The following article was originally published as “The
Trustful Approach: introducing an original philosophical exercise to
live social discord mindfully” as it was meant to serve as a
first introduction to this philosophical exercise. However, since it
is a long article, which goes a lot into details regarding the theory
behind the practice, and since my thinking has evolved regarding some
aspects, I have since then published another post, which is a shorter and way better introduction to the exercise. I encourage you to read
it. In the end, the new title of the present article reflects better
what is in it. The
trustful approach is a philosophical exercise that I have developed
in order to deal with heated disagreements and chronic outrage. It is
especially tailored to political disagreements, though it can be
useful in other cases. The aim of the practice is to make you a more
focused, lucid, and serene interlocutor, without losing your grip on
righteous indignation, should it be appropriate. It is called the
“trustful approach” because it is meant to lead you to trust more
that the person you disagree with do indeed mean what they say, while
at the same time empowering you to express your own perspective. It
is meant to have a clarifying effect on discourse and to promote
resilience in the face of frequent political strife. Ultimately,
the goal is to reduce toxic political polarization.
I
shall, first, explain the rationale of the practice, then talk
through an example of a situation where the practice could be useful,
and, finally, leave you with a set of instructions that are meant to
facilitate practising the exercise.
The Rationale
How
do you practice the trustful approach? It is designed to be a
mindfulness-based method. Mindfulness meditation is a very specific
attentional exercise. As Jan Puc puts it, “mindfulness
consists in stopping the spreading of the affective force of a
stimulus through the mind”
and “Mindfulness
meditation seeks to achieve this effect intentionally by instructing
the meditator to focus her attention exclusively on the emergence and
disappearance of objects in the focus of attention.”.
Therefore,
the way you learn to practice the trustful approach is the following:
1) you learn to practice mindfulness meditation, 2) you put the
theory of the trustful approach to the test during your mindfulness
practice. The theory will provide ways to challenge the emotions
specific to social discord. Now, is it useful to keep on reading this
article if you do not know how to practice mindfulness meditation?
Yes, I think so. Because I will say a few things about mindfulness
that are as good a place as any to start being initiated into it.
When
it comes to mindfulness meditation, the little story that we like to
tell is that striving hard to get what you think will make you happy
often is the very thing that prevents you from experiencing the
happiness that you aim for. The desire disturbs and obstructs the
very happiness that it promises in exchange for its fulfilment. There
is something suspicious about how fleeting contentment is following
hard-won fulfilment of desire: it suggests a certain habit of desire
that is not only not
conducive
to happiness, but actually the
source
of unhappiness. It is restlessness. It is “trying too hard”. It
suggests, not just a certain impotence in appreciating what you have,
but an active repudiation of the very thing you say you want. This
“little story”, or to use a term coined by Martha Nussbaum, this
“therapeutic argument”
is what makes sense of the different heuristics used during
mindfulness meditation. The difference between what counts as “being
present” and “not being present”, what counts as “being
judgmental” and “not being judgmental”, can all be traced back
to the therapeutic argumentation. All the distinctions that might be
puzzling to the uninitiated are explained by it. The trustful
approach will borrow the rationale of mindfulness meditation for its
own purposes and will have its own set of heuristics.
Like
much of mindfulness meditation, the trustful approach will focus on
how desire manifests as a need for immediate cognitive closure: the
attempt to think things through. On top of dealing with our more
visible choices, the technique thus deals with all the mostly
invisible thinking and ruminating that is being done in the service
of trying to attain a certain state of affairs
that should fully satisfy us. In reality, quite often, getting what
we thought we needed prompts
us only to start the cycle of striving all over again, either finding
another pretext for discontentment or doubling down on the current
one. The sheer speed of the cycle is, let’s face it, downright
comical, when it is not tragic.
But
what of it in the case of social discord? We can feel indignation
while witnessing what some people say or do, and that feeling of
irritated shock comes together with exactly such a desire for
immediate cognitive closure. We want to know what to make of the
offence, what to think of the offence. But that cognitive desire has
to be treated like all others desires: it is not necessarily wise to
take it at face value. Desire can fail to deliver on its promise.
Desire sometimes prevents the very contentment that it promises. A
lot of emotional shock happens on the back of previous attempts to
assuage our curiosity and settle the matter in question.
Restlessness. Trying
too hard.
