I recently attended an Israel Advocacy workshop in which we discussed, among other things, how to talk to people whose opinions we…differ with.  Personally, this is a major point of interest for me. As anyone who has ever disagreed with me on something I’m passionate about will tell you, I get emotional and have a hard time not revealing my disdain for what I assume must be intentional ignorance.  Now, I can understand and tolerate unintentional ignorance, which is recognized and corrected in the course of the conversation or on one’s own thereafter.  The type of ignorance where one speaks from lack of knowledge and insists–in the face of new and contradictory evidence–that his or hers is still the correct and rational argument regardless of being unable to support it with anything other than hearsay, “feeling” or conjecture, however, just elicits reactions in me ranging from vocalized frustration to the wordless-yet-pronounced disbelief at his or her depth of stupidity.

Needless to say, this has not gotten me far in life and should be a clear indicator that I should stay out of politics.  Unfortunately, that is where my own emotions override logic.  I can’t help but engage in the political conversation, especially those about Israel.  Conveniently, this leads me back to the reason I signed up for the advocacy workshop in the first place — because sometimes I recognize my ignorance and take steps to resolve it.  In this case I recognize that while I have won many arguments, I haven’t changed many minds, much less made any friends or opened long-term dialogs.  Sometimes it’s even pushed people to dig deeper into their own ignorant trenches.

The workshop was just the beginning of the learning process, and while I didn’t walk away an expert, one thing stuck in my mind: the end. Not the end of the workshop, but the part of the workshop where we discussed how to end a conversation of opposing views.  In this section, our presenter offered up an example of how a brilliant news commentator closes his more confrontational interviews.  The commentator is Bill O’Reilly, and while his politics are controversial, in turn contributing to his success, his skill is incontrovertible.  In this case, we looked at the final exchange between O’Reilly and President Obama in which he carefully, prescriptedly, explains:

O'REILLY: Well, that's our live part of this deal. And I have to
say, I  enjoyed talking to you. I disagree with you sometimes.
I hope you think  I'm fair to you, I try to be. But I wish you
well in the next two years.

OBAMA: Bill, it's always a pleasure. I enjoyed it.

O'REILLY: It's nice to see you.

OBAMA: Thank you so much.

Now that’s impressive.  Sure, Obama has to be polite and respectful, but neither of the two men actually like the other.  Yet, here they are, parting as if they look forward to the next round in their conversation.

On its own, this was interesting, but it would not have been as big a revelation as it was, had I not just recently been listening a freakonomics podcast about pain and how we remember it. Of that podcast, the lasting impression on me was the part about, well, lasting impressions. In a study of colonoscopy patients, it seems that the greatest determining factor of whether a person rated the experience as tolerable or even pleasant and was therefore more likely to return for future screenings, was not the average or peak discomfort throughout the procedure but the comfort of the final moments of the ordeal.  In fact, extending the procedure (and the discomfort), but taking the time to make the extraction as pleasant as possible, made the participants rate their overall memory of the experience as more positive than those who had a shorter, but less–apologies here for the incredible pun–massaged ending.

With that confluence of worlds rivaling those days when you learn a new word and hear it ten times in the course of a day, the lesson was learned.  Now if I could just learn how to *get* to the end of a conversation before one of us walks away disparaged or despondent over the fate of humanity…