Woulda Coulda

“You don’t know me – I’m a good guy,” I rebutted somewhat angrily.

“Yeah, I can see that by your truck,” the man with the immaculate teeth said sarcastically.

I had an idea years ago to start a website called WouldaCoulda. It would’ve been a social media website wherein people posted stories about incidents in which they wish that they had done or said something different. People could comment on the post, suggest appropriate responses, and rate those responses. There would be some cathartic commiseration, but there would also be criticism if people felt strongly enough that the poster was in the wrong. To avoid becoming a cesspool of fuckwaddery, the site would have required some pretty serious moderation.

The idea for the site was borne of the many instances in which I had stammered my way through a contentious encounter, only to subsequently think of all the great things I could’ve said.

One would think that Trump looked back on this exchange and wished that he had said something much cooler than “I know you are but what am I?,” but we’re talking about Trump here, whose almost every utterance is a cringer that anyone but him would want to have back.

Like Trump, though, I tend to say dumb things in the heat of the moment. I am the antithesis of witty. I lose my cool. But, boy, after the fact, I come up with some ridiculously good responses.

When my conservative father-in-law, at the dinner table on Christmas eve, quizzed my kids about what Jesus was swaddled in in the manger (presumably testing how good their parents were at inculcating them in Christianity), I wise-assedly replied “I think it was frankincense and myrrh, right?” He huffily replied, “Bullshit!” and then proceeded to give my kids a lesson about just that. In a sense, my reply was kind of funny, but I could’ve been much more efficacious in getting a constructive point across if I had said something like, “I think what’s more important than what Jesus was wearing is the part of his message that preached love and respect and peace.”

In confrontational encounters my blood rises, I feel shaky, and part of me wants to destroy my opponent. This is not conducive to rational thought. While it might feel satisfying to crush one’s opponent either physically or with wit, the ultimate win is to help your opponent see you and your perspective in a more sympathetic light, and in turn to understand what might be driving your opponent – to see them less as adversaries than as people who have their own insights into the point of contention. Which isn’t to say that there’s no right or wrong, but that one’s own perspective might not be perfectly on the side of right.

Of course, there are times when righteous anger is justified, as when people stand up for others who are being bullied. Recall the people on the train in Portland who died standing up to a racist. On a plane once, my wife confronted a man who was intimidating a woman who was having trouble with her English (and lived to tell the tale). I’ve stood up to people who are being bullies, but I could do more. The more people stand up for justice, the less the unjust are likely to rear their ugly heads.

So, back to the more ignominious encounter with the man with immaculate teeth. I was at the recycle center this morning dropping off branches, metal, and (this is the crucial part) styrofoam in my sweet little 1996 2WD pickup. I dropped off the branches, then dumped the defunct cement mixer in the metal pile. At this point, I would’ve had to exit the facility and re-enter to access the styrofoam recycling. No big deal, as it would only take about 30 seconds to do so – but the shortcut is to enter the recycling parking lot through the exit, so I opted for that plan. I checked to make sure nobody was exiting, then started to pull in. At the same time, a large silver Mercedes van was pulling into the entrance. He pulled all the way across the lot, positioning himself to back into one of the last slots. I stopped to wait for him to back in, but instead he blocked my path and angrily motioned for me to back up and go around to the entrance. I waited for a second to see if he would move, and when he didn’t, I simply went around him and parked.

As he backed up, I got out, shook my head, and put up my hands. He got out and red-facedly began denouncing me, saying that’s the kind of thing that causes serious accidents. I defended myself, saying I tried to wait for him and that there was no way I could’ve caused an accident doing that. I told him he was making a pretty big deal about it.

He continued to loudly expostulate and stick out his chest as I began to fumble for the few pieces of styrofoam in the back of the truck. “You’re what’s wrong with this country!” he bellowed. Other people in the lot averted their eyes and went about their recycling, likely embarrassed for both of us.

That’s when I said he didn’t know me and that I’m a good guy, and then he disparaged my truck. I approached him and his shiny teeth and asked if he was saying I was white trash. I couldn’t help but wonder if he would’ve treated me differently if I was a well-groomed old white guy driving a nice vehicle like him. I wanted to tell him that I had plenty of money (as money seemed to equal status in his eyes), and that I did volunteer work in the community, and that I gave over $1000 to a cancer treatment center recently. But he said no, he wasn’t saying I was white trash, and that he hadn’t even graduated high school, and he’d grown up on the south side of Chicago. That could’ve been an opportunity for me to defuse the situation, by telling him that I was also from the Midwest, and using that as a segue into how going the wrong way in a parking lot isn’t tantamount to homicide. I could’ve asked if he ever jaywalked, and surmised that maybe jaywalking is what’s wrong with society. I could’ve mentioned that it’s a parking violation to back into an angled parking spot (I actually got a ticket for this once), and maybe that was just as egregious as what I did (he might have backed over a little kid, for godsake!). Or, I could’ve patted him on the back and said, “Look, I understand that this is an upsetting issue to you, and next time I’ll spend the extra few seconds to go around to the entrance.”

