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  The negotiator persists, until Schroeder boils over:

  FBI: . . . I’m willing to bring the milk out . . . What are you willing to do to get the milk? That’s the question. What are you willing to do?

  Schroeder: I’m willing to, myself, walk out that gate and be shot by your Bradleys if I have to and I’ll go get that milk.

  There were two moments during the long stand-off at Mount Carmel that suggested a more fruitful conversation was possible. One of them came right at the beginning, another towards the end.

  Three minutes into the ATF raid that sparked the siege, Wayne Martin, the Davidian lawyer, made a panicked 911 call. The operator patched him through to Lieutenant Larry Lynch, from the local sheriff’s department:

  Lynch: Yeah, this is Lieutenant Lynch, may I help you?

  Martin: Yeah, there’re seventy-five men around our building and they’re shooting at us at Mount Carmel . . . Tell them there’s women and children in here and to call it off.

  Lynch had not expected any drama that day. He knew the raid was going to happen; he did not know the ATF were going to be so heavy-handed. He was on duty that Sunday because he expected that Mount Carmel’s neighbours would be calling to express annoyance at the blockaded roads around the property. (‘Because I’m old and fat, that’s why I’m here,’ he later confided to Martin.)

  As soon as the FBI arrived, Lynch took a backseat, which was a pity, because he may just have been the best negotiator of all. He displayed a kind of intuitive sensitivity that was rare among the FBI negotiators. Lynch immediately recognised the urgency of Martin’s call, and made a human connection with Martin by explicitly accepting his priorities:

  Lynch: Okay, Wayne . . . Talk to me Wayne, let’s, let’s take care of the children and the women.

  With the word ‘let’s’, Lynch indicated that he and the caller shared a desire to protect the women and children, and that they could work together to solve the crisis. Later, after the ATF withdrew, leaving the bodies of dead colleagues behind, Lynch gently tried to draw out a dazed Martin, acknowledging his emotion, starting where he was at:

  Lynch: Are you okay? You sound – is there a problem?

  Martin: No, there’s no problem.

  Lynch: You sound upset.

  Martin: Well, everything is, huh . . .

  Lynch: Everything is what, huh?

  Lynch stayed on the line to Martin for the next fourteen hours, calming the situation, and negotiating a ceasefire before the FBI took over.

  * * *

  Later on, as March turned into April, came a different and more deliberate attempt to communicate with the Davidians on their own terms. A biblical scholar, James Tabor, got in touch with the FBI after watching events unfold on TV. He had immediately realised that the FBI had no idea about the Old Testament world inhabited by the Davidians and knew that any chance of a peaceful resolution would depend on the negotiators speaking the language of scripture. After approaching the FBI, Tabor and a fellow theologian Philip Arnold were permitted to begin direct discussions with Livingstone Fagan, a senior Davidian, considered by the Davidians to be a scholarly authority. Tabor and Arnold gained a greater understanding from Fagan of why the Davidians didn’t want to move – they believed the Bible was instructing them to wait.

  The FBI’s display of military hardware was intended to intimidate the Davidians into surrender. What the FBI didn’t understand is that the Davidians were much more worried about another kind of threat, as Steve Schneider had tried to explain:

  Schneider: . . . the only reason why we’re staying here together as a unit still is because of that one word, wait. It’s not because we fear man. There’s a higher power we have learned to fear more so that – I mean when that God says he can destroy your soul and you know what he’s talking about, we actually believe that is a reality more so than this world which will pass away.

  Tabor and Arnold realised that Koresh needed another way to make sense of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation. They taped a long, technical discussion of the Seven Seals, offering an alternative reading, and sent it to Koresh, who was intrigued. At last, someone on the other side was at least taking his beliefs seriously, instead of insulting him or offering bargains. On 14 April, Koresh announced that God had directed him to write out the messages of the Seven Seals. After he had completed this, he said, ‘I will be freed of my waiting period . . . As soon as I can see that people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold have a copy, I will come out.’ Inside Mount Carmel, there was rejoicing, as the ordeal seemed on the verge of ending. But the FBI was unimpressed by Koresh’s declaration. To them, it seemed like another delaying tactic. On 16 April, a negotiator questioned Koresh’s sincerity:

  FBI: Now listen. Let’s get back to the point in hand. This ah – you know – the writing of the seals. OK. You’ve got to do that in there, and its gonna take you x amount of time. But – just tell me this, David – are you saying that when you finish that manuscript –

  Koresh: Then I’m not bound any longer.

  FBI: No. But see, that doesn’t answer the question.

  Koresh: Then I’ll be out – yes – definitely.

  FBI: I know you’ll be out. But that could mean a lot of things, David.

  Koresh: I’ll be in custody in the jailhouse.

