Last winter, I saw an article in Time whose title caught my eye: “There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground.” I’m always intrigued by, and admittedly nervous about, critiques of civility efforts. I opened the article with some trepidation.
The piece was by author and Emory professor Tayari Jones. She starts by describing her first childhood protest, when at age five she joined a boycott of an oil company that was funding the South African apartheid regime. She then outlines her frustration with calls for seeking common ground in current U.S. politics.
When one side of a national divide is very clearly in the wrong, meeting in the middle becomes immoral. Today, as we grapple with family separation at the Mexican border and other forms of ongoing, systemic oppression, Jones argues that the quest for common ground sidesteps the work of fighting for justice.
I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space…
Buried in this is a false equivalency of ideas, what you might call the “good people on both sides” phenomenon. When we revisit our shameful past, ask yourself, Where was the middle? Rather than chattel slavery, perhaps we could agree on a nice program of indentured servitude? …What is halfway between moral and immoral?
This is an excellent point. I agree that in certain instances of gross injustice, it’s not only pointless but even immoral to seek common ground.
(Along with issues surrounding racial oppression, the urgency of climate change comes to mind. In a recent interview with Yes! magazine, writer and activist Bill McKibben advocates for compassion and empathy, but also says: “There are people who are never going to join this fight, and they need to be beaten.”)
But as much as I agree with Jones on this point, and as much as I respect her as a writer and a thinker, I do have a few quarrels with her article as well.
Civility efforts might be misguided when it comes to certain extreme cases. But Jones casts a much broader net—her critique seems to extend to basically all civility work, as if she’s lumped together all efforts to reach out and foster productive dialogue, then thrown out the whole bundle.
To show what I mean, let’s return to the either/or fallacy I described in my last post. This is the mistaken idea that we have to choose between civility work and activism—that we can’t listen to the other side while standing up for our beliefs. This assumption is endemic in Jones’s piece.
She writes: “The headlines that lament a ‘divided’ America suggest that the fact that we can’t all get along is more significant than the issues over which we are sparring.” But I disagree—no one is (I hope) suggesting that our divide eclipses our most important issues. Indeed, there are far more headlines related to our struggles with oppression than to our divide.
Later, Jones asks:
Is it more meaningful that we understand why some of us support the separation of children from their parents, or is it more crucial that we support the reunification of these families? Is it more essential that we comprehend the motives of white nationalists, or is it more urgent that we prevent them from terrorizing communities of color and those who oppose racism?
Again, this is a false dichotomy. Of course reuniting families and preventing far-right terrorism is more urgent, but we don’t have to choose between these options. We can do both!
We can fight for family reunification and work to understand why the separation happened in the first place. That includes understanding the attitudes that allowed it to occur. And understanding how we got here will help prevent this same abhorrent situation in the future.
Along with demonstrating an either/or mentality, the excerpts above also illustrate the broad net Jones is casting. In these statements, she’s not only arguing that seeking common ground is at times immoral; she’s also adding that seeking to understand the other side is also immoral.
I’m guessing she doesn’t realize these two goals are separate. Her broad net may be unintentional. But there’s a difference between “seeking common ground” and “seeking to understand.” In the civility movement, many groups do one or the other, but not both.
Dialogue groups, such as Living Room Conversations and Better Angels, focus on understanding and humanizing people on different sides of the political divide.
Deliberative groups, such as Intelligence Squared, focus on finding common ground so that problems can be solved.
These two goals may overlap. There are also groups, like Urban Rural Action, that do both. But they don’t necessarily overlap—they’re different goals, and you can do one without the other.
While I agree that seeking common ground is not always moral, I can’t think of a single situation in which seeking to understand is immoral.
Seeking to understand implies no compromise, no movement in your own views. What most often happens, in dialogue, is that our own views are strengthened, not weakened. Working to understand another’s values won’t weaken your own—unless they were flawed to begin with, in which case a change might be justified!
And there’s great practical value in understanding the other side. The more we understand what exactly we’re opposing, and why others believe what they do, the better equipped we’ll be as we work for change.
So understanding the other side doesn’t interfere with fighting injustice, and not all civility work can be dismissed as a quest for common ground.
But let’s examine that quest for common ground a bit further. This goal is somewhat more limited in its appropriateness. At times, when one side is clearly being violent or oppressive, it may be inappropriate to seek common ground. But here, too, I still think Jones casts far too broad a net.
The article’s title seems to imply that finding common ground is always immoral. I seriously doubt that’s what Jones really means—while there may be nothing virtuous about seeking common ground with fascists or xenophobes, there’s certainly virtue, in general, in finding common ground. Compromise is a fundamental life skill, the only way to live harmoniously with people different from ourselves. Jones’s point is that there’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground with immorality.
The big question isn’t whether, but when is it virtuous to seek common ground? When is the other side’s immorality so clear-cut that it becomes immoral to negotiate with them?
Jones has identified one type of situation when the “moral middle” is a myth: in instances of severe oppression and violence, we mustn’t tolerate intolerance. This is the heart of her piece.
For many Americans it is painful to understand that there are citizens of our community who are deeply racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic. Certainly, they reason, this current moment is somehow a complicated misunderstanding. Perhaps there is some way to look at this—a view from the middle—that would allow us to communicate and realize that our national identity is the tie that will bind us comfortably, and with a bow.
Her point is powerful; my only argument is about scale. There are many situations when seeking common ground is worthwhile, and times when reasonable disagreement may arise about what’s immoral. And seeking to understand is generally not only moral, but practical.
There are people who wring their hands and just hope everyone will get along. But such thinking isn’t what the civility movement is or should be about. I hope that as the movement gains visibility and cohesion, thinkers Tayari Jones will see a place for civility work alongside the fight for justice.