Instead, we continued the argument with me saying that I don’t drive dangerously and him clacking on about how I was going to kill someone that way. I managed to find the right bin for my styrofoam, then I tipped my hat to him and said, “Have a great day, friend!” He responded with similar sarcasm, then said “What a piece of work.” I drove off a little shakily and spent the next few hours ruminating about the incident, partly due to my anger with him, but mostly due to my disappointment in myself for not handling it better.

In hindsight, I wonder if most of Mr. Teeth’s anger was due to the fact that I disobeyed his self-righteous direction and drove around him. Perhaps he’s a man who’s used to getting his way, and I, a scraggly dirty-toe in a beat up truck, just subverted that order. In that sense, I’m glad that I went around him. But, if I could swallow my pride a little bit, going out and back in through the proper entrance probably would’ve avoided all that drama.

There are, of course, bigger things to worry about, and it’s part of my privilege that I, as someone who’s not used to being challenged much myself, would fret so much about something that happens so often to people who aren’t so privileged. But I do think there are some broader lessons to be learned here.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor who studies the psychology of morality. I found a lot of useful information in his book The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion regarding the divide between conservatives and liberals. And, while I think these distinctions are often oversimplified, there is perhaps more relevance to many of them today in this hyper-tribalist era.

To Haidt, of five sets of moral intuitions (Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, Purity/sanctity), liberals tend to put more emphasis on the first two foundations, Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives more equally endorse all five foundations. Because of this, conservatives and liberals often speak a different moral language. Many of these differences are genetically hard-wired. In the grand moral structure that humans are continuously building, according to Haidt there are constructive blocks from both conservative and liberal ways of thinking that will strengthen the edifice, if we can only work to understand these different ethical mindsets.

While I certainly believe that there are elements of the latter three moral intuitions (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, Purity/sanctity) that have merit in our moral structure, overemphasizing these values has often led to catastrophic events throughout history (slavery, Nazis, despotism, caste systems, etc.). I guess this pegs me as a hard-wired liberal. Despite Haidt’s assertion that humans generally make moral decisions from the gut, not via reason, I believe that reason and critical thinking can be learned and utilized. There’s no such thing as alternative facts – our moral arguments should rest on reason and fact, and the facts generally show that liberal policies that focus primarily on Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity measures work best for creating broadly fulfilling institutions and societies (see Scandinavia, for example, which despite its many flaws has the happiest countries on Earth).

That said, understanding that many people see the moral world differently from me,* and trying to see how this is so, might help me to deal better with potential conflagrations. It’s possible that Mr. Teeth’s morality emphasizes Authority/respect, so when I went in through the exit, I was breaking a moral code; whereas I see the spirit of that rule as preventing harm, so as long as I wasn’t causing harm, it was OK to break the rule. I still contend that it is the spirit of rules and laws that we should obey (assuming the spirit itself isn’t harmful), but I can understand the mindset that just breaking that code could indicate a tendency to lawlessness in more serious instances.

Likewise, my father-in-law believes in the authority of and respect for Christian institutions and the Bible, whereas I find much of the spirit of Christianity to have important moral lessons and much of it to be morally abhorrent (and much of it, like the part about not wearing clothes that mix wool and linen, comically anachronistic).

Nationally, in the face of increased tribalism, it’s important to empathize with people who see things differently from us; at the same time, it’s perfectly acceptable, even necessary, to draw the line when people’s behavior becomes harmful.**

Personally, I would like to develop a demeanor that helps me remain calmer in these situations – one that works toward a resolution that leaves all parties in a better position. Harboring feelings of resentment and vengeance is not the answer; processing the incident, examining it from a more rational point of view, and then letting it go could be the most conducive to increased well-being.

 

*OK, maybe everybody sees the moral world differently from me, since I have a fairly unique take on it.

**And in the case of Mr. Teeth, I’m not saying that his behavior in particular was harmful, or that my response was righteous.

Do you have a WouldaCoulda you’d like to share? Post it in the comments below.