In this conversation with Pamela Narins, social scientist, former Bader Rutter executive, and instructor of the upcoming course, How Do We Disagree? Antigone and Twelve Angry Men, we explored why disagreement feels especially difficult today, amid rising polarization, the loss of shared experience, and the tendency to view disagreement as a social ill rather than a civic necessity. The discussion highlighted that disagreements have always been fundamental to human life and remain essential for learning and growth. Narins introduces the four texts at the center of her course, the Kalven Report, the Chicago Principles, Antigone, and Twelve Angry Men, and describes how each illustrates different forms of conflict, conviction, and listening. She also explains how the class will help students develop strategies for navigating disagreement within their own daily lives.
Lecturer bio:
Pamela Narins is a social scientist by training, a natural storyteller, and a strategist who translates complex ideas into clear, actionable insights. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science from the University of Chicago, where she focused on the behavior of the American voter. This early interest in how people think and decide ultimately shaped a three-decade career in advertising.
Pamela has held senior leadership roles across several major Chicago agencies. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Planning at Bader Rutter, where she built a new creative strategy function within the long-standing firm. Her previous positions include Planning Director at DDB and Global Planning Director for McDonald’s markets outside the United States. Across these roles, she has guided brands ranging from category leaders to emerging start-ups in both consumer and B2B sectors.
A former board member and President of the Chicago Advertising Federation, Pamela now leads an independent consultancy. She is delighted to return to Hyde Park and to the University of Chicago community that first shaped her intellectual life.
Transcript:
Seth Green: Well, my clock has struck 11am, so we are going to get started. Welcome to our preview conversation, where we look ahead to a class in the winter, and today we will be exploring the course on the humanistic basics of productive disagreement with its wonderful instructor, Pamela Nairns. My name is Seth Green, and on a morning like this one, I’m grateful to say that I’m the dean here at the Graham School at the University of Chicago. Welcome to our snowy campus, virtually. It is gorgeous all lit up on white today.
And welcome to those who may not be familiar with the Graham School. We are 135 years into our journey and trailblazing paths for lifelong learning so that individuals across all ages and stages can participate in the distinctive educational atmosphere of this great university. For those who want to continue joining us for events, I’ll just preview that we have a lot coming up.
We have another class preview next week on a new initiative here called Classic Text Contemporary World, where we explore how we can harness timeless wisdom to answer big questions of today. And that class will focus on what is intelligence in a time when, of course, there are now artificial forms of intelligence that are becoming a big part of our society and economy.
And then early in the new year, we will have a conversation with Lucy Kellaway about her midlife transition, where she went back for education, why she did so, and how that enabled her to live her purpose.
And then a little bit later in January, we’ll have a conversation on a new book, Reader Bot, which will also explore some of these big questions that AI has put into our world around the connection between AI and the humanities. And then finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that this Thursday, we have our Graham Holiday party, which will be preceded with a conversation on theater and Broadway with Chris Jones, just returned from taking our Graham students there, and we will be honoring four outstanding instructors with our 2025 Excellence in Teaching Awards. I will say, as of this moment, we have nearly 600 RSVPs for our holiday party, so you will be in good company, and it is a wonderful chance to see your peers and fellow lifelong learners before the holidays.
But the reason you are here is for our conversation with Pamela Narin, and so let me spotlight her. Pamela is a social scientist by training, a storyteller by nature, and a simplifier of the complex by wiring. She has made her career turning data into insights and strategy for marketing organizations.
She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago in political science, focusing on the behavior of the American voter, and then her inherent interest in understanding the mechanics of human behavior unexpectedly, yet seemingly inevitably, led her to a 30-year career in advertising. She currently is founder of an independent consultancy, but she’s also held in-house executive roles in many of the storied global agencies here in Chicago, most recently serving as EVP of Strategy and Planning at Bader Rudder, where she introduced a creative new strategy function to a 50-year-old organization. She is also a fellow of the Leadership and Society Initiative, where we got to know her more deeply at the Graham School, and she is, as of January, a Graham School instructor.
And we are so excited for her course. And so, with that long lead-up, Pamela, let me start with what might be an obvious question. Why this course and why now? What led you to develop this course? Why do you think it’s important to have productive approaches to disagreement? And then we’ll jump into the content itself.
