Announcer: BackStory is made possible in part by KeyBank.

With additional support from the League of Women Voters and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Jason Hibbs: (Music) School board meetings going off the rails, protests for equity and rights evolving into looting, property destruction and sometimes death and fights breaking up families forever originating at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Now, I am not an expert, but it seems like we are doing something wrong in society.

Today on BackStory, we are talking about civil discourse, how to talk, to, listen to and learn from the other side, whatever that other side may be for you.

Our guest today, Cheryl Graeve with the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

She's also the organizer and program director for Engaging Differences and a member of the Prince George's County League of Women Voters in Maryland.

And Dr. Tim Schaefer, director of Civic Engagement and deliberative democracy for the National Institute of Civil Discourse.

And he's also an associate professor of communication studies at Kansas State University.

Thanks to both of you for being with us today on BackStory.

I think it's important to define the term.

First, Cheryl, if you will, just define civil discourse in about 60 seconds.

Cheryl Graeve: Sure.

Yeah, civil discourse is really simply using conversatio done in a respectful way to surface different views using really listening to help promote greater understanding.

And so conversations done in this way can help us engage our differences more productively.

Jason Hibbs: Tim, anything to add to that?

Tim Schaefer: Yeah, and maybe just to kind of I think Cheryl's point is absolutely correct.

And I think another kind of element to this is to say we can think about this almost at two levels.

There's a civility as kind of politeness.

Right.

It's about the kind of codes of conduct.

It's the things that allow us to have good exchange, whether it's in a family setting at Thanksgiving, as you were just mentioning a moment ago, or at a workplace.

Right.

So there are the Robert's Rules of order sorts of scenarios.

But we can also think about civility as this kind of deeper sense of obligation and duty to one another.

So it's that ability to say we do have differences, but we don't have to walk away from one another because of those.

In fact, that disagreement is a reason for us not to stop talking to each other.

It's a way it's a reason for us to find a way actually through those tension.

And Tim, I think most people would agree that we need discourse for democracy to survive, for society to survive.

But what do you say to the person who says people are just too sensitive these days, you know?

You know what happens if the civil part of civil discourse disappears?

Tim Schaefer: Part of what civility or civil discourse allows us to do is actually have that exchange.

Right.

So if we're literally just kind of yelling at each other or we could even take this moment right now.

You're allowing me to speak to respond to your question, right So if you were just talking over and we are fighting about the about the topic at hand, well, then you would have to actually know what I'm saying or have a sense of kind of the complexity of the issue or things like that.

So if we don't step into whether it's interpersonal relationships one to one or if it's larger, you know, with the school board or whatever the scenario might be, if we don't afford that opportunity to actually articulate and speak from that place of either experience or observation, otherwise, then we're really missing something.

And if we value democratic life in this kind of pluralistic, liberal society, in that classic sense of this rich diversity, well, then we don't have the opportunity to actually kind of confront or challenge one another or push on questions.

Can you can you clarify what you mean by that kind of statement or that policy position?

If we don't have that first step civility, this is where I think that politeness, we can almost say it's like these two steps and sometimes you want to gravitate towards the more kind of intense, serious one.

But if we don't have that first one, that civility is this kind of politeness, we can't actually get to that that further step.

Jason Hibbs: Cheryl, what can we do as individuals at work, at home, where we worship to foster civil discourse?

Cheryl Graeve: Yeah, we found a number of different ways that you can foster civil discourse.

And it really does start with you as an individual grounding yourself in an understanding that the other person or people that you're going to engage with, whether they're family members or whether they're in a government setting or or workplace setting, they're human beings with some core values.

And each person wants to be treated with respect and want to be acknowledged, want to be listened to deeply.

So, you know, there's a number of ways you can do it, but start with yourself and your own sphere of influenc in terms of how you would carry forth this in a civil, respectful relationship building way.

And, you know, we really are finding that the narrative in the country says that we are so divided, we're so divided, we're going to fight.

The headlines are all about division.

And yet in individual and small group conversations in cl and workplaces, we find that Americans have more in common than they have different.

And it's really finding that place commonalities.

Jason Hibbs: But how do I engage with someone who holds a belief that runs contrary to some of my deepest convictions?

Let's put it that way.

And are there some issues or some people or maybe some place where it's just not worth engaging in civil discourse?

Tim Schaefer: The first thing to think about is to what end or what's what's the implication of what we choose to do or not to do?

Right.

So there are certain scenarios where we might say this is something that we know we have this kind of chasm between us and.

And is it worth.

Is it worth this effort than the work to kind of to do that?

