Mark Labberton:
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary. I’m Mark Labberton, welcome to Conversing. What a joy it is today to welcome John Inazu as our guest on Conversing. John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion, as well as the Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s written a number of volumes, one is a book entitled Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. A second one is a book called Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference. Another one is a book that he co-edited with Tim Keller called Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference. John, I’m so excited that you’re a guest today on Conversing. Thank you so much for joining.
John Inazu:
Mark, thanks for having me. It’s great to be with you.
Mark Labberton:
I’ve been a huge admirer of your work over the years and some of the earlier books that you’ve published, and I think they’ve landed in spaces that are deeply resonant, of course, with the most recent one, which is the one that we’re going to be talking about, Learning to Disagree. I would first like to just set the stage for people who have not yet read the book, to have a sense of who you are and how you approach this topic, which is such a current one and always needed, but particularly in these crazy times that we’re living in. Give us a little bit about why this was the right book and how it fits into the larger landscape of your work.
John Inazu:
Yeah, thanks. I think the key to understanding my intellectual trajectory is that my core academic work traces back to the right of assembly in the First Amendment, the idea that we live and exist in groups and we form our beliefs and identities in groups. The founders knew that that’s why they have this assembly right in the First Amendment, and that creates both challenges and opportunities. Madison called them factions and they weren’t a good thing, and they created a political challenge in the face of real differences about things that matter, and we’ve always had that in our country’s history. My first book was covering some of the legal, historical and theoretical ground of the right of assembly.
Out of that, I moved into broader questions of pluralism, how do we as citizens get along with difference and how do we work to thrive across those differences. Out of that, came a collaboration with Tim Keller that worked to make those arguments specifically for Christians. Now in this newest book, what I’m trying to do is in more of an accessible narrative storytelling way, help inspire a set of conversations and ideas around putting this stuff into practice, how do you move from the theory to the Thanksgiving dinner table or the neighbourhood picnic. That’s really the goal of this book, to be read by people who might not otherwise pick up a book on pluralism but are wondering how to talk to Uncle Jack.
Mark Labberton:
Uncle Jack, yes, or Karen, or whoever it is that we might have in our minds.
John Inazu:
They have many proxy names, probably.
Mark Labberton:
John, one of the things that is such a positive thing about this book to me is that you first write as a legal scholar and a law professor, and in fact, the outline of the book as readers will discover, is really through an academic year where you’re really taking students through a formation experience. Part of what you’re doing deliberately in your own teaching is to amplify key themes in that curriculum that would emerge for students who are studying to become lawyers. Take us through why that structure makes sense as a way of approaching this particular topic.
John Inazu:
I love that you picked up on the formation piece of it because that’s exactly in the best case what we’re trying to do, especially with first-year law students. What I’m trying to help the reader see is why this experience of legal education, in the strongest sense, it’s the form of indoctrination, but why this indoctrination actually helps us become better people in our negotiating disagreement. The typical impression of lawyers, not without some reason, is that these are the argumentative, stubborn people who actually don’t get past their own perspectives. I want to make the case that the very best lawyering actually models a form of empathy, but it requires an understanding of the other side, an ability to unpack two sides of an argument and to present the best possible arguments in both directions, and that when we step into another person’s argument, we are actually in that process doing a work of empathy.
It’s limited, we’re never going to fully jump into that person’s shoes, but we’re going to understand the perspective differently than we might have otherwise done so. That’s the work of good lawyering, and that’s the work we’re training our students to take before a judge or a decision-maker so that ultimately, they’re not saying, “My side is right and the other side is stupid.” What they’re saying is, “Here’s a really hard issue and here are two good arguments and here’s why one’s better.” That’s the kind of reasoning that I think gets us to better disagreement. I take the reader through some everyday classroom examples, trying to develop some characters and students who learn along the way, including me, and try to model some of that for a broader audience.
Mark Labberton:
One of the things that is curious to me because I’m working on a book on fear, is the way that fear is a backdrop to so much of what you’re writing about. It’s an elaborate scheme in a certain way, a needed elaborate scheme for understanding what it means to manage our fears and to manage what we think is at most at risk, especially when the stakes feel high, the issue is hot. We feel as though something really, maybe even almost primal is at stake or something that feels nearly like that is being debated as though there really could be and is a legitimate other side. This is all part of the thing that you’re trying to help your students and the readers of the book grapple with in various ways to really be able to break through to the possibility of hearing and receiving another person’s story with less fear, at least, than what often is present behind a lot of arguments that go on. I’m just wondering if you could interact with how fear is present to the issues that you’re trying to describe.
