I have spent more than my share of time around behaviorally challenged dogs.
Not bad dogs. Not evil dogs. Dogs with thresholds, sensitive triggers and sometimes very strong feelings about proximity.
One of the things you learn fairly quickly is to appreciate a growl.
That sounds odd if you think the goal is a dog who never growls. A growling dog looks like the problem. People become frightened or embarrassed. They tell the dog no. They punish it. They want the behavior to stop.
And sometimes it does. Unfortunately, the discomfort that produced it may still be there.
A growl says something: I'm uncomfortable. You're too close. Stop doing that. I don't like where this is going. It is communication, but it is also restraint.
Without a growl, your only recourse is bite.
That isn't entirely true, obviously. Dogs have other signals, and a good handler should have noticed quite a lot before things got that far. But the principle has stuck with me because the growl is such a useful little thing. It makes conflict visible while there is still time to do something about it.
And my brain has lately been putting that beside humans, which is generally how I end up somewhere I wasn't planning to go.
We are supposed to annoy each other
There seems to be a growing tendency to treat friction itself as evidence that something has gone wrong.
Someone says something offensive. Someone objects. Somebody feels disrespected. A political disagreement becomes a judgment about character. A question is treated as hostility. The irritating person isn't merely irritating anymore; he is dangerous, evil, irredeemable or no longer invited to Thanksgiving.
Maybe this isn't new. Humans have been exiling and murdering one another over disagreements for rather a long time. But I wonder whether we've become less comfortable with the middle.
The growl.
Most of us understand, or at least should understand, that zero friction isn't the goal. There are rules to this game of life and lines not to be crossed. Cruelty, violence, deliberately humiliating someone—no. But friction exists between beings learning to live with or near one another.
Perhaps we shouldn't expect a life without conflict in the first place. We should get better at keeping most conflict inexpensive and bounded.
Families know this rather well.
I grew up with brothers. Sibling conflict did not require anyone to hold a seminar explaining that human beings have competing interests. Somebody touched something that belonged to somebody else. Somebody got the better seat. Somebody was annoying on purpose and then objected vigorously when the other person responded.
There were fights. But the fight didn't have to decide what we were to each other. My brothers and I could be absolutely furious with one another and still understand that we were siblings.
Love helps enormously with that. Loyalty does too. Families can develop their own peculiar rules for what may be said, how far somebody may push, when a fight is over and what an apology looks like. Some of those rules are healthy. Some probably aren't. But there is usually some shared language underneath the conflict.
Strangers don't get as much help.
Low-cost conflict
The dog world understands ritualized aggression rather well. Growls. Posturing. Warnings. Space. Fighting is expensive. Injury is risky. Fighting usually isn't the objective; the displays help avoid it.
Humans seem to understand this too. In fact, we start remarkably young. Tug-of-war. Thumb wrestling. Rock-paper-scissors. King of the Hill. Games with winners, losers, boundaries and rules about what counts. We learn to compete with someone without needing to destroy them.
Then we get older and improve the equipment.
Boxing. Martial arts. Football. Debate. Sarcasm. Snark. Political argument. Complaint letters. Lord knows I've written one or two. Neighborhood meetings. Courts. Elections. Editorials. The passive-aggressive note left somewhere everyone can see it.
Not all of these are admirable, and they don't all perform exactly the same job. But my mind keeps returning to the category: low-cost conflict.
Ways of saying I object, I am angry, you have crossed a line, I want something different, or occasionally kindly reconsider your life choices without immediately reaching for the most expensive response available.
We start teaching versions of this to children, then build increasingly elaborate versions for adults. Sometimes very elaborate ones.
The Federalist Papers are an awfully sophisticated example of people arguing in public about what kind of country they were trying to build. We still read them. We don't generally say, How dreadful that Hamilton and Madison failed to maintain a conflict-free environment.
The conflict was part of the work.
The trick wasn't eliminating disagreement. It was giving disagreement forms, boundaries and enough shared rules that people could keep participating while it happened.
But a growl has to mean something
This is where my own analogy started bothering me.
A growl works because another dog has some chance of understanding it. Maybe the warning is ignored. Maybe one dog has terrible social skills. And even among dogs, communication isn't necessarily simple. We have bred them into an extraordinary range of sizes, coats, faces, ears and tails—many of the very things they use to communicate. Signals can become harder to read.
Human low-cost conflict seems to have the same requirement. A signal isn't much use if nobody knows what it means.
I grew up in Brooklyn. Someone growing up in Boston might have had different customs, different accents, different ways of insulting his brother and somewhat different ideas about what constituted a serious offense. But there was enough overlap to recognize roughly what game we were playing.
That's one problem: can we read one another's signals?
There is another. Understanding the signal doesn't necessarily mean I will give it any room.
My brothers and I had a relationship capable of absorbing a fair amount of misunderstanding. I could know one of them was furious with me without deciding that his anger revealed everything I needed to know about his character. The relationship gave us some reason to interpret one another with a little generosity—or at least to expect that we would still have to deal with one another afterward.
