Constructive Disagreement

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we'll hear a case for fighting more.

Yes, I said fighting more, but how to do it the right way. If there's one thing Americans across the political spectrum seem to agree on right now, it's that we're too divided. It comes up in every poll about the state of the country, in the anxiety over what to even talk about at Thanksgiving, in the workplace, trying to keep politics off slack. Some of you have been there, in the friendships that ended maybe over an election. The usual diagnosis is that we fight too much, and the usual prescription is some version of calming down and finding common ground. Well, Priya Parker thinks we have it backwards, at least to some degree. She's a conflict facilitator, a person that companies, churches, and families call when they've stopped being able to talk to each other. Her argument is that our problem isn't too much conflict necessarily, it's too little of the useful kind of conflict. Some of you will remember her from October of 2022, when she joined us for a series on her book, The Art of Gathering, about why so many of our meetings, dinner parties, and family reunions fall flat. Her new book is called The Art of Fighting, The Transformative Power of Conflict. It just came out. Priya Parker, welcome back to WNYC.

Priya Parker (1:33)

Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer (1:35)

So you're right. If you want to be more connected to the people in your life, fight more. Really?

Priya Parker (1:43)

I am a conflict resolution facilitator. I've been one for 25 years. And whether you think you're the kind of person who fights or doesn't fight, conflict is in your life. And the problem is we're horrible at it.

When conflict arises, we usually do one of two things. We avoid or ghost or we escalate and burn the house down. And we have this misconception about conflict, which is first that all conflict is bad and dysfunctional, and that quote unquote good people don't fight. And second, if we are going to do it, we think we're supposed to fight with the people we hate and not supposed to fight with the people we love. But what we don't understand is that fighting, the right type of fighting actually builds community.

And everyone is talking about how lonely they are. And I'm telling you, our lack of good fighting is part of it.

Brian Lehrer (2:41)

So the right form of fighting, you say, and the book is in three parts, you say, groups in conflict tend to pass through them in order, tear, grapple and cleave. So let's start with the tear. Your first chapter is just called, Why is this Happening? And you're right that ruptures tend to happen at specific moments in the life of a group. I'm going to ask you how this might apply to politics and our national life in a minute. But give us a sense of those moments, those rupture moments that tend to happen in the life of a group, more in a maybe personal conflict or context or workplace context.

Priya Parker (3:24)

You know, I wrote The Art of Gathering eight years ago, and I wrote it as a conflict resolution facilitator.

And ironically, one of the moments of ruptures or tears in many groups are actually at happy occasions.

Wedding planning, family reunions, in the work context, large anniversary parties. And this is because these kind of public collective moments of meaning and planning for them actually are these forcing mechanisms for groups and families to have the conversations that rarely come to the surface. Like, well, what does it mean to be a Parker? What, how do we wed? Do we say the word God or not? Do we, what color dress is she wearing? And so often, because, particularly in intergenerational families, all of these assumptions stay below the surface, bizarrely or maybe counterintuitively, it's actually at very quote unquote happy occasions that these openings occur because we're all at the same place at the same time kind of watching the symbolism of a community reveal itself. And everything from, oh, they didn't invite me to their wedding, to, oh, that's who they asked to give a toast, right? It's all of these moments where our assumptions are revealed. And so they're actually very important moments for a community to ask, well, who are we now? And what do we need to put down? And what do we need to bring in anew?

Brian Lehrer (5:01)

Yeah, I know one couple personally who I would say their marriage started to fall apart during the wedding planning and then it didn't last that long. Then you say the next job is figuring out what kind of fight you're in. There's an interlude called How to Keep a Kerfuffle a Kerfuffle. How do you tell a kerfuffle from something bigger?