The Dialogue Venture

Archive for the ‘Dialogue and Current Events’ Category

Every now and then, I come across an article with penetrating insight into an issue I’ve vaguely pondered. Writing like that is too good not to share.

That’s why I’m passing along the March 28 blog post from Miki Kashtan. A longtime expert in Nonviolent Communication, Miki writes with extraordinary clarity, from the depths of her own soul, about many issues that confront our world. This past week she turned her attention to two aspects of the horror in Japan:

1. The decline in media coverage, even as the nuclear crisis persists, and what it might say about our cultural attention span.
2. The hubris that has permeated our culture—even, perhaps, our entire era—and its ability to hurt our future. In the West, we live and breathe a legacy that, for more than two centuries, has touted the sanctity of “progress” and controlling our world at the expense of other values. To what extent should recent events (the Japan catastrophe, climate change, etc.) spur us to rethink this mindset on a fundamental level?

We might revisit these issues sometime in the future, but for now I can’t do better than point you to Miki. Take a look, and feel free to respond, either here or on her blog.

The other day I felt sympathy for health insurers.

This almost never happens. Far more often, I fall into the trap of blaming them for all the brokenness in the U.S. healthcare system. Insurers and I have a history, and it isn’t pretty.

Then I started helping a loved one select a health plan. This person has pre-existing conditions, requiring treatment options that—even though well established in the medical community—some insurers have apparently never heard of, let alone cover.

At one point in the process, the old rage began to boil up in me. Suddenly, who knows why, my mind flashed on all the challenges the insurers face: paying for millions of expensive tests and procedures for millions of people with a pot of money that, however large, is also finite. Perhaps this was more about a broken system than about one corrupt player, or set of players, in that system.

To be sure, health insurers must bear some responsibility for the system’s vicious cycle. But many others contribute as well: doctors who order tests to avoid malpractice suits, lawyers who push for extravagant awards, pharmaceutical companies whose necessarily high-risk research pushes drug prices higher, all of us just for living longer and needing more of these tests and procedures. None of these parties is necessarily evil, or maybe even blameworthy. More to the point, we’re all caught in this system that no longer works on a grand scale. We all do what we can to make our corner of it work. Sometimes we do this for noble purposes—for the benefit of others.

Why do I bring this up now? As a cautionary tale.

We can commit our whole lives to dialogue. We can prepare our souls to be people of reconciliation, of peace, of reaching across divides. But the slings and arrows of life’s outrageous fortune keep on coming. We get wounded along the way. It is so easy, no matter who we are, to react with anger and bitterness and recrimination.

That can be a good thing. Some systems, organizations, and people are thoroughly corrupt, and justice demands that we stand up to them in anger. But I think it’s important that we pay close attention to the slings and arrows and take away all the lessons they hold. In my case, this meant pushing through “the evil insurance companies denied me coverage” to the reasons behind denials like this, and the ways we can reform the system so people have access to the coverage they truly need. Often, when we go through this process, the reality of these lessons gives us a larger perspective—one that avoids the simplistic trap of blaming a single scapegoat.

What do you think? Am I being too soft on health insurers? Have you ever scapegoated someone or something when the issue turned out to be much deeper than that? How did you find your way through it?

For this week’s post, I was all set to rant against a news story coming out of Ohio. Now I can’t. What happened between then and now may hold a few lessons for us.

My little tale starts with a headline in my RSS feed. How can you not react to

Fetus Set To Testify In Favor Of Ohio Anti-Abortion Bill

First reaction: sigh. More weird antics in the abortion debate—the very antics that do as much to harden the battle lines as to clarify the issue.

Second reaction: media skepticism. Why did the reporter use the word testify? Surely he knew the connotations it would carry. I thought it inflammatory and irresponsible.  So I decided to blast it here to illustrate the need for precise language when discussing difficult issues.

Then I dug a little deeper and came to my third reaction: uh-oh. The article appeared in The Huffington Post. I’ve just started writing for The Huffington Post. Do I really want to criticize a story on a website that might prove critical to my writing venture?

Fortunately, the article’s author linked his story to a release from Faith2Action, an organization supporting the legislation. Fourth reaction: whoops. The word testify came not from the author, but from the source itself.

So. What did I learn from this exercise?

First, vested interests die hard—very hard. I write a lot about the danger they present to authentic dialogue, and the value of spirituality in clearing them away. None of that means I’m completely free of the damned things. Like our basic human instinct for self-preservation, vested interests appear to be always with us. Hence the need to strive against them in our internal preparation for dialogue.