Our habits of mind not only fail to bring us closure, but they lead
us to desire closure more and more, faster and faster, farther and
farther from reality, thus planting the seeds of all the future
emotional shocks to come. This is what the trustful approach teaches
us to see.
To
do this, it relies on a heuristic. We are going to draw a distinction
between surprise and shock. For the purpose of the exercise, we will
define surprise as an emotional reaction to the unexpected and we
will define shock as bewilderment (not knowing how to make sense of
something).
Having done that, we can now be attentive to several scenarios. 1) We
are sometimes surprised but not shocked, as the unexpected event does
not challenge our sense-making capacity. 2) We are sometimes
surprised and shocked, as the unexpected event does
challenge our sense-making capacity. 3) We are sometimes shocked, but
not surprised, as our sense-making capacity is challenged, but we do
not encounter something unexpected. This last scenario is the one
that is the most interesting to us in the light of the suspicion of
restlessness. It is an experience of a shock that feels
like surprise, as it casts a shadow of strangeness on the object of
attention, similar to the strangeness of the unexpected. Yet, in the
midst of this experience, we can remember that we are not actually
dealing with something unexpected, and we can gain a greater lucidity
regarding what is actually going on. Indeed, as we are feeling the
disbelief of indignation – “I cannot believe that they would do
that” – it is good to check: can we really
not believe, based on all we know so far? Or are we perhaps in a
hurry to not believe, in a hurry to reach for new and better
explanations? If so, we might want to check that this disbelief is
not displacing pretty good explanations of the offensive behaviour
that we already possess. Are we asking for more than what we already
have, thus casting aside what we already have; i.e a satisfactory
explanation of the offensive event? If we feel shock, this feeling
that closely resembles surprise, in a situation where we are not
actually facing something unexpected, it is time for us to pause and
be mindful of our desire for cognitive closure. Do note that
in
the case of ongoing political disagreements, a lot of shocks might
not be actual subversion of expectations, since we learn through
experience what our political opponents are like. So when we are
feeling the disbelief of indignation then, it is interesting to
wonder what we might be giving up on through this disbelief, and what
aspiration this “giving up” is allegedly in the service of.
To
introduce some nuance into this schematic exposé, let’s remark
that it is not an all or nothing kind of situation. It is not a
matter of either looking for closure or giving up on closure
altogether. It is more about the details of how
striving manifests itself. Perhaps we start craving more and more
subtle and original explanations, at the expense of the explanations
we already have. Indulging in this craving too much might make it
worse in the long run. And what are the tacit assumptions behind that
desire for subtlety and originality anyway?
We
need to pay attention to the wisdom of our desire and to the health
of our curiosity. And for this, the devil is in the details. Details
that an introduction to the philosophical exercise cannot fully
capture. It is the meditation exercise itself that is meant to lead
to discoveries.
However,
in choosing “trustful approach” as a name, I sought to give a bit
of a
taste
of what I think the flavour of those details will be. There is a
particular type of distrust in the other and in oneself that is a
sign of restlessness. Time and again, we resist the idea that our
political adversaries believe what they say they believe when they
explain what they do. Thus, we are looking for the real
reason for
the
offence, the explanation behind
the explanation. In this way, it seems to us that the world is filled
with people piloted by ulterior
motives,
either the allure of laziness, haste, and greed, or more complex
allegiances to dogmas, factions, fellow conspirators, etc. The
correlate of that is that we are unable to appreciate that this
polemical explanation we endorse would enjoy a fuller expression of
itself if it were properly articulated as our own particular point of
view, and not as the secret point of view of others that we claim to
uncover in
extremis
through detective work. Positing ulterior motives is often what
happens when we lack confidence in our ability to criticize motives
that are plain to see, and that our political adversaries are more
than happy to tell us about.
An Example
Let’s
discuss the case that Katie Stockdale writes about in Moral
Shock,
which
is the anecdote of how she was shocked by sexist remarks in her
classroom:
“Consider
my experience of moral shock in a classroom setting. In the middle of
teaching, a student raised his hand. I called on him. He asked the
question: ‘When do you plan to have children?’ I was shocked. I
could feel my eyes widen and face heat up imagining
its redness visible to my students; and I eventually replied, without
the ability to look directly at him, ‘that’s an inappropriate
question, so I am moving on’. After class, I was disappointed in
myself for my non-ideal response. If I were to have considered in
advance of the class what I ought to do if a student asked such a
question, I would have chosen to act differently. I might have
intended to respond by looking at the student, directly in the eyes,
and explaining why the question is inappropriate. But in the moment,
I was incapacitated by moral shock.