Strangers don't come with that reserve of attachment.
I don't need to love everybody I share a society with. Thank God, because that would be an exhausting requirement. But if personal caring isn't holding us together, something else has to do more of the work. We need enough shared assumptions, expectations and social language to understand what sort of conflict is occurring, and enough confidence in the arrangement to believe disagreement does not automatically cancel membership in it.
A political opponent can be wrong without being illegitimate. An objection can be sharp without being a threat. Offense can be real without requiring exile. A loss can hurt without proving the game was rigged.
None of this requires agreement about everything. Agreement about everything would make most of these mechanisms unnecessary.
It requires enough agreement about how we disagree.
Sometimes the growl isn't enough
There is another limit to the analogy, and dogs taught me this one too.
I was not inclined to let unfamiliar dogs with vastly different sizes or abilities simply work everything out for themselves. History mattered too. If I didn't know enough about the dogs involved, I might let them meet through a barrier first. Even with dogs who knew one another, there were times when we watched rather closely.
A growl communicates information. It does not guarantee that the other dog can read it or will respect it. Sometimes the possible cost of getting the interaction wrong is high enough that you don't rely on their social skills alone.
Humans have versions of that problem too. Sometimes manners, social pressure and direct negotiation are enough. Sometimes they aren't. One person may have far more power than the other. The facts themselves may be disputed. The consequences may simply be too serious to leave to whoever can posture most effectively.
That's when conflict needs a stronger container: mediation, rules, appeals, courts.
The purpose isn't necessarily to eliminate the conflict there either. It's to keep it bounded when the cheaper methods can't do it safely. A property dispute can be real without becoming a feud. An employee's objection shouldn't depend entirely on whether the person with more power feels like listening. Two people who cannot agree on what happened can hand the question to a process that, however imperfectly, gives them somewhere other than each other to take it.
Sometimes we need a way to make the objection matter.
But most of our ordinary friction doesn't start there.
Don't eliminate the growl
This is where attempts to make everything safer, kinder and less offensive can go wrong.
If every expression of discomfort is treated as aggression, people learn not to express discomfort. If every disagreement threatens a relationship, people either suppress the disagreement or abandon the relationship. If every objection is interpreted through the worst possible motive, eventually there is little reason to bother with the cheaper signal.
Dogs sometimes learn this the hard way. Punish the warning consistently enough and you can end up with a dog who appears wonderfully tolerant right until he isn't.
The growl didn't cause the bite. It was one of the things standing between you and it.
I wonder whether some human conflict works the same way. Eliminating visible friction doesn't necessarily eliminate whatever produced it. Pressure can show up somewhere else—as withdrawal, contempt, rupture, coercion or, at the extreme, actual violence.
If disagreement, objection, posturing, argument and ordinary social correction are unavailable, unacceptable or no longer understood, the conflict doesn't necessarily disappear. We may simply lose some of the cheaper ways of containing it.
Of course, “I'm merely growling” is not a free pass for cruelty, intimidation or endless abuse. Human beings are extraordinarily talented at renaming bad behavior when the nicer label benefits us.
There still have to be boundaries. The whole point of low-cost conflict is that it stays bounded. But perhaps one of those boundaries should not be nobody may make anyone uncomfortable.
Discomfort contains information too.
We are still siblings
Maybe that's what the sibling fights were teaching me.
My brothers and I could fight because the fight didn't automatically decide what we were to one another. We were still siblings afterward. The relationship provided somewhere for the conflict to land without every argument becoming a referendum on whether the relationship should continue.
A society obviously cannot reproduce that bond among millions of strangers. Nor should it try. But perhaps some of our rituals perform a smaller version of the same job.
Debate says we can oppose one another and remain participants. An election says one side can lose without ceasing to belong. A court says the dispute can be real enough to require judgment without requiring the parties to settle it by force. Manners let us signal irritation while still recognizing the other person's standing.
And sometimes we have an even simpler device: agree to disagree.
I've used it plenty. It doesn't mean the disagreement vanished or that either person secretly conceded. It means we have reached the point where continuing the fight is unlikely to improve anything, so we stop. The disagreement remains; the relationship or shared task continues.
Sometimes success looks remarkably unimpressive. Someone says, “That really pissed me off.” The other person says, “Fine, but here's why I did it.” They argue for another ten minutes. Perhaps neither changes a mind. Then somebody asks whether anyone wants coffee.
Nobody achieved consensus. Nobody became a better person. They simply managed to remain in contact.
These little mechanisms are imperfect. They can be abused. They depend upon enough shared understanding to recognize the posturing, enough acceptance that disagreement is normal, and enough trust in the boundaries to believe the cheaper form of conflict is worth using.
But they give friction somewhere to go.
I don't think the answer is that everyone needs to become nicer. I'm not entirely sure that would survive contact with humanity anyway.
Perhaps the more useful skill is learning how to have conflict cheaply enough that there can still be coffee afterward.
Dog people already know the often misunderstood part.
Sometimes the growl is good manners.