Pamela Narins: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you, Seth, and thank all of you for being here for this conversation. Part of the answer to the question is simply, duh. But that’s probably not sufficient. We have been arguing about how to argue since we crawl out of the primordial ooze, and there’s no time, really, where that’s been more evident in terms of our ability or a loss of ability to argue productively than our current moment. But the good news, I suppose, is that our current moment is not unique.
You know, we’ve been living in polarized times, disagreement has been weaponized and framed as a social ill, rather than a civic necessity. And we see this, of course, in our current moment, in our civic and political lives, but really, it’s bled over to the dining room table, it’s in our social spectrum as well.
And the core question, really, to me at least, is, how do we reframe disagreement as a benefit, which is what it effectively is, and embrace it productively. The goal is not to avoid disagreement, to erase it, to pretend it isn’t there, to avoid it completely, but in a sense, to repair its reputation.
In fact, one of the things that drew me to this topic was the fact that evidence across all disciplines, from the social sciences to the hard sciences, the humanities, affirms that disagreement’s not really only fundamental to the human experience, but actually contributes and is required for human flourishing.
Across history, we’ve always grappled with it, and we can learn from past societies, how other thinkers have addressed it.
One thing that’s very important, I think, to recall is that context really matters. Certain principles run through all forms of disagreement, regardless of the means of destruction and the various ways in which disagreement is engaged in, but insight can be gleaned that helps us in our own context.
Seth Green: Well, so let’s dive in to your idea of productive disagreement, because one of the things that we talk a lot about in a democracy, sometimes we talk about it in the context of a company that might benefit from different ways of thinking, is that disagreement can be a tool that strengthens a community, that strengthens democracy, that strengthens a company. It can also be a source of undermining connection and relationships. And so, how do we tell the difference between the type of disagreement that strengthens democratic life, for example, from disagreement that undermines it?
Pamela Narins: Sometimes we can evidently see the corrosive effects. You know, when something is toxic, we can view it as toxic, and to sort of really misquote Justice Potter Stewart from the 1964 obscenity case, you know, I can’t define pornography, but I’ll know it when I see it. You know, sometimes we see it. But sometimes by the time we see it, and by the time we recognize it, it’s too late. I suspect it will come as no surprise that the sort of simple yet increasingly elusive answer is found in shared humanity. Disagreement that seeks to only provide its own point of view, and doesn’t recognize the humanity of the person or people with whom we are disagreeing, is this sort of seed bed for corrosive and toxic disagreement.
In terms of the disagreement we see in our own current life, it is respect and empathy that has been lost. You know, we seek to prove our own points, we don’t seek to listen, we don’t seek to understand. It’s not that we need to seek to agree. That is hardly the point.
But we fail to see our own shared vision. Our country, at least in our national life, used to be, at least to some extent, and we all know this, we had a shared view, at least generally speaking, of what the ideal state was. Even though we had different perspectives on how to get there, we had a shared view of, yeah, that’s the ideal, and we all have a responsibility to help us get there. But we have learned, or we have been taught, to think of other pathways as less legitimate. And the farther and farther we get from the sense of shared experience, which I really do think is the sort of bedrock for empathy, the farther and farther we get from shared experience, the farther and farther we get from seeing other viewpoints as even worth listening to or being legitimate.
Seth Green: Well, and it’s really interesting, and I’m sure you’ve seen this data, Pamela, that if you look at how people think about if the other party’s views in America were to become realized, you know, it’d be the end of America as we know it, right? And if you look at polling, there was always a portion of maybe one party that would believe that about the other, but now the percentages have gone through the roof, so that, you know, there’s a belief, well, if Trump wins, it’s the end of America as we know it. If Biden wins, it’s the end of America as we know it. And that creates, I think, a very different type of disagreement, right? Because it’s almost as if you’re stopping, in people’s minds, Hitler from coming to power, and then, kind of, it’s no holds barred, you know, this is inherently evil, how can we have empathy? And that’s a very different context than saying, okay, this person and I disagree, and I may not think that the country will be as strong if this person leads, but I don’t see it as the end of all humanity, or the end of all… and so, you know, that hyperbolic setting, right, is one in which it’s very difficult to have empathy because we don’t even see the other in the context of that humanity.