One
thing that interests me about moral shock is that it challenges us to
question to what extent our expectations about how people will behave
have a grip on us. In this case, I experienced moral shock despite my
expectations about how I will be treated by male students in the
classroom. I expect that, when I am teaching, I will receive
unwanted, sexually suggestive, or challenging remarks from some of my
male students at some point throughout the semester; it happens all
the time. And I naturally believe, in a Humean way, that the future
will resemble the past. This particular student had also made a
series of inappropriate comments throughout the semester, so I
anticipated more to come. But my expectations about students’
behavior in the classroom, and this student’s behavior in
particular, did not prevent my shock at the immoral act. Why might we
find ourselves shocked by immoral behavior we fully expected from
others?”
Katie
Stockdale then goes on to defend the idea that “the
extent to which a person will be shocked by an intensely bewildering
event depends not on the extent to which it violated their
expectations, but rather how prepared they were, emotionally, to be
in the midst of it.”.
Later,
in discussing a different public speaking-related challenge, she
proposes the idea that the possibility of “emotional preparation”
confirms her thesis, indeed: “To
feel ready for surviving a difficult Q & A, the speaker might
practice how he will manage his emotions in response to a tough
question when it arises – by breathing through the anxiety,
displaying confident body language to counter-act self-doubt, etc. He
might even practice (e.g., in front of a mirror, to his partner)
these strategies, inhabiting his future agency as much as he can so
that the experience, when it occurs, is much less physically and
emotionally difficult to endure. However prepared a speaker might be
to give a talk in terms of practicing the talk itself, and
anticipating potential questions and objections, if the speaker is
not emotionally prepared for surviving a difficult Q & A, he
might find himself caught off guard and unable to respond to
difficult questions – even those that he expected to be
articulated”
When
I juxtapose these two anecdotes, it gives the impression that the
teacher who receives misogynistic remarks can prepare herself
emotionally in order to handle the situation well. If shock happens
when we are not emotionally prepared to be in the challenging
situation, and if it is possible to train oneself to be more
emotionally prepared, then it means that we can prepare ourselves for
these challenging situations. This is a very contentious proposition.
Is that resilience possible? Even if it is possible, is it even
desirable? It could be suspected, for instance, that this proposition
focuses on the behaviour of the victim and fails to face the
injustice, to articulate the way the offender is
the one who should have behaved differently.
Indignation serves the purpose of making you attentive to that. Are
we going to ignore it? I am moving away from how Katie Stockdale
might choose to answer these concerns with her theoretical framework,
and I am instead acknowledging that this problem hits hardest the
theoretical framework that underlies the trustful approach. What is
this philosophical exercise telling us about this situation and how
it can be improved? I believe that, in the end, we can articulate how
there’s room for improvement, without cancelling the benefits of
indignation.
Let’s
examine the situation properly. What kind of person asks, in the
middle of class, about when the teacher is planning to have children?
It is the kind of person who is shocked about all the wrong things.
Who knows what it is exactly that set them off, but at the end of the
day, we know that this is the kind of person who would be shocked if
they thought a woman didn’t plan on having children, or if a woman
didn’t think she owed him a report on her situation, or if a woman
showed excellence in her career, in a way that seems remote from
“motherly duties”, etc… He is shocked!
And
so the teacher is shocked in return – shocked by what he
finds shocking – and in turn, the student might be shocked by her
reaction, he might exclaim: “I was just asking a simple
question?!”. And so on and so forth. Shock and counter-shock is an
instrument of mutual disclosure of values.
Such polarization is not necessarily bad. In the present case,
polarization is absolutely instrumental in allowing feminism to win
by having misogynists reveal themselves and people feel like they
have to pick a side on whether misogyny is okay or not. Yet, the
present situation is not necessarily ideal. People can still pay
attention in better ways, conversations can still be unproductive if
we’re not careful.
