• The chance to consider many sides of an issue strengthens our conclusions and political commitments.

• The chance to consider many sides of an issue strengthens our conclusions and political commitments.

# Acknowledge the dominant ideas. For instance, research among U.S. soldiers indicated that, where they already held strong opinions, simply repeating those ideas reinforced their beliefs. When they heard single-sided arguments against their position, they simply dismissed them as biased. (Politicians do continue to fund attack ads despite their crudity; but here the purpose is not to change our votes, but to discourage us from voting at all.) Propaganda that exposed listeners to both sides of an argument was the most effective in changing minds, and this has been confirmed in later studies. “Regardless of whether they agree or disagree with the position advocated, individuals exposed to two-sided communications are more resistant to later counterpropaganda than are individuals exposed to one-sided communication. . . . Two-sided communications not only expose individuals to counterarguments but to the refutations of those counterarguments . . . ” (Atkinson 748).

This is just what you'd expect. We're aware of both flimsy attacks on our ideas and flimsy defenses. Once we make up our minds after considering both or several sides of a position --or what seem to be the different positions-- we feel more confident about our conclusions and are less likely to change them.

Psychologist William McGuire called this preemptive presenting of counterarguments "inoculation," comparing it to the way doctors vaccinate us with weakened viruses to prevent us from getting the full-blown sickness. Other studies noted that even “a simple forewarning that they are about to receive a communication with which they will disagree . . . . is sufficient to produce resistance to it” (749).

The right wing knows all this perfectly well, as I found in teaching biology to Christians,* and as we can hear every day on the radio. The lying liars will often misrepresent the liberals' or the Democrats' positions on the issues, propping up straw men for easy attack. (“They just hate America,” says my favorite talk show host.) But when they can't lie outright, and have absolutely no viable counterargument, they might simply summarize the liberals with tones of ridicule. Is there a Joseph Goebbels School of Broadcasting where they go to practice sneering?

Talk show host: Take it from me, what you're going to hear from the Democrats is that George Washington was the first president. No kidding! *snort*. Then they'll tell you a lot of people watch TV! *laugh track* They'll just say anything. Listen, I have to play this for you:

Democrat: Children need loving care.

Talk show host: Can you believe it? That's the kind of thing they're trying to sell us right now.

What I haven't read is how effective this particular tactic is among the general public. Murdoch and them keep using it; they must think it works. And we know that caricatures persist even when folks meet the real thing. We know people who hire or smoke with or marry liberals, Jews, black people . . . and will still spout the caricatures they've been taught, and vote for the trainers.

We sure as Sheol can’t combat rightist simplifications with cartoons of our own. It hurts our credibility to talk in one-sided terms, as we sometimes do, about the glories of consensus decision-making, the hemisphere-wide revolution that will break out any day (led by Bolivia and Venezuela), the monolithic natures of Zionism or rightist Christianity, the imminent risk of becoming robots, the inherent peaceability of people, if we were just left alone to do our own thing . . . . It’s not just a matter of being realistic ourselves. Other folks will notice the gap between our leftish tales and the conventional stories they hear. I would hope no one would simply drop their customary formulas for different versions without trying to account for the differences.

Nor is it enough to point out the losers in all these geopolitical games-- the Iraqi kids starved during the economic sanctions against Hussein in the 1990s, Asians who eat the pollution we have exported along with our manufacturing base, the one-time steelworkers here who now make their fortunes grooming pets or selling chips at convenience stores, immigrants hauled away in ICE vans. “No pain, no gain” has been the West’s mantra at least since Calvinist merchants made their first million gulders, the first lesson in our public schools, and, not incidentally, the only realistic understanding of democratic revolution (see "Omelet", below).

There’s also the argument that, since we are bombarded daily with corporate, racist and patriarchal ideologies, we have no need to re-present them to each other in a scholarly search for balance. We don’t have the time or resources. And that makes total sense to me. Political change is not an academic debate among equally respectable positions. Nor can we let racism, sexism and militarism set the agenda and the terms of debate.

At the same time, we can’t counter the core lies without acknowledging them and how they’re coded in our brains. Maybe for kids isolated in some rural commune somewhere it might work to talk about Walmart solely in terms of neoliberalism, but most of us are going to want to know what’s wrong with a economic model that promises cheap goods for gringos and industrial jobs for the poor oppressed Chinese. Why should we responsible citizens pay for a bunch of handouts to the millions (like us) with no jobs, homes or health care? Why not rebuild nuclear power, so long as all the safeguards are in place? A lawyer here points out how ICE has cleverly conflated the issues of undocumented immigration with the much greater problems of identity theft as well as terrorism. What else can we do to combat terrorism but deport the cleaning staff and seize Mideast oil fields for ourselves? Well here I am making my own caricatures. My point is, there’s little opening for new ideas unless they bear some relation, even in opposition, to the old. It’s the old ideas we start with in our heads.

