A Voice for Reticence

Like many of you, I’ve attended my share of diversity or social interaction training sessions, and I always come away from them feeling embarrassed. I blame my mom for that.

My mother passed away three years ago at age 89, and while she had an enormous impact on my life, she was a modest, unprepossessing person whose political and social views were nearly always expressed — if at all — with the disclaimer: “I just don’t know.” As a child of the Great Depression and from modest means, Mom greatly admired FDR and Democrats generally, and she was never comfortable around wealth or opulence. She hated war and could have been a pacifist or an anti-war marcher (a scene I can’t even imagine). For reasons I never fathomed, she loved baseball. She held biases and prejudices, but never overtly, and like many people of her time, Mom felt that if you didn’t have something good to say about someone, it was better to say nothing.

I was thinking about my mom’s reticence last week as I sat through a mandatory meeting with 40 or so of my work colleagues. The people moderating the meeting and directing the conversation wanted — somewhat desperately, I thought — to get everyone talking and sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings about sensitive issues like racism, gender identity and empathy for people not like yourself. They went about this using several tactics. First, we were divided into sub-groups of three and invited to interview one another silently; that is, we had to answer questions about the other person (such as the kind of vehicle they’d like to drive, of what religion were they raised in) by sheer guessing. Following that was an exercise that involved choosing a life we’d least like to experience, and then one we’d most like to have among several not very attractive alternatives. I joined a large group who apparently felt it would be very bad to be an illegal immigrant in America, unable to speak English, and without a job. On the plus side, I joined a slightly smaller contingent who felt that to be a genius-level physicist, but also a quadriplegic, and out of work, wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world. And so on. The last exercise involved responding to a page of questions such as at what age did we discover that there are two genders, or when did we realize we were rich, or poor, or middle class?

Apparently, these are tried and true techniques that, when properly conducted, enable people in group circumstances (like the office) to find out if they are insensitive or culturally deficient. Once our individual prejudices, perceptions and biases are brought out into the open and people have bared their souls, the theory goes, the group can then move forward as a more cohesive, sensitive and empathetic unit.

I kept wondering whether any of this had a basis in quantitative and qualitative research. Was it proven, for example, that by guessing the kind of car someone I barely know was driving, I would be revealing my hidden away biases and pre-conceived notions about relative strangers? I didn’t ever really find out, in part because I managed to pick exactly the kind of vehicle — an SUV — the other person was driving. I even got her religion right. And what did that prove? Nothing much.

I’m not attacking the motives of the people conducting this meeting; in fact, they are in all ways professional. But I think what they are selling is suspect. Underlying this kind of consulting work is an assumption that there are methods that can be employed (like asking you to guess the religion of a person you don’t know) that will reveal your prejudices. And that, furthermore, getting out these prejudices and perceptions in a group setting is the first and necessary step on the path to reconciliation and understanding among individuals with widely varying backgrounds and experiences.

Is that really valid? For one thing, people can always lie, or say what they believe others want to hear. There’s also the presumption that people know how to get in touch with their real feelings, and can articulate them with and among others. Most people I know, including myself, struggle all the time to express their true feelings, even in the private conversations that go on only in our heads. I question the efficacy of building group training around the notion that individuals, sitting with their peers, will not just be willing, but also able to say what they really think.

But my largest objection is to the notion, which seems so pervasive these days, that it is always better — more cathartic, more empathetic, more useful — for people to “share” their feelings, whatever they might be. Doing so makes everyone know you better and helps engender a more “open” society.

I don’t buy it, and here’s why: I have my share of prejudices, like everyone, and I do not believe I am contributing to the world by uttering these views out loud. To the contrary, there’s much in my mind, and perhaps yours, that’s best left unsaid. What may be appropriate in the Confessional booth or the psycho-therapy session seems to me to be not at all helpful when shared among colleagues in the business or organizational environment. After all, what can they do about it? Or me? Revealing to my peers that I dislike short people (actually, my issue is with people who are taller than me) isn’t going to change their minds about me, about their attitudes towards short people, or their hidden prejudices about race or gender, much less mine. And so, what’s to be gained, collectively, by my personal revelation concerning the height of others? Very little.

