Criticism and/or Mutual Learning Conversation? What’s Your Culture?

As you all know, I am interested in not only “when people you don’t think of as agreeing, do agree.”  Like maybe ENGO’s and AFRC on public comment for the new NEPA regs.  What’s equally interesting is when groups who usually agree, disagree on specific topics and are open about it.  This has been happening in a very interesting way with energy on federal lands.. and recent Administration actions have brought this into focus. So we will wade into that, as well as some other topics.

But first, I wanted to talk a little about different cultural expectations around questions and disagreements, or perhaps, what we might call the culture of critique.  For example, I am the creature of what we might call  a certain time period of  graduate study in forest science. It’s perhaps hard to imagine today, but within my discipline, it was  a cultural norm to question each other. That was a way of improving everyone’s work. If you didn’t participate or you had only pious drivel to say (e.g. “I think Dave’s work is very important”), it was thought to show that you didn’t care about the science, or you weren’t paying attention- pretty much a sign of disrespect to you colleagues.  We didn’t say mean stuff like “I think Dave is a jerkhead if he doesn’t use location as a covariate”.  In fact, emotions of all kinds didn’t have much of a home, as I recall, in the lab.  Well, OK I think we all felt sorry for Jim H. when all his seedlings died and he had to start over. In fact, maybe criticism isn’t the right word.. perhaps “engaging in collaborative sense-making” or “team inquiry” or “a mutual learning conversation” is a better description. For the rest of the post, I’ll call it MLC.

I was confronted with a very different graduate school culture when I went back to school in theology about ten years ago.  We were in an online Masters Degree Proposal class and one of my classmates had a proposal with the topic “why the animal rights movement has been unsuccessful at dismantling broader systems of oppression.” (I’m not making this up; people really talk like this). After years of organizational experience in the Forest Service, you’ll be glad to know I responded with.. “maybe that wasn’t their goal, which would explain why they didn’t attain it.” Our teacher let me know that that wasn’t the kind of mutual learning that was approved of in their culture.  Only supportive comments need apply. Which meant I received no helpful feedback on my proposal.

So what is FS culture on MLC?   Through my FS career, my efforts to make helpful suggestions and poke holes into various arguments were mostly appreciated, as far as I could tell.  I think it depends to a large extent on the leader of the team or unit to set the tone.   On the other hand, a certain Regional Forester used to call a bunch of us in and go into a bit of a speech.  I was always helpful, thinking that the taxpayers weren’t paying me good money to be quiet, and also thinking when he gave the same speech externally, it would be better (if he listened to me).  Later, I did wonder about whether this had been a good idea.  As he used to tell me (fairly frequently), I’m not particularly good at reading between the lines.

Anyway, my point here is that I do engage in MLC and will continue to do so.  And you can depend on me to engage in MLCs with people with all kinds of different views, including my own group (if such a thing exists).  I don’t do it to disrespect the people I’m engaging with; to reiterate, in my culture, engaging is precisely a form of respect.  I respect people on all sides as human beings (and in my metaphysics, sparks of the Divine), not that I agree with anyone all the time.

Folks who are interested in the topic of  of depolarization might be interested in the writings of Zach Elwood.  From a Medium story of his:

Benefits of criticizing “our side”

So what are the benefits of pushing back against the more unreasonable and extreme voices in one’s own group? Here are the benefits I see:

• We push our own group to become more rational, and more reasonable, and more persuasive and attractive to a wider range of people.
• Because the other side’s anger and fear is based on their perception of the more extreme and unreasonable people on our side, in making our group more reasonable and more persuasive, we also reduce the fear and anger of people on the other side, which in turn reduces the fear and anger of people on our side.
• We act as a model for people on the other side, to show how it can be done. We encourage others on the other side to do the same thing we are doing, to show how one doesn’t have to fit the stereotype of one’s group (in an episode of my podcast, polarization researcher Jaime Settle mentioned demonstrating our own complexity as a key strategy for reducing polarization)

And a point I think is very important here: we can really only affect our own side. We can righteously judge and castigate the other side all we want (and we do) and clearly those things don’t have an impact. (In fact, I think many people would agree that a lot of the most angry and righteous moral judgments about political stances seems to only add to the judged group’s grievances, and thus our polarization.)

In order to feel morally judged, and to feel bad about doing or believing something, we must respect the people doing the judging, and that is just not the case in a very polarized environment. And this is another reason I’d say there is hidden value in criticizing people on our own side: because there’s no other place your criticism will do any good.

I think that this last point is rather important.  Was it pushback from folks like Martin Nie who were really worried about federal land sales that led to the Lee proposals being pushed back, or was it more due to R folks in the House, including his fellow Montanan Ryan Zinke?   That seems to me a good reason to have all sorts involved in discussions is because each group has credibility with different powerful individuals.