John Inazu:
It’s a great point, a great observation. I think what it gets to is that in our most deeply held commitments, there’s part of us that doesn’t want to be shaken or unsettled. I think the antidote to that is actually one that you can make the case partially out of self-interest. If you are with your deepest convictions, the kinds of things you’re actually staking your life upon, if they’re that serious to you, wouldn’t you want to invite the kinds of questions that would just solidify your thinking around them? Instead of being fearful about them to say, every one of us is living on a kind of faith, and that’s the only way you get by in the world. We’re making these leaps of faith into different belief systems and into the actions that we take. Why wouldn’t I as a mature human being, someone who’s trying to be aware of the world around me, why wouldn’t I invite questions into those deepest commitments? It’s a reframing of the same challenge, but instead of one of fear, it’s one of the invitation that is actually designed to strengthen what you’re doing.
Mark Labberton:
One of the things that neuroscience has taught us about fear is that when we first get the signals that something might be up, we are alerted and the questions are then what do we think we know and what is our capacity to be able to deal with the fear. When it’s distal, then it feels as though the prefrontal cortex is still very much operative, it’s helping us sort out possibilities, we can actually reason. When it becomes proximal and it’s really in our faces, then in fact the neurons all fire and go away from the power of the frontal cortex and they move to the amygdala where in fact reason has less and less to do with the capacity to respond because now it’s just fight or flight and it’s at full-tilt alert.
When I’m reading this book and I’m thinking about the significance of the arguments that are going on in our culture and the need to learn to disagree and the presence of fear, which I do think is just way more important than often is actually given attention to, and then I read what you’re suggesting, it feels as though you’re really relying on a point where the frontal cortex is fully operative and more operative than some people would normally even do in their lives. I’m not sure how much the prefrontal cortex actually shapes our lives every day, though it certainly affects us deeply. When our sons are growing up, I’ve often joke that I used to lay my hands on their foreheads and say, “Come prefrontal cortex.”
Because I just knew everything would be better if we had a complete brain, and that is absolutely true. My point right now is simply you’re asking for a reasonableness in the face of argumentation that actually requires a distance in order to be able to do this. When people are feeling threatened, however, which is the way many, many people seem to be experiencing life daily, when they really feel proximally threatened, the capacity for reason is really lower. To use the analogy you were describing, let’s say the Thanksgiving dinner or the neighbourhood barbecue, probably in that moment you have a chance of tapping into the prefrontal cortex. I guess I want to hear a little bit more reflection about that.
John Inazu:
Yeah, lots of things coming through my mind right now. One is I think there’s a utility in validating fear in some people, and instead of dismissing it as that’s whatever, self-interest or bigotry or bias to actually say, “I can understand why you might feel that.” That’s a step we can make to bring some of this down a bit. I also think what you called reason, and I guess that’s a fair description of it, but I would maybe reframe it as something like the hard practiced habits that let us respond to these fraught situations with a different kind of posture. What that means is we’ve got to do a lot of practice with it and that we have to habituate ourselves into those conversations that we know are going to happen and where we know others around us are going to go right into that fear mode and we have to be prepared to engage differently. As you were talking, I mean as you were describing the negative example, my first thought was that’s pretty much every online social media back and forth where we’re just immediately into ear mode
Mark Labberton:
Exactly. Precisely, yes.
John Inazu:
Then the practices that follow are a bunch of short and snarky and unreflective escalations. If we’re doing that for hours a day, the Thanksgiving dinner table is not going to go very well. In other words, we have to step back and figure out, because we’re human, because we are prone to this fear lever and because when we’re in it’s going to be very hard to navigate around it, what do we do in advance of those situations to practice a different way of engagement? One of the answers has to be get offline and figure out a different way to practice.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Another way is the way that you described in the first chapter, which is beginning with a chapter on empathy, which I think is perhaps in a way one of the hardest things, but also certainly one of the most important things to your whole argument. Because if there’s not some capacity to actually see and know the other and to have empathy for their argument or their perspective or their experience, whatever it might be, then the chances that we’re just going to live locked inside our own frame is almost guaranteed unless we can somehow break that. I’m curious what your experience of teasing out encouraging challenging people to grow in empathy has actually been, that gives you optimism that this can be taught, developed.
John Inazu:
I would just say empirically, I’ve seen this year after year in the classroom where we start the year with a very diverse set of perspectives and some students who’ve never encountered the other side, whatever that may be or who’ve never heard, especially from personal experience, a position or an idea that comes from a very different set of experiences. Over time, it doesn’t happen all the time, but in a healthy classroom setting, you can use that to model empathy and to have students model empathy for each other and to realise that these issues and perspectives are really hard and complex for a reason, and that very few people that you might have in your mind as a caricature of the other side actually show up that way as human beings. That people are much more complex and their views based on an amalgam of their experiences and facts of the world and their moral values lead to all sorts of really interesting complexity. When we take the time to understand that, we’re doing a work of empathy that actually increases our own ability to reason and make our own arguments too.