And, you know, it is a… I think while, you know, sometimes in the Academy we can kind of see it sometimes on the right, I know I found sometimes when I want to raise a viewpoint that may be counter to the existing culture, you know, you immediately come up against, oh, the only way to hold that view would be to be an evil person, because, you know, unions are inherently good, there’s no way to doubt them in public, or this is inherently… and so, you know, this must be an enemy attack. And so it’s interesting to see, just based on polling, that we are there, in terms of, you know, where we have gone in a number of different surveys.
You have noted that humanity can help us grapple with disagreement and learn from the past, and how past societies and thinkers have taught us about handling disagreement that we seem to have forgotten or need to recover.
So, I know one of the things you’re gonna do is you’re gonna talk about texts that will be used in the class as case studies and disagreement. Can you name the text and give us some examples of the types of disagreement it explores, or what it teaches us about productive disagreement and why you chose it? And then we’ll walk through some of these texts and how they help us to think about empathy for the other and respect disagreement, even if we may be coming with a viewpoint that we have, you know, the right view on our side.
Pamela Narins: I actually can name them, yes. But, you know, to the point that you made just moments ago, when opposing views are cast as existentially threatening. Now, there are some things that are existentially threatening, that is very clear, but when even conversational views are posed as existentially threatening, that short-circuits our ability to listen, and if we do not have the ability to listen, we don’t have the ability to grow, or think creatively. It is that sort of emotional and mental and intellectual frisson that allows us to expand and understand our horizons better, and come to better solutions.
But, in terms of the past. It’s sometimes it’s… it’s not… you know, sometimes the texts that we’re… and I’ll talk about the texts, it’s… they don’t necessarily instruct us on what to do, but they instruct us on what not to do. So we learned that. But in terms of the texts that we’re going to be reading, there are four. Two of which are very short and are sort of joined at the hip in a certain sense. As I, as you’ll hear me say over and over, context really matters, but the first two texts we’ll be reading are the Calvin Report, written by the Calvin Committee at the University of Chicago in 1967, which was written during the 60s, in 1967, during a time when institutions, particularly educational institutions, were being called on from all sides to take positions on highly salient issues.
And that laid the groundwork for a sense that the university was going to take a position of institutional neutrality. And in 2014, the Committee on Freedom of Expression, also at the University of Chicago, wrote a document that has come to be known as the Chicago Principles, which also further cemented and solidified this notion of intellectual human, intellectual neutrality. Because to sort of paraphrase the conclusion, the only way to further debate and dialogue is to actually have debate and dialogue. And the only way to further creative solutions is actually to listen to all sides of them with safety. So to disagree, certainly, this foregone conclusion that we will be disagreeing, but disagree without being disagreeable.
So, that will be our first class, where we’ll talk about the sort of groundwork that’s laid. Indeed, then we’ll move on to Antigone, which was written by Sophocles at a time of tremendous political and social change in Athens. The conflict, the types of conflicts that were laid out there were deeply held existential beliefs, in a sense. Personal, familial, senses of honor, the political, divine law versus civil law, individual agency versus tyranny, endless types of extremely foundational disagreement.
And the depths of the beliefs and the unwillingness of the characters to even consider or hear the opposing positions, or understand why somebody else might have them, led to what I’m sure will come as no surprise to any of you who know the story, because it’s a tragedy. It didn’t turn out well for anybody. So there’s a little bit of thought in there. So there’s an example there of why people believed what they did, understanding and having some empathy with the sources and causes of those beliefs, but also understanding that this sort of walled-off inability to hear ended very badly. I chose that story in part because it’s a beautiful story, but also so it demonstrates the sheer power of conviction, which is a marvelous thing. You know, human conviction results in human engine making, and growth, but how destructive it can also be in the absence of openness.
And yes, of course, there are times for moral imperatives. But we have to even view our own moral imperatives through the lens of somebody else’s position who doesn’t necessarily hold them.
And the last of the texts that we’ll be reading is 12 Angry Men. Most people probably know this story from the 1957 movie, but it was originally written in 1954 as a teleplay, and then written in 1955 by Reginald Rose as a stage play, and it is the stage play we’ll be reading.
The context here is also significant because it was, Reginald Rose wrote it as a result of his own experience in the jury room during the McCarthy era, when paranoia and othering and inability to hear, and fear and all of those things were rampant.
