Weddings, famously, create conflict. Before I got married, my parents and I fought over the guest list. A friend of mine struggled with adding some of her husband’s Protestant traditions to their otherwise Jewish ceremony. Another friend had to decode, and then manage, complicated tensions among her future aunts- and uncles-in-law.
All of these issues got resolved, and according to the conflict-resolution facilitator Priya Parker, the process of figuring them out made our weddings more successful expressions of our values. Parker explored the group creation of meaning in her 2018 best seller, The Art of Gathering. In her new book, The Art of Fighting, she writes that arguments are crucial to a group’s ability to do just that. What’s more, in American society—which Parker describes as both conflict averse and low on big rituals—high-stakes events such as weddings are among the “last remaining collective mechanisms to help us have the fights we need to have to figure out who we are now.”
The Art of Fighting is predicated on Parker’s conviction that without confrontation, no group can work well. “Fighting,” she writes in her prologue, “is not the death of community. It is its lifeblood.” Parker considers Americans far too willing to focus on themselves rather than their communities, in large part due to a widespread fear of confrontation. A lot of loneliness, in her view, originates from the all-too-common decision to exit a challenging situation instead of dealing with its simmering disagreements. It’s a smart diagnosis, one that’s as relevant to small-bore social scenarios as it is to interactions within religious organizations, schools, and workplaces. The choice to hide from conflict is, to Parker, in many situations, a choice to be alone.
Parker’s idea that conflict is inherently a social good is intriguing and counterintuitive. But The Art of Fighting is not nearly as communitarian a book as its setup would suggest. Although its more abstract passages describe healthy confrontation as helpful and worthy, its examples tell another story. Parker presents The Art of Fighting as a “group-help book” but tends to take a side in her case studies—and in most instances, her side wins.
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Her own life serves as illustration, too, and often provides the book’s most revealing moments. By way of arguing that everyone needs to get comfortable with disagreement, she mentions a clash she and her father had after the latter got upset that Parker hadn’t invited her stepbrother’s wife to her baby shower. As Parker relates it, their discussion of her reasoning—she and her stepsister-in-law just aren’t close—ends not with compromise or reconciliation but with the blunt lines: “He wasn’t getting it. And that was OK.” Such a one-sided resolution suggests a disinterest in compromise and an interpretation of fighting as an individualistic act. Facing conflict may very well be a social good—I believe it is—but her book more often seems to urge readers to wade into arguments to get what they want.
The Art of Fighting is full of stories of conflict. Some appear only once, and some are threaded throughout the book. The quarreling groups that Parker features, many of which she worked with in her role as a facilitator, range in size from an extended family to a percussion ensemble to a large architecture firm. Parker uses every case to ask a variation of her central question: “How do you fight with those to whom you want to belong?”
In the book’s most moving example, she writes about a church that, in the mid-1990s, deliberated about and then voted on whether it would perform and recognize gay marriages. Its pastor, Martin Copenhaver, understood that they couldn’t make a decision that might lead to division if his church were to survive. “In the political arena,” he tells Parker, “if you win by one vote, you win. In this arena, you win by one vote, you don’t win.”
Hoping to forge meaningful consensus, he hosted four meetings to discuss the subject; only those who attended were allowed to vote. After the election—the church decided, not unanimously but with “no great division,” to allow gay marriage—he asked everyone to reconcile in person with someone who voted differently. In essence, Copenhaver organized the entire conflict to prioritize congregants’ investment in the church, not to lead them toward a certain outcome.
I wanted to learn more about how other sorts of disputes, especially less orchestrated ones, might bolster a sense of community. But Parker is surprisingly blurry about the variety of incentives for confronting or ignoring tension that exist in one setting or another. Some strategies for managing conflict—waiting to engage until no one has steam pouring from their ears; ensuring that the arguing parties’ grievances and goals are clear; creating the right conditions for a tough conversation—may apply to all kinds of groups.