Here the self-appointed emissaries from Halliburton --you know them, there’s one in every crowd, they want to be sure that we give a fair hearing to Karl Rove and Fox News-- can really prove their worth. (I take it back. It’s too easy to label a lot of these folks as errand boys for the corporations. I believe most are simply struggling to reconcile the corporate perspectives they hear every day, and largely accept as “common sense,” with the realities which so rudely intrude. Let’s just call them parrots.) In these circumstances the parrots can serve us. Even those of us who disagree with Halliburton often think like Halliburton --how could we not? its values permeate the language-- and it’s very important to get the official line on the table, so we can examine it together in the light of day. This is especially effective with folks like me who are still trying to figure things out.

In any case, once we've laid our guts on the table and poked them around, it’s time to move on. Democracy and justice are not simply No to Halliburton, rejecting old lies, and we can’t let the death party set our agenda. Once in a while those most anxious to cling to their misunderstandings will try to hold up a discussion while other people are ready to move on. In structured discussions, it’s a matter of some skill for facilitators to judge the right moment to move the discussion (quite aside from the question of who is speaking, or not, and who is taking up too much space). Often other participants will take the initiative to (politely, usually) get the conversation back on track.


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ *~* Omelet. *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Revolutionaries of democratic and corporatist stripes have one big idea in common: that to get to a better society, some people are going to be hurt in the process.

You can find an early version in the Bible, where one of the Jewish gods promises to give Abraham trillions of conquering descendants, as a reward for Abraham’s willingness to murder his son. Not nearly so long ago it was the Bolsheviks: “You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.” So they killed and jailed millions on the promise of paradise for the survivors. Now it’s corporations and their “conservative” servants who keep telling us what a great thing economic change is. As vast as have been the economic and cultural innovations in the half century since I was a kid, I know that people born in this century will see change at an almost breathless pace.

Most of us understand that change is hard, and that sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs. The U.S. Constitution, that’s a good thing, and putting it into practice even better, hard as that is to do. Antibiotics, clean tap water, cheap books: I like ‘m. Some novelties hurt more than they help: HMOs, nuclear waste, sex tourism, lining the Mississippi with concrete, turning forests into parking lots; superbug-breeding antibiotic kitchen soaps; the invention of agriculture?

The questions must always be: who initiates the change, who benefits, and who pays? What do we do to help the folks who bear the brunt of the costs? And we have to ask these questions of democrats as well as capitalists. If neo-liberal trade agreements hurt more people than they help, we have to ask the same question about protectionism. If political revolution can help more people than it hurts, we have to consider the possibility that corporation-driven technological change can do the same. And since all the putative benefits accrue in the nearer or farther future, we also have to question the models we generate to help us see the future. What are the assumptions, and how realistic are they? What does this change look like in the second generation, and the seventh?

I remember a friend saying, with reference to globalization, “I read that almost every Chinese household has a refrigerator now. That’s a good thing. We should be happy about that.”

I like refrigerators. I have one myself. I can’t imagine life without it; it saves me huge amounts of time and money. But refrigerators tend not to drop from heaven on their own. They come with TVs and a/c and power plants and pollution and climate change. So the assumption that refrigerators simply help us keep food longer is incomplete. Who benefits and who pays, now and in the future?

Not easy questions to answer about any change, but we must insist on realistic projections before we accept such proposals from do-gooders, dictators or developers. We might even have to decide that, for everyone to have a refrigerator, some of us will have to give up some of our other doodads.
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# Preempt the lies. We know that we can get past stupid ideas faster once we have a chance to lay them out and look at them. In the course of our conversations we can highlight and question specific assumptions, such as the relationship of “free markets” with freedom, executions with deterring crime, or burning villages to save them.

Sometimes we’re embarrassed to share our stories--we know they’re offensive, even if we’re not sure why. At long last it’s not quite acceptable to spout racism in public, except in code. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with it. So when no one volunteers to risk exposing themselves, an educator or organizer should raise the question herself. Not pointing fingers, or reciting slogans.