These kinds of meetings also reflect the growing noise of public self-indulgence — the mindless chatter online and elsewhere by people talking and writing about themselves. Deeds, not words, the old saying goes. Many people, through the ages, have managed to make a mark on society and, at the same time, remain modest and reticent about themselves. We may not know everything about them, but we know enough to admire, respect and even love them.

Like my mom.

Could I Go Over the Top?

Nothing, to me, is as compelling as reading the accounts of men under the stress and confusion of battle: how they felt, how they reacted, what was going through their minds as they confronted the very real possibility of death.

A Union Cannon at the Angle on Cemetery Ridge

Now, just back from a tour of the great Civil War battleground at Gettysburg, these thoughts have taken on a more tangible dimension.  Away from the books, I stood in places where men shot at distant targets and were in turn shot at.  Many thousands were killed, many thousand more wounded in three days of fierce combat at places called the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill. The question I asked myself, as I looked down the barrel of a cannon still poised on the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, is the question that long has bedeviled me, and perhaps you: would I have the courage to stand and fight, to fix my bayonet, leave my shelter and attack the enemy?  Or would the instinct of self-preservation take over, causing me to stay hidden and out of the line of fire?

(This search for understanding is different from, and much more personal, than my enduring fascination with the causes of war; the broader context of politics, economics and social currents that lead to the clash of nations and peoples. What I want to know is how, why and where ordinary men found the courage to go over the top.  Gettysburg helped me find an answer).

Much has been written over the years about why men fight (and some die) in war.  Until around the time of the Civil War, most explanations centered on a strong identification with an abstract cause (such as freedom or defense of homeland); Confederate troops were said to be more highly motivated than their Union counterparts because they were defending their beloved Virginia or South Carolina from the encroachment of the looming federal government.  Yet that explanation makes only partial sense.  Something more fundamental is required to fully explain why men do not flinch in the face of certain harm.

Gettysburg’s splendid new National Military Park Museum provides helpful clues.  The words of officers and soldiers who participated in the battle on both

A view across the battlefield to Little Round Top

sides are  widely quoted.  What emerges from the museum exhibits (and the narratives of highly trained and personable tour guides at the battlefield) is that there is a very thin line separating the fighters from the frightened.  Those who are able to overcome their fears do so not because they are especially brave (most expressed grave fears of combat) but rather, because they felt a sense of obligation not to let down the comrades in their squad or troop — their friends, their comrades in arms, the fellows who are beside them behind the parapet or crouching in the shell hole or shallow trench. Interviews with veterans after both World War I and II confirmed the finding: amid the horror of war, and perhaps compelled by it, men fight for one another.  This is especially true when there are common ties linking the men, such as home town, school or work place — anything that reflects common interests or backgrounds.  In the Civil War, units on both sides were composed of soldiers from the same state or city, or calling.  At Gettysburg on the third day, with Pickett’s famous charge close to breaking through the Union lines, New York City firemen, serving together in the same unit, helped sway the tide.

It surely has to be this.  How else to explain why at Gettysburg, men from Maine and Massachusetts and Mississippi threw themselves into the bloody fray. How else to  explain why, with Rebel troops surging towards their entrenched positions, soldiers from the 1st Minnesota Volunteers began a counter-charge in which 215 of its 262 men were killed or wounded in the space of a few short minutes.  What other motivation would compel the actions of a young Union officer named Patrick O’Rorke, out of the Irish diaspora struggling to gain a foothold of acceptance in mid-19th Century America, who led a counter-charge of fellow Irishmen to stem a Rebel advance on Little Round Top and lost his life in a hail of bullets. Ardant du Picq, a 19th- century French colonel and military theorist, explained the influence of common bonds forging a fighting spirit this way: “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.”

The answer, then, is so simplistic that it risks sounding trite:  soldiers do what they are trained to do, and they do what they are trained to do because they don’t want to let down the men they are with.  So it is both a professional (I am a soldier) and a personal (I’m going to do my part) rationale that appears to motivate men in battle. They are drilled to act, but to act, they must draw upon a deep and abiding willingness to sacrifice even their own lives for the sake of those around them.

Which makes the verdant fields of Gettysburg, nearly 150 years after three days of mortal combat, such a melancholy and yet uplifting place.