Mark Labberton:
There’s this fascinating project that’s been going on for a few decades in Canada, it arose out of the fact that there was increasing violence in grade schools. This one child psychologist who was working in such schools began to realise that there had been a serious drop in empathy. Her analysis was that in busy households, often divided households, often parents that are struggling to make ends meet, the time to be able to cultivate empathy in your children is often marginalized and therefore they come to school without these empathy skills being developed. She’s developed this curriculum which involves a newborn baby being brought into a curriculum over the course of a school year. The curriculum is all designed to empathize with the child and to help the school-aged children perceive and engage and focus and pay full attention to the baby. Now, it’s been double-blind tested, and it’s had significant longitudinal impact, which is pertinent to your point about empathy can actually truly grow and really be developed and stand the test of time.
This is the most interesting part of it to me. They found that the most influential part of the curriculum was the curriculum where students were meant to empathize when the baby was not in the room, where they are thinking about the baby and they’re thinking about everything that they’ve learned about where the baby is in its first year of development. Now it’s a certain time of day and the curriculum sets up a certain moment for the child’s rhythm of the day at that period in their age, and then asks them to speculate about what they would think the child would be feeling in that period of time. That habituation, this is back to what you were just saying, the habituation of learning to think beyond your own box of yourself into someone else’s circumstances, and then to reflectively engage, what do I think they would actually be feeling? Which is surely near the core of what empathy is really about was the part of the curriculum that’s ended up having the greatest effect. I think that just proves and underscores what you’re saying.
John Inazu:
That is so fascinating. The other thing that comes to mind as you were describing that study is that the school-aged children in the experiment we’re relating not to the category of baby, but to a particular baby.
Mark Labberton:
A baby, yes. Precisely.
John Inazu:
Then when that particular baby is removed from the equation as they’re theorizing, they’re theorizing that baby, not the category of baby.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, right. It’s not baby-ness that they’re talking about.
John Inazu:
Right.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, exactly. That’s why the power of story and the power of human relationships actually can bear the weight of empathy. I’m saying this partly because one of the things that struck me about your book and about many books, important books that are being written in this general area right now is the acknowledgement that we have to be willing to accept complexity. Now, when you say that as a principle, it can feel overwhelming to a lot of people who just feel like the last thing in the world I need anywhere is more complexity, so to be invited to learn to disagree by entering into a world of complexity can feel overwhelming.
I think it’s often because we don’t actually realise how complex we are and how we already hold such complexity, but it’s held in narratives, not in principles, it’s held in experience, it’s held in particular relationships. Actually, if you break it apart, it’s extremely complicated how all that goes. I think the capacity is really there. It is, I think as you say, this business of how do you habituate practices that are going to cultivate and sustain empathy where there’s growth joy in that empathy and not just fear or anxiety, but delight and wonder and entertainment as well as profound insights. Again, it just feels so important to me.
John Inazu:
This is interesting. This occurred to me just for the first time as you were just saying that, but part of the complexity that comes from even the people who would like to avoid it is that as people created to use, usually words, sometimes something other than words to describe our experiences, we’re necessarily adding nuance and differentiation to what we see. If you have 12 witnesses describe the same event or experience, they will do it somewhat differently because the complexity is in the humanity of the engagement with the experience. We’re not robots, we’re not just walking through chequeing the exact same boxes of experience, but we’re having different experiences that are situated in our individual lives.
Mark Labberton:
I think that’s part of what David Brooks has been working on in his book, How to Know a Person, because in that same way that you’ve just described, how do we move towards someone and know and be known in ways that actually can help sustain this long work and make ourselves at home with the habituation of coming to know and be known by someone else? That’s where, as you were saying about the baby, it’s not baby-ness, but it’s this particular baby that’s already been tracking in the classroom for several weeks or months, who you actually have come to know in some sort of way, and you get the personality in some way of the baby and how it changes, therefore the whole category of what a baby is.
John Inazu:
There’s both a challenge and an opportunity there, or a risk and a benefit because the benefit is now you can no longer just talk about the abstract category of baby-ness. The risk is that you now think all babies are the baby.
Mark Labberton:
Are the baby. Right, exactly.
John Inazu:
You’ve now only engaged with the baby in one particular instance, and there’s a lot more complexity and difference out there.
Mark Labberton:
It opens up and it potentially closes down the capacity to move forward. I thought one of the other things that’s very, very rich in the book is the way that you have tried obviously to write a book that is not meant only for the legal classroom. It’s not written as a technical book, but it is a book that moves from the classroom to your ordinary life, to your neighbourhood, to your colleagues, to church, and in other sorts of settings. I’m curious, as you worked across those various fields and you were thinking about this question of how to disagree, there are such differences in those contexts and they set up different relational dynamics, not least in a law school. You can control the conversation and its terms by being the professor and by holding their grade and by doing that, you actually hold their future. That’s a really different thing than Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving or the neighbour at the barbecue. Just how did you intellectually try to consider those differences, and do you think they fundamentally matter or is it just in nuance that they matter, that fundamentally it’s the same enterprise?