The effect here, and again, this is a pretty popularly known story, is the effect of dispassionate, rational, rules-based inquiry. The effect that can have on deeply held beliefs, which were just as powerful as those exhibited in Antigone. Personal, moral, tribal, legalistic, all kinds of beliefs were allowed to be unearthed and explored through patience and dispassion, effectively.
Seth Green: Well, so, I want to ask one more question, and then we have many questions populating the chat already, Pamela. How can students think about the learning journey here? What can they expect in the classroom? Can you share a bit about how your course will be structured, and your aims of the course? I mean, if you were to say, someone who goes through my course, here are ways in which I hope they might come out differently on some level. I’m curious to just kind of hear about the classroom, hear about how it’s structured, and then hear about what you think would be the ultimate aim of this, you know, this reading for that person.
Pamela Narins: Certainly, thank you. The structure of the class will be pretty simple, in a sense. These readings are quite short, and we’re going to read them in order. I will come to every class with a little bit of background, a little bit of context, because I said, context matters. There will be the grounding that we get from Calvin and the Chicago Principals. The densest portion, I believe, will be the introduction and the preface in the Antigone to the Antiquity Strip, because there’s a lot of good history in that.
But effectively, we will be unfolding these conversations in order as we go through each class. I will come prepared with some background. Prepare to read aloud. They are plays, after all. I would say this is a pragmatic thought, but a silly one, but buy a pack of 14 colored markers for 12 Angry Men, because the characters are named Juror 1, Juror 2, Juror 6, Juror 9, and I found it virtually impossible to keep them straight without giving each one a color. But effectively, we will be interrogating the types of human interactions and give us, through this sort of sense of remove, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment, a sense of remove, an understanding of just how naturally corrosive disagreement can unfold, with the best intentions, and how naturally it can be made to work better, provided we think about it.
And when I say there’s remove, one thing this class will not be: it’s a class on current events. It will be virtually impossible to keep the now out of the discussion, of course, because this is not only a timely… and because it’s a timely topic, but it is also a timeless topic, and I think that’s what we’ll be focusing on until we get to the final class.
And the final class will be more explicitly devoted to not only comparing the methods and the structures and the strategies and the types of disagreement that we’ve read about, but also be more overt about bringing in how we can, the now, the current moment, and how we might develop our own strategies in our workplaces, at home, how we might bring these forward in our daily lives. Now, I will say that anyone who might be interested in this class is probably already interested in the idea of getting along with others, so I won’t be changing someone’s mind about, oh my god, you’re right, I should get along with people. But it will give us an opportunity to sort of exercise as a collegial group these notions of practicing how to diffuse disagreement. In order to move ourselves forward, as I said, I believe it’s critical to disagree for human and civic flourishing, but we just have to remember how to do it the right way.
Seth Green: Well, so, we have lots of questions, Pamela, so I’m going to start on them, and we’ll see if we can get through them all over the course of our remaining 25 minutes. Deborah Cohn writes, my questions are, what do you mean by productive? Can all disagreements be redirected to become productive? How do we know that working through disagreements can be productive? And so… you know, I think there is this, and to your point earlier, there may be existential questions. You know, how do we separate these out? How do we think about them? I think there’s a decent part, if we look at our polling today, of our country who might question whether disagreement can be productive, or if these are so existential that, you know, you have to, in some ways, vanquish, or that the other side isn’t reliable or trustworthy enough to have these conversations? How do you answer those questions? How do you distinguish? So what is productive? Can disagreements be productive? How do we know that working through disagreements can be productive?
Pamela Narins: Right, well, part of me wants to say, yeah, some people I just won’t talk to. I mean, there are people, there is a bell curve of conversation, and there are people on the ends of any conversational structure whose opinions are not only not going to change, and again, that’s not necessarily the goal, to change an opinion, but who will be unable to engage. And I was listening to a scholar last year talk about some people you just leave behind, some discussions you just leave behind. Because not everything is fixable, and not everything is worth fixing. That said, I do believe that it’s about regaining a sense of shared experience. We have become so increasingly isolated. We not only have lost our sort of rhetorical skills to engage in conversation, but we’ve lost even our ability to have… to practice those skills, because we are isolated in our own bubble. If you say something like, I’d like to improve civic discourse, that already, remarkably, implies a position. It shouldn’t imply a position. Everybody should want that, but it already does. So, our language, the language of the public square, has been recast to trigger certain perspectives, and I think that how do you, you know, how you distinguish productive disagreement is if you remember there is a shared experience. If you try to recreate a sense of shared responsibility and shared experience on whatever the topic is, civic life or business life, interteen life, etc., then that can be… that can become productive. When you see experience as unshareable, then it can devolve into destruction.
