The Dialogue Venture

Archive for the ‘Dialogue and Current Events’ Category

I camped out at my favorite Starbucks this morning with the intention of writing about the U.S. debt crisis and the dysfunction of government. We might get to that in another post. But as I wrestled with the wording, normal life kept going on around me…and eventually forced me to pay attention.

To my left, two young women talked animatedly about dress styles. To my right, a boy of around six jabbered to his father about the baseball game they might take in later, as Dad listened with obvious patience, attention, and love.

It felt so blessedly ordinary. People—just people—talking and listening and paying attention and, by doing so, affirming each other.

This feels like something very fundamental to the human spirit. Part of us is hard-wired to be social: to talk and listen and pay attention—in other words, to use the basic abilities that are also the ingredients of dialogue.

I wonder if we can tap into this “ordinary” part of us in extraordinary circumstances, when dialogue is of the utmost importance.

Perhaps this is why some longtime public servants fondly recall the days when they’d fight like mad on the Senate floor and then head out to the local pub with their adversaries. It’s probably (as mentioned in last week’s post) what former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in her days as an Arizona legislator, had in mind when inviting the warring sides of an issue to her house for Mexican food and beer and chat. It’s hard not to relax one’s iron grip on contentious issues in such a relaxed environment. As they prattled and swapped stories and talked about nothing much, I imagine, they stopped being “politicians” and started being people—just people. They tapped into that “ordinary” vein. They allowed their humanness to come out.

And they saw the humanness in one another.

I would submit that it’s harder to mount a savage attack on your adversary once you’ve seen her human side. So these opportunities to be “ordinary” open a door, if even only a crack at first, to talk and listen.

What might have happened if, a week ago, President Obama and Speaker Boehner and House Majority Leader Cantor and others had pushed away from the debt negotiation table, changed into polo shirts and khakis, and took in a Nationals game? What if they’d shared some nachos and bought a few beers and yakked about anything but the debt? Would it have eased the negotiations, fostered more respect, led to a better, and better thought out, solution?

I think this sounds more naïve than it actually is. Why do you think parents give warring toddlers a timeout, if not (in part) to help them take a breather and regain their center? Who’s to say it can’t work with adults?

Considering what doesn’t work in Washington—and the fajitas and beer that have worked in the past—why not give it a try?

Remember all those long-ago TV ads that trumpeted the vast promise of the Internet to bring us all together? Apparently, quite the opposite is taking place.

So says a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed by Gregory Rodriguez. A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Rodriguez writes that “despite all the newfangled ways we’ve developed to communicate across all sorts of boundaries, we’re increasingly deciding to talk, tweet and Facebook with folks who are more or less like ourselves.”

Why? Rodriguez quotes a fascinating insight from Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. With the explosion of diversity in today’s world, Bishop writes, people increasingly have to create their own identities. That’s a lot easier when you draw on support from people like you.

I see this as a good thing. In Western culture, at least, we no longer have a social consensus to tell us who we are (or aren’t). Thank God for that, especially since the consensus defined “normal” in very restrictive ways. But as someone with his own eccentric identity, I have seen how isolating the resultant “who am I?” quest can be. Support from like-minded people is a breath of fresh air, and the Internet has made it easier to find them.

The problem is not that we hang out with like-minded people. The problem comes when we only hang out with like-minded people (or only read their like-minded thinking).

By doing that, we drastically limit the number of worldviews we encounter. Our views can easily become more rigid and dogmatic. We might think the answers to problems are simple when they’re not. Moreover, we start to believe things about people not of our worldview—and those things are often inaccurate.

That may be why, for instance, some LGBT people see all evangelical Christians as homophobic, or why some Anglos see all Mexicans as unpatriotic, or why some Americans fear all Muslims as potential terrorists.  And it makes dialogue difficult.

