The argument culture

The linguistics professor Deborah Tannen woke up to the phenomenon when she took time out of academia to promote her book, You Just Don't Understand. As the original and best of the genre attempting to explain why men and women find each other unfathomable, the book captured the bestsellers' chart for 35 weeks, and made Tannen into what most authors only dream about becoming: the focus of intense media interest.

She emerged a chastened woman. Time and again, she found herself being trotted onto television shows, not for a reasoned discussion about why reasonable men and women often descend into stereophonic shrieks comprising two entirely different alphabets, but for a fight; a well-orchestrated, knock-'em-down-drag'em-out fight. The fight would be engineered usually between her and other guests, the latter generally chosen from among those peculiar, free-ranging "controversialists", without any particular wisdom, knowledge or experience, but whose life's work is to rubbish everything in sight.

The nadir arrived in the form of a polite man in shirt, tie and floor-length skirt whom she met before one show. He had read and liked her book, he told her. Then he added: "When I get out there, I'm going to attack you. But don't take it personally. That's why they invite me on. . ." And sure enough, in the studio, Tannen had hardly formed a full sentence before he was leaping out of his chair, waving his arms furiously and shrieking - first at her, then at the innocents who had agreed to come on the show to talk about the problems they had communicating with their husbands.

It's not just Americans. Tune into almost any of our home-grown late-night radio shows and sample those stout champions of free speech - the Jerry Springer clones - as they facilitate a mob of ignorant morons bent on shrieking insults at everyone from refugees to single mothers to "snobby" expectant women who choose Holles St over the Coombe. On Moron Mountain, non-residents are invariably referred to as prostitutes or scumbags. Often, a scumbag is planted among the morons to get a rise out of them. The stakes rise; the polarisation intensifies. Thus the atmosphere of animosity is established and spreads like a fever.

Even on current affairs shows which pride themselves on offering light rather than heat, Tannen notes, the practice of hiring "highly opinionated guests" who can be relied upon to make the show "lively" is well established. Guests known to hold opposing views and adept at withering putdowns are highly prized. One of the most sinister off-shoots of this appetite for a fight is the credibility such appearances lend to the participants.

Controversy has become a marketing tactic. Turn your book, movie, play or TV series into a media event and it becomes a must-have experience for the public. Underlining this ethic, says Tannen, is the conviction that the most engaging media event is The Fight. Now, it's not that Deborah Tannen is a woman to shy away from a decent argument or dispute the merits of partisanship or scepticism. Hers is not another purse-lipped, why-oh-why plea for "civility". Indeed, she quotes the Yugoslavian-born poet, Charles Simic, approvingly: "There are moments in life when true invective is called for, when it becomes an absolute necessity, out of a deep sense of justice, to denounce, mock, vituperate, lash out, in the strongest possible language."

What she questions goes much deeper and is instantly recognisable to anyone who inexplicably feels a bit nauseous after a bout with a newspaper, radio, or television, or been deafened by the simultaneous bellowing of politicians or after reading the transcript of, say, the cross-examination of a plaintiff in a rape trial. It's the misplaced aggression that causes the niggling unpleasantness - the ritualised, mindless opposition - that "pervasive war-like atmosphere that makes us approach public dialogue, and just about anything we need to accomplish, as if it were a fight."

We know it well: the simultaneous yelling, the point-scoring, the sneering, cynical tone, the spleen without purpose, with nobody listening, never mind learning. But for some reason, these performances are deemed to be mighty clever.

The pattern is too pervasive to ignore. It is ingrained in our institutions, has seeped into everyday life (road rage, "flaming" on the Internet, mindless aggression of all kinds) and threatens to poison the human spirit. Tannen describes it as agonism, from the Greek word "agonia" for "contest", to mean a kind of programmed contentiousness, a pre-patterned, unthinking use of fighting to accomplish goals that do not necessarily require it. And she has coined a name for it: the argument culture.

Among 100 examples culled from the adversarial law system, the media and politics among others, one - relating to the law - rings the most insistent bell. Example: You're driving along a street, doing some swivel-eyed window shopping. Then, boom, you hit another car. You know it's entirely your fault. You want to come out with your hands up and say sorry, I'm a idiot, I'll pay . . . But you don't. Are you mad? Lawyers and insurance companies have drummed it into us from the womb: you never apologise, never explain, never take responsibility for your actions. So while the other driver stands there shaking like a leaf, in his pranged car, you assume the ritual warlike stance. Under the adversarial system, writes Tannen, justice isn't the point; winning is. Your goal is not to establish truth but to manipulate the facts to the advantage of your side.

