Author Archives: Paul Heilker

Corder, Jim W.  “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.”  Rhetoric Review 4.1 (1985): 16-32.  Print.

Corder asserts that “We have not at any time in our public or personal histories known consistently how to deal with conflicts” (29). “In discourse and behavior,” he says, “our ways of resolving conflicts have typically been limited and unsatisfactory” (30).  Corder asks, then, “What can free us from the apparent hopelessness of steadfast arguments opposing each other?”  His answer is that “we have to see each other, to know each other, to be present to each other, to embrace each other,” but in order to do that, he says, “We have to change the way we talk about argument and conceive of argument” (23).  Currently, he suggests, the way we “understand, talk about, and teach argument” construes it as “display and presentation“: “We present a proposition.  We display our proofs, our evidence.”  “But argument is not something to present or to display,” he contends.  “It is something to be.  It is what we are” (26).

According to Corder, we are all “narrators, historians, tale-tellers” and “each of us creates the narrative that he or she is” (16).  Making “the fictions that are our lives [. . .] is what we do and are, even if we think we are doing and being something else [. . .] We are always [. . .] inventing the narratives that are our lives” (17).  In like manner, he writes, “Each of us forms conceptions of the world, its institutions, its public, private, wide, or local histories, and each of us is the narrative that shows us living in and through [those] conceptions” (16).  In sum, he contends, “The narratives we tell (ourselves) create and define the worlds in which we hold our beliefs.  Our narratives are the evidence we have of ourselves and our convictions.  Argument, then, is not something we make outside ourselves; argument is what we are.  Each of us is an argument” (18).

As narratives/arguments, Corder says, we can “live comfortably adjacent to or across the way from other narratives. [. . .], be congruent with other narratives, or untouched by other narratives.”  Sometimes, however, “another narrative impinges upon ours, or thunders around and down into our narratives.”  The other narrative/argument is “disruptive, shocking, [. . . ] incomprehensible, [. . . ] threatening” (18).  Hence, we sometimes “turn away from other narratives,” sometimes “teach ourselves not to know there are other narratives,” and “Sometimes we go to war” (19).  Given “the flushed, feverish, quaky, shaky, angry, scared, hurt, shocked, disappointed, alarmed, outraged, even terrified condition that a person comes to when his or her narrative is opposed by a genuinely contending narrative” (21), it is hardly surprising that “probably all too seldom–we encounter another narrative and learn to change our own” (19).

Corder’s response is to “insist that argument — that rhetoric itself — must begin, proceed, and end in love” (28), that we must “learn to love before we disagree.  Usually, it’s the other way around: if we learn to love, it is only after silence or conflict or both” (26).  He notes that “in the arguments that grip us most tightly, we do injure the other, or the other injures us, or we seem about to injure each other, except we take the tenderest, strongest care” (22).  Corder’s radical reformulation, then, is that “Argument is emergence toward the other [. . .] an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other, [. . . ] a risky revelation of the self [. . .] asking for witness from the other” (26).

“When argument comes to advocacy or to adversarial confrontation,” Corder observes, “mutuality [. . .] will probably not occur” (28).  As he puts it, “Evidence and reason are evidence and reason only if one lives in the narrative that creates and regards them” (23), and “there is not arguer who does not believe that his or her view is a just consequence of normal thought and deed” (30).  Hence, he stresses that “The arguer has to go alone.  When argument has gone beyond attempts made by the arguer and by the other to accept and understand, when those early exploratory steps toward mutual communication are over, or when all these stages have been bypassed altogether–as they often will be–then the arguer is alone” (28).  At that point, “the arguer must, with no assurance, go out, inviting the other to enter a world that the arguer tries to make commodius, inviting the other to emerge as well, but with no assurance of kind or even thoughtful response” (26).

For such discourse to be successful, Corder says, we must “learn to live — and argue — provisionally [. . .] We can learn to dispense with what we imagined as absolute truth and to pursue the reality of things only partially knowable” (28).  In like manner, “we arguers can learn to abandon authoritative positions.  They cannot be achieved, at any rate, except [. . .] in arrogance, ignorance, and dogma.”  “An authoritative position,” he contends, “is a prison both to us and to any audience” (29).  And finally, he suggests, “We must pile time into argumentative discourse [. . .] we need time to accept, to understand, to love the other.”  Corder writes that “we must rescue time by putting it into our discourses and holding it there, learning to speak and write not argumentative displays and presentations, but arguments full of anecdotal, personal, and cultural reflections that will make us plain to all others, thoughtful histories and narratives that reveal us as we’re reaching for others.”  He notes that “The world, of course, does not want time in its discourses [. . . but rather] speed, efficiency, and economy of motion [. . .] We must teach the world to want otherwise, to want time for care.” (31)

Corder concludes that “Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities. “[M]ost of our speaking is tribal talk,” he observes, “But there is more to us than that.  We can learn to speak a commodious language, and we can learn to hear a commodious language” (32).