But what if we expanded the spectrum of places we hang out online? It can do wonders for clearing away preconceptions. As our exploration unfolds, we may realize that “all people in x group” don’t have the same perspective, because this blogger in x group has a different perspective. More often than not, we discover that her perspective is well thought out. Maybe we can find ways to at least respect those opinions, if not actually bridge our divides.

Rodriguez quotes former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the value of spending time with “them” and their perspectives. To help reach consensus as an Arizona legislator, she’d invite the warring sides over to her house for home-cooked Mexican food and beer. They’d sit around and shoot the bull. In time, they became friends. This can happen virtually too (OK, minus the edibles).

Will this kind of crossover solve all our problems? Of course not. Differences in opinion and debates over policy will never go away, and neither should they: they can contribute to the forging of better solutions. But we can’t even begin to solve our problems if we’re not talking. And we can’t talk productively unless we see and hear others, especially our “adversaries,” for who they really are. If that means reading MoveOn.org as well as nationalreview.com, or The Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times, then that’s what we have to do.

Every now and then, our elected officials provide an object lesson in how not to conduct dialogue. In that respect, the gridlock over raising the U.S. debt ceiling is turning into a classic. Here are a few lessons I draw from the whole dustup (warning to my conservative friends: I’m going to be particularly hard on the Republicans):

1. Set aside your preconceptions—however temporarily. By doing so, we can transcend our own filters (through which we see the world), clearing our minds and hearts to listen more fully to other perspectives. Had Republican congressional leaders done so, they might have at least heard the views of some distinguished economists that tax increases should form a part of any long-term effort to address the debt. Instead, the leaders have refused to even consider the notion of raising taxes, dismissing any explorations to the contrary and thereby restricting the potential of the dialogue to reach the best solutions.
2. Do not repeat sound bites ad nauseam to address complex issues. The very structure of our news media—fast, brief, pithy, designed for today’s shorter attention spans—puts leaders under tremendous pressure to communicate in sound bites. But while sound bites might illumine an isolated aspect of an issue, there is no way they can communicate the full complexity of something like the national debt. Moreover, when we hear the same sound bites over and over, we begin to assume they are the only way to think about an issue. To borrow a business cliché, these terms set the “box”—and make it more difficult to think outside it. That goes for the people using the sound bites as well as those who hear them. So we need to retire phrases like “job-killing tax hikes” and “balancing the budget on the backs of the middle class.”
3. Treat the issue with the seriousness and urgency it deserves. When ice-in-the-veins economists start using words like catastrophic and very significant, one would do well to approach the issue with instant and extreme seriousness. Add in the constraint of a time limit, and there is precious little room for wasted effort. Yet our leaders continue to talk past one another and not with one another. Other dialogues in other settings—a mutual sharing of views in an interfaith forum, say—can take their time to evolve and explore and meander as necessary. Not so here.
4. Use anger carefully. Part of being human is that we come with the full range of human emotions as standard equipment. Communication tends to work far better in a spirit of calm and open-heartedness, but sometimes (see above) open hearts and minds are in scarce supply, and intransigence rules. In such cases, a judicious expression of heartily felt anger might be just the thing, on the chance that it could wake people up and reset their orientation toward resolving the issue at hand. That’s why I have no beef with the president’s alleged sharp words to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

I’ll bet you’ve drawn your own lessons from this affair. What have you learned? Do share. And to any congressional leaders who might be reading this: Please. Do the right thing. The debt is serious business; give us serious solutions.

(Dear Reader: Yes, I have been absent from these pixels the past few weeks, and not by choice. Work and family obligations kept me away from stringing two thoughts together, let alone two words. Just before the interruption, however, I started work on the post below, so it seems a good place to pick up. My apologies for the hiatus.)

Almost two weeks ago, The New York Times printed a well-researched story by Michael Barbaro on the passage of marriage equality legislation in New York. “Behind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces” reports on the various maneuvers, lobbying efforts, and conversations behind the scenes.