Seth Green: And to your point, this course itself is a shared experience, because you’re reading these texts together. Out of curiosity, are there other things that you think about as someone who cares about this topic that help you to engage in shared experience in a world that is as fragmented and oriented toward echo chambers as our technology and a number of other changes in society now point us toward?
Pamela Narins: Interestingly, there was a, some of it is so simple, but as I said throughout my career, simple is never easy. Some things that are very simple are, there was an opinion that was written by Ezra Klein a few weeks ago in the New York Times that I happened to read. And he talked about the fact, something that we all know, which is we disagree civilly all the time. You talk to the people at the grocery store, you know, the casual interactions that we have demonstrate our ability to talk to people across differences constantly, without turning, you know, without going up in flames.
Seth Green: And so I think one of the things that allows us to…
Pamela Narins: Practice and recognize our shared humanity across differences, and therefore be more productive about it, is to do the things that we know contribute to happiness and civic flourishing, which is simply be outside of our echo chambers, be out, you know, be in 3D, not 2D, all the time. And so some of those simple, just, recognitions of interactions that we have all the time, as long as you become conscious of it, become more powerful.
Seth Green: Jennifer Lind asks, can you tell us more about the context of the Calvin Report? What affected the political events of the era, the U.S. War in Vietnam, determine the timing of publishing it? And then another question, just to weave it in, has there ever been an occasion where the university did make a public statement based on a moral imperative? I can help with that one, but why don’t I let you start as our instructor, Jennifer?
Pamela Narins: Thank you for helping with the second one, because I don’t know. But, well, I mean, certainly the times were… there were all kinds of cries being, on all sides, being levied at all institutions of higher learning, because the kids being drafted were the kids that were going to universities or trying to stay in universities to avoid the draft. And as the war in Vietnam became more and more heated and more a source of public outrage from both sides, there were calls: stand up for the war, stand up against the war. And the university, wisely, believed that there was no sense in taking a position like… regardless of individual positions, an institutional position was ill-founded because it struck down debate, and it suddenly hamstrung any institution in the future. So in terms of what was going on at the time, it was purely the environment and the political… the saliency of that environment, that inspired the committee to meet.
Seth Green: Well, and textually, I’ll just say that in the later document, Chicago Principles, there’s this idea that the university is not a critic itself, it’s the sponsor of critics, and that if it becomes a critic as an institution, it then silences potentially disagreeing viewpoints, and short-ends that educational mission. I’ll just briefly answer Jennifer’s other question here. The university in those documents does say that there may be times when it is necessary to advocate for a viewpoint for the flourishing of our educational mission. So they’re not general social viewpoints that might shortchange the ability of scholars to take their own views. But they are viewpoints that generally lead to our ecosystem of education being possible. So as an example, if there is an effort to stop immigration and not allow scholars to come to the U.S. to participate in the free-flow exchange of ideas, that would be the type of thing that might lead to a concern, and then there’d be a debate about whether or not to take a position. That position would not be for its own purpose of just having a social viewpoint, but explicitly for the purpose of preserving the institution itself and its ability to achieve its educational mission.
We have another question here from Jerry. There was something contemptible about the way… oh, okay, let me come back to that one. Let me come to Emily. What is the role of persuasion in productive disagreements? What is the end goal? Is it some degree of consensus?
Pamela Narins: Sometimes consensus is a good thing. Sometimes it is not necessarily the goal. As much as I love my own opinions, if all of them share… if everyone shared my opinions, this would be a pretty boring, uninteresting place. Sometimes difference is exactly what we’re after. So persuasion can be a nice rhetorical and dialectic tool. Persuasion is fun if you want someone to… you know… I was in advertising for a long time. People used to say that, you know, what I did was… was I forced people to do things, or buy things, or think about things that they shouldn’t want or buy. And my perspective on it was always I was inviting them to think about something in a new way. That’s all I was doing. You couldn’t force anybody to do anything. So persuasion is a lovely thing when you invite someone to think about something by giving them a new context or new pieces of information to think about. But agreement is not always the goal. But civility is.
