Crime and Punishment

Season 1 Finale: Rob Danisch's favorite teacher chastised him for being too emotional during a debate about a book.  

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Transcript

Michael Lee: [00:00:00] Fact, value, and policy. Many of our disagreements fall in one of these three categories. What happened, how we make meaning about what happened, and what should we do. Let's examine the second type of those disputes. Value based disputes. These types of disagreements involve our ethics, our morality, our political and religious beliefs, our ideologies.

What happens in many arguments is that each party throws fact after fact after fact at the other one. But they talk past each other because they are each pushing for different sets of values. Maybe one person is driven by equality while another is driven by individuality. Maybe one person is pushing for fairness while the other one wants safety.

We may even agree on sets of facts. We're running out of money. You [00:01:00] lied to me. Immigration is increasing. Crime is decreasing. You name it. But the disagreement over fact is just one step and maybe not even the most important one. What's vital, assuming you want to maintain a relationship or try to be persuasive is to find a mutually agreeable value.

And look at the world through that shared point of view. I'm Michael Lee, professor of communication and director of the civility initiative at the college of Charleston. Today's guest is Rob Danish, professor of communication arts at the university of Waterloo. He is the author of beyond civility, the competing obligations of citizenship and a forthcoming book called living democracy, how communication systems shape political culture.

Rob, tell us an argument story. 

Rob Danisch: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I think I think a really simple story that goes back a long time until I was when I was about 17. Um, my favorite English teacher in the history of my education, who had an enormous [00:02:00] impact on me, uh, was teaching crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky.

And we all had to read it, and I was one of those kids that talked an awful lot in class. And we got to the epilogue of the book, and I hated it. I hated the epilogue so much, I hated the ending. And I just had this outburst in class, like, this is an awful book, like And she was like, Rob, you have to stop talking.

You're not You're not contributing to class constructively right now. And I got so mad at her. I was like, you can't, you can't say that to me. I'm the best student in the class. Like I'm carrying the conversation here. And she's like, no, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the room if you don't stop talking.

And I got really, really even more upset. So I, I like, I had to leave the room and I was like, I don't like you as a teacher anymore. This is terrible experience. Um, and she came back to me later on and kind of, we talked about it a little bit, but she was like, you were being way too emotional and you were, scaring the other [00:03:00] students and nobody else had a chance to talk.

And she's, it's my responsibility to make sure all the students are participating in the conversation. And I wanted to talk about the quality of the episode of Crime and Punishment. I was like, but you're not listening. You're not hearing my argument. Like it didn't make sense in relationship to the rest of the book.

Like I wanted to have this kind of robust debate about that piece of literature. And she was talking about something else. And. I don't think we ever squared it. Like I, I don't think she ever addressed my, what I thought was substantive concern. I never addressed her stylistic maybe concern or a structural concern.

And I regret that we never, we never sorted that kind of argument out. Uh, we just sort of talked past one another for a long time. Um, so that's the story that's just stuck with me for 30 years. And part of my academic career is like making sense of that interaction too, I think. 

Michael Lee: What was your objection to the epilogue, out of curiosity?

Rob Danisch: Well, the redemption part, like, the, the, the, [00:04:00] the way Dostoevsky turned to religion in the end didn't seem to make sense to me in relationship to the character. And I was like, there's a structural or formal problem in the text. And that's what I mean, like, I really wanted to talk about the, like, I wanted to have an argument about the formal properties of a piece of literature.

Um, And to me that, that was like this contradiction and like great authors couldn't, couldn't write in those kind of contradictory ways, like it all had to hang together 

Michael Lee: for me. You think that the turn to religion, this redemptive arc doesn't make sense with what's preceded it in the text. You say so. Did you, do you think that you said so vociferously, angrily?

Rob Danisch: Yeah, that's the problem. I think I said so, like, I think I loved the book until the last 20 pages and what was happening for me is like this thing that I loved, like became something that I didn't think that it was, and I had this kind of emotional response to that. And I think my teacher was trying to tell me, Hey, like the classroom, you're having an emotional [00:05:00] response.

You think you're making this kind of formal substantive argument, but it's coming from this emotional space. And that confusion, I think kind of set off for me, like a lot of questions that I'm still trying to answer. Um, in my own scholarship and my own teaching and in certain ways. 

Michael Lee: Putting the best, most charitable version of her argument together.

What was, was her case that you're welcome to make these arguments provided you're doing so in a very serene, rational way? 

Rob Danisch: Yeah, I think so. I think she wanted it to be more like a philosophy seminar. And I wasn't having it. I was, I was, Like, no, sometimes emotions are fine. And sometimes, you know, we feel things in response to texts and that's okay.

Um, and she wasn't quite, and that's what I mean, we never quite squared that, you know, we never came to see eye to eye on that sort of problem. 

Michael Lee: Did you feel, was there some part of you, let's talk for a minute about your emotional investment in the text, because I'm [00:06:00] interested in the fact that it sounds like you both agreed that you were speaking from an emotional point of view.