Second, it is so easy to miss the full story. Remember death panels? I wonder how much of that drama could have been averted if more people had simply dug deeper into the facts. Surely, with the testifying fetus story, I could have stopped with the notice in my RSS feed and come to some conclusion about irresponsible journalism. And I would have been wrong.

Third—and I’ve said this ad nauseam—getting the full story and clearing away vested interests require reflection, time, and work. In today’s culture, these are hard to come by. And yet, as the death panels brouhaha illustrates, our national conversations could be more productive, and move more efficiently toward resolving our national issues, if we took the time and did the work.

True, we all have lives. We cannot possibly research every news story that comes our way. What we can do, perhaps, is suspend our judgment on those issues we cannot research.

The ingredients of dialogue—depth of thought, precision of language, the work of the soul—are difficult and elusive. Clearly, none of us gets them completely right. But our attempts to do so can make the world better. That alone is reason to pursue them.

I know this feeling.

It came over me in 1986, when Corazon Aquino led a people’s uprising over Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. I feel it now with every fresh report of developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya.

It is exhilaration. Joy. A sense of history moving forward, not backward, driven by ordinary people.

Suddenly dictators with absolute power and iron fists are gone, or barely there. Masses of everyday folks—giving voice to their long-deferred dreams of a better life—are not only demanding change but organizing themselves into functional groups, patrolling streets and even cleaning up after protests. It is just possible that an entire region may change in what, from history’s point of view, is the blink of an eye.

There are drawbacks, yes, and big risks besides. The reports of violence from Libya are disheartening, to say the least. Egypt’s military could change its mind about democratic reforms. Extremists could rise to power. The people, having won the right to vote, may elect leaders who scare us. It happened in Gaza with Hamas.

I believe it is worth the risk. And besides, it seems there is no going back, for the Middle East or the rest of us.  For decades, U.S. foreign policy has joined forces with some very unsavory characters—the Marcoses and Mubaraks of this world—while the U.S. government trumpeted its commitment to freedom and democracy. The uprisings of the past weeks have, in a way, forced my country to a decision point. Either we believe our talk of rights and human worth and dignity, or we don’t.

There is also a lesson for those of us who cherish dialogue.

At its most mechanical level, dialogue involves voices and ears, speaking and listening. It is difficult to use your voice when you don’t have a voice—when your government prevents you from speaking or simply refuses to hear. Dialogue works only when all voices are free to speak and all ears are tuned to listen.

But the lesson I hear runs even deeper, and it is a lesson of hope. The protesters in the Middle East have shown us that, at the most fundamental level—beyond the oppression and ruthlessness and control of those who would silence us—we always have a voice. It can take extraordinary courage to use it. How many of us would do so when our lives are at stake? And yet this is precisely what the protesters have done. In the process, they have given us encouragement to do the same.

I will cherish the joy of this seismic change. I will pray for the future. And I will seek to use my voice in the spirit of these courageous souls.

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times makes a provocative point in his excellent analysis of today’s political dialogue. About halfway through, he suggests that a confusion between values-speak and politics-speak is making things worse. In Rutten’s words:

Values do not admit compromise; politics, which is the prudent application of values in pursuit of the common good, requires compromise.

Some of what we’re experiencing today as bitter political rhetoric may reflect the leaching of the values debate into the generality of our political life.

The problem with politics in which every question and situation is framed as a matter of fundamental values is that it makes compromise impossible. There simply isn’t any way to meet the other side even halfway without, in some fashion, ceasing to be yourself.

Rutten may well be right about the current interplay of discourse and values in contemporary America. But unlike him, I don’t think it has to be this way—especially if we come to the belief that we are not our values.

Here’s why that matters. I have often said that authentic dialogue calls us to set aside (however temporarily) our preconceptions, including our values, in order to listen with full attention and an open heart. That’s too much to ask if our values define us.

But what if our essence is deeper than that? Many faith traditions point to something deeper: the soul, the life force, the divine spark. If we identify with this essence, we can relax our death-grip on the other things we often use to define ourselves: status, wealth, and position in society, but also our proclivities, perspectives, and yes, values. That “relaxed grip” empowers us to set aside most everything to engage in dialogue—without “ceasing to be ourselves.”

This doesn’t mean values are irrelevant to dialogue. Indeed, they help us weigh what we have heard after we have heard it: what it might mean for us and our understanding of the world. But by not leading with our values—by not declaring certain things “off limits” or automatically filtering the other’s perspective through our own—we free ourselves to listen deeply. Deep listening builds trust, and trust is essential for making dialogue, and collaboration, work.

So we can hold values and still reach across divides. Good thing, too. How can we even hope for a civil society otherwise?

If you’ve been perusing this blog awhile, you might not expect what you’re about to read.