Right.

And there might be scenarios where you would say maybe not.

Right, whether it's with a relative that you see once a year at Thanksgiving or at a holiday, for example.

And it's better to pass the gravy literally.

Right.

Instead of of have this deep confrontation about policy differences on on legislation.

Right.

And those kinds of things.

But in a lot of scenarios, if we want to say, yes, this is important for us to be able to engage.

So what allows us to do that?

This is where I think some of the basic practices of setting up some ground rules, some boundaries that allow you to actually have that kind of conversation.

So, you know, if we want to think about it, like where are those parameters are?

Are we going to am I going to say you don't have to recognize my humanity?

Like is that in or out of bounds?

Right.

And for a lot of people, we would say that'd be out of balance.

Right.

So we start to kind of create the conditions for that more constructive kind of discourse to happen.

An important point.

This actually goes to a little bit of the front end of your question.

Is that one of the challenges right now and we know it from a lot of research, the Pew Research Center, Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins has written on this.

But partizanship more than policy, if we to say in the political space for a moment.

partizanship is the primary identifier.

Nearly 40 percent on a scale of 30.

The political values that people might classify on race and religion, education, age, gender, all these things.

Party falls at 39 percent among, you know, more than these 30 kind of categories.

What that means or what that indicates to me is that this is becoming this kind of unfortunate barrie to actually having those levels of interaction.

Right.

So.

So the assum or also the assumption of what that other side is, if we want to use that language where we might categorize them without being able to step into that.

So if you have that familiar relationship, if it's a family member or a close colleague or or a coworker, things like that classmate, for example , we might be able to say, yeah, we we know are those those kind of boundaries are and we can navigate through that.

But there are certain scenarios that some of us don't want to step into that for fear of that.

Right.

This kind of absolutist kind of argument or statement that would either be dehumanizing or just doesn't do anything productive.

So in certain scenarios that sometimes better than either we say sometimes walk away or kind of let the temperature cool a little bit and there might be another opportunity, which is a good reason why attacking one another is not necessarily productive, especially if you actually know the person.

Right, because the future creates other possibilities that may not exist at this moment.

Jason Hibbs: Let let's say it's the other way around.

Let's say I'm the person with the belief that disgust the other person.

I know they hate a part of me.

Do I engage?

Cheryl Graeve: I would say, again, it sort of depends on the relationship and the context, as Tim mentioned.

But if you do engage, I would suggest that one of the key things is to go into that.

Conversation with Curiosity to be really genuinely asking that person what, why, what, how did they come to that belief?

Why does it matter to them?

What does that look like?

And to be in just as authentic engagement through curiosity and inquiry, because that is another human being on the other side of that conversation.

Now, obviously, if you're not in a safe space or there's sort of violence coming up, that's that's a whole different category.

But we you know, there are many people who have crossed bridges of understanding and respect because they genuinely listened and found the humanity in that other person.

Jason Hibbs: Well, Tim, you've mentioned politeness several times so far.

Is there are there times when being polite does more harm than good?

Tim Schaefer: Yeah, absolutely.

So so it's interesting.

I exist in the space.

I studied civil discourse and dialog and deliberation.

An in one of my favorite articles is from the late 1990s.

And it's called Why Conversation is Not the Heart of Democracy.

And I'm not going to, you know, kind of go into all the details.

But at the very end of it is and I'm going to paraphrase slightly here, is that there are moments when this this aspirational ideal of civi discourse just isn't always possible.

Right.

And that's when we have this kind of eruption, this kind of screaming of like, we can't do this right.

This can't happen.

And we've been experiencing that in the last few years.

Right.

So we would articulate it as social protest, kind of this protest politic orientation, which is not, you know, categorically, as we would often think , civil or kind of the embodiment of the civility as we've been discussing it.

And that has an absolute role and a place to play in democratic life.

Right.

When we think about the the affordance to and, you know, right from government protections and all of these other factors and layers, the ability to speak and articulate, sometimes really abhorrent views.

Right.

That we have to we have to find this opportunity for us in a collective sense to say how do we articulate either frustration or opposition and at the same time, right through kind of things like protests, but also in these more kind of constructive environments.

Right.

Protesting, for example, does something rather specific and particular.

Right.

It can often elicit this this dramatic response.

But it can it can't it can affect change.

Right.

We've seen it through social movements, especially nonviolent social movements.

Civility in civil discourse can also do that, if done in the right ways and in the right kind of conditions .

The situation is we have to really attend to these factors that would would take seriously the the importance of recognizing what and when and how interesting.