You were communicating emotion and however, your criticisms of Dostoevsky were coming across. Do you agree on that? And then the question is, is that appropriate in the learning environment that she was hoping to cultivate? 

Rob Danisch: Yeah. And I think for me, I, I still want it to be appropriate. Like I want people to have, I want my own students to be able to have.

Emotionally charged reactions and thoughts to a text or to a problem that we're working on, and I don't think I could articulate this at the time, but like I was trying to say no, like we should be allowed to have this in the classroom too, and I think she was trying to say, well, not exactly, you know, it's, it's not the safest space for that or the best place for that.

And yeah, so I think that that's become a kind of preoccupation of my own study of communication and when and how these kinds of passionate arguments unfold in public spaces [00:07:00] and whether that's okay and like what that has to look like, etc. 

Michael Lee: That's right. And she seems to have, if I'm hearing you correctly, seems to have articulated a kind of even split between this is a reasonable argument and this is an emotional argument.

Emotional arguments are potentially destructive. It's certainly not constructive for learning about Dostoyevsky or biology or anything. Yeah, I think that was 

Rob Danisch: her position. Yeah, I think that's well 

Michael Lee: stated. Um, 

Rob Danisch: you're speaking emotionally. 

Michael Lee: And so she actually left, made you leave the room. 

Rob Danisch: Yeah. Yeah. Which was new for me.

Like I was a good student, you know, I didn't, I didn't like that very much. 

Michael Lee: And the way you present, Today, frankly, coming across, it's difficult for me to imagine. 

Rob Danisch: I was a more difficult. Well, I, I, I thought of that, um, part of that example, because I was a very argumentative teenager, like a very difficult, difficult teenager.

Um, and I'm much less. It's much more kind of constructive or accommodating now and something kind of evolved in me over time, but I [00:08:00] don't, I don't feel embarrassed or like I don't feel bad about that, that difficulty like I have my own teenagers have some of that in them and I'm proud of it when I see it like I don't think people should shy away of those strong feelings and thoughts.

Um, even though I've mellowed some in the intervening years, I guess. 

Michael Lee: I want to, I want to sidebar this bigger discussion about reason and emotion and come back to it for just a second and ask. on a personal level about reasonable expressions versus emotional expressions. After that, after you were asked to leave the room and relatively disciplined for feeling an emotional investment in a text and then communicating that, did you ever have similar instances where you felt strongly about an argument or a controversy or a text and you're in public, maybe a class, maybe not, maybe in a relationship?

And he thought, You know, I should really get ahold of this because I don't want to have to leave the room again. 

Rob Danisch: The same thing. So something very similar happened to me in university in my second [00:09:00] year in a university history seminar, uh, where I, I can't remember the texture, but I was making a kind of passionate argument about whatever it is we were reading.

And it didn't get quite that bad, but the teacher was like, Rob, shut up. Like, we don't want to hear that anymore. And I had that flashback to the same argument and I guess I was a little older because. I handled it a little more constructively than I did at the time. Um, but yeah, I, I, I don't feel like that's unusual to me.

Like I, I talked to my students about this and they'll tell me too, that they have these moments where they feel like things get a little too heated. They have to stop talking. Um, and so in my years between like 15 and 25, I would say that that was not uncommon, uh, or unusual, like it happened a couple of times, versions of that.

Yeah. Maybe not to the extent, but in versions. 

Michael Lee: And then in your own work, and maybe in your own practice too, where it seems like if I'm [00:10:00] hearing you correctly, you're saying when we should communicate how strongly we feel that that we have emotional responses to the values we're pushing for, for the texts that we read, that we're not computers.

Yeah, arguing in binary code and that the reason we care about these things in the first place is that we have an emotional investment in the outcome, and we should share that. 

Rob Danisch: Yeah, like, I think as humans, we are emotional creatures, and that's not a bad thing. Um, I think that difficulty is that those emotions could be destructive of relationships when they run too hot or get too intense, right?

So there's this balance between managing, positively managing a relationship, yet not giving in or giving up on those things, those core values or core beliefs that you have. You know, to this day, I think that the crime, the ending of crime and punishment is a bad one. And if you think it's a good one, like you and I might disagree about that.

But I want to do that in a way that. We can maintain a kind [00:11:00] of constructive relationship yet felt the kind of freedom to express that disagreements. Uh, and that's a delicate balance of the difficult thing to do to achieve communication. 

Michael Lee: Well, lucky for me, I've never read it, so I don't have to mix it up with you.

Um, let's ask about Let's say it's come up on the show several times now That when somebody gives an example of an argument that they didn't particularly like You Whether they were in an argument with somebody they had a negative experience with, or even when they're kind of self reflecting on a time when they didn't like their own performance in a dispute.

Emotion bad. Reason good. If I could change anything, I would go back and I would suck all the emotions that I expressed out of that exchange or try to convince another person that they should be less emotional when they argue with me. 

