Arguing Well in an Age of Outrage

John Inazu, the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis, reflects on a painful argument with his father and what it taught him about humility, boundaries, and repairing relationships. Inazu, author of Liberty's Refuge, Confident Pluralism, and his newest book, Learning to Disagree, shares why our hardest conflicts often happen with the people we love most. The conversation explores why online arguments rarely lead to understanding, how shared humanity can rebuild common ground, and why institutions like universities still matter for healthy disagreement. It’s a candid conversation about family, politics, empathy and learning how to disagree without losing each other. 

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. You're at a party, you're having a conversation when suddenly you hear your name from across the room, despite the noise your brain picked out that one word. This is selective attention, our ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out the rest.

But what we deem relevant shapes the reality we perceive in disagreements. Selective attention means we're literally experiencing different versions of the same events. Selective attention makes every argument feel obvious. In a heated discussion with your spouse, you notice every eye roll, sigh folded arms and signs of dismissal.

They notice your raised voice, your interruptions. Both of you miss moments of connection, the attempts at understanding the signs of care. You're in the same conversation but attending to very different data. Your realities can [00:01:00] diverge based on what you notice. We can live in these parallel universes and occasionally collide with each other.

Political discussions become incomprehensible through selective attention watching the same debate. Supporters see strength while opponents see weakness. Reading the same article, different people extract opposite meanings living through the same events. We construct contradictory narratives. We're not just interpreting the facts differently.

We're literally noticing different facts. Understanding selective attention helps us recognize the limitation of our perspective. What we notice isn't all there is what seems obvious to us might be invisible to others. In disagreements, we can consciously redirect attention. What am I missing? What are they seeing that I'm not?

Sometimes resolution requires not changing minds, but expanding attention to encompass more of what's actually there. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. [00:02:00] Our guest today on When We Disagree is John Anou. John is the Sally d Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University.

And his books include Liberty's Refuge, confident Pluralism, and his newest one is called Learning to Disagree, the Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. John, tell us an argument story. 

John Inazu : Mike, great to be with you. So the story that comes top of mind is one that I touch on briefly in my latest book but it's a, it's an argument with my dad and it unfolded during a family vacation over Thanksgiving and it was the confluence of.

Political disagreements and family parenting disagreements and just the intensity of being in the sh same shared space. And it ended very poorly. And we didn't talk for over a year. And it is one that continues to be with me. 

Michael Lee : I want to hear about the conflict and how it ended poorly, and of course that [00:03:00] yearlong hiatus y'all took.

But just to start at a high level, why is it always Thanksgiving? 

John Inazu : Yes. As I tell lots of people, Thanksgiving is hard enough without the disagreement. So usually the best approach is just go there, show up, reconnect, have some food, and talk about football. And if there's anything simmering, leave it for a different conversation.

The pressure is already high and there's no need to exacerbate it with even more. 

Michael Lee : And you didn't follow your own advice this time, it sounds would you 

John Inazu : mind telling us what was going on? That is, it was a tremendous failure to heed my own advice. 

Michael Lee : What happened between you and your dad? 

John Inazu : It was the culmination o over a few days, but we were talking about, I think it was something around the intersection of race and politics and as it, it continued to heighten and simmer, it just got worse and the whole family was involved and we just weren't able to move forward on it.

And then there were personal dynamics too. So it was k it was the confluence looking back, it was the confluence of the personal issues. [00:04:00] The political disagreements and the intensity of the moment that led to it to just fester and grow. 

Michael Lee : And it, it sounds serious enough to where you didn't speak for a full year.

Was that because of the confluences? You say something tonal, something specific that was said in the course of the argument. 

John Inazu : If I remember correctly we ended the time together with an abrupt middle of the night. Packing up the van and the kids and driving 14 hours home. So it was a very abrupt and dramatic ending to it.

And then it just took a long time to, to reconnect on a relational level. We had a, really almost a year of no communication. A couple efforts to try to talk through things, but they fizzled and what finally brought it back together is when, my mom called to let, it let me know of his cancer diagnosis.

Wow. And then it was pretty clear that we had to start talking again. 

Michael Lee : The hatchet was buried pretty quickly, I imagine, in that emergent circumstance. 

John Inazu : Yeah, and it just, he was sick for a year before he [00:05:00] died and. It was a time, it was a very intense year, but it was a time to build, rebuild, trust, and rebuild relationship in the midst of a lot of suffering.