If
the student were trained in the trustful approach, he might start
noticing things that he had not noticed before about how he feels in
the situation. For instance, he might notice that he is shocked by
the fact that the
teacher is being a teacher, in the way that she is,
even though it is a fact that shouldn’t be surprising to him since
he is aware of that situation already. Noticing that gap might make
him aware that, in his indignation, he is pushing away the most
straightforward explanation for this state of affairs:
the teacher believes that this is the best use of her time, based on
the values that she holds. This straightforward explanation is in
stark contrast with other inflammatory explanations that disclose the
act of being
a teacher as
a desire to be the center of attention, to lord one’s ‘subversive’
status (that’s how it appears to the misogynist) over the students,
etc, in short:
as
a challenge to be addressed. Thus, the class setting might stop being
disclosed to the attention of this student as the best setting to
challenge one another’s views about how to lead one’s personal
life. Thus, we go from a sexist student who raises their hand, to a
sexist student who doesn’t raise their hand. The first benefit is
that it does not create the counter-shock of the teacher, which might
motivate further entrenchment (how can one question one’s
self when one feels that people can’t take a “simple innocent
question” or “can’t take a joke”?). Far from leaving the
sexism embedded in the attentional pattern of the student unnoticed
and unchecked, it directly modifies those attentional patterns: if
the female teacher is not immediately ‘challenging’ on sight, she
can be seen as a teacher, and not as a woman who is making a ‘big
deal’ out of being a teacher. There is absolutely no guarantee that
a sexist student might be open to undergoing this kind of training,
but it is good to not rule it out a
priori.
What
of the shocked teacher? Is improvement possible there? She might
express a wish for empowerment, like Stockdale does, as we have seen:
“After
class, I was disappointed in myself for my non-ideal response. If I
were to have considered in advance of the class what I ought to do if
a student asked such a question, I would have chosen to act
differently. I might have intended to respond by looking at the
student, directly in the eyes, and explaining why
the
question is inappropriate. But in the moment, I was incapacitated by
moral shock.”
I
think that this wish can make sense and that we can have good hope of
it being fulfilled,
though
I do not mean to suggest that it is necessarily appropriate in all
scenarios. It entirely depends on the circumstances. I think that, in
some situations, the trustful approach might help with that. We know
the behaviour of the student was shocking, but hardly unexpected. In
that gap, maybe we will start noticing some interesting things.
Maybe
the teacher felt at a loss for words because she felt that there was
a very high bar to clear: to meet the student’s dismissive gaze
and, in spite of his scoffing, to meet his entrenched world-view with
an articulate and convincing explanation while avoiding to ridicule
herself in front of a potentially tough crowd. In other words: a halo
of invulnerability might have been perceived around the student and
the crowd. And this felt-sense of a high bar to clear, this embodied
sense of missing the means, could potentially have been prepared by
certain habits of mind that the trustful approach can address.
Certain habits having to do with how one thinks about this student or
people like them. Indeed, as we ruminate about him, (“Seriously?!
What was this guy thinking?!” -“How
can you still be sexist in [insert
the current year]?!”
-
“How
can you get through to people so lost?!” - “Did he not realize?
Or, on the contrary, realized all too well?”)
we might repudiate straightforward explanations and adopt skewed
explanations instead. We might repudiate the idea that this person is
an indignant sexist who is trying to express his values. Indeed, I
suggested earlier that the student is shocked, and that this explains
his behaviour. I did not feel like a lot of detective work was needed
to uncover the fact that he was shocked, instead, I felt that this
was not a hidden truth but the very meaning of his utterance (the
question he asked). Simply put, he is communicating sincerely enough.
But we have a habit sometimes of refusing to see this, and to try to
adopt skewed explanations instead: he was not a sincere communicator
because he was trying to be the center of attention, or he was trying
to get a reaction, to hurt, to joke, to prank, etc. Those
explanations are skewed not because they describe things that cannot
possibly be there at all, but because they split motives like one
would split hairs, and side-step the central motivation that is plain
to see: you want to grab attention when you have something to say,
you want people to be impacted by your words when you have something
to say, you want to convey what looks “funny” to you when you
joke etc. So this person felt that they had something worthwhile to
say! To engage in the trustful approach is to come out of the haze of
looking for ulterior motives when a straightforward explanation would
do: the student was shocked, and so they reacted because they felt
they had something to say.
