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The Soft Power of Gratitude
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The Soft Power of Gratitude
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Who’s Ready to Think About Blocking Out the Sun?
The idea of artificially lowering the planet’s temperature is gaining supporters and hitting political opposition.
By Alexander C. Kaufman
For years, the idea of geoengineering—artificially lowering global temperatures through technological means—has been met with skepticism. Only a handful of dedicated and much-criticized scientists have argued for researching it at all, and when others weighed in, it was generally to trash the idea. This September, in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Science, more than 40 experts in climate change, polar geosciences, and ocean patterns warned that geoengineering was extremely unlikely to work and likely to have dangerous consequences. Spraying reflective aerosols into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s heat, could, for instance, “cause stratospheric heating, which may alter atmospheric circulation patterns, leading to wintertime warming over northern Eurasia,” they wrote.
Science fiction has more vividly imagined how humanity might try to reverse climate change and make a mess of it. This is the stuff of Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, in which a failed geoengineering experiment has rendered the planet uninhabitably cold, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, in which the Indian government decides to unilaterally geoengineer the climate after a heat wave roasts millions of its citizens to death. In Robinson’s telling, though, the problem is not geoengineering itself but the risk humans might hastily deploy such technology to manipulate our atmosphere, before we have studied it enough to fully understand what it might do.
As the actual predictions for Earth’s future have become more dire, scientists are starting to agree. More than 120 of them signed on to a response to the Frontiers paper that argued that more research into geoengineering was, in fact, “urgently needed.”
“Within the scientific community, I don’t think there’s any question that there’s growing support for the research, just driven by the reality that climate change is progressing,” Philip Duffy, the former top science adviser in the Biden administration, told me. “There’s a very strong realization now that some amount of overshoot is inevitable, and that mitigation alone can’t fix this.” Hopes of cutting emissions quickly enough to limit the dangers of climate change are fading: This year’s United Nations climate summit concluded over the weekend with a final statement that avoided any mention of fossil fuels, in what was widely hailed as a victory for oil and gas producers. If the world cannot drastically, quickly overhaul global energy and agricultural systems before the planet reaches irreversible tipping points, then what?
In theory, geoengineering could mean brightening marine clouds, or encouraging heat to bounce back into space by mirroring light off polar ice. The term has also been used to describe technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere, which is now widely accepted as a necessary tool to limit global warming. The most vexing technology is what’s broadly referred to as solar-radiation management—those reflective aerosols that could prevent the sun’s heat from reaching the Earth.
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After years of being treated as fringe notions, all of these ideas are gaining traction. The billionaire Peter Thiel has backed geoengineering work. Elon Musk has expressed his support for start-ups pursuing the technology. One Silicon Valley-backed company, Make Sunsets, went as far as carrying out a rogue experiment in Baja California in 2022. Left-wing environmental circles have long criticized even researching these technologies; now some activists (who see climate change as its own form of unintentional geoengineering) argue that geoengineering technologies are a way of reversing capitalism’s climate sins. U.S.-government labs have been actively investigating what it would mean to pour sulfur dioxide into the Arctic atmosphere. Stardust Solutions, an Israeli-U.S. start-up that wants to commercialize reflective-aerosol technology, recently raised $60 million; the company’s aim, CEO Yanai Yedvab told me, is to give governments the information they need to weigh whether to deploy this technology. Bill Gates has publicly been arguing that the climate movement should worry less about emissions goals and more about improving life in a hotter future; at a private lunch I attended last month, he said that dramatic tools such as geoengineering technologies would be good to have “in the arsenal” of climate adaptations.
Like most geoengineering supporters, Gates meant only that we should understand these tools better. More research, after all, would not guarantee deployment. Virtually no advocates are publicly arguing for deploying geoengineering at present; they are arguing only for publicly funded (and therefore publicly accountable) programs.
But at the same moment that scientific and business leaders are softening to the idea of geoengineering, the political opposition in the U.S. is growing. “The politics are wildly bipolar,” Craig Segall, a senior adviser to the Federation of American Scientists and a former top lawyer at the California Air Resources Board, told me. In recent years, he himself has embraced the need to research geoengineering, but he has also watched opponents on both ends of the political spectrum dig in. On the left, the most extreme thinkers argue that the world should be talking only about mitigating emissions—that the solution to climate change is dramatically scaling back energy production. On the right, a contingent of MAGA leaders have become vocal adversaries to geoengineering research and are using it to feed conspiracy theories about government manipulation of the atmosphere.