John Inazu:
I think the answer is maybe both. There are fundamental differences and there are similarities. One of the similarities that I try to discover in the process of the book itself is that what I am often prone to do in my separating the classroom from everything else in life is to conclude that the classroom is the place where we make mistakes and learn, and the rest of life doesn’t deserve that kind of grace. Actually, at the family dinner table, in the workplace, in the neighbourhood, we’re making mistakes all the time. For some reason, I’m able to extend a kind of grace to my students in the classroom and invite the mistakes and invite the imperfection, but I sometimes don’t extend that same grace to my neighbours or to my friends.
I think there is at least an aspirational goal of wanting to say life is a learning environment and life has to be full of grace when mistakes are made and a recognition that we’re not going to get it right. That’s where I think the different environments and contexts align or should align. Where they differ is that we, and you kind of set this up with your question, but we live in the world by occupying different roles and those roles matter, and our awareness of those roles matter. The example that came to mind in recent weeks as I’ve been talking about the book is that I had a discussion with one of my daughters a few months ago, and it was over a heated political issue. She’s a teenager, and we were disagreeing about it.
As she was sort of presenting her side, I was across the room and I was just responding as a law professor, and I was pointing out why her claims were overblown or why her logic wasn’t clear or why she hadn’t accounted for the other side, and I didn’t have my glasses on at the time. Then as I kept going and my rebuttal got stronger and stronger, my wife said, “You realise she’s crying right now.” In that moment, it occurred to me that whatever else I was doing, I had fundamentally misconstrued my roles that I was there principally as dad and not law professor, and by messing that up, the rest of the disagreement almost didn’t matter. That ended in an apology from me to my daughter, but I think it illustrates why there’s not a complete parody of these different contexts because we occupy different roles and relationships within them.
Mark Labberton:
Different types of nuance and authority come along with all of that distinction.
John Inazu:
That’s right.
Mark Labberton:
That’s extremely interesting. I think one of the things that is a challenge in disagreeing is that way that if it’s two people a conversation with disparity in “authority,” in relationship to the thing that’s being discussed. Sometimes it’s authority that we claim from other people’s authority and that we want to associate with, or sometimes it’s that we believe we have our own intrinsic authority and we live in an era when the authority of the person’s own opinion, passion, commitment, experience, et cetera, seems to reign supreme over any other kinds of debates or standards. How does that affect this ability to handle disagreement well?
John Inazu:
I think as a normative matter, I would say there should be some asymmetry in the level of responsibility. When you are in a relative position of authority, then you should have a greater responsibility to exercise the virtues of restraint and patience and listening and understanding, often because that authority is tied to experience if nothing else, but the roles also matter there. I wouldn’t entirely link it to power though, because I think power is a trickier and much more dynamic concept. I think about the power dynamics in the classroom where as a professor, I am usually in the position of power, but in the couple of instances where I’ve been the subject of a protest, in that moment, that power dynamics really shift quickly, and maybe some of the obligations also shift there. If we focus on authority and relative authority, then I do think there’s asymmetry of responsibility.
Mark Labberton:
There is such a strong sense that part of the impact of postmodernism has been, I believe Derrida was the one who said, “Really, there’s just language and power.” That then really does mean that it’s all about aggressiveness and dominance. It’s not about any of the other virtues, or any of the virtues I should say, that are really at stake, especially from a Christian point of view in the consideration of the fact that we’re talking to a person also created an image of God who shares real human dignity and value, whose complexity is intrinsic and a magnificence about them rather than a bother. Those are all things that only come if we’re prepared to actually receive the whole person and not just their argument or their opinion or their point of pain for that matter.
John Inazu:
That’s right.
Mark Labberton:
Let’s imagine today that you were king of the forest and you brought this book and its principles to being the president of Columbia University, and you were going to be given sufficient authority, to use that word, sufficient authority to address what’s happening. I just am curious how you would try to ground this. This is not a cheap shot about anything that’s happening at Columbia or its president or anything like that. I’m just using it as a thought exercise. When you think about the virtues that you’re really trying to stimulate in learning to disagree, that’s a vivid national, especially university-oriented field of disagreement right now. Take us there with the principles or the themes of your book.
John Inazu:
Lots come to mind. One of the basic first moves I would want to make is to remind the relevant members of the community that there is a responsibility toward the community and not just a bunch of individual actors and part of that responsibility is recognizing that people are hurting in very deep ways on both sides of this issue within the community. We’re not talking about abstractions or debating some historical event, we’re talking about real felt emotions back to our discussion of fear among other emotions, and to start there. I would also say, and this is a broader point that comes up a bit in the book, one of the challenges with the contemporary higher-ed landscape is that these attempts to articulate community, which is actually tied to purpose, mission and values, if they’re coming in the moment of crisis, they’re coming way too late,
Mark Labberton:
Absolutely.