And, but one of those moments where I think we both recognized pretty quickly that this was an now or never thing and we needed to move toward each other. 

Michael Lee : I'm struck by this year period where you didn't talk. You've obviously written quite a bit on healthy conflict, dialogue across difference, empathy, respect, and I'm to focus in on that year period.

I could see that year period being interpreted as setting appropriate boundaries as taking a break. I could also interpret that year period as the silent treatment. 

John Inazu : And maybe it's a little bit of all of those, right? I think it's very easy for us to tell ourselves stories that we want to hear about why things happen.

And maybe the truth is somewhere in the midst of all of that, there, there did need to be some boundary setting. There [00:06:00] were some particular issues that weren't just amenable to ignoring. But there wasn't, I think in both directions there wasn't a whole lot of effort really, too. And so I think it's probably an a useful example of how all of us have mixed motives and imperfect execution of our efforts.

And it leads to the messiness that is sometimes relationships. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. And in this moment it sounds like there was a political angle to the conversation as well as a personal and familial angle to the conversation. Which kind of gets me to the question I wanted to ask you, which is, if I was to ask you to give the culture and to give us all some advice about how we can disagree better, would that be different in different contexts?

In other words, would you give me particular set of advice about my family disagreements, but maybe different advice about my political disagreements? 

John Inazu : For sure. And sometimes, this actually does go back to your earlier question about boundaries. As finite human beings, we [00:07:00] just have to set boundaries all the time.

So we can't actually figure out disagreement with everyone in our lives. We've gotta prioritize what makes sense and count the costs about what relationships are worth investing in. We, I don't think we can do this online, so we need to figure out. What are the face-to-face and the deepest and most personal connections, whether it's family or friends, where we want to pursue these disagreements.

Sometimes it's maybe not close friends, but it's colleagues in the workplace or others who surround us in our daily lives. But it can't be about disembodied abstractions online because we're not gonna make any progress, and it's probably just gonna waste our time and other people's time too. 

Michael Lee : If I can restate your case and make sure that I'm getting this right, your point is to figure out what the goal is for the relationship and work your way backwards perhaps to topics and techniques that work for that moment, as opposed to saying, we always have to be talking about the thorniest issues all of the time.[00:08:00] 

John Inazu : I think that's right, and I think particularly in family relationships, although this also works for old friends you haven't seen in a while, it can be very easy to assume a familiarity and a common ground that might have once been there, but maybe is not there anymore. And so the first step toward better disagreement in those relationships.

Might actually be figuring out what your ongoing shared humanity and common ground is, and that might just be doing very ordinary things for a period of time before you try to tackle the hard disagreements. 

Michael Lee : Sometimes common ground gets interpreted as shared beliefs about the world. But it doesn't sound like, you mean that in the sense that common ground could be we both like pickleball even though we disagree about literally everything else in our lives.

Or do you mean common ground?

John Inazu : But I would say even pickleball is a shared belief about the world, right? So I think re reaching out and recognizing that we. In our common [00:09:00] humanity with other people, have lots of things in common, right? We all have to eat, we all have to be embodied in a way we all die.

We all these things about us that are, that transcend our individual political, religious, or cultural identities and that actually gives us quite a bit of activity and normalcy that we can connect around before we jump into the hard disagreements. 

Michael Lee : You said that you don't think some of this work can be done online, which I'm struck by because sometimes amongst folks who are talking about better disagreements, and I'm certainly one of them, the advice is that we can radicalize and get meaner online, but that any reparative repairing work has to be done in person.

And I'm struck by that asymmetry. So Will, will you say a little bit more about why you don't think there is much of a space for improving disagreeing online? 

John Inazu : I think you hit it with the premise of the question. The radicalizing is so easy to do when we only encounter [00:10:00] caricatures or partial people, and we don't give people the benefit of the doubt online because all we're experiencing are the sound bites and the retorts that we see.

We're not thinking about the person we work with, our neighbor or the person we're doing life with. And so it's very easy to pour into distrust and to keep the. The prior assumptions going and maybe even rooted more deeply. There's actually some pretty interesting work by Chris Bale and others suggesting that even the best efforts to, to focus on agreement and better understanding online backfire, because the algorithms and everything were sent just reinforce the caricatures of the other side. So even when we get exposed to different arguments and inputs, we, they only reinforce our prior beliefs. 