  One danger of an overly technocratic approach to a deep-rooted disagreement is that it can drive the other side mad; another is that, caught up in the disagreement’s dynamic, the technocrats rationally persuade themselves to do something crazy. On 19 April, just five days after Koresh had changed position and said the Davidians would surrender once he had finished his translation of the Seven Seals, the FBI’s leaders lost patience and, after receiving approval from Attorney General Janet Reno, ordered an assault on Mount Carmel. The Davidians may have had guns but they had shown no appetite for aggression or violence, except in self-defence. Now, a force capable of military combat was unleashed upon a small group of American civilians. The FBI shot about 400 canisters of tear gas – flammable under certain conditions – into a building lit by candlelight. Through a loudspeaker, an agent told everyone inside to come out. ‘THIS IS NOT AN ASSAULT,’ he said, even as the mechanical arms of Bradley armoured vehicles were smashing through the building’s walls. The residents of Mount Carmel huddled in fear, as chunks of concrete crashed down around them. Somehow, the compound caught fire, and was soon engulfed in flames. Koresh and seventy-three other Davidians were killed, including twenty-one children. Over the loudspeaker, an FBI agent intoned, ‘DAVID, YOU HAVE HAD YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME . . . HE IS NO LONGER THE MESSIAH.’

  * * *

  It is one thing, at our vast and comfortable distance from the awful tragedy of Waco, to identify what the FBI negotiators got wrong, entirely another to assume that any of us would have had more success. The truth is, it’s incredibly hard to step outside your own cultural bubble and see how odd it might seem to others, or to enter another’s and get a sense of how it might feel normal to them.

  Culture to human beings is like water to fish: we can’t see it because we live in it. It rarely shows itself in our conversations with others like us, precisely because it constitutes all the things we don’t have to say. It doesn’t feel like a particular way of seeing the world; it feels like reality. Of course the world is this way. That’s just the way it is. But the truth is, we are all partially sighted. This might be even more true of those of us who pride ourselves in being objective and analytical, since we have a pronounced tendency to assume ours is the only valid way to perceive the world.

  Cultural difference isn’t just a matter of East versus West or Britain versus France. A country has a unique culture, but so do towns, workplaces, families and long-standing relationships, which is why the adage about never judging another’s marriage is so wise – we don’t know the culture. In fact, even among people who have grown up in the same places, attended similar schools and watched the same shows, each individual will still have acquired their ve
ry own quirks, habits and rituals. An individual is a micro-culture; we are all, each of us, a little odd. One way to think about any disagreement, then, is as a culture clash.

  It’s usually only when we bump up against someone with a different way of seeing the world that we get a glimpse of the medium in which we swim. An encounter like this can trigger a threat state, leading us to dismiss or demonise the other. But that stops us hearing what they are saying. To make yourself less prone to this reaction during a disagreement, try thinking about yourself as a visitor from a distant land with a very distinctive culture. You’ll need to work hard at understanding the culture of your host, but you’ll also need to reflect on your own. What experiences shaped your point of view? What are your blind spots likely to be? Which beliefs and habits of thought have you inherited from your forebears? Be an anthropologist to yourself.

  9. Get Curious

  The rush to judgement stops us listening and learning. Instead of trying to win the argument, try to be interested – and interesting.

  Daniel Kahan, a professor of law at Yale University, studies the way that our political opinions dumb us down. More specifically, he investigates how people unconsciously distort new information to make it fit what they already believe, on controversial topics from vaccination to climate change. A commonly heard complaint about political culture is that voters aren’t presented with enough facts. Kahan’s work suggests that giving people facts won’t necessarily help.

  In one of his studies, people were given a maths problem to solve. Using data from a (fictional) clinical trial, the respondents had to make a series of calculations to work out whether a new skin cream had been shown to increase or decrease a rash. Most respondents got the answer right. Next, they were invited to interpret exactly the same set of statistics, this time in the guise of a question about gun laws, a highly polarising topic in the United States. Some respondents were given data suggesting that gun crime was on the rise after a change in the law, others that it was falling. This time, how accurately people answered the statistical question depended on their political persuasion. Faced with a result they didn’t like, pro-gun respondents suddenly got worse at maths; the same went for anti-gun respondents.

  Kahan points out that this shouldn’t be so surprising. If a person reads about a potentially dangerous skin cream, or a change in how much tax they pay, it makes sense to absorb the new information rather than sticking to what they already believe. To do otherwise would clearly be self-defeating. But most people get little tangible benefit from being correct about, say climate change. They do, however, get an immediate benefit from expressing beliefs that others like them share: the feeling of belonging. We care more about people than being right, and the risk of changing a shared belief is that you no longer have people with whom to share it.

  Say you’re discussing the night sky with a friend and he mentions that Venus is Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour. If you correct him (it’s actually Mars), he’ll probably accept he was wrong. Maybe he’ll be mildly embarrassed, but the conversation will move on. Now imagine a similar conversation taking place in the seventeenth century. Your friend says something about the Sun going round the Earth, and you correct him, noting that according to the findings of this guy Galileo, it’s the other way around. Your friend is likely to get furious, to deny all the evidence you present, and to denounce you as a wicked heretic. That’s because, at the time, astronomy was not just about astronomy. It was bound up with people’s deeply held beliefs about the social and spiritual order. By telling your friend that the Earth goes round the Sun, you were not just correcting an error in his conception of the physical universe, you were threatening his place in the social universe and thus his very sense of self. That’s why, faced with information on a topic in which we have some personal investment, we perceive what supports our identity and ignore what does not.