Corder’s piece reinscribes a number of recurring thoughts I have about writing and nonviolence: that we are never taught how to deal with conflict or what the positive values of conflict might be; that we need alternatives to the stock moves we currently have, which seem to be merely avoidance of conflict or all-out war; that the possibility of composing nonviolent, productive responses to conflict is a matter of hope, of optimism, and has a future orientation; that what we need is nothing less than a fundamentally different way of thinking about, talking about, teaching, and doing argument.  I think Corder’s assertion that argument is not something we do but something we are is profound and powerful; it aligns strongly with my sense that genres are ways of being in the world (which is not surprising since that idea also comes from Corder).  His formulation that we are narratives/arguments is, again, a radical and provocative revision: our arguments are critically important, and we defend them so ruthlessly, in short, because argument is a matter of identity, the sum total of our entire life experiences and our conception of the world as expressed in a narrative that allows them to make sense.  What is at stake in any argument is not the issue, not what we should do about the issue, but my personal, fundamental sense of who I am and how the world works.

Corder thus quite rightly points out that when advocacy and adversarial confrontation occur (which is most of the time), mutuality is unlikely; that our evidence and reason and perspective will/can only seem normal to us and will/can never seem normal to someone standing in a truly different place/narrative/sense of the world; that when genuine contending occurs, our arguments injure the other unless “we take the tenderest, strongest care”; and that our responses to finding ourselves/our narratives/our arguments opposed will be primarily and strongly emotional, a matter of self-preservation, first and foremost, which is why we only rarely change our positions.

I both love and am challenged by Corder’s reformation of argument, of rhetoric itself, as love, that we must learn to love before we can profitably disagree.  It reminds me of something I heard described once as a tenet of Franciscan theology but have not been able to track down: that we have to love someone before we can understand them, that it doesn’t work the other way around.  I love the image of argument as emergence, the idea that to argue means to reach out endlessly toward our adversaries, to make ourselves fully present — not merely presented or displayed — to the person we are arguing with.

But there are significant challenges to this perspective, some of which strike me as perhaps insurmountable (at first blush, anyway).  Arguers, in Corder’s scheme, a fearless solo agents endlessly willing to sacrifice themselves before hostile adversaries.  Is this always the way of nonviolence?  Similarly, he notes that we will need to learn to give up the idea of absolute truth.  Is he suggesting that argument as emergence/love is predicated on epistemological conversion, that it cannot be successful unless all involved have embraced a post-structural sense of truth?  Corder likewise says that we “can learn to abandon authoritative positions” since they are “prisons,” but he does not say how we can urge or help people to actually give up these positions.  While I like the idea that giving up authoritative states allows us more movement, if Corder is right and we are arguments, then asking someone to give up an authoritative position is asking for an existential/ontological crisis.  I’ve spent a career urging people to embrace uncertainty as a positive experience and a productive state via the essay.  This is no small row to hoe, no small feat he is suggesting.  Finally, what does it mean to create a commodius world, to speak and hear a commodius language?  How do we do that?  How can we teach people to do that?  This resonates for me with the idea of heteroglossia, of polyphony, of miktos — the word Isocrates uses to describe his Antidosis, of Huxley’s three poles of essayistic development — the personal/autobiographical, the objective/factual, and the universal/poetic.

I am buoyed, though, by the one clear avenue for the development of pedagogy and practice of argument as emergence that Corder discusses near the end of this piece — the idea that we can use narrative and personal reflection to emerge toward our others, make ourselves plain to others, to reveal our full histories and the stories about how we came to occupy our positions.

— Paul Heilker

Barak, Gregg. Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. 2003.  Print.