Think of Sophia McColgan and the war-like stance of the North Western Health Board's insurers. The insurers dictate policy, we learned through this case, not the health boards, no matter how obviously just or clear-cut the case. Consider the many cases we know of where the bereaved or injured have sued health professionals. Recall how staggeringly common and heartfelt the remark that a simple apology and explanation - an acknowledgement that something had gone wrong - were all they wanted to begin with.

In the argument culture, war-speak pervades our talk and shapes our thinking. Everything is boiled down to a battle, a war, a pre-emptive strike, a fight between irreconcilable opposites. In the House of Commons, the Speaker has had to chastise members of both main parties for the growing habit of cheering their leaders when they enter the chamber of Prime Minister's Question Time, like prize fighters. In this culture, there are just two sides to every story, never three or 103, or - heaven forbid - that squishy, soft area known as the middle ground.

It's dirty, it's colourful, it's entertainment. Above all, it's simple. It's also stupid and lazy.

So the historic merger of Democratic Left and Labour is subsumed into the much simpler "battle" between Bernie Malone and Proinsias De Rossa. And, though more than half of the Dubliners recently surveyed, supported the farmers' march, the issue is still packaged lazily and provocatively as urban-rural warfare.

In parts of the media, every trifling, easily-explained little scandal sprouts a "gate" at the end of it, trivialising the truly scandalous nature of Watergate and inflating the whole concept of "scandal" to a point where the public is reduced to numbed indifference. Vincent Foster, a Little Rock lawyer assumed into the White House by Bill Clinton, wrote in his suicide note: "In Washington, ruining people is considered sport."

Joe Klein, a former Clinton election strategist, journalist and "anonymous" author of Primary Colours, learned a lot of things when caught at the butt end of the media after his anonymous cover was blown: "I've also learned this: what it's like to live as a politician. . . and it is impossible. It is impossible to think straight. It is very easy to screw up, and it is unrelenting. They do it every day, and that is no way for a civilised nation to choose its leaders. . ." Journalists responded by accusing him of talking like a politician.

Meanwhile, Tannen notes the unprecedented exodus of decent, long-serving politicians and lawyers from their professions because of the increasingly vituperative nature of the business. She also captures a deep discomfort among a swathe of journalists about the type of work increasingly required of them which sits ill with their private values.

So if the argument culture is so harmful, how has it become so entrenched? Tannen traces its roots back to ancient Greece, when Aristotle taught that objectivity and logic were the only true routes to human judgment. Plato kept up the pressure by arguing that poets should be banned from educational establishments lest their emotional power divert the search for truth through the approved routes of critique and attack and rigorous debate. Even the Latin word for school - "ludus" - derives from "military exercise". It is no coincidence that this type of exercise is grounded in values and behaviour that are overwhelmingly male.

Are men more likely to engage in ritual opposition, to shore up the argument culture? Are they more likely to find opposition entertaining, to enjoy watching a good fight or having one? Yes. Right across the cultures, anthropologists have found men (especially those aged 18-35) engaging in what can truly be called a war of words; contests in which they vie to devise clever insults, typically boasting of their sexual prowess and impugning the sexual purity of their opponent's mother.

Women, obviously, fight too - often ferociously - and confront and annoy one another mightily. The difference is that they don't tend to engage in ceremonial combat to negotiate status and display their prowess. They are, says Tannen on foot of a mountain of research, less likely to enjoy fighting for pleasure or as a kind of game or performance. This could explain in part why many women find the traditional office environment so negative, time-wasting and exasperating.

If the argument culture is destroying us, basically by making us deaf to each other, then what's the alternative? Tannen offers no cures. She examines a host of other cultures, such as the Japanese, which one anthropologist described as a system of "victors without vanquished", a system which he says, has helped Japan avoid disastrous internecine ethnic and religious strife. But basically, the message is that we should cop on to ourselves. And remember the fellow who went to a seminar and returned positively bouncing with his thrilling discoveries and told Tannen excitedly: "I don't have to make others wrong to prove that I'm right."