  Kahan’s name for this phenomenon is ‘Identity-Protective Cognition’. You might assume it only applies to people of low intelligence or education, but Kahan has found that highly intelligent and educated people are, if anything, more likely to distort and mould facts to fit their worldview. Clever people are better at finding reasons to support their beliefs, even when those beliefs are false. They make more convincing arguments, to others and to themselves, and they’re better at reasoning away contradictory information. In the online forums on the flatness of the Earth or the lies of climate science, you can observe people using considerable scientific erudition to reach wholly erroneous conclusions.

  For those hoping for more productive political disagreements, this suggests a bleak prognosis. More facts won’t help, neither will better reasoning. So what might? Kahan discovered an answer to that question by accident, when he was approached by a group of documentary makers who wanted some guidelines on how to interest viewers in science-based topics. The group asked the professor to help them identify members of the public with high levels of scientific curiosity. Kahan and his team of researchers invented a survey tool, called the Science Curiosity Scale (SCS): a series of questions designed to predict how likely a person is to have their attention held by a science documentary. It includes questions about how likely the respondent is to read science books, and invites them to choose between a few articles with different levels of scientific content.

  Kahan’s team surveyed thousands of people and found that individuals with high levels of scientific curiosity were equally distributed across the population: men and women, lower class and upper class, right-leaning and left-leaning. They discovered something else, too – something totally unexpected. Out of his own curiosity, Kahan had inserted some questions on politically polarised issues into the survey. When the answers came back, he noticed that the higher a person’s level of scientific curiosity, the less partisan bias she displayed.

  For Kahan, this was counter-intuitive. Previously, he had established that more knowledgeable people were also more likely to be partisan thinkers. But what the survey had done was distinguish people high in knowledge from those high in curiosity. The curious people didn’t necessarily know a lot about science, but they took a lot of pleasure in finding stuff out. It turned out that Republicans and Democrats who were highly curious were much closer in their views on, say, climate change, than Republicans and Democrats with significant levels of knowledge about it.

  Kahan and his research colleagues designed another test. They gave participants a selection of articles about climate change and asked them to pick the one that they found most interesting. Some of the articles were supportive of climate change science, and some undermined it; some articles had headlines that framed the story as a surprise, others as confirmation of what was known.

  Normally, partisan respondents would pick the article that supported their worldview. But science-curious Republicans picked articles that went against their prevailing political viewpoint when the headline framed the story as a surprise (‘Scientists Report Surprising Evidence: Arctic Ice Melting Even Faster Than Expected’). The same was true of science-curious Democrats, in reverse. For the scientifically curious, Kahan concluded, the intrinsic pleasures of surprise and wonder trump their desire to have what they already know confirmed. Curiosity beats bias.

  * * *

  Powering up your desire to learn is often the only way to make the most out of a difficult encounter. If you’re a climate change activist who meets someone who believes the whole thing is a hoax, the best you can do is be intrigued by how they arrived at that view. What experiences have they had, what have they read or heard, that got them there? Knowing that won’t reconcile you to their view, but it gives you something to talk about.

  You can get to a disagreement too soon. It’s usually wise to defer the point at which you say, ‘Well, actually . . .’; the longer you let the other person talk, unimpeded by interruption or the need to defend themselves, the more data you gather about their perspective. That inevitably puts you in a stronger position: either you will lear
n something that modifies your view or you’ll have gained a better understanding of the other person’s view, and of how to argue with them. And sometimes, the more a person talks, the more they talk themselves out of the position they started in.

  Questions are good way of showing curiosity, but they can also be a way of avoiding it. If I ask, ‘Are you serious?’ I’m really saying that I don’t take you seriously. Asking, ‘Why do you believe that?’ is better but not by much. It sounds like a demand to the other person to justify themselves. It positions you as the judge and puts them in the dock. Much better to ask, ‘Can you tell me more?’ or some variant. That kind of question shows that you’re willing to listen and that you see this as a conversation of equals. ‘Can you tell me more about why you believe that?’ is different to, ‘Why do you believe that?’ in a subtle but significant way.

  Some of this book was written during a stay in Paris. While there I was contacted by a businessman called Neil Janin who knew that I’d previously published a book on curiosity, the topic he wished to discuss. He didn’t know I was writing a book on disagreement, but that turned out to be his speciality. Janin spent thirty years at the management consultancy McKinsey, many of them running its Paris office. Now semi-retired, he coaches senior executives in how to deal with difficult, conflict-ridden conversations. When we met, he was recovering from illness and had lost his voice. From across a café table, he fixed me with his penetrating gaze and delivered aphoristic wisdom in an intense, rasping whisper. ‘The key to it all’, he said, ‘is connection. If you don’t connect, you can’t create. What stops me connecting to a colleague? Judgement. “He’s stupid, she doesn’t get it. They don’t have the facts; once I give them the facts they will change their mind; if not, they’re idiots.”’ When we are in a disagreement, he continued, we face a choice, with an easy option and a hard option. ‘We love judgement. It helps us be “right”, which is good for our ego, and requires no energy. Curiosity is energy-consuming, because you’re trying to figure things out. But it’s the only way through.’