On Dr. Phil’s show in April, for instance, a young woman asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, about the familiar conspiracy theory that the condensation trails of airplanes contain mind-altering chemicals designed to sicken or control the American people. The so-called chemtrails theory emerged in the 1990s on internet forums and late-night radio, where amateur sleuths presented the idea and used scientists’ rebuttals as evidence of how deep the conspiracy went. Rather than challenge the idea, Kennedy suggested that it was, in fact, a campaign carried out by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA,” he said, before explaining that the chemicals that the woman had mentioned—bromium, aluminum, strontium—might be coming from jet fuel. He promised to “do everything in my power to stop it,” adding that “we’re bringing on somebody who’s gonna think only about that, find out who’s doing that and hold them accountable.” (Kennedy did not respond to my request for comment.)
In July, after deadly floods in Texas killed more than 130 people, Fox News aired an interview in which the chief executive of Rainmaker, a start-up aiming to seed clouds, was asked whether its experiments had spurred the floods. (This notion has been widely debunked.) Few geoengineering experts consider cloud-seeding to be geoengineering; it’s now commonly used in drought-parched places such as Dubai and the Tibetan Plateau as part of China’s efforts to ensure the continued flow of glacial water. But Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene soon piled on. Two months after the floods, the Georgia Republican held a hearing, called “Playing God With the Weather,” that conflated weather modification with geoengineering.
These public officials are responding to a broader movement. In 2020, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, called geoengineering research “a template for both hubris, hypocrisy and risk.” President Donald Trump’s ex-wife Marla Maples has become a prominent activist against both vaccines and geoengineering. Nicole Shanahan, the Silicon Valley lawyer who was Kennedy’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, has said geoengineering should be “a crime.”
On the left, Craig Segall told me, the opposition to geoengineering has been mostly moral signaling. But on the right, millions of dollars are going toward blocking geoengineering before it ever starts in earnest. More than two dozen states have introduced legislation, mainly sponsored by Republicans, to block any geoengineering efforts. Bills have passed into law in at least two states, Tennessee and Florida.
Elsewhere in the world, the situation looks different. In a talk at the Paris Peace Forum last month, Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa hailed the research into solar-radiation management currently under way in Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, and his own country. Developing countries, he said, must be “active architects of our own future.” China’s geoengineering efforts are still nascent, but John Moore, a scientist at the University of Lapland, in Finland, who has advised China’s research into geoengineering, told me that if Beijing does “decide to prioritize it, it will get done.” In other words, our world is looking more and more like the one Kim Stanley Robinson imagined, in which some country decides to try altering the atmosphere.
There’s an analogue for the moment we’re in now. Back in the early 2000s, many climate activists vocally opposed funding adaptation infrastructure—sea walls, raised streets, and other measures meant to mitigate the impacts of a changing climate. They argued that these undertakings would prove ineffective and, worse, would remove the will to decrease emissions. More than two decades later, emissions are still rising, and the cost of adapting to climate change has mounted by the billions each year. Now virtually no serious people involved in climate policy still oppose adaptation funding.
It’s easy to imagine a similar scenario playing out with geoengineering, which essentially amounts to a particularly potent and large-scale tool for adaptation. The arguments that scientists still make against geoengineering follow much the same logic as those against sea walls: In the Frontiers paper, the authors wrote that geoengineering technologies offered “false hope,” and risked sapping the will to address greenhouse gas pollution. They’re right that would-be geoengineers cannot guarantee that their ideas will work or that the intended benefits will outweigh the negative side effects. The barriers to exploring the possibilities of these technologies are rising, arguably more on the right than the left. But short of just going for it, the only way to find out how helpful or dangerous geoengineering might be is to let people ask.
The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’
by Tris Hedges, postdoctoral fellow in philosophy
Sartre’s phenomenology reveals how a shift from subject to object (and back) is not merely a matter of grammar
You meet with a friend to take a walk. Together you stroll through the park, coordinating your movements and reciprocally engaging and communicating with one another. According to the British philosopher Margaret Gilbert, this is a paradigmatic case of experiencing oneself as part of a ‘we’: two people communicatively connected and joint in their commitment to take a walk and catch up.
But what happens when suddenly you become aware of someone staring at you, perhaps listening in on your conversation? In this moment, you may be pulled out of the intimately closed-off dyad as you are abruptly made aware that the two of you have become the object of someone else’s experience, either visually or auditorily. You now experience yourselves not as a private ‘we’ but as a ‘them’ in the eyes of the other.