John Inazu:
When you as a leader or a stakeholder, and you know this from your own leadership experience, but you have to do the work way in advance to say, this is what we’re about. These are the reasonable boundaries of our disagreement. Within these boundaries, we’re going to welcome robust differences of opinion. We’re going to respect each other as human beings and as learners and as members of this community. We’re going to allow for different kinds of engagements. Fundamentally, this is the purpose of the institution and this is why you and I and we are here. When that work hasn’t been done, and my strong sense is it has not been done in a lot of higher-ed institutions, then the moment of crisis is going to be far too late to try.
Mark Labberton:
One of the things that has struck me over the years being closely related to the University of California Berkeley is how much as Berkeley has become ever more a STEM school, I am aware that the capacity for interpersonal interaction has fallen off and it becomes more and more a school or an environment, a culture in which disagreement is really thought to be only rational and only mechanical in a certain way, often technological more than it is actually human and humane. There’s a loss as this transition is happening in many universities where the humanities are waning significantly, that there’s less and less of a stockpile of resources inside the university than there has been at earlier times of being able to bring the full human experience to the table and therefore to create the culture that you’re trying to describe about a culture where real humane and human principles are really leading and defining what it is that you’re trying to do.
John Inazu:
I think that’s part of it, and I think exacerbated by technocratic leadership. Another part of it to stick with a particular example of Berkeley is that schools like Berkeley and its peer institutions are increasingly unclear about their purpose as they try to be national players or international players in that landscape. When I think about the possibilities of the flagship state schools, very few of them are actually focusing on the mission at their front door, and they have so many other competing values and aspirations that it becomes very hard to ask what we’re about or what we’re wanting our community to be about. Berkeley is not alone in this, but it’s just an example of one of those schools that’s struggling in this way.
Mark Labberton:
It’s a permeating problem and it does play out pretty vividly, in that case in Sproul Plaza, where so many of the demonstrations at Cal occur and have occurred. Having been in and around Berkeley for 40 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the plaza listening to the evolving character of the sorts of debates that have occurred just in the 40 years that I’ve been around Berkeley. I think this issue of competing agendas and lost agendas really means that for the reasons I think that are related to what you were saying about the absence of this core mission, set of mission and principles and values has just gotten scrambled in such a way that it’s hardly there rhetorically, let alone in any functional kind of way. It’s a significant challenge, I think.
John Inazu:
Well, it made all the harder by the relatively short student life cycle. When you have this turn over every four years or so, you have to keep through liturgies and practices and words reminding your stakeholders in the community of what these purposes are. You can’t count on the speech you gave three years ago holding any weight, and that’s very hard, I think, for leaders and boards to keep in mind. Because you huddle up in your echo chamber and you have some really great conversations and think you’ve worked it out, and then you step outside and realise nobody else in your institution is on board or has had any sense of the process that you’ve just undertaken.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton, thanks for listening with me. I do think that in the conversation about the importance of civility, I think probably because of my experience being a pastor, as much as anything, I’m aware of the way that civility can be used to domesticate experience and emotion and to try to quiet it in such a way that come let us reason together sort of an approach when the raw reality of what people may be experiencing or the fear that is pushing in upon them is discredited by that kind of somewhat dispassionate form of civility.
In a courtroom, passionate argument, I think would be probably ruled out of court in lots of cases because it would feel too extreme to be able to hold the legal argument that might be being made. I guess I’m wondering, in learning to disagree, how do we learn to disagree in civil spaces is an important thing, but how to disagree in passionate places of deep fear, anxiety, bitterness, vulnerability. I know that’s not the primary space that gratefully most of the people that are going to read your book are actually living, but that is a real set of spaces that I would argue millions and millions of people live in every day.
John Inazu:
I love that point. You don’t want to go into the courtroom in the style of My Cousin Vinny. That’s not going to go well for you. There is a domestication of the discourse of law, and in many ways, and I think actually what’s behind this is law as an alternative to unchequeed vigilante violence requires almost a clinical precision in the other direction, and so it matters, and it’s the normative frame that I pick for this book. I love that you pointed out this other dimension because it also codes with gender and racial characteristics as well, and cultural and others, and there is a baseline around a certain Western American highbrow discourse that assumes a rationality or diminished emotion, and in turn suggests that an expression of emotion is somehow a sign of weakness or not playing by the rules, when in fact, sometimes that emotion or even that non-cognitive expression becomes extremely important. This, again, is one of the things I love about the study of the right of assembly.