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But the book doesn’t do enough to acknowledge that different sorts of conflicts have different stakes. Starting a fight for the good of the group may be wise among relatives but foolish if doing so could also mean losing your job. And a values-based argument may not be worthwhile in a corporate context where the overall goal is to maximize profit. One of Parker’s recurring examples is a debate that took place within a law firm about whether the TV in its common space should show World Cup games played in Qatar. It begins with an intern objecting, on Slack, to the “human rights abuses of workers in the lead up to the World Cup and the horrific status of rights for LGBTQ people and women in Qatar.” The managing partners invited employees to what Parker characterizes as a too-wide conversation about the World Cup. It was, she writes, “the wrong fight with the wrong assemblage of people in the wrong room.”
Parker uses this argument to underscore good and bad ways to navigate conflicts, especially ones that arise online—certainly an important issue in our screen-heavy times. But missing from this analysis is any real engagement on Parker’s part with the substance of the conflict itself. Readers never learn how the issue was resolved: Did the World Cup get shown or not? Was there ever a meaningful discussion about the objections the intern had raised? The book uses this example to describe strategies for handling internal dissent, focusing on how the managing partners could best have reestablished peace among their employees. It becomes a story about conflict management rather than conflict as a potential social good.
Some of Parker’s personal anecdotes more vividly illustrate her not-quite-communitarian approach to fighting. In one, she describes enrolling her children and their cousin in a small soccer camp one summer. Initially, the kids report hating camp and getting bullied by their counselors. Parker speaks with the camp director, who talks with his employees and establishes that Parker’s children and niece, who started on the eighth week of camp, are unfamiliar with both the established cohort’s “teasing culture” and the basic rules of soccer. Parker suggests that the camp’s coaches “give our kids a Week One experience, orient them, do the things you did with all the other kids when they were new.” They comply, and the camp—which Parker needs for child care—works out.
Parker’s reaction to the situation is entirely reasonable; what parent wouldn’t try to help a kid who’s being picked on, or scramble to rescue a child-care setup that seems about to fail? It is not, however, an illustration of confrontation as community service. She shows herself engaging in conflict to get her kids special treatment rather than nudging the kids to advocate for themselves or asking how the camp might better help them settle in despite their latecomer status. Another way to put this is that no compromise is on offer here, and we get no sense of a group working together. Parker, as the customer, gets to be right.
Throughout The Art of Fighting, individuals prevail in this way. A woman named Rebekah, exhausted by attending her family’s Passover seders—too much cooking, too much disruption to routine, too much airtime for her right-wing uncle—gives them up. But Parker never writes about what Rebekah’s parents, siblings, or children might lose when she and her nuclear family stop coming, or how her continued, if conflicted, attendance might have led her relatives to create more sustainable traditions. Just as some therapists prioritize clients over the other people in their lives, Parker prioritizes the subjects of her anecdotes over those with whom they fight.
What these stories add up to, ultimately, is a much less surprising take on conflict than the book tries to lay out. Parker provides a useful guide to having arguments in good faith without hurting anyone’s feelings unnecessarily or creating a corporate crisis. But arguments can be so much more than that. Alone in the book, the story of Copenhaver’s church demonstrates that even enduring and loaded disagreements can, if handled with enough care and respect, strengthen the bonds between parties—in other words, they can be productive, not just nondestructive. Many readers will have experienced this in intimate relationships. I, for one, have grown closer to some friends after air-clearing arguments and have drifted from others who weren’t willing or able to talk through issues when they arose.
But as Parker points out, public life in the United States isn’t set up for healthy conflict. Meaningful group fights are rare experiences. Aside from my wedding planning, I haven’t been part of one. I believe, in theory, that such a dispute could be transformational for both a community and its individual members. But in order for Parker’s book to have taught me how to navigate one, she would have had to truly let go of the old idea that the reason to fight is to win.
The post A Diagnosis for Social Conflict That Gets Lost Along the Way appeared first on The Atlantic.