Michael Lee : This is something, a belief that I share, but in my darkest hours, it also can lead to some despair because if that's the case.

Then the culture [00:11:00] radicalizes or grows more extreme or more intolerant at a rate that we can't match with face-to-face interactions. In other words, if we're trying to improve healthy conflict debate and dialogue one-on-one, then we're mopping up after a tsunami and the water's gonna keep coming faster than we can mop it.

John Inazu : I think the intuition is as right as it is bleak, which is to say yes. The potential mitigator here is we're not just talking about one-to-one interactions. Local institutions matter a great deal. Now, the bad news is most local institutions are weak or otherwise in a world of hurt, but I think there is a potential or partial answer in the health of our local institutions that can bring people.

Face-to-face in more than a one-on-one context, but I we're absolutely going to have to figure out ways to do this offline, even if it means a radical reorienting of how we consume news and how we process information. [00:12:00] 

Michael Lee : I'm gonna ask a question that I know is guilty in advance of being a false binary, but just go with me for a second.

I wonder if it's not just the algorithm that disables healthy conversations online, but it's also the presence of an audience. In other words, if you and I are performing for other groups of people, perhaps it's harder to have respectful discussions because our egos get involved. The theatricality gets increased and so forth.

But that can also weigh against effective measures to teach folks to have healthier disagreements in person as well. If there is an audience there they might applaud. They might like the red meat, they might like insults, they might like rough jokes, et cetera. 

John Inazu : Yeah, that's, as they were asking the question, the image that was coming to my mind is when I was growing up, sometimes, at the local breakfast spot or whatever, you'd see a the table of retired guys who were just sitting around giving their hot takes about every issue under the sun and you could dismiss them as something between jovial and [00:13:00] irrelevant.

But now that's all of us, right? We're all the group of old retired guys spouting off our hot takes about everything, including issues. We don't understand a thing about just because we want the dopamine hit because we're experiencing it online. And so we've all become the Insta pundits about everything, which is just contributing a bunch of noise and not much clarity or understanding.

Michael Lee : Yeah, and on one level, them sitting around theatrically talking about issues that they just read in an article on that morning, you can, it can produce a kind of like an eye roll in many of us, but in another sense, that is the basis of democracy sitting around the table with people who even frustrate you, holding forth on stuff that you'll never quite completely understand.

John Inazu : That's a, I love the question. I don't know actually. So what? Democracy certainly depends on an informed citizenry, and we can question the validity of that premise today, but does it mean processing? A finite or [00:14:00] very large set of issues coming across the transit every day. Maybe one way to clarify the analogy is that back in the day, the group of retired guys had limited inputs, right?

They were reading probably a local paper that had a combination of national news and local news, and maybe they were watching one news show a night. So the basket of information about which they could debate was somewhat limited. Whereas today we just have this massive and constant input of issues all the time.

And so the quest to be an informed citizenry is even further complicated by the universe of information and where do we even start? What does it mean to be informed today? What issues should we know about and how deeply should we know them? I don't even know how to begin to answer those questions.

Michael Lee : Yeah. And so much of public participation and public debate and holding forth on these topics and willingness to participate in public debates is threatened by. Of course the information overwhelm, miss and disinformation, but also threatened by hate and anger and rage and kind [00:15:00] of fear to participate.

Of course, distraction, lack of community. Then of course ignorance, public stupidity, deification as it were. And I'm really struck by the example of the old guys, and for some reason I'm imagining them as muppets in my head. They really cut against all of that, right? They're sitting there arguing, they're reading, maybe they're not reading everything, but they're reading something and their participation is, 

John Inazu : isn't guided by that.

Yeah. I really like how we've developed this analogy or this metaphor. A huge difference is maybe the lack of performativity right there. There's no audience for those guys except for each other. They're just relating to one another. And the sole purpose of gathering is to talk to each other.

The people around them are an afterthought. They might not even notice them, whereas our online interactions are so often driven by performativity. We want someone to notice that we've. Liked the post or we've weighed in or we've expressed our [00:16:00] right support or dis disagreement with the issue of the day.

Michael Lee : Yeah, and this is, this issue of performativity is something that I think has. Been a stalking horse for this discussion about our conflicts and can we argue better for quite some time for a lot longer than this, but at least since John Stewart went on crossfire with Tucker Collison and Paul Bal 20 something years ago and criticized them for being just theatrical.