What this brief anecdote illuminates is the phenomenological distinction between a ‘we’ and an ‘us’. First, we took a walk together and were unified from within, by our sharing in commitments, goals, communication and emotions. Then, we experienced ourselves being unified from the outside as we noticed someone looking at and listening to us.
This may sound like a mere grammatical distinction, but in this short article I want to draw on existential and social phenomenology to show that the distinction between a ‘we’ and an ‘us’ in fact points to an important experiential shift – a shift that reveals something deeper about how we live in a social world saturated with power relations, group markers, and social identities.
Phenomenology is a school of philosophical thought established by Edmund Husserl at the turn of the 20th century. This philosophical tradition enquires extensively into first-person experiences and thus a range of complex issues surrounding consciousness, selfhood, embodiment, perception, affectivity, temporality, and intersubjectivity. While phenomenology began with analyses into the first-person singular – how I experience the world through my embodied subjectivity – a great deal of phenomenologial work has since been dedicated to enquiries into the first-person plural.
When nationalism was on the rise in Europe in the early 20th century, phenomenologists began exploring forms of experience at communal and societal levels. This yielded comprehensive investigations into collective and shared experiences, affective sharing, social participation and group identity. After the Second World War, phenomenologists then engaged rigorously with questions of group-based oppression, marginalisation, exclusion, and how hierarchical distinctions become sedimented into the fabric of our social world.
One shortcoming is that their analyses of the ‘we’ and ‘we-experiences’ are abstract and idealising
A central tenet of this research in social phenomenology pertains to the conditions of going from a first-person singular to a first-person plural perspective. In other words, the transition from an ‘I’ to a ‘we’; from an experience being singularly mine to collectively ours. This transition has also taken centre stage in wider philosophical investigations within social ontology, the field of philosophy that investigates how things come to be through social interaction.
One shortcoming of many of these mainstream philosophical accounts – both from the phenomenological tradition and from contemporary social ontology – is that their analyses of the ‘we’ and ‘we-experiences’ are abstract and idealising. Abstract in the sense that the plural subject is shorn of any sociohistorical situation, and idealising because the ‘we’ is characterised by cooperation, consensus, equality and reciprocity.
But what about those moments in which we situate a collective of people in the world – a world not only inhabited by other people, but one that is saturated with power relations, conflict and historically instituted hierarchical distinctions? To do this, I turn to existential phenomenology, a branch of phenomenology that foregrounds how historically contingent institutions affect lifeworld-specific variations of basic structures of human existence. One thinker who was interested in adopting such an existential-phenomenological social ontology was Jean-Paul Sartre.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre elaborates on the existential and philosophical importance of what he calls ‘the Look’. Unlike earlier accounts that emphasised how the first-person plural emerges out of the relation between I and you, Sartre is interested in how they relates to me as an object. ‘The Look’ groups us together from the outside into an objectified and homogenous ‘them’, pulling us out of the self-contained and self-created ‘we’ that was unified from within.
In extending the existential and phenomenological importance of ‘the Look’ to collective (rather than individual) experience, Sartre draws a distinction between the ‘we-subject’ (le nous-sujet) and the ‘we-object’ (le nous-objet). Since nous in French is used for the first-person plural, in English we could translate Sartre (as his American translator Hazel Barnes did) as drawing a distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘us’. Sartre himself was wary of deriving theoretical insights from mere grammatical categories, especially when many languages do not even use or differentiate between a first-person plural pronoun. But, as the philosopher Sarah Pawlett-Jackson argues in The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025), pronouns came into use precisely in order to capture a particular form of lived experience, a particular phenomenological standpoint.
In many languages, the first-person plural pronoun can take on both a subjective (or, nominative) and objective (or, accusative) form. In English, ‘we’ is used when referring to the plurality as the subject (of an action, belief, judgment, emotion, perception, etc). We saw a movie at the cinema. We need to move the table. We are indignant. However, when that plurality becomes the object, it is referred to instead with the pronoun ‘us’. The cinema didn’t let us in. That table is too heavy for us. They were indignant towards us.
In other words, whereas a we-experience is a plurality of subjects who are jointly conscious of an object, an us-experience involves a double consciousness. Not only are we conscious of each other and a shared object of experience, but also of us as an object that stands in relation to them, the external Third. It is Sartre’s introduction of ‘the Third’ onto the scene that resists the collapsing of the first-person plural into the ‘we’, instead introducing the ‘us’ as something phenomenologically distinct.
Double-consciousness refers to ‘measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’
So, what does it mean to have a ‘we-experience’ in comparison to an ‘us-experience’? Anglophonic philosophical discussions around the first-person plural have almost entirely focused on the ‘we’. By taking the subjective form of the first-person plural as the modus operandi of their investigations, phenomenologists have been predominantly concerned with how we do things together in reciprocal and communicative face-to-face interaction. In order to experience the world from a ‘we-perspective’, certain basic criteria need to be met. First of all, there must be a plurality of subjects who are undergoing the experience. If I am the only person enjoying the sunset, my enjoyment is felt by me as an individual subject, rather than by we as a plural subject. Secondly, the subjects must be unified in some sense. If a stranger sitting near me is enjoying the same sunset, it would be presumptuous to say that we experienced it together unless our enjoyment has been communicated to one another. We haven’t created the necessary unity.
An experience of oneself as a member of an ‘us’ rather than a ‘we’ can be understood to have a distinct phenomenology in two important respects. First, whereas a we-experience can take place between a dyad, an us-experience is necessarily triadic in its structure. A felt sense of ‘us-ness’ can arise only in relation to an external Third element. It is important not to delimit the Third to face-to-face encounters; the Third can be represented through various forms of media, from political posters to radio announcements to graffiti, and thus the Third is encountered with varying degrees of mediation. One can be made reflectively self-aware through ‘the Look’ of the Third by hearing a rustling of branches, the sound of footsteps, or a CCTV camera turning to face your direction.
This foregrounding of being-seen through the Other is reminiscent of the notion of ‘double-consciousness’, first introduced by W E B Du Bois in his essay ‘Strivings of the Negro People’ (1897). For Du Bois, double-consciousness refers to ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ – a commonplace experience for Black people living in a white supremacist society. This understanding of double-consciousness influenced early work in existential phenomenology, especially that of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, through the work of their friend and collaborator, the African American author Richard Wright, for whom Du Bois was an important source of inspiration.
With us-experiences, one can speak of a plural or collective double-consciousness. The members of the ‘we’ are no longer singularly conscious of a shared object of experience, but are doubly conscious of themselves as an object of experience. In this sense, an us-experience arises because of a collective relation to an external Third.
Disentangling the ‘we’ from the ‘us’ is helpful in going beyond the idealising and abstract philosophical discussions in social ontology because it foregrounds the manifold ways in which we experience ourselves being categorised, grouped together, and stereotyped according to certain markers. Plural markings are often the result of sociohistorically instituted identity categories, groupings and hierarchical oppositions. For this reason, first-person plural experiences in terms of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, age and so on often take place in the register of the ‘us’ rather than the ‘we’. This is because these social-identity categories are instituted and policed according to visible markers. While they can be appropriated for emancipatory struggle – and in such cases we can speak of a we-experience at the level of race or gender, for example – they are more often externally imposed in stereotypical, prejudicial and derogatory processes of othering.
So, us-experiences can be less harmonious, consensual and self-endorsed than we-experiences since their constitution hinges on these external impositions. Of course, being part of a ‘we’ can also be negatively valenced, such as the ‘we’ that emerges out of an argument or fight, but to experience oneself as part of an ‘us’ bears no necessary link to feeling a positive sense of commonality with the other members.
Yet the ‘us’ is not simply the dark and depressing side of the ‘we’. As Sartre went on to show in his later work of existentialist Marxism, it is often from the alienated, marked and stereotyped ‘us’ that collective struggle, political action, and a coordinated and resistant ‘we’ emerges. In becoming conscious of one’s position in the social world, you, and others like you, can prompt a response of resistance to dismantle and overcome the social constraints that one collectively faces with others. An emancipatory transition from an ‘us’ to a ‘we’ takes place when the external Third loses salience in lieu of an internal unification and organisation that comes about to reclaim agency over ‘them’. Existential phenomenology, far from being an esoteric philosophical discipline, has crucial political importance in helping people collectively see themselves as agents of change.
Tris Hedges is a postdoc in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. They are on a three-year fellowship, the first two of which are being spent at the Affective Societies Research Centre at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGGc9oBdo1s&list=RDuGGc9oBdo1s&start_radio=1
Alan Parsons - Blown By The Wind
All along the shoreline, there are footprints by the sea
They head into the distance then they lead right back to me
I made the break to freedom, now I'm following the dream
You're never going to get here if you hold the old routine
Now everything we possess that fills our empty lives
Is only good for leaving far behind
We are blown by the wind just like clouds in the sky
We don't know where we're going, don't know why
We just ride with the wind, and we'll drive through the rain
We don't where we'll get to or if we'll get back again
Call along the valley, and you just may find us there
I couldn't say for sure because we may be anywhere
Head into the sunset or just wander out to sea
Wherever your heart leads you
Is the place you're meant to be
And someone who could be impressed wth ordinary lies
Could really use a little peace of mind
We are blown by the wind just like clouds in the sky
We don't know where we'll go, but we'll get by
We just ride with the wind, and we'll drive through the rain
We don't where we'll get to or if we'll get back again
Now everything that we possess that fills our empty lives
Is only good for leaving far behind
We are blown by the wind just like clouds in the sky
We don't know where we're going, don't know why
We just ride with the wind, and we'll drive through the rain
We don't where we'll get to or if we'll get back again
'I would like somebody to keep my extremities warm': Is winter the season for romance?
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Why Are We So Afraid of Conversation?
Lamorna Ash
A glut of self-help books promises to teach us to do it better.
In my mid-teens I succumbed to a protracted period of intense self-consciousness. For about five years, give or take, I was convinced I had lost the capacity to chat naturally with anyone, crippled even in the lowest stakes conversations by a sense of terrible guilt that the other person had ended up in conversation with me — someone with absolutely nothing to say. I can hardly remember how it felt now, except that at the time I used to describe the sensation by way of several lines from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. They were about a character who came across a puddle she could not cross. In finding herself incapable of crossing even a puddle, her whole identity failed her. We are nothing, she cries out. Then falls.
I can see now that what I was experiencing was an acute form of something we all go through in the transition from youth to adulthood. A child is not self-aware enough to consider what their speech does or could do to someone else. At some point, however, they will experience the sharp existential recognition that if they are a subject able to perceive the person opposite them, that person is perceiving them right back. The puddle widens; it becomes for some of us uncrossable. For me, the realization that I could be judged by others, that I had no control over their judgements, nor knowledge of what those judgments might be, was enough to briefly render me speechless.
We dream of some alternative way it all might have gone: If we’d just found the right words to articulate our position, they might have come to understand or accept it; if we’d only kept to certain topics and avoided others…
Right now, there is a general belief that people of all ages are losing the ability to speak easily to one another. Increasing political polarization, the ubiquity of screens, the COVID-19 pandemic — all have contributed to a malaise and neuroticism around the practice of conversation. In the U.K., the phenomenon of young people failing to return to school since the pandemic has become so widespread that they are collectively labeled “ghost children.” A teacher friend told me that some of these children have confessed to her that their biggest fear is anticipating negative conversations they could have with their peers. After so long engaging almost exclusively with other children over social media — platforms that can intensify and melodramatize even the most quotidian encounters — they have forgotten what face-to-face interactions are like. The truth is, my teacher friend told me, the majority of conversations kids have with one another throughout the school day are neutral or often quite nice.
As lockdowns lifted, there were numerous reports of people feeling anxious about their atrophied social skills. Even before the pandemic, psychologists had found that more of us are choosing to break ties with loved ones. A 2019 psychology study suggested that more than a quarter of Americans are currently estranged from a relative — and that the majority of those interviewed in the study found the experience “emotionally distressing.” Even if estrangement is a choice necessary to our health or safety, we remain haunted by the absence of the people we leave. We dream of some alternative way it all might have gone: If we’d just found the right words to articulate our position, they might have come to understand or accept it; if we’d only kept to certain topics and avoided others.
In response to these worries about conversation and connection, a glut of self-help-adjacent books has appeared, promising to teach us to do it better: Alison Wood Brooks’s TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, David Robson’s The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network and Jefferson Fisher’s The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More, among many other titles. For several weeks, I lugged these books around between the library and various social occasions. I am long out of my adolescent period of social anxiety. And yet while reading them, I became acutely aware once more of how I engage in conversation.
On my date, I was distracted by a paranoiac daydream about our tentative, preliminary chat being dissected somewhere by a bunch of scientists in — as my imagination had it — lab coats. Was I “self-disclosing” intimate facts about myself to build up a “rapid rapport,” because I’d just read that people actually want to know more about us than we give them credit for?
Is all this totally artificial, I wondered midway through a first date in a pub. Wood Brooks, Robson and Fisher all offer neat digestible summaries at the end of their chapters to consolidate their strategies for how the reader might best conduct efficacious, generative conversations. “Self-disclosure is more effective than small-talk at building a rapid rapport,” Robson explains, “and people are more interested in your deepest thoughts than your instincts lead you to believe.” In the pursuit of perfecting our capacity to converse, Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, routinely pores over the transcripts of recorded speed dates with her colleagues, along with myriad other species of conversation. She advises that “asking even insincere questions is a form of caring” and that those who prepare possible conversational topics in advance increase the fluidity of their exchanges.
Back on my date, I was distracted by a paranoiac daydream about our tentative, preliminary chat being dissected somewhere by a bunch of scientists in — as my imagination had it — lab coats. Was I “self-disclosing” intimate facts about myself to build up a “rapid rapport,” because I’d just read that people actually want to know more about us than we give them credit for? Or was I doing it because of the strange and fragile dynamic produced on first dates where — because there is no history between you and possibly there will be no future — you can exist more earnestly in the present, speaking more truthfully and unrestrainedly than you might even to your closest companions? Recently a friend suggested that in some ways a one-night stand echoes the dynamic of a confessional: this quasi-sacred space in which you can reveal deeper aspects of yourself, and from which you go away feeling somehow unburdened.
This is the difficulty with these books, and with many books that combine popular science with self-help: There are the theories, the summaries, the action points and then there is the unpredictability, spontaneity and mysteries of human interaction itself. As Wood Brooks suggests in her introduction, conversation is one of “the most complex and uncertain of all human tasks,” “an ongoing act of co-creation in pursuit of all manner of needs and desires, a stream of micro-decisions delicately coordinated between multiple human minds, as the context changes at every turn.” This is what makes it such a thrill, and potentially a total horror. Learn all the cheat codes, participate in all the pre-game warmups: It’s still impossible to predict where a conversation might take you.
✺
In The Art of Conversation (1993), British cultural historian Peter Burke notes that in classical Latin, conversatio meant something like “intimacy.” In vernacular languages up to the early modern period in Europe, cognates of conversatio often conveyed a sense of physical closeness: gathering or dwelling together. It was not until the late 16th century that the English “conversation” came to mean the exchange of words — and from there, to be written about as a kind of performance, a game through which you could achieve not just closeness to another person, but also influence and esteem. Wood Brooks, Robson and Fisher all respond to this last sense of conversation in some way — whether to take umbrage with the way it has come to predominate, degrading us all into becoming adverts for ourselves, to take it for granted or to encourage readers to grab some of that influence and esteem for themselves.
TALK is the expanded form of a course that Alison Wood Brooks has been delivering to MBA students and executives since 2019. She often speaks to the reader like we too are intent on using our conversational acumen to prosper in the corporate or political sphere. For example, when she encourages her readers to try a little humor in their conversations, she points out that people tend to “underestimate how often attempts at humor go well — leavening the mood, drawing people together, boosting perceptions of competence and status.” David Robson is a science writer who alights on conversation as an essential element in his synthesis of more than 300 academic papers into social strategies that will “help you build a more satisfying social network.” Like Wood Brooks, Robson has a tendency to consider human connection, primarily mediated through conversation, in pragmatic terms: “Once we have landed a job, our social connections can contribute to greater productivity and creativity.” Jefferson Fisher, a Texan personal injury lawyer from a long line of Texan personal injury lawyers, focuses in The Next Conversation on how to handle more adversarial conversations, with our loved ones, on the bus, in the workplace.
It was not until the late 16th century that the English “conversation” came to mean the exchange of words – and from there, to be written about as a kind of performance, a game through which you could achieve not just closeness to another person, but also influence and esteem.
I was most taken with The Next Conversation, the most no-frills, low-theory of the three books. I found Fisher’s approach totally uncynical. His mission statement is simple and, in its simplicity, quite radical: We should enter conversations not to prove but to learn something. Through conversations we are supposed to be changed and opened up to one another, for the puddle between us to shrink. In this respect, Fisher takes the reader closest to the earlier meaning of conversation set out by Burke: as a way of crossing the puddle and coming together.
The book has its origins in an online video short that Fisher recorded on his phone and uploaded to social media in 2022. The video, titled “How to argue like a lawyer pt.1,” catapulted its creator into celebrity status. In the video, Fisher offers three points for a better, more easily resolvable argument: Keep it short, keep the emotion out of it and don’t curse. It’s easy to see why that video, and his subsequent ones, became so popular: He has the sort of genial, unarrogant, unaffected demeanor that could charm anyone.
The Next Conversation is both a product of Fisher’s online celebrity and a response to it: From where he was standing, as a lawyer, as an Insta-celeb with more than 6 million followers, it seemed to him that something was going wrong with the way people were interacting — not just in arguments, but in all conversations. They enter conversations with their defenses up, and so fail to listen to the person opposite them. It’s as if Fisher’s occupation, which requires him to watch people battling one another with words all day long, caused in him the epiphany that there must be a better way to speak to one another.
The evidence Fisher uses to support his claims is largely drawn from his own experiences as a legal professional, as a friend, parent, partner. He is a born storyteller, the text enlivened by funny, idiosyncratic anecdotes, and his own interjections to those anecdotes, words like “blerf” and “oof.” My favorite of his stories is about a man named Bobby LaPray. LaPray witnessed a bar fight in which Fisher’s client had got caught up, so Fisher brought him in for a deposition to see if LaPray could be called as a witness at the trial. But the deposition was making LaPray visibly distressed. “His eyebrows began furrowing with each answer. A sign of negative emotion.” (Fisher is never afraid to state the obvious.) Eventually LaPray lets rip: Lawyers are the worst thing that has happened to America; all they do is lie. Rather than taking the bait, Fisher asks himself, “What else is at play? Who am I really talking to?” What’s been your biggest personal struggle this year, he asks LaPray. At this point, LaPray instantly softens, telling Fisher that he’s just had to admit his mother into an assisted living facility, there’s no one else to help him in supporting her, and he can’t understand a lot of the “legal stuff” required of him.
It seemed to him that something was going wrong with the way people were interacting — not just in arguments, but in all conversations. They enter conversations with their defenses up, and so fail to listen to the person opposite them.
Fisher uses this anecdote to underline another primary thesis: “The person you see isn’t the person you’re talking to.” According to him, this shouldn’t be a source of alarm: To discover who the person in front of you really is, you just have to ask the right questions.
During the enlightenment period, conversation manuals set out the “art of conversation” for upwardly mobile readers who hoped to consolidate or further improve their social standing. Today, there are whole fields of academia — in psychology and sociology departments, in business schools and institutions of public policy — that purport to anatomize the science of conversation, an endeavor that reminds me of an entomologist pinning a butterfly to a wall.
After four years of such research, Wood came up with “TALK” as a handy acronym for four maxims that she believes can help us master conversation. 1) Topics: a good conversationalist picks good subjects and can effectively use their chosen topics to optimize conversation. 2) Asking: “Asking more questions increases information exchange, but it also has a less obvious, and more important, benefit: It improves the relationship,” she writes, which is funny because it’s surely much more obvious or intuitive to ask questions because you want to know more. 3) Levity: It’s productive to insert moments of playfulness and fizz into our conversations to prevent them from becoming stale. 4) Kindness, “because great talkers care for others and show it.” She compares the act of conversation to jazz composition, “the art of negotiating change with style. The aim of every performance is to make something out of whatever happens — to make something together and be together.” Levity is thrown into the mix because she recognizes that, whatever the context, we enter conversations hoping to amuse and delight one another — even in a business meeting, there are always little sparks that remind you we are not yet all automata. The rest of the book is spent expanding on these maxims one by one, in her colloquial, easy style, with references to classic psychological studies, her own research and her own experiences.
Around 50 to 60 percent of U.S. citizens report feeling social disconnection at regular intervals in their lives. Received wisdom suggests this is a particular condition of our atomized, social-media-fractured present.
“Being a successful person is about relationships,” she writes. “And relationships are about talking. Good people, the types of leaders we are trying to train at [Harvard’s] business school (and everywhere else), are those who understand, connect with, learn from, and inspire other people.” There is a naivety here — perhaps the naivety necessary to keep believing that the people you are training in business school are the “good people” who are going to change our world. It also feels extraordinarily out of step with our moment: Enormously successful business leaders, and leaders of countries, are no longer required even to pretend to be good or kind or generous to win influence and supporters. And yet, despite Wood Brooks’s commitment to shepherding the business leaders of tomorrow, there are many moments in Talk where you can feel her straining against the limits of her goal to remake conversation into a pragmatic business skill. She recognizes that being too didactic about how conversations should go is at odds with “the messiness and irrationality of real talk” because “we’re all making it up as we go along.” In other words, conversation will always be, as Samuel Johnson once described it, “talk beyond that which is necessary to the purposes of actual business.”
Robson, in synthesizing decades of academic research, wants to elucidate not just how to conduct a meaningful conversation — the kind that moves beyond the bounds of small talk and allows us to feel more intimately connected with our interlocutor — but why such conversations are good for us. Building deep bonds with our fellow humans improves our physical as well as our psychological wellbeing, lowering our risk of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, he explains. The trouble is that most of us do not feel we are achieving sufficient social contact. Around 50 to 60 percent of U.S. citizens report feeling social disconnection at regular intervals in their lives. Received wisdom suggests this is a particular condition of our atomized, social-media-fractured present. We live further from our families, work from home, spend too many hours online and too little in the real world. And yet, even people who report seeing their friends, families and colleagues regularly describe feeling “underappreciated and unloved” a lot of the time, Robson points out. Our social and historical contexts may differ, as well as some of the technologies we use to communicate with one another, but there is something oddly comforting about the universality of our experience of isolation.
Naturally, our conversation skills grew a little rusty during the pandemic. And we do dilute our conversations by conducting them across many competing mediums at once. And maybe the differences between us do feel more insurmountable. But fundamentally, the gulf between one person and another — a gulf that can only be healed through our attempts at expressing, as best we can, what is going on inside each of us — has not altered. It’s part of the human condition, like the dawning of my awareness as a child that if I was a conscious subject with my own private world, so was everybody else.
Researchers tracked hundreds of students over one semester, asking them throughout that period to provide their relationship status, then answer the question “Who are you today?” Those students who reported falling in love during the semester began to use more adjectives and nouns than they had previously in order to describe themselves.
Robson offers copious evidence to suggest how pessimistic we are about our capacity to connect with others through conversation, in which we “consistently underestimate how much the other person enjoyed our company” (I was reminded of the U.K.’s ghost children, dreading conversations that would most likely turn out to be perfectly harmless.) “The average person leaves a conversation feeling that their new acquaintance liked them far less than they liked their new acquaintance — and vice versa,” he writes, describing a phenomenon researchers refer to as “the liking gap.” We are predisposed to feel shut off from one another; then, acting on our feelings of being shut off, we produce the very disconnection that we feared.
How do we overcome such barriers? After all Robson’s comprehensive laying out of the psychological research into human connection, the answers he comes to feel surprisingly obvious. We just need to make contact with one another — even though it is hard, even though we are likely to miss half the meaning of what the person opposite us is trying to articulate, even though we might often feel our interlocutor is similarly failing to understand us. Again and again, Robson’s “action points” are about reaching out to people going through hard times, trying to make new friends, rekindling old friendships. The liking gap, that great gulf we feel between ourselves and others, perhaps really is just a puddle we need to feel brave enough to jump over.
Probably, a reader could have worked that out without recourse to 300 academic papers. Still, my favorite of the psychological experiments Robson draws on is this: Researchers tracked hundreds of students over one semester, asking them throughout that period to provide their relationship status, then answer the question “Who are you today?” Those students who reported falling in love during the semester began to use more adjectives and nouns than they had previously in order to describe themselves. “Their self-concept literally expanded,” Robson writes, “as their partners helped them to discover new aspects of themselves.” He goes on to quote Anaïs Nin on friendship: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” We are built relationally and dialogically; our selves grow through conversation with one another.
Every summer I teach a creative writing week for a group of teenagers at a house in rural Devon. One afternoon I was standing outside in the sunshine on the lawn with the other tutor, both of us drinking coffee. We were just talking, ultimately, and had been for a while, our coffees cooling. At one point, one of the kids on the course sprinted up to us to ask, “Why do you guys just stand around doing this all day?” It was a question my younger self might have asked. I don’t remember my response. But if I could answer my student now, I would say that sometimes I think conversation is about the most fulfilling, pleasurable, ethically minded activity you could possibly engage in: to sit opposite another person hearing things you have never heard before because only they could have articulated them, to be saying things you didn’t know you knew until the other person’s words unlocked them in you, not to prove but to learn. To let yourself be transformed by what the other person has to say.
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