Buy them a beer and politely ask questions.
In the name of efficiency, those eight words summarize the rest of the post. Feel free to close your phone and get on with your day. Of course, if you’d like to stick around, there’s more below about why we should have conversations, my travel day from Hell, and a straight out of Hollywood meet-cute .
I can only speak for my fifteen or so years of political awareness, but it seems like we’re perpetually caught in a cycle in which our leaders and pundits demonize the other side, witness something tragic happen, then speak out about the importance of finding ways to talk to each other.
You’re familiar with the drill. Tragedy occurs and is rightly mourned. Talking heads go on CNN or pen op-eds lamenting the state of our discourse and begging us to converse respectfully with our opponents. Other talking heads dig up examples of the original talking heads not conversing respectfully and cry hypocrisy. Still more talking heads then pop up to write rebuttal op-ed’s which also criticize the original viewpoint, but this time because it’s seen as prioritizing civility over the lived experiences of the people suffering at the hands of the other side.
And on and on the cycle goes.
Please note, I’m not trying to push my personal left-right politics on you here. My use of “other side” means the side you are not on. Examples of the above behavior exist across the spectrum. What’s more, the need to talk with each other is a global need. The side you are not on might simply be a place and people far away from you that you need to talk to anyways. Globalization has taken its licks in the past few decades, but on balance, I think trade deals are still a better way to source our tea than pillage and plunder.
After all, all of us are trapped on the same small rock orbiting the sun. What’s worse is that we’re trapped here with each other. There’s a reason Sartre got famous for the line “Hell is other people.” The thing is, other people aren’t going anywhere.
Ezra Klein has been getting criticized a lot recently, but for what it’s worth I think he’s right when he says “we are going to have to live here with one another.” Personally, I think that successful cohabitation starts with conversation.
I love conversation. It’s far more enjoyable than hitting each other with rocks, and every conflict in history that hasn’t ended with one side’s complete extermination, no matter the level of acrimony, has had to involve some level of discourse.
A few weeks back I shared an article about Jubilee—the viral YouTube show on which a guest with some particular opinion will face off with twenty or so internet denizens who hold a completely different opinion. Nominally, the idea is to promote debate. Practically, people yell and make inflammatory comments in the hopes of going viral on TikTok.
Frankly, it’s not really conversation. There’s no real give and take, no genuine attempt to understand the other side’s perspective, and very little extension of empathy.
Look, you can define conversation any number of ways, and I’m not one to quibble over technicalities. Borrowing from Justice Stewart, let’s just say as regards conversation, “I know it when I see it.” I suspect you do too. But just because you know what conversation is, doesn’t mean it’s always simple to have one.
Conversation is easy when you’re with a friend and enjoying your third martini. Conversation is difficult when someone is saying things that make you want to grab them by their lapels and shake them until they start making sense. Hard conversations are hard for a reason—it’s uncomfortable to feel scrutinized by someone else and alien, if not downright threatening, to hear views that are so wildly different from our own.
Conversations, easy and hard, have been on my mind because I recently had a chance to practice the subtle art of discourse on a slow plane to Memphis.1
I say slow plane because what should have been a two hour flight turned into a ten hour odyssey, with planes being diverted to different airports, gate changes, aborted takeoffs, boarding and deplaning, and multiple crew swaps.
Travel days like that have a way of grinding down the spirit and putting people on their worst behavior. They also have a way of giving miserable voyagers some level of esprit de corps, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when, shortly after we finally took off (for the second time) my seat-mate struck up a conversation about the book I was reading.
For light reading fare I had brought Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America’s Heartland, which I had picked up sight unseen from the new arrivals shelf at the library. I was hoping for a book exploring the rise in incidences of political violence, especially among socially-alienated young men. Instead, I got part-memoir, part-Rust Belt cultural study.
Regardless, #47 is prominently displayed on the cover, bright red hat and all, which is what I think led my seat-mate to inquire about the book. It turns out the gentleman next to me was something of a conservative activist, with the six-figure Twitter2 following and texts with JD Vance to prove it.
We spent the rest of the flight in conversation—and specifically talking about politics and culture. It’s fair to say there are any number of issues that we don’t align on, but we had an honest to God discussion, with respectful questions and thoughtful observations. I didn’t come away from it with new viewpoints on any banner issues, but I do feel like I have a better understanding of why some people hold the positions they do.
Acquiring that understanding required me to suspend my inclination for debate or withdrawal and just listen. Even more importantly, I had to ask thoughtful follow-up questions based on what I was listening to.
Now, a few things made this conversation easier than it might have otherwise been.
First and foremost is that we were strangers, which always makes for an easier conversation, because there’s no pressure to maintain a relationship moving forward. When some random guy on the street shouts at you that the Earth is flat you brush it off and move on, but it’s strangely hard to let it go when that guy is your Uncle and he’s shouting it across the dinner table at Thanksgiving dinner. Anonymity can be dehumanizing, but it sometimes makes challenging discourse simpler.
Next was the nature of the venue. There’s something about flying that lends itself to moments of reflection and the odd serendipitous encounter. After all, there’s a reason dozens of romantic comedies use the mismatched seat-mates trope to introduce their protagonists. Some people like to just turn on noise cancelling and tune out the rest of the plane. Hell, that’s what I do most of the time. But sometimes, when the conditions are just right, magic happens.
Finally, and most importantly, I bought the guy a beer. See, if you don’t preload your credit card onto the United app, they won’t let you purchase an alcoholic beverage. No, they will not take cash. No, you may not use your credit card directly. We might be able to land on the Moon, but the technology to swipe an AmEx at 30,000 feet seems to elude us still.
That’s how, when the beverage cart came by five minutes into our conversation, right at that risky point where you might lose the whole thing entirely in awkward silence or choose to go deeper into the discussion, an opportunity presented itself. My seat-mate may have been an expert on political sentiment, but I had him beat when it comes to booze purchasing, so when the stewardess informed him that they wouldn’t be able to take his credit card, I jumped in to buy him the beer he wanted.
Readers, it is almost mathematically impossible to dislike a person who buys you a beer. Cultures around the world share bread and salt with guests to make them feel welcome, and beer is really just bread and salt served in a cold liquid form.
So, for $9 plus tax, I had an interesting conversation with someone who I’d never normally talk to. I may have massively disagreed with a lot of this person’s perspectives, but I enjoyed the discussion all the same. And I think they did too, but what saddened me at the end was a few hours later when I checked out their Twitter profile.
They had taken some of the points we had discussed around youth engagement, religion, and social media—points that they had eloquently expressed thoughtful perspectives on—and turned them into Twitter rage bait. Even more depressing was how successful the content was performing in the algorithm. Something just felt dirty about seeing an attempt at high-minded, well-intentioned discourse turn into internet slop. Two people walked off that plane with a better understanding of the other’s perspectives on difficult cultural issues, then thousands of people (and bots) scrolled past those same topics in their most vile form, and for my money were worse off for having done so.
All this is to say I continue to think we should do our best to have conversations. High-minded and head-in-the-gutter alike. But we should also be careful to ensure that when we go out into the rest of the world, real or digital, we’re putting something of our best foot forward there too.
Thanks for tuning in. As always, if you love every word or if you think I’m the internet’s dumbest boy, feel free to let me know directly or in the comments. See you next time.
A “slow plane to Memphis” is in the same linguistic group as many Martin family expressions.
No, I will not call it X. It took a decade for “he tweeted” to become normalized, but “he Xed” is a bridge too far.
I'm partial to the photo of the horse in the pub