I’ve always loved chess. I’m not very good at it, but I like the concentration it requires and the semi-academic sense I always get when playing it. Something about a game of chess suggests refinement and maturity (at least to me) and I’ve been wishing, lately, that more people approached conversation they way they should approach chess.
For example. Most of us, if we saw our chess opponent make a stupid move, wouldn’t leap to our feet and shout ‘that was a retarded move, have your lost your mind?!’ (unless, perhaps, we happened to be nine years old). Even if our opponent did make a retarded move, we would probably have the good grace to keep playing politely, or, if we couldn’t help it, point out the abberation in a kindly and civilized manner. With the exception of the clinically insane, I don’t know any grown people who would taunt or criticize their opponent until tears or violence erupted.
And yet, I see these lapses in conversation. Understandably, when someone else’s words or belief system challenge another person’s convictions, tempers can flare more quickly than they would over a board game. It does make sense, after a fashion. But I keep wondering, if we can be civil throughout a board game (where the object, truly, is to beat the other person), why can’t we be civil throughout the course of a conversation? (Some reasons are abundantly clear. Chess comes with rules, conversation doesn’t. Someone taking away your rook pales in comparison to them taking away your civil liberties, or trying to.) I’m not ignorant to the nuances and misunderstandings of human communication… but the more I think about it, the more I’m certain that if you would never end a friendship, start a fist fight, or reduce another person to tears over a chess game, then neither should you do any of those things during the course of a conversation.
Now, the other side to that declaration is this – some people really are too aggravating to play chess with, or even talk to. (Again, I reference the clinically insane, but consider also the belligerent and the merely unintelligent.) In such cases I strenuously advise that you avoid the other person entirely. If another person is too crazy, too rude, or too simple for you to be civil to, then stay away from them. But if you do genuinely like the other person, and they sacrifice their bishop needlessly (or profess to believe that Jimmy Hoffa was abducted by little green men), address the matter with patience and tact.
(I can hear it now – I know there’s a blogger out there somewhere claiming that Miss Manners leads the most boring life ever… but really… would you rather be the admittedly-less-thrilling person who everyone will play chess with, whom everyone invites over for dinner, or the abrasive jerk no one will give the time of day to? And, I’ll leave this confession with my readers – yes, my favorite part of this rant was tagging ‘little green men’ and ‘Jimmy Hoffa’ at the same time.)
Tags: chess, civil liberties, Jimmy Hoffa, little green men, tact