Seth Green: Well, so there’s a question here from Jerry, and I’ll now finish it. There was something contemptible about the way former President Claudine Gay of Harvard used context in her response to Representative Virginia Fox at an education hearing about anti-Semitism on campus. What would you recommend about, in quotes, profiting from one’s enemies by this interaction?
Pamela Narins: Well, this is where she failed on the… in upholding the Chicago principles, as it were. There are… and this… and this is also where the now can become extremely trappy. Institutional neutrality is critical. Personal neutrality is impossible, necessarily. So I, you know, from a personal perspective, I found… I found that contemptible, too. But she needed to uphold the ability of everybody to feel safe in disagreement in her… at her institution. She failed to do it. There are other institutions that failed to do it, as well, and they were brought before the court of public opinion, as it were, rightly or wrongly, comfortably or uncomfortably, but it became very… there was a whole lot of moral relativism there, so you’re right. The context that I think of as relevant is the context within which these issues become salient. And then there has to be some neutrality within those contexts to parse the issues safely.
Seth Green: So how do we think about areas of science? We have a few questions here. Should scientific facts be up for debate? Is climate change happening? How to deal with it? Can you talk a little bit about that? I know that’s outside of the humanities, but how do you think about using these tools of productive disagreement for people that may be debating scientific or other matters on which there may or may not arguably be more of a methodology for finding answers than a perspective-based approach?
Pamela Narins: I’m a believer in science, let’s just be clear on that. It is the context within which certain objective truths or scientific methods of inquiry are being called into question that need to be interrogated. So, if you want to believe that the Earth is flat. Again, are you a person who is on the outside, and there’s just… it’s not worth trying to fix the debate, and I hope there are no people on this call who believe the Earth is flat, and in which case I apologize. But the notion of there being objective mathematical truths, and I use that term sort of lyrically, the context within which those things are being brought into question, that’s the area of debate and conversation that needs to be revived. And re-nurtured, not the debate about whether or not science is true or not, in a sense. I’m not sure that makes a ton of sense, the way I just said that, but…
Seth Green: Yeah, well, I mean, let me throw out there that I think what has happened in our culture, and this happened over decades, and it happens across different perspectives, is that a group of individuals who have expertise put out there some things that are very factual, right? We can see that the Earth is warming. And then they put out, sometimes as facts, things that may not have been rooted at the same level of, you know, reality, meaning that they’re harder to be able to test as you could the thermometer.
And, you know, I think that some individuals who may have felt that they were left out of those truths about, you know, what is oppressed or oppressor? What is, you know, how do you look at all these different categories, right? They felt as if, okay, I’m being told this is a fact, this doesn’t match my reality, now maybe I’ll wonder about any fact. And we’ve had this, you know, big loss of trust in institutions, and they’re related in many ways, and it does seem that having more productive disagreement and being able to see empathy in each other across many different angles, across different perspectives, but also across different education or other variables, could be part of repairing trust and get us back to a place where some things are acknowledged as fact. Maybe temperature, which we can test, would be one of those, but then there’s more openness in other areas where there really is meaningful ambiguity, even if there may be a consensus among experts, it’s not the same as a temperature thermometer that can be tested. I don’t know if that resonates at all as a way to think about it.
Pamela Narins: It does, and I would also… I would add that not only are there this sort of maybe unimpeachable sets of facts, you know, the temperature is rising, which we can measure, and as well as the sort of more subjectively perceived senses of facts. But there’s also, you know, science moves. It used to be that bloodletting was considered a cure for a whole lot of things, and it no longer is considered that. So, even things that appear to be objective facts or scientifically derived truths can be shown to be inaccurate or less precise, or replaced with something better. So, it is always true to say that, even in terms of demonstrable information and data. God knows, you can… you can turn data to say almost anything you want, and the data are the data. You can still… you can manipulate them, or present them in certain ways, to support a particular opinion, which is at odds with somebody else’s. So I think you’re absolutely right. There are, there are lots of different venues through which we can de-demonize the other, and I think that’s really the… that’s the sole perspective here, that, you know, the change I would like to see in the world is to have the world be a safe place for people to have a conversation, rather than have it be existentially at stake almost all the time.
