No Truths to Be Self-Evident: Truth, Belief, Trust, and the Decline in Trials. She wrote, “We are swimming in new oceans of information. At the same time, we are less willing to agree with each other on what is credible, real, or true.” This article was part of a symposium about the so-called “vanishing trial,” and it provides some explanation for declines in trial rates and increase in use of ADR processes. Much of the article is a great survey of intellectual, technological, and social developments contributing to centrifugal forces eroding what had been shared knowledge. These trends have accelerated in the last 15 years and are likely to continue doing so.
It’s a damn miracle that people ever understand each other. And yet somehow we sometimes do, though often quite imperfectly.
Click here to see what else I have been reading (not limited to textual material).
