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Anger ManagementLessons from an improbable collaboration.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, April 2, 2007, at 4:02 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

In search of a third way, I called Professor Goldsmith, now at Harvard Law School, for a quote. We'd met briefly last fall, and despite my inclination to dislike him based solely on his former employers, we managed to sit on a panel for an hour without scratching or pulling hair. On the phone last month, he mentioned some interesting stuff about congressional history. I said no way. He said indeed. And so we wrote a piece together explaining why the Justice Department can't be apolitical.

It was, at it turns out, not exactly punditry. Nobody was trying to score points, and it took many more redrafts than I am accustomed to. We had to negotiate almost every sentence. We've both been told by readers that we must have reined one another in, but the truth is that when you're working with someone who has different views, you tend to rein yourself in. Whether out of fear or respect, I am not quite sure.

As a process this illuminated for me the difference between the Supreme Court justices who write carefully and narrowly to garner that fifth vote and those who favor the clever swish of the quotable, blistering dissent. And maybe because I have written an awful lot of similar "dissents" in my life, I can attest to some of their weaknesses: They're easy. You just take aim and fire. They subvert what's really important to what sounds important. Dissents make the spaces between the two sides larger than they need to be and paper over the fundamental agreements. And while some of my favorite writing happens in dissent, it sure is exhausting when it's all you read.

Interesting as that was, though, the most important lessons about collaboration came with the fallout. The bad news: People come up to you at cocktail parties and holler, "You co-authored with WHO??? That guy should be indicted!" But the good news—in fact, the great news—is that feedback came from people across the political spectrum (and from points on that spectrum where Slate is less daily fare than daily fire). People who either loved the piece or were blown away by the mere fact of the collaboration came back with the warmest of responses.

That's how the folks who would never have read a piece authored by Goldsmith were reading Goldsmith, and the people who hate Lithwick actually managed to choke down one of her articles. Either one of us could have written this piece alone. It was a fairly factual review of history, after all. But what became important was that we didn't.

Cass Sunstein warned in his 2001 book, Republic.com, that the Internet would create polarized intellectual communities in which people could isolate themselves from what he calls "unplanned, unanticipated encounters" with opposing viewpoints. I fear we're there. Everything I need to know about you I already learned from your bumper sticker. It seems to me that a more useful way to encounter opposing viewpoints isn't through anonymous posts in the blogosphere or disembodied heads on a talk show. (The encounters on Hannity & Colmes are hardly "unplanned.") It may be the old-fashioned way, the way the Framers imagined it: face to face and ferried along by the benefit of the doubt.

Althouse herself strongly advocates that women in public life develop a thicker skin about Internet bile. Maybe. I just don't know if anyone's skin, male or female, can ever get thick enough to withstand being told that you should be set on fire and rolled down a hill (my own favorite hate mail ever). And I don't know that it should. All this skin-toughening forces us to launch more and more scorching attacks. More anger. More isolated communities. Pointier spear tips necessary to pierce the opponents' increasingly thick skin.

Before you call me a hypocrite, I'll concede that I've doled out my share of chip shots, although I have tried to avoid personal attacks. I've answered back to some of my attackers and, frankly, none of it felt very satisfying, and I'd wager that none of it has changed any minds. You know what felt better? Collaborating with someone with whom I disagreed about fundamental things. Working that piece over and over until it was good enough for both of us. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say the experience helped me rethink some of my default settings.

So, I think we should have one day a year on which the Paul Krugmans collaborate with the George Wills, and the Ariannas co-author with the Johnsons. I think if Jonah Goldberg and E.J. Dionne had something to say as a team, I'd want to read it. And even if the only thing they could ultimately bring themselves to agree upon for that one day a year was a decent recipe for crème brulee, I'd probably still read it, because an annual effort to beat our typewriters into ploughshares might remind us that we don't live in two Americas. Or even in millions of teensy personal Americas with capital cities called "keyboard" and "mouse." I'd read it because it would be a tonic for so much of the political conversation we're having in this country: the spiraling cycle of screaming, punching back, and then toughening up enough to do it all again tomorrow.

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
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Remarks from the Fray:

As someone who has been routinely critical of Lithwick's writing, I think this piece was relatively well-done -- and recognizes in her own writing some of the lazy partisan tendencies that have invited criticism, which one hopes will lead Lithwick to be a better columnist.

That said, I think Lithwick misdiagnoses the disease. While outrage-as-tool screeds are indeed troubling, the most troubling part is not outrage per se but the flaws contained in such writing -- blindness to contrary facts, ignoring obvious argument flaws, imputing implausible positions, dismissal of disfavoured sources, acceptance of authority based on agreement, etc. In other words, cultivating outrage corresponds with careless thinking, writing, and (in a loose sense) scholarship.

Lithwick's (fairly sensible) prescription -- collaboration -- seems to indicate that the problem is not outrage but the sloppiness that accompanies it. Collaboration may not mute outrage so much as it may force care by virtue of a skeptical audience. Lithwick's description of her own collaboration ("On the phone last month, he mentioned some interesting stuff about congressional history. I said no way. He said indeed.") shows that what she was getting was not so much muting of opinion, but solid facts that she would not otherwise have sought out. She would never have encountered the historical facts on her own, and if she had, she would have discounted them. Collaboration with Goldsmith did not force her to be civil so much as it forced her to consider facts that her ideology would otherwise have caused her to miss. Likewise, by collaborating with an opponent, one is likely to tighten one's argument logic, because zeal can turn a blind eye to logical fallacies.

None of which is to say that Lithwick is the only person with such problems, or that her concern about the level of discourse and over-use of outrage are out of place. In fact, I think her idea of mandatory collaboration (or at least recommended collaboration) is a very good one. If nothing else, it accomplishes the same as the old trick parents use to divide a piece of cake (one kid cuts, another one chooses, you end up with equal slices) -- you will tend to get a sparer, more unvarnished, more logical, and more solidly factual account of a controversy. In my mind, that makes for better journalism and better discourse. But in general, careful research and critical thinking will go a long way towards accomplishing the same thing. "Outrage" is mostly troubling to me because it inhibits those traits, not so much because of the decibel level.

--HLS2003

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