Episode 72 - Deborah Tannen – Beyond the Argument Culture to Evolutionary Dialogue

Transcript

“Duncan Campbell, I heard about your podcast a few months ago, and have been deeply listening to all the dialogues with your fantastic friends/guests. Your words, ideas, and wisdom are truly inspirational.  You have evoked a new appetite for knowledge in me that I hope to share with a starving younger generation. Thank you for doing what you do, and creating a unique space, void of boundaries and classification.  A breath of fresh air!  Much love and respect.” – Amit Kapadiya

In furtherance of creating and maintaining the planetary dialogues now required in the 21st century, I have featured a special series of dialogues on this site with myself and other elders in the weeks leading up to and including the 2008 Olympics hosted by China and the U.S. election season.  These dialogues address various specific political aspects of our planetary crisis, with its dangers and opportunities for a visionary and evolutionary shift. (We remember that the Chinese character for “crisis” is often described as meaning both “danger” when visioned from a fear perspective, and “opportunity” when visioned from a wisdom perspective.)

In my preceding dialogues I have talked in various ways about the need to generate dialogues across generational, ethnic, gender, and national boundaries -- building bridges of understanding and wisdom in the cooperative spirit and reaching out required by our 21st century realities, and the essential roles that we all are called to play in our evolution for it to take place.

This is the time for renewed dialogue, for visionary and inspiring discourse producing practical and innovative solutions together, to engage our own elder wisdom and youthful inspiration, and in so doing to experience and exemplify that “Dialogue is the Language of Evolutionary Transformation”™.

And that is what we all do, in our mutual roles as host, deep listeners, and guests, when we gather together here from all parts of the globe in Living Dialogues.

 

Other programs you will find of immediate interest on these themes are Dialogue 70 with Lester Brown, Dialogue 69 with Barbara Marx Hubbard, Dialogue 57 with Sobonfu Some and Dialogue 52 with Angeles Arrien. Also you may wish to listen to Dialogue 58 with Ted Sorensen, counselor and co-visionary with John F. Kennedy, Dialogue 59 with Robert Thurman on a potential paradigm-shifting environmental and political partnership between the Dalai Lama and China, and Dialogue 61 with David Boren on our seeing the need for new energy and transpartisanship.

 

SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR FREE TO LIVING DIALOGUES AND IN THE COMING WEEKS HEAR DUNCAN CAMPELL’S DIALOGUES WITH OTHER GROUND-BREAKING TRANSFORMATIONAL THINKERS LISTED ON THE WEBSITE WWW.LIVINGDIALOGUES.COM.  TO LISTEN TO PREVIOUS RELATED DIALOGUES ON THIS SITE, SCROLL DOWN ON THE LIVING DIALOGUES SHOW PAGE HERE -- OR CLICK ON THE NAME OF A GUEST ON THE LIST AT THE RIGHT -- TO HEAR DUNCAN’S DIALOGUES WITH DR. ANDREW WEIL, BRIAN WEISS, COLEMAN BARKS, RUPERT SHELDRAKE, LARRY DOSSEY, JUDY COLLINS, MARIANNE WILLIAMSON, MATTHEW FOX, JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE, DEEPAK CHOPRA, BYRON KATIE AND STEPHEN MITCHELL, CAROLINE MYSS, GANGAJI, VINE DELORIA, JR., MICHAEL DOWD (THE UNIVERSE STORY OF THOMAS BERRY AND BRIAN SWIMME), STEVE MCINTOSH, FRANCES MOORE LAPPE, STANISLAV GROF, RICHARD TARNAS, MARC BEKOFF AND JANE GOODALL, RICHARD MOSS, PAUL HAWKEN, PAUL RAY, JOSEPH ELLIS, DUANE ELGIN, LYNNE MCTAGGART, ECKHART TOLLE, MICHAEL MEADE, ANGELES ARRIEN, SOBONFU SOME. TED SORENSEN, ROBERT THURMAN, DAVID MARANISS, DAVID BOREN, GEORGE LAKOFF, TOM HAYDEN, JAY INSLEE, BRACKEN HENDRICKS, BOB GOUGH, VAN JONES, BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, LESTER BROWN, DAVID MENDELL, AND OTHER EVOLUTIONARY THINKERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

The best way to reach me is through my website: www.livingdialogues.com.  Many thanks again for your attentive deep listening in helping co-create this program.

All the best, Duncan.

P.S. As a way of further acknowledging and appreciating your part in these dialogues, and since I cannot personally answer all of them, I have begun to publish from time to time in these pages some of the numerous (unsolicited) appreciations received from you.

 

Announcer: This program is brought to you by PersonalLifeMedia.com

Deborah Tannen: I'm Deborah Tannen, known for the book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men In Conversation. My most recent book is about how mothers and daughters talk to each other, and it's called You're Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters In Conversation. Also a book I've written which I've just been talking to my great delight on the show, Living Dialogues is the book The Argument Culture and the subtitle is Stopping America's War of Words. Duncan Campbell has just been a terrific conversationalist and I've been so grateful for the opportunity to enjoy Living Dialogues. It's a privilege.

Deborah Tannen: I can't thank you enough. I've had a lot of interviews but this one has been very special.

Duncan Campbell: Well thank you. Thank you very much, Deborah.