Splitting
motives leads
to unnecessary and unhelpful theories. For instance, one might take
the worry that the student was trying to be the center of attention,
and start hypothesizing that he is, in fact, not a convinced
misogynist himself, but just happens to take on this mantle to make a
scene. Once this hypothesis sets in, the student is now perceived
with the aforementioned halo of invulnerability: in these conditions,
what could we possibly say that wouldn’t already be fully
anticipated by this cruel set-up? It becomes difficult to meet his
gaze, to muster the will to say something. What’s the point? He is
being sexist, but he can’t be reasoned with, and we are making a
fool of ourselves. The above wrong-headed hypothesis might seem like
an “extreme” example, as it puts forward a pretty useless guess,
making the offender sexist in a very roundabout way. But it is
actually an example of a pretty widespread style of thinking about
this type of event, making me worry that many would not find it an
extreme example. This sort of hypothesis starts from a place of
disbelief at the apparent motivation of the offender, and then
crosses into a search for hidden motivations. It creates useless
guesses that are useful only to scare oneself: if the person is
performatively sexist, they are still sexist, except... What
can you do about it? Outperform them surely. The recurring theme
seems to be that a grievance we have against the offender is fully
elevated to the status of insight into their psyche (“they hurt us,
they must be a sadist”, “cruelty is the point”), which
unsurprisingly fixes the estrangement we feel firmly in place. We
thus conflate our own perspective on the situation, however justified
it may be, with their psychology. As a result, the psyche of the
offender seems as deep, mysterious, and invulnerable, as we feel
impotent, and vice-versa.
Many
different worries can lead to many different unhelpful hypotheses,
not all having to do with literally thinking the person is not a
convinced misogynist, but all having pretty similar consequences:
they make the offender appear unreachable, untouchable, and so they
make us lose our means. I propose the idea that if the teacher is
indeed in the grip of those unhelpful ideas, various exercises, such
as mindfulness meditation, can revise the underlying insecurities and
improve the situation. (It is also perfectly possible that there are
no such corrigible insecurities to be found in any given case, but my
point is only that it makes sense to check, using the trustful
approach, because sometimes
they are interesting things to notice.) I believe that the trustful
approach is not doomed to unfairly center our attention on the
behaviour of the victim, at the expense of condemning the
perpetrator, given that, not only are we able to articulate the fault
of the perpetrator with the vocabulary of this exercise, but the
therapy offered to the victim is directly dependent on a discussion
of the fault of the perpetrator, as we have seen. We
seek to face the injustice as straightforwardly as possible, weeding
out tempting excuses for the behaviour of the perpetrator at the same
time as we
weed
out skewed psychological explanations. By
the same token, we give ourselves the tools to notice when we are in
the wrong, or when no one is, or when we all are.
The
Instructions.
I am now leaving you with
instructions to practice the exercise.
If you have not practised
mindfulness meditation before, you have to learn how to do it.
Resources for this abound on the internet.
If you do know how to practice
mindfulness, then take the following text as a checklist that
allows you to notice all that is relevant to notice when you focus
your attention on indignation. At first, memorize and call to mind
the phrases of this checklist that you find most helpful. Soon
enough, you will have internalized those instructions and you will
probably have no need to recall those phrases.
Here
is the checklist:
- In the manner characteristic of mindfulness meditation, notice and
contemplate your feeling of indignation whenever it arises. Try to
recall: are you shocked & surprised, or are you shocked, but not
surprised? If you are genuinely surprised, it makes sense to wonder
how best you can satisfy your curiosity regarding the shocking event.
But if you are not surprised, and yet feeling shocked, it makes sense
instead to examine where your renewed curiosity is taking you. Are
you drifting away from what you already know? Are you pushing away
simpler and more reasonable explanations of the event? Are you
desiring newer and subtler explanations faster and faster?
- Notice how strange and bewildering the offensive behaviour and the
offender seem. How quick the repudiation of previously established
knowledge is. How alluring the desire for cognitive closure is ; its
promise of satisfaction. How urgent and pointed your sense of duty
feels, as someone who feels they have to respond to this situation.
And most of all, notice the solidarity between those four aspects of
shock, how one contains all the others. How estrangement from the
mind of the offender is the correlate of your renewed desire to make
sense of things.
- Be attentive to those things most of all when you are trying to
read the minds of others, trying to understand what they must be
thinking. Does the mind of the offender feel like an impenetrable
black box, an unsettling mystery? Does it feel like a halo of
invulnerability protects the offender from being reached, one that
simultaneously calls for new tactics of engagement and thwarts them
at every turn? In those conditions, notice if you are splitting their
motivation into caricatural motives, such as: attention seeking,
sadism, etc.
- How does indignation feel as it spreads through the mind?
***
03/01/2024
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out ; especially if you want to try out the trustful approach)
