What Conversation Can Do for Us

By Hua Hsu

Excerpts from the March 20, 2023 Issue of The New Yorker

Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?

...“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains... Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” (Princeton). She makes the case that talking to others—sharing our stories—is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls...

Cohen returns to true conversation as a kind of sanctuary... In its ideal form, it involves no audience or judge, just partners; no fixed agenda or goals, just process...

Obama seemed interested in trying to solve a problem inherent to conversation: its tendency to devolve into argument...

the “deep canvassing” model is far from the autotelic ideal of conversation that Cohen prizes; Giridharadas’s book, after all, is titled “The Persuaders.” Conversion may be an outcome of conversation, of course, but the ideal posits that the exchange isn’t merely the instrumental pursuit of an agenda... or Cohen, talk is about the experience; for Giridharadas, it’s ultimately about the next election...

We can’t be confident, either, that our splintered public sphere is a symptom of conversational collapse. There has never been a time in human history when the average person has had access to the sheer volume of conversations that technology makes possible today—all those takes, tweets, threads, text chains, posts, and articles. Then there’s the world of podcasting, where people readily listen to hours of freewheeling, sometimes thorny discussion. Is it that we’re incapable of having conversations, or that there are simply more voices to account for? Could it be that we are suffering from too much talk, not too little?...

...the ability to speak to someone is a means to an end rather than a means toward making the world a more ambiguous place. The logic of accumulation gets applied to social interaction: talk only when you can get something concrete out of it...

Where do we find a great model for conversation? Cohen points to the college seminar, a rare case of “a conversation that is at once a means to an end (learning something) and an end in itself (engaging in the flow of group talk).”...