Deborah Tannen who is my resource person in gender issues and understanding how gender affects ethical action states that any time that two men are in conversation that competition tends to power the exchange as two men compete for status. When two women are in conversation their exchanges usually attempt to make a connection as they use language to connect and support.
Women tend to listen more as they are building a connection with another. Men will bounce around on issues seeking to gain the upper hand.
Gender issues like race are not biological. They are derived from the culture in which we were raised as well as the culture in which we find ourselves today. Women can have the male conversation pattern and men can have the female conversation pattern.
I believe that the above patterns are the reason that it is so difficult to achieve a bipartisan decision in Congress. John Boehner, a Former Speaker of the House, is making this point in his recent book, On The House. The people who he describes in government are caricatures of men seeking status.
Trump is now the head of the Republican Party that is seeking a way to regain its status of the good old days. It is Trump’s culture now. If we want to see the dynamic of men in conversation in the extreme just think of Trump’s exchanges with others. “Only I can make America Great Again.” Women who follow him are quick to accept this competition style. The women in the Republican Party are meeting this weekend in Florida with none other than Matt Gaetz addressing the group, a person alleged to have been involved in the sex trafficking of women. There was a backdrop of a photograph of the January insurrection attempt for all to see as they entered the women’s conference. They saw that event as a patriotic act even now. They unfortunately have adopted the male way of seeing the world. Think for a moment. Were those people, men and women, attacking the capitol seeking connection or status?
We hear shades of that classic line in My Fair Lady, “Why can’t a woman be just like man?” If that happens, we will never see bipartisan actions in Washington.
If Ethics is based on the pillars of justice and love, who is most likely to enter into conversation that achieves those two ethical principles? Clearly Biden operates more from a support and connection mode of conversation and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi both seem to be interested in power and status as a way to achieve those two pillars. For a brief moment Mitch forgot that times have changed when he told business to stay out of politics. This was certainly a move to get the upper hand and status. Business’ reaction was to spank him until he finally said that “he didn’t express his thinking well.” It’s a new day, Mitch! Pelosi, on the other hand, has figured out that sometimes getting into a spitting contest with men doesn’t work.
When I was in graduate school for counseling psychology, my group had group therapy several times a week to determine how we came across so that we could adopt more enabling conversation interpersonal styles. This was a hard-hitting experience. People would leave a session in tears because a hard truth about how others perceived them came their way.
Since my mother may have invented group therapy as she would always confront anyone with whom she differed, I was very comfortable with the whole process. This was the world in which I was raised with a mother who was very male in conversational style and a father who was very female in conversational style.
My supervisor who was a very skilled and tough guy and I clashed on a regular basis. There is a song that I hear on the radio called “I won’t back down!” performed by Tom Petty in 1989. One of the lyrics is, “You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.” Every time I hear it, I begin to smile because of a truth I learned about me from my supervisor of the group. In one of our individual one on one meetings, he said, “Jim, competition! It’s my issue too! You and I have to stop competing with one another for who is going to run the show!” I learned the hard way how much status and competition entered my conversational style with other men.
There are three big thinkers in political ethics. Politics is about distribution of power, who has it, and how do I get it. We have to come to a fundamental understanding of how people are built which we see in their style of communication. Thomas Hobbes said that humankind is competitive and glory seeking with one person having the power, the Leviathan, a mortal God. Locke, on whom our government is based, saw people as basically cooperative with a desire to help one another, and Rousseau saw humankind as not only good but great giving us that guideline that “the government that governs best, governs least.” Since you can trust us to do the right thing, we don’t need much government. He called us the “noble savage.”
If we want to have less gridlock in Washington, perhaps we need to change the question in that musical, My Fair Lady, to “Why can’t a man be more like a woman?” That conversational style that grows out of the cooperative spirit could lead to the support of one party for another as well as co-operation, justice, and love defined as “willing the neighbor’s good.” However, there is also an important ingredient in gender issues that we could use in fewer amounts. Tannen says, “That women never forget an injustice. Men, on the other hand, get quick closure and move on.” We saw that clearly in Biden’s choice of Harris who went after him in the Democratic Debate. He said, “I don’t hold grudges!”
Can you imagine if politicians in Washington understood these principles! The underlying principle of group therapy is that once you become aware of how you are acting that is unhelpful, you do less of it. Certain situations, however, will bring it out again. My supervisor and I never challenged one another after he pointed out how too much competition and a quest for status can be counter-productive for me and others! It is like having a wild horse locked in a stable that only comes out when I need to ride it! We all have a variation of that, men as well as women. What’s yours?
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