Jason Hibbs: OK, well, we have to get a quick break in here, but we'll be back with more back story in just a moment.

(Music) Welcome back to Back Story, we're talking about civil discourse with Cheryl Graeve and Dr. Timothy Schaefer.

Let's jump right in, Cheryl.

In recent years, there's been emphasis on calling out racism, micro aggressions, white privilege and many other things, but often that calling out turns into bullying.

You know, racism is bad, but so is bullying.

So how can we address an issue without causing more harm?

Cheryl Graeve: Yeah, I think that's a good question.

And I think maybe rather than calling out, we would call people in, call people into an understanding of what is at the element of the issue for the human bein that is in conversation or engagement or in this sort of national framework in which we're put in these issues.

You know, I think the idea that people are for example, I'm going to give you an example.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we brought together hundreds of Americans from all regions of the country ages I think we were like 21 to 84 of of all sorts of different political stripes and backgrounds.

And we were talking about infrastructure and over and in a conversation, small groups brought them together and then understood that out of that, 93 percent of them wanted Congress to work together in a bipartisan fashion.

Seventy eight percent found that they had more in common than they they expected when they went into the conversation.

And over 90 percent said they'd want to do something like this again.

So.

You know, I think Tim raised earlier that there's a difference between sort of partizanship and policy People have a lot of commonality sort of in how they want either to be having just and fair kind of living respect for each other, good community.

So finding some of those places of commonalities, even in our very different historical inequities, creates an opportunity for new ideas and for further advancement toward solutions in our democracy and in very connected way.

Jason Hibbs: And Tim, we've been talking a lot about face to face interaction, but what about social media?

I mean, for example, I have some family members on social media who post things I completely disagree with.

Some of them are very hurtful personally.

But I know that there is nothing I can say, especially on social media, that will change their minds.

Am I doing the right thing, making my mother happy by keeping the peace?

Or am I being complicit by not saying anything?

Tim Schaefer: One of the unfortunate realities and when kind of the the response areas on news websites and things kind of emerged at the turn of the millennium, a lot of people especially scholars, are really excited.

All of a sudden, here's the ability for people to communicate, kind of share ideas who didn't have to be literally in the same space together or have that kind of familiar relationship.

And then we saw kind of what happened.

Right.

And so a lot of those have gone down, right.

They no longer have them because of trolling and things like that.

But more specifically, to your question about particularly social media I would pose it as this question of to what end.

Right.

Are the confrontations?

Is it to advance a robust discussion?

Right.

Or is it more to throw your two cents into a thing and be like I got.

Right.

And then you kind of walk away without kind of consideration for what any of that means, or have you just kind of, you know, have you put salt into a wound sort of situation?

So it for for me, it becomes, I think, a really challenging scenario, because so much of our communication is mediated through these platforms .

And again, it goes back a little bit to what we were talking about before, the sense of proximity, not necessarily geographically.

Right.

Do I sit across a room from you or do we share office space or are we are we family or things like that?

But do we have something that has us convening regularly to where this interaction can do something potentially constructive, help us learn from one another, or at least have that nuance?

Right.

A big part of civil discourse is not necessarily I've heard this thing and now I've changed my mind.

A bigger element of this is like it creates the conditions for me to kind of reflect a bit and think about the topic at hand and say, oh, I haven't thought about it that way or I didn't have that information.

What do I do with that?

And the aspiration or the hope is that maybe at some point in the future, maybe the near term, but also maybe the long term.

I say all oh, Sheryl did say that thing to me or Jason said that thing.

And now I'm realizing I hadn't really processed that before.

And maybe I should write the language that I choose to use or whatever the sort of scenarios might be.

Jason Hibbs: Cheryl, do you want to jump in on that specifically when you do know the person on the other end say it's a family member on Facebook?

Cheryl Graeve: Yeah, I think first, before I go there, I think it's an important reminder, a citizenry that we need to understand that also these social media platforms are using algorithms that are the economic model is really designed to divide us.

Right.

So I think we have to understand that as people become more critical, consumers understand don't turn away or do what we can to encourage that, that there may be some changes.

But I think when you're talking with or you're engaging with a family member or a loved one on social media, you know, I think it's important to remember that they are, again, beloved mostly to you.

Right.

And so, you know, taking a pause before you respond to something that might be agitated, you, I think is important.

Maybe you just don't respond to them in that moment.

Maybe you find another time when you're face to face or do a phone call or something offline to say, hey, I want to understand a little bit more about what you were saying there.

I disagree.

I have you know, I respectfully disagree or whatever.