Barak’s sweeping sociological explication of violence and nonviolence is filled with categories and ways of thinking of these terms in the modern American landscape, which are useful for attempting to parse out the ways that humans are either violent or nonviolent. For instance, he has two categories for structural violence: one “pursued allegedly for the purposes of establishing, defending, and/or extending hierarchy and inequality […which] can be accomplished by harassing, exploiting, beating, torturing, or killing people based on their age, class, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexual orientation” (5); and the other which “is pursued allegedly for the purposes of decreasing privilege and/or increasing liberty by the resisting, protesting, and attacking of those persons, symbols, or things that represent the “establishment” or the “powers that be” through “rebellions, protests, and assassinations” (5). He asserts that “a holistic framework for decreasing violence and increasing nonviolence at home and abroad” would require that “we do not limit ourselves to thoughts of personal forms of violence and nonviolence,” but “remember to consider forms of institutional and structural violence and nonviolence” (5). Because of this structural framework of inequality and violence, many individuals defined as “violent,” according to Barak, my actually be “engaging in a ‘defensive’ reaction to some kind of real or imagined assault, injury, or harm perpetrated on or against the self, family, group, or nation” (8). Thereby, the soldier can be a hero to his people and a terror to another country’s people; the battered wife who killed her husband is both a victim and murderer. Shame can play a part in these retributive actions, and Barak cites Gilligan’s “three preconditions that must be present before shame can lead to a full pathogenesis of violent behavior […] (a) feeling too ashamed to admit that one feels shame, which only makes one feel further ashamed; (b) feeling that there is no other nonviolent means available for warding off or diminishing one’s feelings of shame or low self-esteem; and ( c) feeling an overwhelming sense of shame in the absence of feelings of either love or guilt” (10).

The center of the book is an exhaustive look at specific kinds of violence, including rape, murder, institutionalized violence of the state, and many different other types, analyses largely based in statistics. The last two chapters are entitled “Chapter 9: Models of Nonviolence” and “Chapter 10: Policies of Nonviolence.”

What is nonviolence? According to Barak, nonviolence can be presented as two models of thought/action: “first, as alternative or competing visions to the paradigm of adversarialism” and “second, as expressions of the shared visions of the paradigm of mutalism” (272). Adversarialism is “[t]he tendency to oppose,” and “as a paradigm of social interaction [it] operates in essentially all spheres of life and in all human relationships” such as “ecology, sports, law, economics, education, sex, politics, race, religion, class, consumption, and perception” (274). Breaking down adversarial tendencies, especially in America’s boot-strap capitalistic society, seems impossible, as our everyday language is filled with sports and war metaphors, as well as binary language of “good/bad” “black/white” “win/lose.” Indeed, “adversarial assumptions include the beliefs that one engages in adversarial behavior to overcome another, to achieve revenge, and/or to arouse envy […and] that parties oppose each other’s interests more than they share anything in common” (275). The author goes on to define “compulsive adversarialism” as “competition for the sake of competition,” citing Kohn’s argument that compulsive adversarialism “represents a cultural defense system that promotes the denial or circumvention of the necessary work to overcome the unnecessary and destructive tensions in the self and in the larger society (Kohn, 1992). Adversarialism, in short, promotes extreme individualism and isolationism” (275).

[How many highly insecure teenagers and young people claim that they are not mean or cruel, they are sarcastic? Or, more recently, how many young people are unable to exclaim true joy at anything, relying instead on being ironic, dressing and acting in such a way as to never commit to finding happiness in anything. Competition for the sake of competition leads to a tense society, as groups of people are not able to relax and enjoy themselves without someone insisting that they are winning and everyone else around them is losing, whether at driving to a location, making money, or listening to bands you have probably never heard of.]

Alternatively, “Mutualism assumes deep fulfillment in social connections. It assumes that there are pleasures to be derived from sharing and from cooperation. Mutualism also assumes that both individuals and society can reside in peaceful relationships with themselves and others” (275). He notes that “Thus far, models by which the world is understood have tended to take adversarialism as the ‘real’ and to take mutualism as the ‘idea’” (276), which strikes me as a distressingly sad idea.

Barak cites Fellman to help put these paradigms in direct contrast: “According to the adversary paradigm, people are defined as dangerous, potential competitors, and inevitable combatants. According to the mutuality paradigm, people are defined as potential friends ‘who can be trusted to respect feelings and vulnerability and who can be known partly through knowing oneself’ (Fellman, 1998, p. 27). Adversarialism sees human interactions as primarily a series of “zero-sum” games with only winners and losers; mutualism sees human interactions as potentially a series of “win-win” exchanges, or negotiations and compromises, where all parties to a conflict can become benefactors” (276).

[In this environment, it is important for me to do something that everyone else is not doing. To get a job or fellowship, I cannot be part of a team only; I must LEAD the team in some way, and bulletpoint all the things that I have personally done. My team’s results are not as important as my results, and everyone is out to steal my work, my glory, or my job.]