Seth Green: So, there’s a question here, and, you know, I know your course is going to try to really stick to the texts and not necessarily engage just in the current moment. Maybe it’s a sign of where we are in terms of productive disagreement, that so many of the questions do relate to the current moment. It’s from Candace Wayne. Is it possible in our current political environment, in which many think we are approaching an authoritarian takeover in this country, for those who hold that view to engage in productive disagreement with those who they see as holding those authoritarian views, or who will not stand up to those views?
How do you think about that? And that’s happening in, you know, I think many houses in our country, in terms of whether you can have that productive disagreement. And I will say that I think for people that may have conservative views, I just want to name that many felt exactly the same way about what they saw as state takeover of many parts of their life in the last administration. So, this is now being felt, I think, especially on the left, because we have a person who’s currently president, who’s moving things in a certain… but I do think that there was a large portion, maybe less heard in some of the circles we run in, but who felt very similarly in theme, you know, just a few years ago. And so how do you think about, in both of those perspectives, what do you do to channel, if you really are concerned about that existential nature from either perspective, potentially?
Pamela Narins: And I think it’s entirely appropriate that you remind all of us that there are two sides, you know, that two sides have held equivalent perspectives. Throughout my career, I used to talk about the difference between personal Pamela and professional Pamela. Personal Pamela has a point of view, but that is not relevant. What is… it’s relevant to me, I suppose, but professional Pamela would say that there is action that needs to be taken. If you… if one has a perspective that the state system, or the rational rules-based governmental system, that they presumably hold dear, is under threat, action must be taken. There are those who have said, on both sides, the other guys aren’t being nearly strong enough, nearly forceful enough, nearly aggressive enough. Again, that is not unique to one side or another, but both sides have accused the other, you know, accused their own party of not acting forcefully, or not meeting fire with fire.
All of that said, while I spent some time thinking about how to save democracy, I realized that was not going to be within my remit. And so on a human level, and this is humanistic basis, how can we all, in our own small ways, do the bits we can to repair the world? How can we change just a little bit what is within our control?
The big existential questions are critical, and they are one of the reasons why this issue felt so salient and relevant to me, and why I wanted to pursue it, and why, initially, I actually had a host of texts, including a neurobiology chapter that talked about how this was ingrained in our being, but… how do I do something? How do we do something to remember that we are all in this together? And so larger issues. I don’t know, in a sense. But I think it’s the… we all accrue, our individual actions accrue to a larger humanity.
Seth Green: Well, so this is a perfect segue, Pamela, because our next question in here is, what role, if any, does having the ability to empathize with some of the opposing views have in the ability to have productive disagreement in our lives? For example, in a family, in a relationship, in a marriage, in all these other areas. Can you talk a little bit about how it might make us better, you know, in all of the facets of life? We’ve drawn very heavily so far on the political, right? But obviously, disagreement is a productive idea across, you know, my personal interactions, across my career, potentially, as I build. Let’s talk a little bit about how you see this helping people beyond their political citizenship.
Pamela Narins: Sure. Well, certainly, these texts will provide us with two very different… and I’m talking about the bulk of the text, Antigone and 12 Angry Men, provide us with very different modalities for handling deeply held beliefs. And I mean, you could… you could do the whole thing in an hour, because it’s pretty clear, but the depth of these texts really is beautiful, and there’s a great deal we can learn from spending more focused time on them. That said, we’ve all had our dinner table, or we’ve all had our moments in businesses where people hold a profoundly different view, and the only way, and this is something I can say I know a great deal about throughout the course of my life, the only way to be able to diffuse… to most effectively diffuse something that’s potentially inflammatory is to understand why the other person thinks the way they do. Unless you happen to have a really big stick, and you’re willing to beat everybody else over the head with it, which sometimes is appropriate, I suppose, but generally speaking, the way to diffuse and move forward and come up with a shared solution is to understand why they think, and somebody else thinks the way they do, and understand the tools that we can use to invite them to at least be open to discussing it. Again, not necessarily change their opinion, but be open to discussing it. And that’s where the shared experience comes through.
