The slander and abuse of current political discourse does not even rise to the level of disagreement. After all, disagreement is an opposition between opinions, not a fight between opinionators. I do not express my disagreement with your views by threatening to kill you. In my book, The Art of Disagreement, I offer a guide to a better political rhetoric by showing that storytelling can create the social trust necessary for political arguments to be productive. I am now Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, where I teach political philosophy.
What if all kinds of human thought and speech could be boiled down to just two? According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, those two kinds of human thought are stories and arguments.
Bruner considers evidence from neuroscience and from cognitive science to argue that stories and arguments are processed differently by our minds and are rooted in different parts of our brains.
Stories are structured by their plots, while arguments are structured by logic. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, while arguments have premises and conclusions. Stories give us anecdotes, while arguments give us evidence.
I love books that compellingly simplify complex matters with powerful new theories.
In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life-those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind-a side devoted to the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful. This is the side of the mind that leads to good stories, gripping…
Nicholas Carr shows us why Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram bring out the worst in us. Their algorithms are designed to generate envy, outrage, and fear rather than empathy, understanding, or affection.
Carr takes a deep dive into research in social psychology to make the case that we all become trolls while doomscrolling. We want to believe that learning more about other people makes us like them more, but Carr shows that what we learn about other people online makes us like them less.
We are all prone to oversharing and lying online, which undermines social trust. Moreover, it is now impossible to tell whether messages on social media were generated by human beings or bots, further undermining our trust in other people.
I love how Carr illustrates his arguments with examples from cutting-edge research.
From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanised and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.
A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech…
Hope, Laughter, Survival on the Refugee Trail
by
Eileen Kay,
Dramatic true story with a wacky sense of humor.
Retired English teacher in Budapest meets foreign medical students fleeing the war in Ukraine, producing a sweet and unlikely friendship, spicy soup, and wicked joking. A sense of humor, however dark, can keep us from despair.
Finite games aim at winning, whereby the game is over. Infinite games aim at continuing the play and are never over.
One’s career is a finite game that ends with success; one’s life is an infinite game that aims at continuation. What does this have to do with political rhetoric?
Some people make arguments in order to win them, while other people offer arguments in order to continue the game of argumentation. Some people tell stories for power or profit, while others tell stories to elicit other stories and keep the game going. Philosopher James Carse argues that we treat life too much as a series of finite games while missing the creativity and free play of infinite games.
After this book, you’ll never look at your life in the same way again.
"There are at least two kinds of games," states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. "One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."
Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change-as long as…
Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was sent to Auschwitz by the German Nazis because he was Jewish.
While in the camp, Frankl noticed that individual prisoners responded in totally different ways to the same appalling circumstances: some stole food from others, some hoarded their food, and some shared their food with others. He concludes that human freedom is ineradicable. He also learned from his camp experience that people want meaning in life as much as they want food or water. Human beings do not live for pleasure, but for the discovery of meaning.
I loved this very inspiring and compelling book about how some people, like Frankl, can rise above the most horrendous suffering.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
Broken Boots, Redeemed Soul: A Veteran’s War with Sin and Salvation
by
Brian Lofton,
Broken Boots, Redeemed Soul: A Veteran’s War with Sin and Salvation, is a raw and faith-centered memoir about life after military service—and the internal battles many never see. Brian Lofton shares his journey through addiction, shame, identity loss, and spiritual distance, revealing how the hardest struggles often begin after…
Robert Putnam is a Harvard political scientist who studies social trust, which he calls “social capital,” because once we earn trust, we can spend it for a long time.
Putnam argues that Americans in the mid-twentieth century had much higher levels of social trust than we do today, and this made for a much more stable and decent politics. That greater social trust, he argues, was the product of people joining clubs, fraternities, and other associations in huge numbers. Whereas people used to bowl in bowling leagues, now they generally bowl alone.
In case you are wondering about what has happened to our politics, Putnam offers a compelling diagnosis and a prescription for a better way forward.
We focus too much on trying to reach agreement in politics when we should be trying to understand our disagreements. Politics, after all, is the art of making decisions in the face of disagreement—usually by voting. We seek agreement through persuasion and argument; we understand our disagreements by telling stories about how we came to believe what we believe.
Political persuasion rests on listeners' trust in speakers. Where civic trust is high, we can rely on persuasion and argument; where it is low, we must rely on personal testimonials. The old political rhetoric of argument and persuasion must be supplemented with a new rhetoric of storytelling and understanding. When talking with our civic friends, as with our personal friends, we should seek to understand as much as to persuade.
In 1964, the FBI found smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were driving before they disappeared at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived in Mississippi as a volunteer to assist Black civil rights…
An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed during nearly a decade of wars in the former Yugoslavia.