Barak continues: “Adversarial values tend to give greater importance to battle and tough-mindedness than to friendship and serenity. Nonadversarial or mutual values, such as enjoying good health, feeling secure and comfortable in one’s environment, exploring sensuality, caring for others, and finding pleasure in a great range of people and diverse experiences, gives greater importance to peacemaking and social justice and to flexibility of mind rather than to structures conformity, vilification, and revenge. In short, a situation of making love rather than making war.” (276-77)

[And we know that love and empathy and understanding lead to one being called weak (or, womanly, as if such a thing is an insult) and unrealistic. How many times have young people calling for a spread of welfare or an end to war been termed “unrealistic,” as if a multi-billion dollar war machine based in fear and pride is an ANY way realistic? To be loved, to be understood, is to be vulnerable, and we as a culture are afraid of vulnerability. What if we are embarrassed? What if it is unreciprocated? What if someone sees our true selves? It is much safer to be a foe than a friend.]

Mutualism is challenging: “mutualism understands the importance of and advocates that people identify with the hurts of others by recognizing their own hurts and the energies of resentment and rage that are bound up with them” (278).

[Personally, I never want to fully take on my demons, and very few people do, much less publicly; there is a reason that therapy is typically between two people, one a professional sworn to secrecy, or among people with the same type of secret (alcoholism, eating disorder, etc.).]

Barak cites Fellman’s seven elements that minimally constitute the philosophy of mutuality (1998):

1. The other is experienced as fully human or the other’s full personhood is retained in one’s consciousness, emotions, and action;
2. Compromise and harmony, openness and growth are prized, and contrasting realities are accommodating to each other;
3. Power is shared among all parties and all people;
4. Mutuality replaces subordination to hierarchy with interdependence of equals, the shared connectedness of human lives;
5. Emotional responsiveness is essential;
6. Giving is a primal way of connecting;
7. Love and community are prime aspirations.

According to Barak,

Mutuality means realizing, directly or through sublimation, the full range of one’s own feelings, fears, and inclinations. It means connection with one’s own emotions and, in turn, trying to understand them and allowing for their full recognition and (where appropriate) expression […] Mutuality also calls for a liberation of the self from the tyranny of an overly rigid conscience and from overly rigid people who threaten to disapprove of or punish the self. It is a morality of insight into and compassion for the self and others and their interrelationships. Finally, mutuality is not about sentimental declarations of unity, idealism, or utopianism, or about clinging to early internalized authorities. Rather, it is an empathetic act of putting oneself in the place of another and then reflecting critically. (280)

[Mutuality is not saying, “I understand.” It is saying, “I have felt something like the pain that you are feeling, and I am sorry,” or “I do not understand your pain because I have never been raped, but I understand why you would feel lonely/angry/insecure.” Mutuality is treating every living human as an equal, which, in all honesty, is difficult for most of us. Aren’t we smarter/prettier/better than others? Well, no. And that’s the first step in realizing that we live in a truly messed up society — that we are taught that the places we are born in society and our genetic makeup make us superior to other human beings.]

Is there such a thing as healthy competition, or competition just for competition’s sake, if it does not improve either party involved? I’m unsure. This work makes a convincing argument that there is no need for competition that tears down one party. I believe that we are taught at a young age to lose gracefully, and our only lessons to be taken from “losing” is how to win better next time. How many times have you heard someone remark in post-game press conferences that they will learn from this experience, but NOT how to win next time? Probably, never.

Fellman’s elements of mutualism could be applied to the classroom, the workplace, or one’s personal life. It emphasizes emotion and understanding over critical eyes to different people and cultures. Prior to entering college, I had never seen a grown man cry, save for the death of a loved one. I repeat: I had never seen a grown man have an emotional response to anything besides death in my eighteen years of existence before college. Crying, and laughing, and having a deep, empathetic experience with someone takes effort and bravery, especially as anti-feminine sentiment has come full circle back to harming men by making it impossible for them to show anything resembling a “feminine” emotion.