I don’t know if that’s…
Seth Green: Another question here, which will bring us back into the political, are we really all in it together? Which I think is a potential assumption made so far. I would say that isn’t the case, as some groups benefit from a particular social, cultural, political, and economic system and configuration, and others do not. The idea that we’re all in it together minimizes, to my mind, these very structural positions. I do think this is a big source of where we see some of the challenge, is that there can be a sense there’s a zero-sum game. And so, if someone disagrees, then if it’s a zero-sum game, and my goal is to advocate for a specific group, then it would make logical sense in game theory that, therefore, if they have the opposing viewpoint, they threaten the very possibility. We do know that politics moves resources, that’s indeed the point of politics, is the social movement of resources through norms and policies. So how do you think about that question, and how the humanities might help us to realize some of that shared experience, even if the very nature of politics is one of distributing gains and losses, potentially?
Pamela Narins: Certainly. I’ve often thought that if we, given the polity and the structure of our polity. Here… oops, I just clicked on something and didn’t mean to, sorry. If anybody’s happy, that means somebody else is screwed. You know, we have to sort of equally distribute discontent. And if we do that effectively, we win. That said, I mean, as long as we are all living in the same place. And define the unit of analysis. I live in this building, in this city, and, you know, in the state, in the country, in the world. We are all living in the same place. To a certain extent, our destinies are shared. I believe in one set of political norms, somebody else might believe in another set of political norms, each of which have their own mechanisms of distribution of service and treasure. And it’s about negotiating the solution that either optimistically maximizes happiness, or, more realistically, minimizes distress, in a sense. And so I think all of these tools allow us to, in whatever forum we find ourselves engaging, remember that negotiation and compromise is the sort of way people have been trying to get along since we’ve been people.
Seth Green: Well, so, final question for you, Pamela, with our time. Can you talk a bit about how the texts thread together? Are there common answers to these questions within each of the course texts you will teach? And maybe talk a little bit, if at all, how the play and film adaptations may be integrated.
Pamela Narins: The what? I’m sorry?
Seth Green: The play and film adaptations may be integrated. So talk about the texts, how they come together, and give us a send-off that makes us excited about the possibility of reading these with other people who may disagree without being disagreeable.
Pamela Narins: You mean you’re not excited already?
Seth Green: I am very excited. Actually, I think this is exactly the discussion we want, and, you know, the challenge is, this is a very hard subject to discuss. It immediately, I think, is viewed as the right answer, meaning we all want to disagree productively. Then you get into the details, and you start to realize it’s really hard, because our views are strong, and we have different ways of categorizing different experiences, right? Because we don’t all have that sharing. So, I think it’s a great testament, but let me come back to this question about text for you. Yes. How do we weave them?
Pamela Narins: The… well, the commonalities are these are all people grappling with extremely intractable issues. They handle them, I would argue, diametrically. The solutions are found in diametric opposition to one another, but the passion engaged, and the passions held, and the biases held by all the characters, with the exception of one in 12 Angry Men, are the same. They are tribal, they are emotional, they are genetic, almost. I would see myself as much a guide in all of us together finding those commonalities, than I am the person who’s got the predetermined notion of how… I know how I feel they come together, but I think the exploration of the text in the class and the conversation among all of us will be very useful in helping to answer that question. Where are the commonalities? Where are the mistakes that were made? What can I do? Moving forward in my own life to make this work better.
Seth Green: Well, Pamela, let me end by being bold and saying that we are so excited about this class, and one of the reasons is I think it can do what we aspire to at the University of Chicago, which is we don’t teach people what to think, we teach them how to think. And usually that means we teach them how to ask the right questions. And I think, you know, to the points in the chat, this is a really difficult subject. It is context-specific in terms of how you might approach it. But I think one of the keys is that you’re constantly asking the question, am I really thinking about all the different perspectives out there? Am I being as generous as I possibly can be to other points of view? And am I making my argument in a way that best takes into account what would be the greatest counter-argument to it? And I think if your class, which I know it can, because you’re reading texts that elicit that exact behavior, can help people, it’s not that we’ll come out with perfect answers. But we’ll come out with better questions, and that will, I think, make us more possible in being able to be both in a democracy together, and in all of our relationships in society together. And so, thank you for joining us as an instructor, for sparking so many productive questions in this discussion, and I look forward to hearing about your class this upcoming winter. And thank you all for joining us for this, and we look forward to hopefully seeing many of you in that class.
Pamela Narins: Thank you.