Assembly doesn’t happen in a purely cognitive rational space. Assembly is about the women’s suffragist movement coming together and performing symbolically all kinds of nonverbal expression. It’s about the Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey and all kinds of disruptions and not just organised marches. There’s a real beauty and potential about the emotive dimension to engaging across difference. The challenge is, I think, and maybe the sweet spot here is to do that in a way that is genuine but also strategic and disciplined in some ways. This is, I think the beauty of the lesson of the Civil Rights Movement is how it can bind so well the multi-dimensional expression and solidarity, but also being purpose-driven and disciplined. If we were to say, now apply that to the Thanksgiving dinner table, is there a way to recognize the complexity of emotion and feeling and honour that and not just insist that we have to stick to a back-and-forth volley of arguments, but at the same time have a broader frame and purpose for it and have a generosity that grounds that in a common enterprise. That would kind of be the ideal. That sounds very hard.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. I’ve recently, for various reasons, spent time listening to anything I can find that’s video footage of Fannie Lou Hamer. Part of it has been to try to understand this point that we’re talking about right now where she comes to places where she needs to play by a different set of rules than the rules that she’s actually living in culturally. She is smart and she’s shrewd and she’s careful about observing the rules of the places to which she wanted to give testimony or witness to the injustices that she and others were experiencing. In the context of that, you can also feel the depth of her emotion that’s just even slightly beneath the surface. It’s controlled, it doesn’t feel threatening, it’s not imposing itself, but there would be no way of listening to her voice for more than 30 seconds without realizing here is a fire burning and now she’s bringing herself in this way. That, she stands out in part because of the beauty and elegance and authenticity of how she held both of those two things together. I’m just curious if that resonate with what you think you just said.
John Inazu:
I love it. It’s a great example. The challenge is people can fake that too. A really good actor could bring that as well. Part of the challenge of human interactions is to distinguish the fakers or the foe actors from the authentic person who combines and blends that. I was also thinking of the term strategic incivility. It is sometimes not playing by the rules of the game, but it is strategically done, and it is blending this strategy with the deep rich humanity of what’s happening in the moment too. Again, distinguishing the fakes from the real ones takes some discernment and work.
Mark Labberton:
In a way describes some of the tensions of the polarization of today because both sides are seeing the other side as being bad actors in this claim of authenticity and both suspect that the other side isn’t really authentic or that their arguments are not legitimate in that way. That then shuts down the possibility of, again, of empathy and understanding because there certainly seems to be plenty of evidence of charlatanism going on. At the same time within that, there are people who are really carrying genuine personal experience and struggle, pain, concern, conviction that is not at all put on, but is associated with others who are, as the charlatan pile on continues to unfold in America.
John Inazu:
This strikes me as one of those examples where both partisan extremes are complicating this issue by claiming that it’s so binary. On the one hand, you have a conservative media lens that is saying all of the identity politics stuff is to be disregarded, and all we care about are the ideas or the discourse. In the extreme other direction, you have people saying, the only truth you can hear is the truth out of my experience, and if you don’t share these identity characteristics, you have nothing relevant to say. Neither of those is very plausible in the real world with real human beings. I think if we were to step away from some of the punditry, we would say, if we start with ordinary experience, we would say neither one of those is true. It has to be somewhere in the middle, and that’s where most of us actually live and operate.
Mark Labberton:
I think that’s a good way of describing what I’ve often observed, and I think it’s fitting with what you just said, and that is this tendency in this era for totalizing where we take whatever our starting point is and we totalize it toward the world and therefore shut down anything that doesn’t fit under the umbrella of our totalizing perspective. That’s what isolates people even further and makes the possibilities of genuine communication and being able to helpfully disagree with one another, almost an impossible thing. Because if you’ve totalized and you refuse to give that up, then the possibility of actually moving toward each other in understanding seems like it’s already been surrendered. Is that over? I know I’m using broad language here.
John Inazu:
No, I actually think you might be understating the problem, unfortunately. Because in the coming months and years, the algorithms and the financial incentives of our online interaction are going to make this all the more the case.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
John Inazu:
If we think we can beat the algorithms or if we think that we can enter into these online spaces and not have this do deep work on our souls and our formation, we’re kidding ourselves and they will absolutely lead us to these totalizing positions. It’s going to speed up, it’s going to be more dense, it’s going to be more comprehensive in our lives, and I think there’s, at some point, we just have to radically sever some of the online engagement.
Mark Labberton:
I just recently had the opportunity to interview Shirley Mullen as a guest on Conversing in relationship to her book Claiming the Courageous Middle. In the conversation I had with her, one of the things that she was trying to argue for is the importance of trying to bring people together in a pursuit of what is true and that truth is something which various positions and arguments claim they’re committed to truth or that they have the truth. What she’s trying to argue for is this way of claiming a middle that does not presuppose that you hold the absolute truth and that you’re trying to instead move toward this middle space, which is different than a middle point. She’s not arguing for a punctilialization of positions, but more to a space in which there’s oxygen for both sides, recognition of both sides but the truth is what’s being pursued. I’m curious in the work that you’re doing in your book, where does truth fit into this, whether it’s about the truth of a legal case or about the truth of the experience being witnessed to or whatever it might be? How does truth figure into disagreement?