It's a fair criticism if the goal of all debate is only theatricality is only performativity. But I think there is a sense that you could throw the baby out with the bathwater and say therefore all performativity is bad. When performativity can be really helpful to a entertain. It's not like everybody who went to see Lincoln and Douglas was just there because they cared about the issue.

It was the only show in town. And you can also make your points more concisely in a way that's more convincing with some level of performativity. So I don't it, it doesn't seem to be an either or to me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. 

John Inazu : It's interesting. [00:17:00] I think performativity can model something useful when we put it in the right box and understand it in the right way.

So you and I both teach at universities and I'm struck that in higher ed, the performative. Public events that are either debates or speeches, bring in the big speaker, fill the room and have a talk or a discussion for 45 minutes. Those have value to them and they are useful in tee up issues, but they seldom actually reflect.

Thoughtful and deep debate just because they're limited in both the scope and the time to do so we've got these other resources in higher ed, like the classroom or the ongoing book discussion where over time with for extended periods of time with breaks in between and with texts to guide you, you actually can get into those deeper issues.

So if the performative moments can point us toward mechanisms for deeper disagreement, then I do find them useful. I think the [00:18:00] problem is in a lot of higher ed, the performative moments have replaced the classroom or they become the focal point of modeling and showing disagreement. I just don't think they can bear that weight.

Michael Lee : As we close, I'd love to hear your advice from, for the culture, whether it's higher ed families, romantic partnerships or certainly red state, blue state stuff that comes up for all of us from your new book, learning to Disagree, and if we could distinguish between two types of advice. One is like reactive advice and one is proactive norm setting advice.

So if we could start with the proactive norm setting advice. How do you prepare a field to have a more productive disagreement? 

John Inazu : I think what first comes to mind from your list is higher ed. Because in, in some ways, because I wrote learning to disagree within the context of a university setting in a law school setting, but in preparation, I often think about.

The first [00:19:00] step of recognizing the privilege of where we all are. So it doesn't matter what higher institution, sorry. It doesn't matter what higher education institution you're part of today. If you're at a college or university in the United States, you are part of just a tiny sliver of humanity that has the opportunity to experience what you're experiencing.

And throughout human history and around the world today, the number of people that would. Would just not even know where to begin with the privilege of being able to learn and discuss and be with other smart people engaging about ideas. So if we can start there and then ask yourself if we can't pull this off here in the university with all of the opportunities we have, and of course there are challenges all around and some schools are harder than others, but what an opportunity and what a responsibility that comes with that opportunity.

Michael Lee : Some reactive strategies. When I do dialogue and debate sessions on campus or on the road [00:20:00] the most frequent set of questions I often get are questions about what happens after somebody pulls the pin on a grenade. 

John Inazu : Yeah, I hear, to stick with the higher ed context, I think recognizing the value of.

Extended time that we actually have. So if something blows up in the classroom, more often than not, you have another day to come back to and revisit what just happened and you can insert some time in between. So if we all think about a framework of patients and follow up questions and the luxury of time that might not happen elsewhere in the world.

That gives us the opportunity to hold our reactivity and at least to think about it for even 24 hours to think about something means that we're going to approach it with a different lens and a different emotional heat than we might in the moment. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. For therapists talk about this as embracing the pause.

The final question I'm gonna ask you is intentionally cheeky, but [00:21:00] you teach in a law school. And write about healthy arguments, which for some people can seem like a little bit of an oxymoron if they have a negative view of lawyers. Do you think lawyers and arguing get a bad rap? 

John Inazu : Yeah, so this is actually the subversive theme of my entire book here, which is I want to convince people who read learning to disagree that lawyers who you think are really part of the problem can be part of the solution.

And I want to take that conditional quite quite clearly, so that maybe not, bad lawyering and bad legal education can just exacerbate our arguments. But the best kind of lawyering that argues for. A degree of empathy and understanding what the other side, this is why in Supreme Court opinions you have majorities and dissents that.

That try to show you both sides of complicated issues and help you realize that it's not about you being right and the other side being stupid, but it's about different people. Often in good faith coming to vastly different understandings of important issues. And the law at its best can help [00:22:00] you do that.

So that's the pitch, at least of what I'm trying to say. 

Michael Lee : Yeah, the best lawyering is like the best debating, which is that it enables perspective taking. 

John Inazu : That's great. Yep. Exactly. 

Michael Lee : Donna Nazo, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

John Inazu : Mike, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. 

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse KZ and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.