Speaking as Persons

One of the tensions I run into with deep conversation (especially where disagreement is involved) is the temptation to always try to reframe the conversation in favor of my own perspective.

This is certainly the most comfortable way to operate, since we are all most familiar with our own perspectives. But it also makes speaking directly to another difficult, since such reframing often leaves their perspective as the rhetorically weaker one, and the argument we end up trying to win is with a fabricated opponent.

When two people have fundamentally different assumptions and worldviews, I think it can be best simply to take turns dwelling in each other’s worlds, and then having a discussion about each person’s experience. This method makes everything less abstract and rhetorical. And it leaves room for people to speak as persons instead of ideological representatives.

I have been thinking about where that actually becomes possible, and one place keeps coming to mind: reading the same book with someone.

When two people have the same text in front of them, they are more easily able to get out of their own heads, since the book offers a shared space to inhabit. That common ground makes the harder thing easier, which is taking turns in each other’s worlds and then talking honestly about what each person found there. Of course, those with wildly different worldviews may disagree about the text, or have different interpretations of it, but those differences can at least be centered around something objective: the text itself. A lot of serious reading used to be done this way (not alone, but together), with much of the real conversation happening in the margins, where readers argued with the author and with each other. Reading alone, you’re likelier to skim the difficult sections and simply not engage with what you disagree with. Reading with someone, the hard paragraph is where the whole discussion goes.

That’s the kind of reading I want to do more of. In that vein, I have an announcement to make later this week involving something I built to help facilitate this. Stay tuned.

— Johnathon