John Inazu:
I should first say that I have such tremendous respect for Shirley and this new book of hers, and I think I’m so glad you were able to dialogueue with her about it. I actually think it’s a really important distinction about the middle space versus the middle point. I think very few people who are trying to work in this area are living experiences and beliefs that are at the midpoint of the extremes. We all have our deeply held convictions. It’s the way that we engage in disagreement with a certain temperament or approach, and that’s what’s middle or moderate about it. It’s the approach, not the substance. When we think of truth questions, I think as a first step, and this is maybe a point of humility, we ought to recognize that most of the claims we make about the world are a blend of non-neutral normative claims. There are best judgments about how to get on in the world that combine some facts and some empirical data and a lot of experience and a lot of values, and they’re not provable in the sense of a mathematical equation.
If we go into these conversations saying, this is the truth or this is the just cause, we’re going to have a hard time persuading other people. We’re also going to be making, I would say epistemically shaky claims in those assertions. If we say, here is how I’m trying to live my life based on my best understanding of what I think is good for human beings or human flourishing or the social fabric, that’s more invitational and it’s not surrendering any ultimate truth claims because we can at the same time say, especially as Christians, there is a God and there is truth and one day what we see dimly we will know fully. For now, the best we can do is act in the confidence of what we’ve come to understand and the starting point to say that, that is a non-neutral claim about how we’re getting on in the world, I think is actually an important first step in engagement.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. I do think that’s why that portion of first Corinthians 13 that you just referred to is such an important thing to lift up that we see, but we see through glass darkly that we are not the holders of certainty, even as we claim an absolute God. My knowledge of God is not absolute, and my argument and perception of that God is not absolute, even if God himself is. One of the things that I’ve been wondering is in this experience, you’ve clearly articulated in a very fascinating way in your book the process that you take students through. I guess I’d like if you would be willing to give us a little more personal insight into how you have been shaped and if there’s significant people that taught you by their example about what this means. That could be of course, academically or just in personal life experience. How has this position that you’re describing and that you’ve reflected in each of your other books been formed in you?
John Inazu:
A couple of things come to mind. One is I have never, or I have rarely been fully comfortable in any setting, so I often find myself as someone who loves the institutions of which I’m a part, but also feels a bit outside of them. As a Christian at Washington University, there’s some distance as a professor who’s a member of my church. There’s some distance as almost pacifist who worked at the Pentagon. There’s some differences in both directions, as a Japanese American, my relationship to white culture and also non-white culture. I think part of it is just the lived experience of having to negotiate and understand what majority baselines are when I’m seldom part of them. When you can assume control the narrative, it’s just easy to not be reflective about it. When you have to question or struggle to understand why certain assumptions are the way they are, then I think it causes a greater curiosity and maybe it requires more patience along the way. That’s one thing just from experience and the set of circumstances of life.
Mark Labberton:
That’s very significant.
John Inazu:
I also think though I have been just blessed with friends in my life who are truth tellers and who help me see blind spots sometimes a little more stridently than I would like them to, and this includes family members, but also, good friends. I’ve worked to invite that kind of truth telling because I do think we have these frailties and blind spots and limitations, and it’s not like we’re ever going to reach a point in life where we figured them out and where we can just cheque that box and now not worry about it. I think that at each stage of life to have people, peers who, for whom the power dynamic does not come into play, and also lifelong friends who know you really well and who know where you’ve been and where you’ve gone, and just invite that truth telling and then be ready to hear what they have to say.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, exactly. That’s really interesting because I do think what you really have given a picture of is really an ecosystem that is made of many, many parts, all of which have contributed in certain ways to that in a way critical distance of not being submerged and fully identified with any given place or circumstance that you may have occupied, but also, the benefit of really close relationships over time that do this formative work, which I think is what the fruit of your book is really about. It’s your work and it’s the work of the community of people and other influences that have shaped you.
John Inazu:
I love that. That’s great. I should have gotten you to blurb that for me. That’s beautiful.
Mark Labberton:
I do think that one of the things that we’re facing right now is just this rhetorical frenzy that is going in completely opposite directions to anything that you’re trying to argue for in the book. It is high testosterone, it is highly technological, it’s rampant, doesn’t even begin to capture it. It’s literally consuming the world, and especially political speech. Beyond political speech, it is also really a major problem. It’s like a wild virus. COVID would seem mild by comparison to some of the rhetorical viruses that are being passed around.
I guess I’m just wondering from your point of view as you write a book that is about such an important topic and you’re trying to give handles to a process of change and to the issues that can bring about change and help in teaching people to be formed in a way in which we can all learn to disagree in far better and more constructive ways. I’m just wondering, what is the large antidote? Apart from your book itself, what is the antidote that if you could apply to this moment would potentially try to change or have influenced to change these circumstances which are literally running wild and have no boundaries at all?