The habit to “one up” is astounding, and far-reaching. It can also leave lasting negative impressions of others. Have you forgiven the friend who, when you exposed something personal to them that you had not revealed to anyone else, could only respond, “Well once MY mother died/I was depressed/I almost killed myself. It was awful.” I doubt it. As much as the SAT’s, GRE’s, class rankings, and high school sports coaches want us to believe otherwise, life is not a competition. This adversarial compulsion doesn’t just lead to violence; it leads to PERCEIVED violence. You cannot trust strangers because they will probably try to harm you, although most of us will  never rape or murder or rob anyone in our lifetime. You would be foolish to travel alone, because someone will challenge your size or gender in order to take what they want from you. You would be foolish to trust anyone, as they will likely betray that trust for their own gain. Better to lock yourself away and harden your heart to others than be hurt by these mysterious bringers of hatred in the world that you have been taught are waiting for someone just like you.

Having long regarded the classroom as a necessary safe space for ideas, musings, and writings, I think that instructors should make it clear that it is okay to be “wrong” or to continue to formulate an opinion through a work or class and change one’s mind or approach later. There is no reason for us to demand that students remain static in their opinions through the semester; in fact, it should be a mark of a bad instructor if her students do not grow in some personal way, as well as a professional/knowledgeable way, through her course. This ideal is easier said than done, and much easier in a classroom that includes creative/opinion writing than, say, a calculus course. However, a safe space can be made in ANY classroom, and it all depends on the instructor’s approach.  

From this work, I will define/glean the terms “adversarial” and “mutualism,” and hope to incorporate these in my teaching and personal lives. 

— Emily Blair

Kroll, Barry M.  The Open Hand: Arguing as an Art of Peace.  Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013.  Print.

Kroll explores “how arguing could be conducted with an open hand, as an art of peace,” with the “open hand not simply as a gesture of peaceful intent but also as an instrument of contact, an way to connect with an opposing force . . . receive aggressive energy and redirect it” (2).  Kroll’s approach emphasizes the incorporation of meditation and mindfulness exercises “as practical arts that enhanced one’s effectiveness in the world, especially in difficult conversations, interpersonal disputes, and arguments about divisive issues” (13), and it uses the martial art of aikido as a extended metaphor and physical analog for the open hand “moves” one can make in arguing for peace.  He devotes the book to discussions of three alternatives to adversarial arguing — reframing, attentive listening, and mediating.

In reframing, two-sided debates are “reframed as a careful analysis of the situation, with an assessment of options for addressing a significant problem” (16).  To reframe arguments, writers can A) “shift attention from points of contention to larger issues,” to the questions or situation that generated the argument in the first place (32); B) “expand the options being considered, slowing down the rush to decide on a course of action”; and/or C) “introduce new perspectives that encourage participants to step back” and consider “creative solutions  . . . [or] fresh way to understand the problem” (33).  Later, Kroll refers to these various tactics of reframing as “searching for better problems” (57).  In the second approach, which Kroll describes as “conciliatory,” you move opponents to listen to your views by first hearing theirs, by “demonstrating that you have paid attention, achieved a measure of understanding, and sympathized with their concerns and perhaps some of their ideas” (17).  One way to “demonstrate fair-minded, nonoppositional listening,” he says, is to use a “say-back protocol” (71), and the goal in this approach is “reciprocity: the statement of one’s own position should be . . . more or less the same length and equally clear and even handed, aimed at mutual understanding rather than persuasion” (81).  In the third approach, writers seeks “to find a way to induce cooperation between adversaries, mediating a dispute so that it becomes (so fas as possible) a productive encounter” (17), “encouraging adversaries to cooperate on the basis of shared interests or goals” (89).  According to Kroll, good mediators “look beyond the positions that have shaped the argument and led to an impasse, devling into the unexpressed or tacit interests, values, needs, and goals,” which requires “both investigation and sympathetic identification with each party’s concerns” (96): “beneath people’s claims and arguments lay deeper constellations of values and commitments, some at the root of the dispute, some that were shared” (99).  Mediators can guide disputants toward “agreements of different strengths, such as agreements on procedure, agreements that are provisional or partial, and second-order agreements (agreeing about where you disagree)” (101).

Kroll asks students to “become observers of the dynamics of everyday arguments,” to pay attention to the conflicts taking place among parents, friends, romantic partners, roommates, etc., to their own habits of arguing, and to record their observations and reflections as weekly journal entries (31): “nearly all of the students agreed that prior experiences — personal interactions, obeservations of debates in the media, and their training in high school — had encouraged arguing with a closed fist.  What they needed, to expand their repertoire, was a sense of the alternatives” (32).  He asserts that “most people who are involved in divisive disputes see no alternative to the familiar strategies of attack and defense, striving to maximize advantage even if they aren’t getting anywhere.  This is as true of interpersonal disputes as it is of both professional conflicts and public controversies” (92-93).  Kroll is careful to note that “Conventional–even confrontational–argument has a place in one’s repertoire because there are occasions for principled advocacy, responsible assertion, spirited defense, and strenuous opposition.  But these are not the only or always the best ways to argue with adversaries” (125).  The goal, then,  he says, “is to expand the rhetorical repertoire in order to give writers options and choices” (123), “to enable them to make choices about how to proceed when they are engaged in argumentative conflicts” (124).