DRworks is a team of educators and organizers that facilitate the Dismantling Racism process for community groups. In the course of the workshops they lay out typical stages of response to race and gender issues on the parts of white men and other groups. For instance, they describe some characteristics of Anglos in the "Be Like Me" stage:

In this stage, we
∑ want to be seen as an individual
∑ begin to sense white privilege with little or no awareness yet of power
∑ believe we can ‘flatten out’ differences
∑ believe in importance of ‘fairness’
∑ feel apologetic, guilty, or fearful towards people of color
∑ see racism as a problem between individuals
∑ either over-identify with people of color or think people of color should ‘just get over it’
∑ can see the differences as ‘exotic’ or ‘erotic’
∑ don’t see ourselves as part of the problem (Okun).

When I took part in an early version in the 19990s, the presentation seemed pretty accurate to me and other participants. The team must have done a lot of work to put it together, because it would be easy to simply assemble a bunch of stereotypes that would not illuminate at all. For a presentation like this we'd have to be extremely honest --reflecting only what we've heard and not what we assume-- and at the same time open-ended --we can't claim to know everything about how other people think.

This kind of analysis helps participants examine and compare their experience in a context in which change is expected and inevitable. Whatever set of ideas we start with, of course we're going to move on and move forward. And it's not just ideas we're going to change. The ultimate goal is to develop and carry out practical strategies to address racism and sexism in our groups.

I've heard about other efforts to address common lies and the big Stories that hold them together. The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME), for example, publishes school booklets with Israeli and Palestinian versions of history side by side, and a third section left blank for the students to fill in; though I don’t know how the discussions are structured (Chen 46).

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‘This is a simple, little inoculation,’ says [psychologist Rebecca] Bigler. ‘Every teacher can write these five words on the board and run through them every day, telling kids that people may say things they don’t agree with, like “this is the girls’ aisle,” but they are empowered to say something back: “I don’t agree with that. Gender doesn’t limit you!” And when kids start to say it, over time they start to believe it’ (Moss 54).
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Seems like we could apply this approach to a lot of the ideas we carry around, such as “free” trade, the necessity of economic growth, the dangers of immigration, the sources of terrorism. About immigration in particular I’ve seen several variations of the “10 Myths” format, trying to anticipate and defuse common fears-- the genuine ones, and the cover stories. (Although some of the counter-arguments seem superficial.)

One of the commonest lies says that we all accept corporate dominance and the starvation and murder it requires. Our presence at sites of resistance, large and small, undoes that lie, even if we’re not changing other people’s minds.

We can certainly challenge the killers' claims that they kill on our behalf. Pratt gives us a good example: the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, active in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. "The Association repudiated the 'myth of mob chivalry'; its statement of purpose said " . . . the claim of the lynchers [is] that they were acting solely in the defense of womanhood . . . . we dare not longer permit this claim to pass unchallenged nor allow thos bent upon person revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and lawlessness in the name of women" (45). Bombers protect our freedom or faith, polluters give us jobs, abusers protect the family . . . liars!

Finding methods and opportunities to lay out the lies and examine them highlights again the question: Who do we work with? Are we trying to mobilize the faithful for a particular battle, or do we aim to organize the unorganized and the corporately organized (with all the prep work that entails)? These goals needn’t be mutually exclusive at all; I see them largely as reflections of short- and long-term approaches. But they require different kinds of discussion.

* Caroline’s preacher tells this joke to his congregation: An atheist teacher asks her students who’s an atheist. The kids want to comply, so all but one raise their hands. The teacher asks the hold-out what she is. I’m Christian, the student says. Why? the teacher asks. Because my parents raised me a Christian. The teacher asks, If your parents were morons, what would that make you? Like you, the kid replies.
Caroline recounted this story with glee. I wasn’t sure how to respond right away, but the next class I recounted what Belenky et al wrote about professors who put down their students, and I asked her if that was her experience. Naw, she said, I just took it as the student calling the teacher a moron. She go on to say one of her daughter’s teachers made a sarcastic remark about the daughter’s bible (conversation 10-29-03).
On occasion I do some forewarning of my own, to defuse students’ discomfort at my ungodliness. When Sammi asked me if I’m a Christian, I said no, and added that when I was overseas, saying that to people made them very uncomfortable. Muslims expected me to be Christian and had no problem with that, but were frightened by the idea of someone who doesn’t worship a god. If there’s no hell, they wonder what could hold me back from stealing and killing. It’s a different idea of what human beings are. Are we born killers? Would we naturally kill each other if god didn’t tell us not to? [ 10-16-03 ]