John Inazu:
I wish I had a great answer to that. I think the only answer is a lot of very small and very personal efforts where individual lives change postures, and in the aggregate, they start to contribute to social change with storytelling and exemplars and costly practices in that direction. I think it maybe starts with just some basic human recognitions. You mentioned fear earlier, our fears, our loneliness, our desire for affirmation and acceptance, and that when we can name that in ourselves and in our political opponents and our family members and then our neighbours, and then work toward relationship. I don’t think it’s generalizable though, it’s not top down. This is the polarization and the social challenges we’re feeling are ultimately issues of the human heart and individual people.
Mark Labberton:
I agree with what you’ve just said, and I think that is the circumstance. I’m actually a strong believer in those small incremental steps. I’ve been meditating a fair amount in recent months with the metaphor that Jesus uses, that the kingdom of God is like yeast and how differently we would understand the nature of the church and its mission in the world if we actually allowed that to be our dominant metaphor rather than empire, which fairly quickly became one of the primary metaphors of how the church was meant to be in the world and how the church styled itself, built itself, institutionalized itself was really out of a very different set of instincts than yeast, which is much more the small 2% tiny incremental small movement toward something really being changed.
John Inazu:
Can I, just on that point?
Mark Labberton:
Please, yes.
John Inazu:
This, to me, is such a critical point, and it’s an exegetical point about how American Christians read scripture in the New Testament. Because as people, especially majority culture, white Protestant Christians who have assumed a cultural baseline that is so different than the ones in which the New Testament writers operated, that creates such an impediment for how we understand scripture written to a community that wasn’t in charge and wasn’t stark, and it had to be the yeast because they didn’t have the option of empire. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in our own hermeneutic because of that stark difference. There are places we can turn to listen to other people who can read and understand differently.
Mark Labberton:
Extend that comment a little bit further. Say more about what you think the consequences of doing what you’re describing would be.
John Inazu:
Well, I think if American Christians started listening more to the Global Church, for example, or to faith communities in this country that have never been in control, and then they would open themselves up to readings of scripture and formational practices that are more consonant with maybe what the writers of the New Testament were thinking as. This isn’t to say that obviously God can work through all cultures and all peoples, but there is something peculiar about trying to assume an understanding of scripture from a baseline of control or empire, and there’s something radically imaginative and inspiring about trying to do the alternative. The way that I’ve been thinking about it recently with some friends, including Matt Kaemingk and other people we both know in common, is the question of how do we think about living neighbourly and faithfully in a world that we don’t control? I think that gets us maybe closer to the starting point than the question that some Christians today are asking.
Mark Labberton:
I think this is what I’ve been meaning when I’ve been talking recently about the importance of understanding that our identity should be more like live life as exiles rather than life in the Promised Land, and that life as exiles, which is what the Global Church really understands itself to be, they’re definitely strangers in a strange land. They’re outsiders to the context that they live in. They are minority populations. They have little influence and power and certainly very little authority typically, and in those contexts, they have much more like as you’re saying, and your testament frame of understanding what life in the kingdom of God is really going to look like, then the assumptions of power and the presumptions of that kind of social location. I do think that maybe in closing, I’d love to have you comment on what I think is to me a potential catalyst for change, and it has to do with leaders, but it also has to do with ideas, and that is just the whole field of imagination.
It feels to me like there are examples in history, of course, of people often or movements that have been able to project a certain imaginative hope that has caught fire in a way that didn’t arise necessarily as an antidote, but became an antidote to what were other kinds of cultural feelings and habits and practices and assumptions that were present and somehow, sometimes like a brush fire, that sort of imaginative picture will unfold in a way that people can really hold onto. Now, this can be used corruptly. I get that. There’s plenty of examples. You could say Hitler did this, but there’s other positive examples of this as well. I wonder, as you think about learning to disagree, what is the role of imagination and how do we use it constructively for the sake of being able to envision a hope in the future?
John Inazu:
I think it’s quarter individual encounters because imagination is a prerequisite to seeing the fullness of the human beings across from us, and it requires a kind of generosity of interpretation and a willingness to let go of our own blinders. I like aspirationally the ideal that it could lead to cultural change as well through narratives. The struggle and the question I have is how do those narratives spread given our fractured media environment and our lack of trust and authority, and frankly, the sheer number of dollars that are invested in networks that are committed to almost the opposite of imagination. At the end of the day, God is powerful and creative and can work imaginatively, but on a purely human level, I have some doubts about how that works culturally right now.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Back to the yeast rather than to the control.
John Inazu:
Yes, indeed.
Mark Labberton:
John, thank you so much for being a guest today. This has really been stimulating. I certainly want to commend the book again to all of the listeners, Learning to Disagree by John Inazu. John, I’ll be eager to follow how this unfolds and how your own work continues to contribute so much to the public square as a Christian, as a lawyer, as a professor, as a person who takes these matters with great seriousness, your contributions have meant a lot to me personally and I know to many other readers. Thank you again for being here today.
John Inazu:
Mark, thanks so much and it was great to be with you.
