THE ARGUMENT CULTURE BY DEBORAH TANNEN

The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen

The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen

(1) What are the multicultural and/or educational issues the author focuses upon in this book?

Deborah Tannen, sociolinguist and author of You Just Don't Understand, Talking From 9 to 5, and That's Not What I Meant, is back with a new book. This time, Tannen tackles the adversarial culture in The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. (Hunter, 2001) Tannen discusses our culture's style of seeing issues and questions as having two sides and of setting "the" two sides against each other to battle for primacy. She charges that not only does the "argument culture" (or "culture of critique") make life more confrontational and frankly alienating, it also reduces the amount of information made available to spectators or information-seekers. Tannen mentions academia and the legal system in the course of her discussion, but the bulk of her analysis is directed toward the media, with its fashionable ritual of "tough questions" and its peculiar institution of "objectivity." (Hunter, 2001)

The Argument Culture is not a call for civility. Tannen recognizes that people flock to confrontation for many reasons, including enjoying a good fight, and that some issues do have two sides. Rather, Tannen warns against the way the culture of critique, by reducing every issue to two sides, can destroy the nuance and complexity of a discussion and even overvalue opinions that are utterly meritless. Two obvious examples are "nature vs nurture" and Holocaust denial. Any knowledgeable person understands that nature and nurture both contribute to development, but the very label "nature vs nurture" creates a false dichotomy -- and a false competition -- between the two concepts, clouding discussion of their effects with the frequent question "well, which is it?" (Hunter, 2001)

On a slightly different note, the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen is a fantasy with no factual basis whatsoever, but the media has given substantial column inches and air time to extremists who claim it never happened. The media defends itself as being responsible for "objective reporting," usually just a euphemism for "publishing a pair of diametrically opposed views," typically presented with no analysis to guide the reader as to whether there are yet more views or which view has the most evidence on its side. (Hunter, 2001)

As readers of Tannen will expect, there is a gender twist to this argument (that is to say, this careful sequence of facts and logic meant to persuade the reader of Tannen's point of view). Women are, on average, less confrontational, and so the argument culture will tend to value men's contributions, which are more likely to be in the idiom it values, and that's just if the less-forceful women contribute at all. (Hunter, 2001) Before a chorus of women (or much more likely, men) thunders forth to claim that women can be just as obnoxious as men, let me assure you, that is not in doubt. What is also not in doubt, at least to sociologists, ...