The problem with ‘agreeing to disagree’
Scenario 1. You are at a party and someone brings up Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. You think Trudeau is a shallow glam boy who uses photo-ops to distract from real issues. They think photo-ops are an effective gateway to discuss those issues. You argue back and forth. Neither of you changes your mind. You agree to disagree. The party goes on. Scenario 2. You are at a party and someone brings up racism or sexism and says those who say they are affected just have an affinity for victimhood.
How do you respond? Do you fight back? You can agree to disagree on opinions, as Scenario 1 shows. Can you agree to disagree on facts? Can you agree to disagree when one set of lived experience (of not facing racism or sexism) is privileged over, and seen as more valid than, another set of lived experiences (of being systemically discriminated against)?
Can you agree to anything less than complete consensus when what’s at stake is your right to exist equitably in your skin and gender of choice?
Fighting back creates awkwardness, something we are socially conditioned to avoid. So people hesitate to debate topics such racism or sexism because they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing, be shouted down no matter what they say, or be revictimized.
Agreeing to disagree no longer comes after a debate goes around in circles. It comes before it’s even begun. What is supposed to be a mature end to a fruitless debate has turned into a passive-aggressive, fragility-catering, non-confrontational social censorship of facts, ideas and policies.
Everybody wants a less threatening space in which to have those conversations. There is also lack of clarity on where to draw the line between “staying in your lane” and speaking up against injustice.
“This keeps people apart because we do not have those challenging complex conversations around things like colonialism, racism, Islamophobia and also white supremacy,” says Katy Sian, a sociology lecturer at the University of York in the U.K. and the author of books including Conversations in PostColonial Thought and Racism and Governance and
Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights.
The erasure of others’ experience allows for denial to support the rise of neoliberal delusions such as “postracialism” and “post-feminism,” as if those struggles are a thing of the past.
“Without those conversations we do get to a stage where we can say that happened so long ago, we’re over it,” Sian says.
How do you bridge that knowledge and experience gap?
There is racial bias training. There are virtual reality interventions where your mind can be tricked into body swapping with another gender or race, which have been shown to reduce biases.
Meditation, once shrugged off as a resource of scientific study into emotions and cognitive processing, might also have some answers. “There have been some intriguing outcomes of meditation practices in shifting biases,” says neuroscientist Wendy Hasenkamp, science director at the Charlottesville, Va.-based Mind & Life Institute. “It used to be believed that by the time you are in your 20s, brain development was complete, and there wasn’t much possibility of changing personalities and beliefs. But foundational studies in the area of neuroscience have shown that our brains are highly plastic, and much more malleable over the lifespan than we realized.”
The way we view others, for example, is based on associations in our minds that are continually updated.
“Our ideas about the identities of others (and ourselves) are concepts we form in our minds. These concepts are a kind of mental pattern of associations, constructed out of our experience with others over time. The associations come not only from our personal experience, but also from what is fed to us by our culture, by media.”
Embedded in these associations are evaluations such as good, bad, scary, non-threatening. Our concepts then inform our decisions and behaviour towards others. These beliefs become habit.
“Meditation brings in the possibility of changing our habitual mental patterns,” Hasenkamp says. “It helps us first see those patterns for what they are and then work consciously to shift them.”
Scientists have been studying meditation to see if it brings about a reduction in biases. The studies mentioned here used Harvard’s seminal Implicit Association Test (IAT), which was designed to detect mental associations that create bias without someone having to consciously be aware of them.
The IAT evaluates your implicit biases by measuring the speed with which you sort faces and words into categories. By doing so, it “measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., Black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy),” according to its creators. The test has withstood periodic academic scrutiny into its validity since its introduction in 1998 and is now widely used in social psychology research.
One six-week study asked 101 volunteers to take the IAT for biases against Black people and homeless people. They were then randomly assigned to three groups. One group practised loving kindness meditation (generating caring feelings towards people you know and then growing the circle to include others). The second group discussed loving kindness meditation, but did not practise it directly. The third were just put on a waitlist — not assigned to any task.
At the end of six weeks, all participants took the IAT again. The group that practised meditation had a reduction in implicit biases against both stigmatized groups. The other two groups recorded no change.
Similar studies have been conducted with volunteers practising loving kindness meditation for seven minutes in one study and 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation in another study.
This research is still in its early days, but the studies suggest that targeted meditation may reduce bias towards members of “outgroups” (i.e., people not like you). A lowering of psychological stress due to meditation might also be a factor in bias reduction.
The six-week study also confirmed what my inbox suggests: evidence does not change minds. Discussing or learning about or thinking about ideas of compassion and equality did not change bias.
So your party arguments are unlikely to effect change. Does that mean you shouldn’t engage in those discussions?
The sociologist Sian would insist that you do. “It’s about trying to destabilize and critique those things that we think are fixed in society. Without conversations we wouldn’t have made so many changes.
“Without civil rights activists in the U.S. speaking out, we wouldn’t have those conversations or those changes happen.”
Being silenced does not advance any thought.
Not debating the structural dimension of racism and sexism allows the privileged to be oblivious to the turbulence of social discontent flowing underneath the veneer of equality, and be surprised or shocked that a Donald Trump could possibly win the U.S. presidency, riding on such a wellspring of support.
“I do think what is required at the very minimum is a critical understanding of one’s history and politics,” Sian says. “That, and just having the courage to have these conversations and the strength to start that alternative dialogue.”
“That conversation might not change someone’s mind,” Sian says. “But without the conversation they would never have heard the alternative view. You’re still passing on knowledge they might not have found otherwise.” Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkhar.