Use Your Backhand Down the Line
Political discussions may be "hardball" but so is tennis. Play both.
Many people think they survived the Christmas season by avoiding serious conversations. As if survival is a victory.
Play tennis with each other and your game gets better, especially if you are evenly matched. Your flaws are exposed and, hopefully, corrected. Your strengths are used more wisely and to better effect. At best you will match your game with your opponent, a partner in taking your game to a higher level.
And it’s fun. Competition is fun, not only when you win. More fun that hitting against a board wall with a net drawn on it. There is nothing like challenging oneself against another—with a little “trash talk” and laughter and the occasional high-five. Playing without a good opponent is worse than playing without a net. That’s why we talk about our regular “game” as meeting our partner on the court.
If you win at tennis, or golf, or cornhole, you haven’t broken up a family gathering. If you lose you don’t resort to name calling. Can we “do” conversations about religion and politics, the two taboos of family gatherings, in the same way—with passion and sportsmanship, taking advantage of mistakes, hitting it hard down the line.
Understanding politics and the future better, explaining our point of view better and sharing our personal experiences better is the nature of such a ”game.” We should be playing for the sake of the game itself, not trophies for the “man cave,” or mantle piece.
And there is a “hidden” additional benefit to serious political discussion. As a discovery process, we become aware of the broad range of our agreements. The better our backhand, the more acute our thinking, the more we strengthen each other’s perceptions, the more likely we are to find common ground—the basis of democratic life. That’s a different kind of winning. The right kind.
Think about this. Shallowness of ideas, sloppy intellectual “play,” leads more often than not to a retreat into partisanship and name calling. Serious discussion, like serious tennis strengthens our thinking and that inevitably leads to our finding shared values and reaching agreement on facts. Then we ideally move from sparing with ideas, to seeing common interests, to putting agreements into action.
What if we admitted that our disagreements are at least in part due to weaknesses in our thinking, flaws in the way all of us have been viewing the world and handling abstract concepts. Democracy is the end game of serious conversations, especially when they are earnest and hard fought—with friends, with citizens. (And in every possible way these days we need to learn how to accept defeat as well as win with grace.)