Rob Danisch: Yeah. 

Michael Lee: What do you say to that? 

Rob Danisch: Uh, I think that's a really difficult, you're asking a lot of yourself.

To do that, if you were in a position of saying, I wish I could suck the emotion out of this, [00:12:00] and I think that's almost an impossible asking in some ways, um, I think the way I think about it is, how can I constructively articulate these emotions? What are the communication practice or what are the rhetorical practices I have available to me so that I can hold on to them, express them well, and at all at the same time not kind of cause a sense of alienation or defensiveness in the person that I'm in conversation with.

That to me is a skill. It's a learned skill. It's a difficult skill to learn. Um, but, It doesn't ask you to just extirpate your emotions from the get go. It asks you to figure out a way to formulate them, articulate them in constructive fashion, and I do a lot of work with my students on that sort of thing in our, some of my classes with um, like I teach small group communication and they have to do, it's an active class, they're, they're in small group Talking and they get heated sometimes they and they yell at one another, get upset [00:13:00] with one another, and it's not that I don't want them to feel heated.

It's that I want them to figure out that constructive ground on which they can positively manage that interaction with the emotions still present. 

Michael Lee: You said, you mentioned two, the same word twice and I want just a quick elaboration on what you mean by constructive. One of the themes that's come up and both in the, in the world of bridge building and depolarization, but also in the show pretty consistently is how to disagree while staying in relationship.

When I hear you say constructive, that's kind of where my head goes is can I communicate my emotions and my, my good reasons, hopefully my evidence in a way that facilitates you and I to stay in relationship. Is that a fair way to talk about this? 

Rob Danisch: I think it means two things, actually. I think that's part of it.

I think the first part of it is that can we maintain a positive relationship, positive regard for one another in the presence of that disagreement. But I also think it means partly can we be productive in our disagreement. And by productive, I mean, sort [00:14:00] of, on one sense, non defensive. So, uh, I teach a lot about defensive reasoning and stuff.

Sort of like I accidentally made fun of Taylor Swift in class the other day. My students were like, you can't do that. Taylor Swift is the greatest. And then I got defensive. I was like, no, she's terrible. Like we got locked in our positions and it wasn't productive. Right. So we could have gotten engaged in a productive conversation about like.

Well, what is a good Taylor Swift song look like? What is she doing for you that, like, I'm not seeing? How do you want me to see her differently than I see her? So can we, by constructive, I mean, can we have a positive relationship and can we reason productively together so that we're kind of revising some of our more extreme or intense positions?

Michael Lee: As we close, I'd like to give you a hypothetical scenario and see how you handle it. And it's probably something that's happened before. Let's So, you have a student in a class you're teaching [00:15:00] who is having a very strong reaction to a text. Maybe it's a text you quite like. And they're saying that this is really not a great piece of work.

They're doing so in a way that you think, Might be giving others maybe a fence or just perhaps making them uncomfortable because you're doing so loudly or vociferously or using strong, they are using strong language to object to this text. What do you do or say to that student? 

Rob Danisch: Yeah, so I think two things.

One, I always try and say, like, I appreciate you talking to me about this. Like, I appreciate you bringing this up because I want to reward them for saying out loud that thing. Um, I think that first step is a way of demonstrating care and interest in the student's position perspective. Um, but the second thing I'll do is, Also, I want them to be careful about the text, so I'll try and get them to be specific to point to the passage, the line, the word, [00:16:00] that particularly gets under their skin, so we can do a close, kind of careful analysis of what's going on.

So if I can pivot to that kind of careful analysis, I think that's the moment of like productive reasoning together. Um, It doesn't always work, but like, you know, and that can be effort, it can be hard to do that, like they don't want to do that because they want to sit in that anger or frustration with the thing, but pivoting to kind of care about the text and the specificity of it can do a lot of constructive work, I think.

Michael Lee: I'm interested in that there's no, and I don't, I'm not recommending this, but I'm interested in that. It's not here in the sense that part of at least the hypothetical example, and part of the example you led the show with was your teacher was almost like acting as the savior of the audience. Protecting them from the negative feelings that you were allegedly causing.

And then in this hypothetical example where you're the teacher, and you think maybe people [00:17:00] are, are taking offense, or they, they're shifting in their seats uncomfortably because the student is being pretty loud. You, you're not going to do much to say, look, you're giving offense, or think about how they feel, or giving them the right to say, yeah, I didn't really like that very much.

You'd say, thank you for sharing this with me. Honored by your opinion. Let's get specific about our reasons. 

Rob Danisch: Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't thought about it the way you just framed it and I don't want to cast aspersions on my old English teacher who I love dearly. And I do think I'd probably do it differently than she would have done it.

Yeah, so I, I think that's, that's fair. And I want to be in that space that looks more like what I described than what happened to me. Um, although she was a great teacher. So yeah, I think that's a fair description. 

Michael Lee: Rob Danisch. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you very much.

When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. [00:18:00] Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree at gmail. com.