Point of divergence

I feel like for my birthday, God gave me two babies that went to bed like a dream!! and here I am, with time on my hands to fill with whatever I want to do. I wanna clean up my freak-nasty house, do the laundry, go to bed early, write in my journal, write my book, and blog my eyes out because I have 100 posts floating around in my head.

I want to talk politics, without really talking about politics. Let’s be real, political posts on my own Facebook feed are just about to make my eyes bleed. I get so sick and tired sometimes of post after post after post of information that either makes me angry or annoyed or lose hope for humanity. And because I get so sick of it, I really don’t post very much about politics. I’ll like the occasional post or sometimes I will say something, but for the most part, I keep my political thoughts to my dinner table.

One of the big reasons I don’t talk about politics in the social media world is because I don’t want to be attacked. It seems like any political post is just bait dropped in a tank of pirañas. The other big reason is because most of the time, I’m not entirely confident in my knowledge of the issue being tossed back and forth. I may have an opinion, but anything I read seems either so biased or so lacking in hard facts or just so incomplete that I feel like I couldn’t even talk intelligently about the issue, let alone defend my stance.

And this week, I realized one big thing: all my pent up emotions about politics need some kind of outlet, or I just get more angry and more annoyed and more hopeless. So I did. I entered the political debate this week and it was actually a really rewarding experience. I did it in a way that opened it up for discussion because of one thing: I wasn’t seeking to be right. Instead, I was seeking understanding as well as points of divergence.

If you’ve never heard of the point of divergence, it’s a term I came across when I took a rhetorical theory class in college. It’s a concept that has helped me really to be an all around better communicator and conflict resolver.

My professor was an ornery old cuss that would do more talking than teaching, but he usually had interesting things to say, so we listened. One day, early in the semester, he asked, “What is argument?” In a class based on the meaning and use of language, you don’t assume the answer to such a question to be as easy as it may seem.

Someone answered that an argument was usually two people debating their differing opinions.

“What you describe is called a fight,” He said. “The argument you describe is called, ‘I win, you lose.’ That’s a fight.”

He referred to a teaching of Aristotle (or was it Socrates? or Plato?) that went something like this “An argument is a discussion that leads to understanding or solution.”

He then went on to describe the point of divergence and why finding this point was crucial to an effective argument. Here’s what he meant:

Let’s say a mom and her son are discussing curfew. Mom says be home at 10:30. Son says to move it to 11:00. Let’s use a diagram to represent the argument:

Where the arrow is just one strand represents where the mom and son are in agreement. The two diverging strands of the arrow represent their differing opinion. The point of divergence is the exact point in which they stop agreeing and begin to disagree. If they can discover through their discussion what they agree on and what they disagree on, they can find the point of divergence. Once they find the point of divergence, that is where the real “argument” should focus for the desired conclusion.

Most debates will always be fights because people are too far out on their individual strands of their opinion, trying to yell across the gap between them, instead of sliding down their opinion strand to the places of thought where they no longer have to yell, where the opinion of the other person isn’t so far out from where our own opinion is.

Let’s go back to our curfew example:

Mom says curfew is 10:30 because it is a school night and you’re too young to be out till 11:00.

Son says move it to 11:00 because all my other friends are allowed to stay out that late.

Mom says no.

Son says everyone is going to make fun of me.

Mom says no they wont.

Son says why do you always treat me like a baby.

Where do they even agree here? Well, they both agree that there should be some kind of a curfew. But what is the son really saying here? His reason for extending his curfew is rooted in what his peers are doing and what they will say about him if he doesn’t do as they do. The point of divergence has to do with whether or not peer acceptance is an valid reason to extend curfew.

That’s the discussion they need to have. It’s not so much about is an 11:00 curfew better than a 10:30 curfew. If the conversation stays at this is better than that, Mom and son are going to be stuck in disagreement or Mom is going to just slam down authority and win anyway. But she will lose the chance to understand her son better, and maybe even more importantly, for the son to feel understood.

But by realizing that the point of divergence is more about her son’s concern with his image and acceptance among his peers, they can now have a meaningful conversation about what is not just at the heart of the argument, but what is in the heart of the son. Mom still might have to play the authority card, but they will have gained understanding, if not also solution.

The point of divergence is in every argument and it really changes the focus of a discussion. You and I are arguing about who the greatest music artist of our day is. I say Tim McGraw. You say the Fray. I say his music always has meaningful lyrics and paints a picture of good country living. You say the Fray has a good beat that quiets the busy mind down and has poetic imagery. The point of divergence is really more about what criteria should be used for measuring music artists. What is more important, a good beat or honest meaning? The argument isn’t really about McGraw or the Fray at all.

Let’s look at gun rights. You say we need to get rid of guns. I say keep them. You say too many shootings are happening. I say if we lose our guns, we can’t protect ourselves. Where do we agree? We both agree that there are dangers we need protection from. The point of divergence is what is the greater danger: shootings or not being able to protect ourselves. It really isn’t about getting rid of guns.

Is this making sense? Simply put, if we can find the point of divergence in arguments, we avoid fighting about things that really aren’t the core of the problem. That’s the biggest thing. We don’t get stuck trying to prove that my reasons are more important than your reasons. We go right to the place where we cease to agree and try to see what is initially causing the polarization between us.

It’s like train tracks, looking at the problem from where it first begins to diverge allows you to work with a smaller space than if you try to fix the problem 10 miles down the tracks when the two railways are so far apart from each other. It’s easier to understand each other when we first begin to disagree than when we are clear out in blatant disagreement.

And really, when it comes to politics, I think most of us aren’t far left or far right. I think most of us are situated somewhere in the middle. I think that by trying to find points of divergence, we will realize that we actually are more similar than we are different. And if nothing else, I think we’ll realize that our friends and family aren’t as crazy as we thought. When we find the point of divergence, we allow for meaningful discussion that really can open the way for understanding and/or solution.

Cool, huh?