As you might pick up from that last sentence, some of the effort was classically political. Governor Andrew Cuomo, according to the article, organized contentious gay-rights organizations to present a united front to the Legislature. There were postcard campaigns, phone calls to legislators, promises of political cover.

I was more taken, however, with other dimensions of the effort. Here are two:

1. The personal dimension. Barbaro’s story mentions many personal connections between the players in this drama and LGBT people. Billionaire Paul Singer, whose support Cuomo requested in an effort to persuade Republicans, has a son who is gay. Cuomo’s own partner, Sandra Lee, urged him to push through marriage equality at least in part because her brother is gay. The cantankerous senator Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) had watched his family come apart because of his no vote two years earlier: his partner’s nephew, a gay man, refused to speak to him thereafter. Constituents repeatedly approached the governor and legislators with their own stories.

Here’s my takeaway from this: I’ve long believed that the best way to clear away our stereotypes is to spend time with someone we’re stereotyping. In this case, some people changed their minds on same-sex marriage because they knew, or became acquainted with, GLBT people for whom same-sex marriage is a life-changing issue. This is one great advantage to dialogue across divides: it puts us face to face with people we misunderstand. As we hear their stories—and spend time with the human beings behind the issues—our preconceived notions give way to a more nuanced picture, and we begin to see our dialogue partners for who they are.

2. Then there’s the issue of confidentiality. Many of these conversations were held in strictest secrecy, and I believe that’s appropriate. Sometimes confidentiality can create a space for people to give and take, try out new ideas, suggest half-baked proposals, and generally fumble along, free from concern that any given line will be taken out of context in our always-on, media-saturated public square. In this confidential space, people get to put their heads together, and better ideas generally result. Clearly, secrecy can be miserably corrosive in other contexts—secret prisons, anyone?—but I think it serves a good purpose here.

There’s more to be said on these issues, but I’d rather hear from you. What lessons do you draw from the process behind this legislation? What best practices (or pitfalls) do you see that could make our dialogue better?

This morning, to prepare for the upcoming annual convention of our Episcopal Diocese, I am pondering two resolutions on which we will vote. Because I have to suffer through this, so do you. (N.B.: There’s an important point at the end, and it goes way beyond The Episcopal Church. Still, if you’re short on time, skip to the boldface paragraph below.)

The two resolutions deal with the church’s trial courts, which come into play whenever a complaint is lodged against a priest or bishop. Our national convention has instituted a new structure for the court process; some people think it runs against the Church’s constitution. So, I’ve been doing some research to figure out what’s happening here.

Stop me if the following sounds oddly familiar.

One key issue is whether the power to make this change resides with the national authorities or the local authorities. Much has been written to interpret the (possibly) relevant clauses of the Church’s constitution. Look through the constitution itself, however, and the language is not only vague, but written in a specific time and place. It (perhaps deliberately) left the task of interpretation to later generations when they faced issues not covered by the language therein.

Sound familiar yet? If not, here’s a clue: Think U.S. Constitution. And the Bible.

U.S. Constitution first. One key issue is whether the power to make changes resides with the national authorities or the local authorities (i.e., the states). It is perhaps the fundamental difference between Democrat and Republican. Much has been written to interpret the (possibly) relevant clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Look through the Constitution itself, however, and the language is not only vague, but written in a specific time and place. It (perhaps deliberately) left the task of interpretation to later generations when they faced issues not covered by the language therein.

That’s why we have these fierce debates over the separation of church and state, say, or the right to privacy. You won’t find these words in the Constitution itself. Instead, the Constitution left the interpretation up to us.

The Bible, I would submit, is the same way. We have a text that, mediated by the Spirit of God, guides us in the way we live our lives, individually and collectively. It too was written in specific times and places. The authors could not have foreseen, for instance, the scientific findings of the past half millennium, which provide new data to inform the debate over when life begins or whether being GLBT is genetic.

In a nutshell, then: In critical parts of our common life, we have a guiding text before us. It does not answer everything, so our charge is to interpret the text—as well as the interpretations that have come before us—to arrive as close to the truth as we can.