But I think the relationships that we have in our families and our communities and within our faith, you know, friends are important to retain as much as we can.

And then sometimes there can be a point where it's just you've reached a point where you just have to unplug for a little while.

That said, we've heard a number of people doing that.

The holidays are coming.

That creates for a number of years now sort of worry about, you know, are we going to have a civil engagement with each other or are we going to break?

So I think it's the relationships that are key to remember.

Jason Hibbs: Yeah, and social media, you know, it's of all the school board meetings, you know, it's just the very few where the parents are really upset and yelling.

Those are the ones that go viral.

But I think you kind of mentioned this earlier, Tim.

How do people's beliefs like political beliefs influence how they behave?

Tim Schaefer: Yeah.

So one of the you know, and I've participated in some of these school boards, the community where I live right now, I was asked to come and speak about some of this.

And in fact, it got shut down.

The police got called.

Everybody was escorted out of the building because it became such a confrontation around a particular topic.

Critical race theory was the discussion that night.

And so it could have guessed that.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, but so we can see how this kind of plays out.

And but it leads me to to maybe what I would say is one of the challenges and this gets highlighted in a wonderful report people could find it's called Truth Decay from the Rand Corporation a few years ago.

And they found that we were in this moment.

It's really challenging.

And if I can just say this for a second, I know we only have a little bit of time, but it's this blurring between kind of facts and information in this opinion, this kind of voluminous effect.

Right.

Of of opinion over facts and this decline of trust in institutions like media and otherwise that kind of create these conditions.

Right.

So the report and I would echo this right, the erosion of civil discourse, this kind of political paralysis, things we see in D.C. right now, but also this kind of uncertainty and disengagement from one another.

This becomes very real.

And so there are ways in which we can come to expect certain topics.

And critical race theory is one that if you kind of look at the context of why it became this kind of lightning rod is some of this is intentional.

Right.

So to Cheryl's point about kind of the platforms, for example, these things are chosen in some respects to serve either as a litmus test, litmus test or as just kind of this provocation to elicit a response that we've now come to see across the country frustratingly.

Right.

And as we're on right now, in an election cycle, many school boards are holding elections.

My own is, for example, and these kinds of questions are coming up.

How do we think about having these these bodies that really care for the future of democracy if we think about education being central to that?

Well, part of that is creating a condition where we conditions where we can have people learning about the complexity of life, of the nuance of that, and being able to do so in a productive, kind of constructive and educational way.

But the frustration on my part is what I experience and observe is that if we don't allow for that, for those bodies to exist or to function as they should, then we're really we're harming ourselves.

Right.

So it might feel good.

There's there's one of the frustrations about all of this is, you know, whether it's the kind of the mean tweet or the the I gotcha thing and you walk away from your Facebook post, it can feel kind of good, right?

I'm right.

I know you're wrong, but what does that do?

And especially if it does have real implications on not just I made a comment on a post that somebody I don't know made but it is about the people who are shaping the curricula that are defining what my my children and I have children, what they experience in school.

Jason Hibbs: Yeah.

Let me get one last question in here real quickly.

Going to have about 30 seconds each.

I think sometimes we think of the other whenever we have discussions like this, like Democrats are going to have images of Republicans in their mind.

Republicans are going to see Democrats.

How can we personally examine ourselves to make sure that we are engaging in civil discourse?

Tim, you can go first.

And Cheryl, you'll have the last word.

Tim Schaefer: The biggest thing for me is to humanize people, to say who who are you as a person?

We're complex beings.

We have all sorts of kind of wrinkles and foibles.

And for us to recognize that politics, while right now feels like a dominant factor that shapes who we are, is not the only thing that shapes who we are.

Cheryl Graeve: And I would build on that by saying that's absolutely right.

And and each of us as individuals have the opportunity to pause to.

Look at the other person that we're engaging with or group as human beings that, again, care about our communities, care about our children, care about our families, and that that we want to.

There's a deep hunger for us to engage and to engage respectfully.

And the pandemic just put a whole nother, you know, disconnection to us all.

So remember, we want to connect.

We are hungry for respect between each other as human beings.

And we have absolute ability to control our own reaction to whatever's happening.

We might not be able to we can't control other people, but we can control our own reaction, how we take it in, how we see it, how we react to it.

Jason Hibbs: So that is a great note to end on.

I appreciate you both.

And I appreciate those of you at home for watching BackStory.

I'm Jason Hibbs, and we'll see you next time.

Announcer: BackStory is made possible in part by KeyBank.

With additional support from the League of Women Voters.

And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(Music)