The Trustful Approach: Some Considerations on the Theory Behind the Practice (Mindfulness, Phenomenology, Disagreements)
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.”1. 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”2 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)3. 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?”4
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.”5. 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”6
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 values7. 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.”8 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 internet9.
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?
***
Pierrick Simon
03/01/2024
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out ; especially if you want to try out the trustful approach)
1 Puc, J. (2019). In Defence of Bare Attention: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6). p.182
2 Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. REV-Revised. Princeton University Press, 1994. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2tt8tt.
3 For those conceptual considerations, I am indebted to Katie Stockdale. But these concepts are modified for my own purposes. See: Stockdale, Katie (2022). Moral Shock. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (3):496-511. And also see my response to it: Simon, Pierrick (2023). Shocking Others: a Phenomenology of Emotional Shock and Political Polarization. Kultura i Wartości ISSN 2299-7806 Nr 36.
4 Stockdale, Katie (2022). Moral Shock. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (3):496-497.
5 Moral Shock. p.498.
6 Moral Shock. p.505.
7 Osler, Lucy (2023). WTF?! Covid-19, Indignation, and the Internet. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5):1-20.
8 Moral Shock. p.496.
9 If you do not know where to begin, a trustworthy source is « Waking Up » created by Sam Harris. Looking around on the internet should make you discover Waking-Up adjacent content for free where Sam Harris teaches you how to meditate. Otherwise there is the app « Waking Up », with a free trial, a subscription, OR, for those of us who cannot afford the subscription, you can request a « scholarship »: no strings attached, no questions asked, they grant you a free subscription if you cannot afford it otherwise, here: https://app.wakingup.com/scholarship
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