Winning vs Understanding

The Difference Between Winning an Argument and Understanding Someone

What happens when the objective changes from being right to becoming curious?

I was at the Mesa Verde Visitor Center when I met a Christian man who believed the mountains in the distance were not more than four thousand years old.

I was there doing Triptych Dialogue, approaching strangers and asking the same three non-confrontational political questions I had developed for the project:

How would you describe the political system of the United States of America?

Describe your feelings or reactions to the current state of U.S. politics.

Politics in the United States... (Finish the sentence).

The questions are deliberately simple. They aren't designed to trap anyone, expose what they believe, or lead them toward a particular answer. I ask them because I want to hear how a person describes the political world in their own words.

I gave this man the same opportunity I had given everyone else.

He answered.

And then we started talking.

He began talking about truth with a capital T. He talked about God and quoted verses. He questioned the age of the landscape around us and argued that none of this could be as old as I believed it was. At one point he told me that Christianity had saved him from an addiction to pornography.

I remember wanting to put him straight.

Not just on one thing. On a lot of things.

We were standing at Mesa Verde, surrounded by evidence and a landscape that, to me, seemed to make his position almost impossible to understand. I started asking him whether he believed the information displayed in the visitor center was true. Was all of this just a big lie?

I had started the conversation by asking questions.

Now I was using questions as weapons.

When listening becomes another argument

The strange thing was that I had already done what I came to do. I had interviewed him. I had given him a platform. I had listened to his answers.

But somewhere along the way, listening stopped being the objective.

I wanted to correct him.

He wasn't interested in the responsibility of talking with strangers or people he disagreed with. He didn't see much necessity in it. He told me that he had done me a favor by answering my questions.

Now I needed to do him a favor by listening to what he had to say about God.

I felt the opposite.

I felt that I was doing him a favor by giving him the opportunity to speak.

We were both keeping score.

Neither of us was really listening.

Eventually I couldn't seem to break through his certainty, so I tried a disruption.

He was talking over his wife and waving his arms in front of her face when she tried to speak. I pointed this out. I told him that I thought he was being disrespectful to her and ignoring her.

He said, “No, I'm not. I love my wife very much.”

Of course he could love his wife very much. That wasn't really what I was pointing to.

But looking back, I can see that I had moved from challenging his ideas to challenging him. I was no longer listening. I was trying to find something that would make him stop and reconsider.

Maybe it was an ad hominem. Maybe it was simply frustration.

Either way, it wasn't a bridge.

The part I got wrong

It would be easy to tell this story as an example of somebody else refusing to listen.

That wouldn't be true.

I had given him the opportunity to speak. I had asked the questions. I had heard his answers. But when our conversation moved away from the questions and into disagreement, I stopped listening in the way I thought I was listening.

I disputed his facts.

I challenged his opinions.

I tried to expose contradictions.

And when that didn't work, I pointed out something about his behavior.

I was still trying to win.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

I was standing there talking to a stranger about the importance of talking to strangers while trying to convince him that he was wrong.

What I was missing

That encounter stayed with me.

Not because I changed my mind about the age of the mountains. I didn't.

Not because I suddenly understood his religious beliefs. I didn't.

What stayed with me was something much simpler: when we become very stuck in our ways, we can become unable to listen to one another.

He was speaking from inside his certainty.

I was speaking from inside mine.

And I began to realize that if I wanted Triptych Dialogue to be more than an exercise in asking people questions, I had to learn how to listen when I didn't like the answers.

That meant looking for something other than agreement.

It meant looking for a bridge.

The bridge word

Over time, I began listening for what I came to think of as a bridge word.

It is not the same thing as the Word-Title.

The Word-Title belongs to the person I'm interviewing. After answering the three questions, they give me a single word that expresses something about their own answers. It is their word.

The bridge word is different.

It is something I hear in the conversation that I genuinely recognize in myself. It might be a word, an idea, a concern, or something human that gives us a place to meet without pretending that we agree.

I don't choose it for them.

I don't change their Word-Title.

And I don't use the bridge to erase the disagreement.

The bridge simply gives me another way into the conversation.

At Mesa Verde, I didn't find one.

Or maybe I wasn't listening for one.

I was listening for the next thing I could challenge.

That distinction changed the way I approached later conversations.

Leaving something behind

I also began to understand that I don't have to change someone's mind.

That may sound obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me while I was standing there at Mesa Verde.

I wanted to break through.

I wanted him to see what I saw.

I wanted him to question what he believed.

But perhaps the point of these encounters isn't to produce transformation while two strangers are standing face to face.

Maybe I can simply leave something behind.

A question.

A different way of seeing.

A moment of uncertainty.

A possibility that might return to the person later, when I'm no longer there.

What they do with it is no longer mine to control.

That realization changed the way I listened.

I began looking for the bridge word.

Sometimes I found one.

Sometimes I didn't.

And I think that matters too.

A bridge isn't something you manufacture just because you want there to be one. You have to discover whether one exists.

Understanding isn't agreement

I still think the man at Mesa Verde was wrong about the age of the mountains.

I still disagree with much of what he believed.

Listening didn't change that.

Perhaps that isn't what listening is supposed to do.

Understanding someone doesn't require accepting their facts, their politics, their religion, or their conclusions.

It requires something harder.

For a moment, I have to stop trying to make the person in front of me fit the picture I already have of them.

I have to let them be more complicated than my argument.

That is difficult when I believe I'm right.

Maybe especially then.

Because the moment I become certain that the other person is wrong, I can begin to believe that I no longer need to understand them.

And that is where the conversation can end.

What happens when the objective changes?

I used to think that a good argument was one in which I could make my case clearly enough that the other person understood why I was right.

I'm less interested in that now.

Not because facts don't matter. They do.

Not because disagreement doesn't matter. It does.

But because there is something that can happen before agreement and before persuasion.

Curiosity.

What if, instead of asking, How do I convince this person?, I ask:

What am I not hearing?

What matters to this person?

What am I assuming about them?

Is there a bridge here?

And if there isn't, can I let the conversation end without needing to win it?

I don't know whether I would handle the Mesa Verde conversation perfectly if I could have it again.

I probably wouldn't.

I might still want to correct him. I might still think the mountains are obviously older than four thousand years.

But I hope I would listen a little longer.

Because I've begun to think that the difference between winning an argument and understanding someone isn't whether we eventually agree.

It is what we're trying to accomplish while we're standing there.

The argument is about being right.

The encounter is about discovering what is there.

And sometimes the most important thing I can discover is how quickly I stopped listening.