If we can at least agree on this, it could be huge. Why?

Because this perspective cuts us loose from certainty: in particular, the certainty that drives us to point to one clause and divisively proclaim that “the Constitution clearly says.” Our resulting lack of certainty—as well as its corollary, the fact that we need one another to sort out the truth in light of the text—drives us to work together, to listen to one another, in the humility that no one has a corner on The Truth. Out of such collaboration come better dialogue, better ideas, better decisions, and greater unity.

If this is true, my earnest hope is that we can adopt this perspective more fully: in our diocese, in the United States, and in our faith traditions.

I know very little about war. I have never served in the armed forces, have never been shot at, and know few combat veterans. I occasionally read some military history.

Here is one of the few things I know: War must be horrific beyond imagining.

I pick that up from what experiences I do have with those who have served: through friends of friends, through literature, through stories picked up along the way. The overwhelming impression I get is of young men and women who return from combat and remain, resolutely, silent. From what I hear, they often carry their experiences unspoken to the grave.

From this silence I draw conclusions. Is that a legitimate thing to do?

It can certainly be tricky. Since words are our basic currency of communication, we are not practiced in interpreting silence. It is easy to filter silence through our own perspectives and biases. The results can be profoundly misleading.

And yet silence does communicate. We know this intuitively. It’s built into our language: “Her silence spoke volumes.” “The silence was deafening.”

How do we know what we’re hearing when we listen to silence?

It helps when more verbal forms of communication back up the message we think we hear. We know about the horror of war from people who have spoken up. Many Holocaust survivors have told their stories. Civil War soldiers, among others, wrote home from the front with sometimes graphic descriptions of battle. Combine such verbal evidence with our aforementioned silent veterans, and the silence speaks more clearly.

Reading nonverbal cues—especially actions—can draw the message from the silence as well. This, too, we know intuitively: hence we say that “actions speak louder than words.” So the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide among veterans adds clarity to their silence.

We could, I suppose, insist on words from everyone to get more clarity in dialogue. But people cannot always speak their mind. Veterans have no words for the stark realities of war. Citizens of dictatorships dare not speak out for fear of their lives. The same is true of those who have suffered domestic violence.

Listening to silence demands care, full attention, a curious mind, and an open heart. But it is part of dialogue. Without it, we would miss the powerful witness of those who cannot speak.

Here’s why the spirit of dialogue is essential.

I awoke this past Monday to the news that Osama bin Laden was dead.  My initial reaction was complex: sadness because, in the great words of my faith tradition, God “desires not the death of a sinner”; concern that a critical mass of people would misinterpret this as a final victory over terrorism; a sense of the necessary tragedy of violence as a last resort, and my dismay that it is necessary at all.

At the same time, I experienced a profound disconnect with the jubilant crowds near the White House and Ground Zero. The chants of “USA” utterly mystified me. And I was afraid that I would be ostracized for not feeling the same way.

As the week wore on, I read and heard and reflected a great deal. A surprising number of voices expressed my feelings, and I no longer felt so alone. The president spoke of justice, and—while I listened in on discussions of due process and trial by jury and guilty until proven innocent—I came to see his point. The proclamations of victory quickly died down, to be replaced by conversations about next steps to thwart terrorism. Even now we are learning more about the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism worldwide. We’ve barely begun to discuss whether bin Laden, in a sect that honors martyrs, might be more powerful in death than in life. But I’m sure we will discuss it.

Here’s what I see in all this: Something happened in the world. We—the global we—filled the airwaves and the blogosphere with talk about it. Sentiments and opinions shifted. Some reactions subsided; others gained strength. New evidence came to light. It is almost as if we spent the week collectively figuring out what to think.

I’m not usually a big fan of the media’s constant opinion making. Every now and then, though, I think we get it right. This was one of those times.