Kroll’s book was published by a prominent university press in 2013, which suggests the timing is good for additional work on the intersections of peace studies and writing studies.  The three approaches it explicates are concrete, pragmatic, and seemingly very useful ways of reconfiguring argument so that progress on the issues and the relationships of the disputants might become possible.  Kroll offers a ready-to-go pedagogy for teaching writing as nonviolence, although his “conciliatory approach” strikes me as little more than the standard, ethical injunction to not set up straw dogs as you argue.  We have always urged students to summarize the con arguments “in a way that demonstrates fair-minded ‘listening’ [to] the opponent’s interests, concerns, and positon on the issue.”  The only difference I can see is that Kroll suggests that the final section of a conciliatory argument does not urge the opposition to change views.

I leave the book, though, with a number of questions about underexamined terms and concepts.  For instance, Kroll suggests that “By taking controversial topics and reframing them as opportunities for deliberative discussion, rather than defaulting to pro/con debate, these . . .  students were expanding their options for arguing about disputed issues” (55).  But what does discussion (let alone deliberative discussion) mean?  How do we do it?  How, exactly, does it differ from debate?  And how might we teach it?  In like manner, Kroll writes of “a process that will require more dialogue than argumentation” (99).  But what is dialogue?  What is involved in doing dialogue?  What is the dialogue process and how might we teach it?  How is dialogue different from debate or, more importantly, from discussion?  Similarly, much of Kroll’s approach relies on the idea of attentive listening: “attentive listening, a kind of listening that goes beyond hearing but stops short of agreeing” (84).  But how do we do that?  What is the “listening process”?  And how can we teach that?  And how can we render or demonstrate or prove that attentive listening has actually happened?  And finally, the whole image of finding common ground comes up: “I wanted students to consider how to proceed when the opponents in a debate were not able to find any common ground” (97), to help them in “identifying common ground in or around the topic, locating issues on which adversaries can cooperate–despite fundamental differences” (105).  The entire concept/metaphor/goal of “common ground” seems in need of serious critique.  To begin with, it is a territorial metaphor and thus seems doomed to fail because it reinvokes the whole metaphor of argument-as-war.  Moreover, reminiscent of Trimbur’s critique of “consensus,” the goal of seeking some kind of “common ground” defaults to searching for some lowest common denominator, some path of least resistance, which truncates any effort to consider more complex or sophisticated approaches and likewise refuses to acknowledge the value of dissensus and conflict.  The suggestion to use “a middle-ground approach” (105) or of “finding a middle way between extremes” (106) seems to only exacerbate these issues.

One aspect of writing and nonviolence that I will need to develop is the how the genre of the exploratory essay (as I have developed it elsewhere) would seem to be a strong vehicle for nonviolent writing.  Throughout Kroll’s text, I hear him describe features of “arguing for peace” that I have previously ascribed to the essay:

•      in reframing — “perhaps the key shift is from assertion to question, from claim to query, from declarative to interrogative mode.  A question invites answers rather than counterarguments” (33)
•      in reframing, “a writer should examine multiple approaches to a problem rather than two competing proposals” (37)
•      “instead of narrowing focus and reducing complexity, we broaden the context and make the problem more complicated . . . [and thus consider] the conditions that led to the problematic situation in the first place” (45)
•      “a special form of intergrative thinking, one in which elements of opposite views are merged in a position that embraces contradictions and accepts tensions, letting them stand rather than trying to resolve them” (106).

Each of these are qualities that I have explicated and discussed as features of the exploratory essay in previous scholarship.

Similarly, there are clearly connections between Rosenberg’s and Kroll’s ideas about nonviolent communication.  Rosenberg’s NVC explictly seeks to uncover the unmet needs that are not being effectively expressed in situations of conflict.  Kroll, too, says that good mediators look beyond positions taken to consider “the unexpressed or tacit interests, values, needs, and goals” (96), asserting that “beneath people’s claims and arguments lay deeper constellations of values and commitments, some at the root of the dispute, some that were shared” (99).

— Paul Heilker