I Never Thought of it That Way, Monica Guzman

 (2022, BenBella Books)

Shortly after the elections in 2016, an acquaintance who had voted for Trump told me that the paramount issue for her was abortion: abortion is murder, and preventing that kind of murder is more important than the environment, infrastructure, and affordable health care. If Monica Guzman’s book had been available back then, it would have given me several ideas about what to say next.

Guzman is not out to tell us how to change people’s minds on political issues. Her concern is understanding; she wants us to be able to communicate with people who think differently from ourselves, and thereby to create a space in which we can stop demonizing one another. Once that happens, change is possible on both sides. Her book reports some good research into the polarization that divides our society at present, and is full of advice about mitigating that division by relaxing our own aversions and asking the right questions.

• What are the conditions that make good conversation possible?
• How can we best cultivate genuine curiosity about people outside our ken?
• What makes a conversation go awry?
• What kinds of nonjudgmental questions work best?
• What can we do to prevent people in a group from tuning out of the conversation?

Guzman has a number of answers to all of these questions and more, and through adroit summaries she helps her readers keep track of the strands of her argument. The one problem I have with the book is its style, which is so colloquial as to seem condescending, as if standard English were too hard for us. Guzman writes “‘cause” instead of “because” and can start a sentence “Remember earlier when I said…” or say that something “is A-OK and kinda awesome.” This language probably comes from the public presentations she often gives, but I find it annoying. Nevertheless, the book genuinely recognizes the difficulty of the problem it addresses and its ideas are both intelligent and practical.