What if we didn’t take the time to talk and listen and reflect: in other words, to engage the event in the spirit of dialogue? What if we just hunkered down with our thoughts and those who agreed with them? For one thing, we’d all be stuck in our own limited perspectives—much as we are on healthcare reform and deficit reduction and abortion. There would be no opportunity for our thinking to evolve, and it would become ossified, hardened against the “opposition.”

We’ve seen where that can lead in terms of policy: gridlock, culture wars, the rise of uncompromising positions, and, in the end, no progress on the issue at hand.

This week wasn’t like that. Perhaps the lesson here is to start listening and reflecting early—right from the start, actually—not allowing time for one’s position to harden. Perhaps the lesson is to treat different viewpoints not as threats or sins but as opportunities for curiosity. Maybe we learn that our first question in the face of disagreement should be not “How the hell can you think that?” but “Is there something in your opinion, however objectionable, that can teach me something?”

What if we did this on a collective level? How much better might our policy decisions be?

What do you think?

Dialogue, especially on social and political issues, benefits greatly from a clear (and agreed-upon) grasp of the facts. But ferreting out honest-to-goodness facts can be wickedly tricky. Allow me, in the spirit of making a point, to look at what may be an absurd example.

Our subject is an innocent-looking sentence in “School aid reductions won’t harm students,” a recent op-ed from New York’s lieutenant governor, Robert Duffy. Discussing a state school system that he calls “large, expensive and underperforming,” Duffy writes:

It is the most expensive system in the country and the 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas, according to the Census Bureau.

Usually I read sentences like that without blinking an eye. Why did this one set my truth antennae to tingling?

Let’s unpack the sentence a bit. A strict reading doesn’t make sense, if you think about it. No school system contains adults with high school diplomas—not as students, anyway. Students in high schools are teenagers, generally, and they don’t have high school diplomas because they’re there to earn high school diplomas.

Now that’s clearly not what Duffy means. But what exactly does he mean? Perhaps he’s referring to graduation or dropout rates, in which case his statement makes sense as legitimate evidence. But maybe he meant that New York State itself—not the school system—ranks 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas. Now we’re on shaky ground, because all kinds of factors might influence that statistic. Does New York’s large population of immigrants skew the ranking? Do the data count immigrants’ diplomas, if earned in another country, as “high school diplomas”?  The answers to these questions might help us understand whether the “34” statistic really proves Duffy’s point.

OK, maybe I’m tilting at windmills here. But the point stands. People who debate an issue (as in op-ed pieces) naturally use statistics to bolster their case. There’s nothing wrong with that when it’s done in good faith, as Duffy (I believe) is doing here. Dialogue, however, is not debate. The spirit of dialogue, with its commitment to ferreting out the truth above making a case, demands that we weigh such statistics carefully, consider who is using them, and evaluate their relevance to the issue at hand.

This is extraordinarily hard work in today’s world, with reams of information cascading toward us every minute.  Our 24/7 information cycle requires us to have finely tuned truth antennae, so we can pick out strange fact usage quickly. Try this exercise: Next time you read an article, watch a video, or scan a blog, and you run across something cited as fact, take five seconds to weigh it. Does it make sense? Is it self-evident? Or is something just a little bit off—something that sets off your truth antennae?

Have you already run across things that fit into that “something off” category? Feel free to share them here.

We Americans are having a national dialogue of sorts about the federal debt. Our elected officials and pundits are leading it. It might even go well this time.

Stop chortling out there.

My hope for serious dialogue began to stir in December, with the release of a report from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Often associated with its co-chairs—former Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles—the commission seems to have approached its work with both seriousness and bipartisanship. You’ve got to love a report that includes this:

We spent the past eight months studying the same cold, hard facts. Together, we have reached these unavoidable conclusions: The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table. And Washington must lead.

Read that first sentence again. I would submit that the experience of coming together, with all our differences, to study “the same cold, hard facts” is extremely rare these days—let alone for eight months at a time.

