On interruption

Okay, so I have to preface this blog post on interruption by saying that I began writing it before watching last night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I’m going to proceed with what I wrote before, then come back to reflect on “Donald's" continual interruption of “Secretary Clinton.”

Last month I attended an informal Shabbat potluck hosted at the home of a member of my congregation. It was a smallish group, and we had lovely conversations. Near the end of the evening only 7 people were left, and the conversation turned to politics. Now, this is a topic I care about, and all the people in the group were passionate and ranged from strongly liberal to progressive or even radical leftists, highly intelligent and well-educated, and mostly (I judged) knew more than I did about the things we were discussing. So, I did a lot more listening than talking. And, as a perennial facilitator and ethnographer, a part of my awareness was of course on the conversational style, while the rest was attending to content.

What I noticed was that, in this unfettered and un-facilitated conversation among 5 people raised Jewish (at least 2 of them raised in New York, at least 2 from the Midwest, I’m not sure about the 5th) and 2 people who married years ago into Jewish culture, there were very frequently 2 or 3 people talking at once, and no-one complained about being interrupted. In fact, it appeared to me that sometimes, even when 2 or more people were talking at once, everyone’s point was actually being heard.

Now, I’ve known for a long time that Ashkenazi Jewish culture includes a highly verbal, interruptive, and argumentative style of conversation, especially among Jews from the East Coast. I even knew that my success in academia was in part due to being somewhat steeped in this culture. But due perhaps to the combination of living my whole life in the Midwest, my own values, and my facilitation training, I lean much more in the direction of turn-taking. I tend to feel pretty annoyed in settings where people are not allowed to finish their sentences uninterrupted, especially if airtime isn’t being shared equally and people aren’t being listened to. In fact, I’m so annoyed by them that I tend to avoid them unless I’m facilitating and can intervene to equalize things.

However, lately I’ve been thinking about the value of interruption.

For one thing, in order to accomplish “intervening to equalize things,” one has to be able to interrupt. I have occasionally coached people (usually women) to interrupt more when leading or facilitating. Obviously, one also needs to be able to listen exquisitely well to be a good facilitator, and to interrupt mindfully, strategically and skillfully, rather than out of anger or habit. Today, I’m thinking that one also needs to be able to listen exquisitely well in order to be able to have a successful conversation where more than one person is talking at a time!! There is a style of rapid-fire interweaving of overlapping utterances by different people that can actually be non-competitive and creative, figuring things out together in a yes-and-what-about-this-idea way. A kind of collective thinking out loud.

There is also a skill of interrupting oneself. At a recent CORE event facilitated by adrienne maree brown, among the other meeting process agreements like respect, make space/take space, engage tension but not drama, she included the acronym “W.A.I.T.”, which stands for, Why Am I Talking? Be willing to quit mid-sentence, when you realize that what you’re saying has already been said, or is totally off-topic, or is taking up an inappropriate amount of time, is a rare capacity indeed (though people who feel disempowered in a conversation may often interrupt themselves for other reasons, like feeling inadequate or not feeling listened to, which I am not advocating).

Then there is the importance of being able to interrupt when you are in conversation with someone who doesn’t interrupt themselves, ever. We all know people whose cultural background and/or psychological makeup leads them to talk continuously until they are interrupted by another person. Due to a combination of his cultural background, his family dynamic, and his speech disfluency, my stepson Sam is such a person. Don and I noticed once when we visited Sam his freshman year of college that one of the reasons he got on so well with some of his new friends seemed to be that they had that East-coast-Jewish style of speaking, so he wasn’t left to monologue as he frequently is in the more “polite” Gentile-dominated Midwest.

This past weekend, I had another, even more extreme experience of this conversational mode at Don’s first-cousins’ reunion. Six first cousins and 5 spouses gathered for two days in Santa Fe to eat, sight-see, and compare notes on their memories of their parents, 5 siblings who grew up together in The Bronx, NY during the Depression. Again, people talked over each other all the time, and with 11 people, there was no way we could actually all listen to each other to do the “rapid-fire interweaving of overlapping utterances,” the “collective thinking out loud” – it was simply too loud to hear!

It was nearly impossible to keep a conversation happening in the full group with one person speaking at a time and everyone else listening. For one thing, I don’t think it was a shared value; "side" conversations erupted repeatedly and effusively, and unapologetically took off running in their own directions. At one point I actually did attempt to facilitate a one-person-speaks-at-a-time conversation, because I genuinely wanted to hear all of the memories and thoughts being shared, and because it seemed to me that we were on a quest to understand a particular family dynamic and we needed to share and sift and string together all the clues from all the perspectives in order to do so (and because, well, as I said, I can’t hardly restrain myself from facilitating sometimes).

As I (somewhat successfully, with Don’s help) facilitated for a while, it was of course the more introverted, female, and Midwestern voices we needed to interrupt others to make space for. (I pretty much gave up on trying to make air space for the spouses who were raised non-Jewish in the Midwest – we were talking about the childhood experiences for the most part, and the spouses hadn’t been there). Other cultural and power dynamics also probably figured in to the conversational process, and these dynamics were in part the topic we were discussing – how and why some branches of the family were treated with more respect than others based on class, gender, disability, education, etc. After we'd dug into it a bit, I let go of the attempt to facilitate and practiced enjoying the hubbub.

I can think of lots of other places to take this discourse on interruption -- Vacation as interruption, death/illness as interruption, the importance of interrupting racism, classism, sexism, and other oppressions… and even pragmatist philosophy, which views interruption of habits and taken-for-granted ways of doing things as the source of creativity and learning. However, it’s the day after the first 2016 Presidential debate, and I really have to say something about the Trump-Clinton-Holt dynamic.

First of all, I have to confess this was the first time I’ve actually watched Donald Trump on television. I simply don’t watch much TV, and also I’d fervently hoped he would not end up the nominee and I wouldn’t have to take his candidacy seriously enough merit watching him. (After last night’s debate, I went to bed and had a bad dream that Donald Trump had taken over so much power that I had to text my whereabouts to him. So my subconscious, at least, is dismayed.)

Secondly, I want to say that I did not envy the moderator, Lester Holt. I used to be part of an organization that had a person on the board who was a bully and who, in my assessment, had an unacknowledged and untreated personality disorder, and it made facilitation extremely difficult. When you combine these traits with being raised in New York (which Trump was) and being on the world’s biggest power trip, I’m not sure what more Lester Holt could have done. Trump is not like the people I mentioned above, who don't quit talking until interrupted. He didn't quit talking even when he was interrupted, by a person supposedly in authority. Trying to win the floor by being louder than Trump would’ve risked Holt being labeled an “angry black man.” Similarly, had Clinton attempted to compete for equal airtime she would probably have appeared “shrill,” rather than dignified and unfazed as she mostly did. I do think if Holt had the ability to turn off Trump’s microphone, he probably should have used it, though allowing him to repeatedly interrupt Clinton and get the last word more than his fair share of the time may have had it’s own benefit. After all, the country needs to see what Trump is really like, and giving “Donald” free rein to hang himself might have been for the best.

While, as I’ve said, I don’t think interruption is inherently bad, when it is done in petty, vindictive, racist, misogynistic, and mendacious ways, it’s definitely abusive and immoral.