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of western visionaries, such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning - a dia (flow) of logos (meaning) - beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now, as together with you, the active deep listener, we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: I'm your host Duncan Campbell welcoming you to living dialogues. I'm really truly delighted to have with me as my guest on this particular dialogue, Deborah Tannen. Deborah Tannen whose books are familiar to you because she's written any number of New York Times bestsellers, and I've had the opportunity to talk to her in a previous dialogue. And I must say she's one of my very favorite people to have on the program. So Deborah, welcome.

Deborah Tannen: Thank you. What a delight to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Duncan Campbell: Before we  go further, I'm gonna give our audience a little bit more about you so they have some idea of the extraordinary things you have contributed to our culture and to many people individually. Deborah Tannen is on the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown University, where she is one of only two in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. Her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men In Conversation which has sold more than 2 million copies and has been translated into 29 languages, was on the New York Times bestsellers list for more than 3 years including 8 months as number 1. It was also on bestseller list in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, and Hong Kong. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness. Among her other books Talking From 9 To 5: Women and Men at Work  was a New York Times business bestseller. And what we're gonna talk about today The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words won the Common Ground Book Award.
Deborah Tannen is a frequent guest on television and radio shows, and she is an internationally recognized scholar who has received fellowships and grants from a number of foundations. She holds a PHD from the University of California Berkley, as well as five honorary doctorates. She was a fellow at the Center of Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, following a term in residence at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton, New Jersey. And in addition to all of her research and writing, Deborah has published poetry, short stories, and personal essays as well as producing two plays. Her website is www.deborahtannen.com. So Deborah, a wonderful list of academic accomplishments as well as books for the general public which is a real rare skill, and with that background you're uniquely qualified I think to speak as brilliantly as you do in your book The Argument Culture about the historical and social and institutional origins of why our public discourse seems to be so dominated by polarized thinking, polarized talking, debate, sometimes as you put it rancorous discussion, so there's a lot of heat but not necessarily a lot of light and I think politically speaking we might even say that our culture in the west and in the United States is becoming exhausted in a certain way because of this one sided emphasis on adversarial talk. So how did we get into this as a culture going back historically? Let's perhaps begin there.

Deborah Tannen: Yeah and it has a corrosive effect, I think, on the spirits of the citizens as well. It traces back really to academia, and there's a book by David Nobel that I like that kind of explains that he calls the Christian Clerical Roots of Academic Science, and that as well as the work by Walter Ong, who is a Jesuit. He traces it to the medieval universities where you didn't look for knowledge, you learned to debate. And it was the ability to argue any side of a debate that constituted an education. It was not a search for truth. When I first thought about in a way each of my books grows out of the book before and the book The Argument Culture really grew out of a combination of You Just Don't Understand, which was about women's and men's conversational styles, and then a book that followed Talking From 9 To 5, which is about women and men at work. And in all my work on gender, my goal was to enhance understanding and promote harmony. We're so inclined to just throw up our hands and say 'Oh you women!' 'Uou men!' To patholigize and assume our way is right, that your way is wrong, that if we understand other styles and understand some of our frustration obviously not everything, but some of our frustration can be traced to different conversational styles it's a starting point to both get along better but also solve some of these problems of inequality that we're dealing with. And I was so disheartened that when people responded to that book it was often framed as the war between the sexes, the battle of the sexes. I'd be on a television show and I don't want to say this was always, but it did happen, "Well, we're gonna have you on and we're gonna also invite a man to represent the other point of view", as if I was somehow advocating for women and so he had to advocate for men. And the most extreme example was a show in California where there was a man in the green room, where you wait to go on the air on a TV show...

Duncan Campbell: Yes, mmhmm.

Deborah Tannen: And he was wearing a shirt and tie and floor-length skirt, and he had shoulder length red hair, and he told me beforehand, "I read your book, I really enjoy it, I think it's terrific, but when I get out there I'm gonna attack you. Don't take it personally, that's why they invite me on and that's what I'm gonna do." And that's what he did do. And so the minute I said the first thing, he kind of leaned forward, threw his arms out, and began attacking not just me but all women.

Duncan Campbell: Mmhmm.

Deborah Tannen: And the very interesting and troubling result was that people in the audience also became very pugnacious and adversarial, and this show had done what many shows did, they had invited individuals on to talk about their own experience and people in the audience were attacking them. I had never seen that on any other show! They were picking it up from him.

Duncan Campbell: And they were attacking you and him, or just--

Deborah Tannen: Well they were attacking--HE was attacking me...

Duncan Campbell: Right.

Deborah Tannen: And the audience was attacking the poor souls who had come on, as you know, like Oprah will have a show, she'll have average people on to talk about their problems so there three women who had come on to talk about their problems communicating with men in their lives.

Duncan Campbell: And you came on as the expert and this guy came on as the expert.

Deborah Tannen: And so he set the tone of attacking me, the audience was attacking them.

Duncan Campbell: Yes.

Deborah Tannen: So it really dramatized how there's a kind of imitation going on where you hear that other people are doing it and you do it as well. And this really did play in as well to something that I was observing in academia, where we're often trained to begin an article by attacking someone who came before. And there are many people who feel that if you just start your article by agreeing with other people you really haven't made a contribution. As one person said, "You kind of have to stake out a claim, stake out a claim." And this idea of "stake out" in itself is really kind of military. Someone said, "If you wanna be taken seriously you have to get in the ring and be willing to fight with the big boys."

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell