Big differences, small tent
I spent six nights in an uncompromisingly small tent with an old friend. We disagreed relentlessly, and enjoyed it. How can this sort of environment be recreated in more typical conditions?
Last month I spent six nights in an uncompromisingly small tent with an old friend. He is not vaccinated. I am. He voted for the winner of the 2016 presidential election and the loser of the 2020 election. I voted in opposite ways. He listens to Ben Shapiro’s podcast. I listen to Ezra Klein’s.
In that small tent at night, and on trails during the day, we argued a lot. We went back and forth about race, policing, wealth, gender, education, guns, the sources of our information, and much more. There were moments when one of us became impatient with the other for making no sense, or raising his voice, or talking too much, or saying the same thing again and again, or for the sheer incomprehensible stupidity or malignity of his beliefs.
But these moments were followed, invariably, with shared and genuine laughter, shared and mediocre food, and enthusiastic return to more conversation. How could this be so? How is it that, in so many instances, I and so many people I know and hear about choose either to yell at or talk smack about people we disagree with, while in this particular instance, my old friend and I chose to talk with each other rather than about or at each other, and to do so more rather than less, even as the differences in our beliefs and opinions continued to emerge?
One obvious reason for this is that he is an old friend. We go back 35 years, and the trust we started to develop when we first became friends has deepened as we’ve moved through different phases of our different lives. I know him and trust him as a person, even when I don’t share this or that opinion he espouses, or the combination of them. Time matters.
Another reason—almost certainly related to how long we’ve been friends—is that whatever one of us said or however the other one responded, we were both able to laugh. We cracked up for good reasons and no reasons. This shared laughter, in light moments and tense moments, made it possible for us to get back to the difficult stuff. The laughter seemed to serve as a release and also a reminder.
A third reason, and one that seems less obvious to me, is the size of the tent that we shared. It was, as I have already said, small. Every time he blew his nose, I felt like a tissue. Every time I snored, he thought about reaching for his phone in the dark to record it—and then, the last night of our trip, he did so, and gleefully played the recording for me in the cold, dark, early morning to wake me up. The tent was so small that our experience of it was nearly identical. It was a deeply shared experience, so however much we differed on the subjects we talked about, we also held in common the absurd and uncomfortable experience of being unavoidably aware of another person’s every sound and move. And we shared the trails, too, the uphills and the downhills and the views and sounds they took us through.
Something else we shared is that we felt safe with each other. The large knife on my friend’s shoulder strap, the smaller knife on his belt, and the telescoping steel baton on the other side of his belt—these did not make me feel safe, but I knew that underneath these weapons, he wanted me to be safe, healthy, and happy, and I wanted the same for him. So even when we disagreed, we did not feel threatened by each other. This mutual wish for safety and well-being could be due to a whole host of factors: we’re both middle-aged white guys from Chicago; we know each other well; we saw no way in which the happiness of one would detract from the happiness of the other; and so on. But what I want to emphasize here is not the causes of this feeling of safety so much as the fact of it and what it meant for our capacity to keep disagreeing with each other.
This sense of safety may be related to the other big reason we were able to keep talking with each other even as we continued to disagree about serious subjects: we both went into the trip with appreciation for the time we would spend together. We’ve lived across the country from each other for decades, and we’ve been pretty buried in our families, our jobs, and our lives, so this time together felt like a rare opportunity. We wanted to get to know and understand each other as we are now, and we both felt lucky to have the chance to do so. This sense of appreciation for the time we would spend together felt like the opposite of how people talk about jury duty and so many other activities and encounters in public.
Since returning to regular life from the time I spent with my friend, I've been wondering: can we, in situations where we don’t have longtime friendship as a foundation, engineer into being some of these reasons or conditions for talking across differences? Can we build familiarity or laughter or shared experience or a sense of safety or mutual appreciation into our encounters with people who are not already our friends? Can we see others as potential friends, or at least as neighbors, even or especially when we don’t yet know these people or don’t feel confident that they have our good rather than our harm in mind? Can we look at jury duty, and many other public encounters, more like my friend and I looked at this trip: as opportunities to get to know each other better and understand each other and ourselves more deeply?
My short and predictable answer to this question is a qualified Yes. I believe that we can make it more likely that at least one or two of these conditions will be present in our public encounters. And I’ve seen from my experience with Oregon Humanities and other bridging organizations that we can work from one or two of these conditions toward the others as well. But creating these conditions takes real, ongoing work, the specific content of which I will say more about in my next post for The Oregon Way.
By way of preview, I’ll just say that, in most cases, this work does not depend on sharing an uncompromisingly small tent. And to conclude this current post, I should mention that my friend and I were also able to continue to disagree and talk with each other about difficult subjects because we were not trying to craft policy together or to resolve our differences in some binding and practical way. As is almost always the case, we were talking about this stuff because we were trying to understand our world, each other, and ourselves, rather than because we had to design and implement a particular policy or course of action. But if we did have to negotiate our differences in order to design policy or a particular course of action—or whenever any of us do have to do this—then there is all the more reason to stay in conversation when the conversation, or the disagreement, gets difficult.
Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.