Paula Marantz Cohen: Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation
Reviwd by Danny Heitman
As we’ve often been told, the art of conversation is on life support, ravaged by the excesses of technology. Hooked to our phones and laptops, or so the theory goes, we’ve lost the true gift for gab. Sherry Turkle, one of many writers who have noted the problem, weighed in with her book “Reclaiming Conversation,” in 2015. “We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other,” Ms. Turkle told readers. “For on our screens, we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be.”
In “Talking Cure,” billed as “an essay on the civilizing power of conversation,” Paula Marantz Cohen echoes some of Ms. Turkle’s laments about online culture as a corrupting influence on conversation. But Ms. Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University and the dean of its honors college, finds other culprits, too—some well-publicized, and others that readers might not have considered.
Political polarization quickly rears its head as a conversation killer, blocking the interchange of different perspectives that give a good talk its vitality. “To speak to the converted or the entirely familiar is not to truly converse,” Ms. Cohen writes. “It is to have one’s beliefs reinforced; it is self-soothing but not self-developing.” Mentioning the liberal pedigree of her family, Ms. Cohen writes gratefully about how her world view was expanded by a deep friendship and decades of thoughtful exchanges with a conservative colleague who has since died. “What sustained us in our disagreement,” she recalls, “was our mutual respect, indeed deep affection, for each other. It was a feeling that carried moral as well as emotional weight.”….
After the truth-shower 