Now look at the result. The recommendations in the final report could not possibly have come from one partisan group or another. They include substantial reform of Social Security and reductions in defense spending. They include commitments to protect the disadvantaged and to “cut spending we cannot afford—no exceptions.” They devote a lot of time to the programs that contribute the most to the debt.

This is what dialogue can do—dialogue that sets aside preconceptions (however temporarily), looks at the “cold, hard facts” when they are available, and shares ideas across divides. Why is it that such clear thinking and dialogue in Washington happen only in rare shining moments? What would happen if it took place more consistently?

Maybe we won’t have to wait too long to find out. The “roadmap” from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) is certainly a bold attempt at a serious proposal (though I find it draconian). The president’s 2012 budget proposal takes on some recommendations from the Simpson-Bowles commission (though not nearly enough of them, in my view, and the cuts to key programs for the poor are still too deep). Then there’s the so-called Gang of Six: a half-dozen senators, three Democrat and three Republican, who are crafting a counterproposal of their own.

So the president has paid attention to the dialogue from the Simpson-Bowles commission, if only in part. Others are dialoguing with their “adversaries” on a proposal that offers more cold, hard truth about a cold, hard situation. Perhaps the result will be legislation that actually addresses the debt crisis.

Wouldn’t that be a refreshing change? And if dialogue truly can contribute to big solutions, shouldn’t we be demanding more of it from our elected officials?

A while back, an old friend upbraided me for imagining a dialogue on immigration. As she saw it, I was ruminating on an issue for which, in her words, I “had no dog in this hunt.”

At the time, I thought she made a good point, but now I’m not so sure. Do we need a personal stake in an issue to reflect on it openly? How much of a stake do we need?

First, to state the obvious: Those who have an intensely personal stake in an issue deserve a privileged place at the dialogue table. They live the issue, after all. The rest of us are under obligation to listen, and listen intently, to their stories. Sorting through Arizona’s immigration law without Arizonans at the table, for example, would be as arrogant as it is ridiculous.

But if we take that as the whole truth—“all those with no dog in this hunt, stay out”—we run into problems. Here’s an example: My daughter is an adult. I have no direct connection with the local school system anymore. Does that mean I should stay away from Board of Education budget meetings? What if my personal stake lies in the importance of educational excellence for the future of our (pick one: town/ nation/planet)? Is that really a personal stake?

Matters of war and peace are even stickier. The U.S. government pays little, if any, attention to the voices of those who would be combatants—let alone their families—when deciding whether to go to war. That is a travesty, and peace advocates rightly raise the issue in times of conflict. But what about the foreign policy expert, with no loved one eligible for combat, who can articulate the (possibly legitimate) geopolitical reasons for a particular war? OK, perhaps that’s self-evident. But what about the ordinary Joe whose religion proscribes the use of force in any situation? Should anyone care what he or his religion thinks?

Yes, I think they should. Wisdom can come from anywhere. We don’t know who carries the wisdom that a dialogue needs until we have that dialogue. If we apply “no dog in this hunt” rigidly—excluding those without a stake, or even including them but treating their views lightly—we risk missing the perspective that could make all the difference.

Logistically, of course, we can’t include everyone in every dialogue. And circumstances will define the number of people we can or should include in every situation. When the Public Conversations Project convened a long-running dialogue on abortion, it was important to keep the group small and the proceedings quiet; that provided a safe space for people to build trust and sort through the immensely complex passions around this topic.

For me, the lessons here are twofold. First, it is essential to honor those with a personal stake in an issue—and listen to them very, very carefully—while also inviting as many people as makes sense to the table. Second, it is valuable to reflect on the catchphrases we throw around every day: to evaluate their truth for this situation, in this context. By doing so, we force ourselves to think about the issue at hand more clearly. In thinking with clarity, we communicate that way too—and thus enhance our chances of connecting effectively in dialogue.

Does this make sense to you? Have you heard catchphrases that don’t quite stand up to scrutiny? Feel free to raise them here.