Most of my students at the University of Virginia love going home for the holidays. They cherish their immediate families. But some do not look forward to holiday dinner with the extended family.
My students are mostly liberals (no surprise) and they do not relish the thought of a sit-down encounter with their uncle in a MAGA hat who, especially after two beers or three, wants to debate. The kid just back from college is his favorite target. Neither, though this is admittedly less common, do my conservative students relish a sit-down encounter with their aunt in the antifa hoodie.
I talk to students about tactics, the more humane the better. I confess, I sometimes call in the Gallic heavy artillery. I summon Jacques Lacan.
Suppose your uncle says, “Trump’s doing such a great job; he should really be president for life.”
The first commandment is: Don’t blow up. Don’t jump from the table and run for your room, hot tears splashing the floor. Your uncle might actually love that. Keep your cool. There’s an easy, all-purpose answer for such provocations. Take a breath and say: “That’s interesting. What makes you believe that?”
Then listen. Real listening’s tough. Fifty years of teaching have taught me that. In the movie “Pulp Fiction,” Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace are getting to know each other and one of Mia’s well-placed questions is, “Do you listen, or wait to talk?” Vincent confesses, “I wait to talk.”
People can tell which one you’re doing. Few things can calm a savage heart like being genuinely listened to. Keep listening. Ask constructive questions. No reactions, not yet. Unless the speaker has a political psychopathology going on (which, in the current environment, is not as rare as it should be), he will soften. His voice will modulate; he’ll stop sweating.
Now, finally, it’s your turn. Speak your piece. Be detached, genial, even kind, but say what’s on your mind. Prefix fraught opinions with a simple qualifier. “I might be wrong, but ….”
I might be wrong: It’s simple to the point of banality, but in my experience, highly effective.
Prepare by doing research. Do some reading. Be respectful. If you can create a rich, humane conversation, you may learn something. As Emerson says, “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn from him.”
Why is it so hard to have a rich, candid exchange with someone who disagrees with you? Here’s where Lacan can offer some understanding. He thinks that the ego — the I or sense of self — is a “paranoiac structure.”
Lacan deals with this matter in his famous paper on the mirror stage. Summarized in basic terms, the essay says that at a certain crucial moment early in life, a child sees his or her image in a mirror. The image is wonderful: It’s coherent, smooth, and rather beautiful. But inside, the child feels differently, full of desires and resentments. The child wants an inner life that resembles the calm outer image. So she develops an ego, an I, that tries to deny turbulence. When something comes along that challenges serenity, the child becomes anxious and frightened.
And so it continues into later life. According to Lacan, we live in fear of losing the perfect image we saw in the glass. The thought that we might be wrong about something as important as, say, who will rule our country can make us so afraid that we begin hollering.
I think that Lacan overplays his hand when he suggests that the ego is always paranoid. I’d rather say that it becomes frightened when its stability is badly threatened. Then we fight as though we are fighting for our lives.
Lacan himself apparently possessed an ego that bore comparison to the Arc de Triomphe: grand and overbearing. He often abruptly ended psychoanalytical sessions early. He’d simply tell the surprised patient that was enough for the day and he had to leave. Camille Paglia, who did not care for him at all, called him a vampire who sucked the life from his students. Lacan is apparently an example of a common teacherly type: a “do what I say, not what I do” instructor. But I believe he has something to say.
Face it — people (and maybe especially guys) want to be correct. They want to win the argument. When I was a boy, my father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, frequently informed me that he knew everything. He added that he was always [W]right. It was a joke, and it wasn’t. My father was, in ways, an archetypal dad of the 1950s, who wanted the ego stability of always being correct.
My mother often had terrible stomach distress. When something she ate upset her, she said that it had “disagreed with” her. Sometimes our language knows more than we do. My mother was saying that being disagreed with was as painful as having a bad stomach ache. Perhaps it can be true for us all.
Lacan suggests that a loud holiday argument is not exclusively about whose political opinion is correct. Something much more is at stake. We are trying to sustain our illusory perfect ego. We are trying to keep up the illusion of a self that is always in control. Keeping an illusion alive can be much more fraught than sustaining a truth. T.S. Eliot says that “human kind / cannot bear very much reality,” and I think he is right.
When we are challenged, our very beings can feel like they are at stake. It’s good to take that into account and proceed skillfully. Civilization, at its best, is based on discussion, candor, open disagreement. We need to find ways to have rich exchanges. That means learning how to argue without threatening the integrity of our interlocutor’s very self. We’ve got to listen without waiting to talk. When we do talk, we’ve got be modest but firm (“I may be wrong but …”). If we see that we are talking to a scared (and often lonely) person who cannot stabilize his or her ego, we need to back off and congratulate ourselves for trying.
Success is hard, but the prize is worth it. A sane, thoughtful conversation with someone you disagree with is one of the very best things in life.
Mark Edmundson is a professor at the University of Virginia.
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