Like every national tragedy, the horrific shootings in Arizona last weekend have led to instant analysis of the broader picture—especially what this says about us, our laws, and the remedies required. A groundswell of voices is calling for dialogue, for reaching across divides, for “disagreeing without being disagreeable.” More stridently, pundits like Gary Hart have explicitly blamed our toxic public discourse for Jared Loughner’s actions.

Naturally, as someone who cares deeply about dialogue, I would join that groundswell in a heartbeat. Right?

Would that I could.

Look, I am always delighted to see civil, compassionate dialogue get the support it deserves. I think the president hit the right note in his Tucson speech: this tragedy can serve as a catalyst to re-examine our actions and behave more civilly. But precisely because I care about dialogue, I don’t want to connect it causally to the horror in Arizona. Not yet, anyway.

Why not? First consider the evidence—or, more to the point, the lack thereof. We still know precious little about Loughner. What we do know points to serious mental imbalance at the root of his actions. Almost nothing connects him directly with our scorched-earth public discourse. Any connection we make, therefore, is tenuous at best, at least right now, until more evidence comes in.

Consider too our emotional state. Simply put, we are a nation in shock. If you have ever experienced shock, you know it is impossible to think straight. Same deal here.

Authentic dialogue is about clarity, a quest to uncover truth wherever possible, a “listening together” to grasp what the situation is saying to us. By its very nature, this kind of dialogue—whether among friends, between partisans, or across the blogosphere—takes time: time to reflect, time to build on one another’s perspectives, time for new facts to emerge.

Yes, we do need to restore civil dialogue to our public square. The effort to foster it should proceed regardless of any connection with the Arizona shootings. In the weeks and months to come, there will be plenty of opportunity to reflect on that connection. But now is not the time. Better to grieve now and reason together later.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

—Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Fact: Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a U.S. senator from New York. Fact: the Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908. Fact: coffee reduces the risk of liver cancer.

Or does it?

You might think so from scanning news articles on the coffee-cancer link—like this 2005 story from MSNBC.com on research out of the National Cancer Center in Tokyo. But read more carefully, and you’ll find qualifiers: words like may and phrases like can help reduce and cautions about reading too much into one study.

This may bring to mind the coffee-causes-cancer scare of the early 1980s. According to the article linked here, many people tried to wean themselves off coffee because they read the findings of this one study as fact. They might have acted differently if they’d understood a basic tenet of scientific inquiry: that, according to the article’s author, Elizabeth M. Whelan,

one study does not a conclusion make. Science is a process of exploration, requiring examination, reassessment, and replication. Only when there exists a large, consistent body of evidence demonstrating that some factor is linked to disease—whether it has a harmful or protective effect—can a credible association be established.

So what on earth does this have to do with dialogue? I hear several lessons; see what you think.

First: Facts are elusive. It is all too easy for us to confuse fact with opinion, or a provisional understanding pending more evidence, or the latest (unreplicated) research. None of us gets “the facts” right every time. So while the truth is important, the quest for truth is even more so. If we commit ourselves to that quest in dialogue, we are free to follow the dialogue wherever it goes in search of truth. We are free to encounter the flaws in our understanding, the biases in our vested interests, and let them go.

Second: This all takes time. As I implied earlier, careful reading and study yields a more complete, more nuanced, and therefore more accurate picture of the truth than a quick scan. Scan enough at the expense of reading, and we can easily end up with a simplistic view of an immensely complex world. Similarly, ferreting out the truth in dialogue often takes exploration of nuances, definition of terms, deep listening, etc. Quests don’t happen in the blink of an eye.

Here as in so many places, U.S. culture militates against the requirements for dialogue. Exercise the depth of thought required for truth questing, and we open ourselves to charges of “overthinking” or “intellectualizing” or “navel gazing.” And who has the time required to engage in thinking or dialogue these days?

All of which leads to the third lesson: dialogue requires intent. If we assume dialogue and thinking will take place naturally in our busy culture, we will be disappointed. If, however, we deliberately carve out space for both, we will find ourselves engaging in both—and, perhaps, connecting with like-minded questers in a critical mass that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

The news from WikiLeaks has me thinking about the value of privacy—and how it can make or break certain dialogues.

Here’s what I mean. Dialogue, almost by definition, requires a certain amount of mess. As we “think together,” we will toss out half-formed thoughts and imprecise language in an effort to build something together, whether that “something” is a new bond across bitter divides or a new approach to a difficult issue.

The process can be wildly circuitous. My first half-baked idea may have no value in itself yet spark something good in your mind. We might pursue a long line of thinking only to find it’s a dead end, only to find that a single glimmer of a shard of an idea from that pursuit gets us exactly where we need to go. We could pile good idea on good idea and find they build into a great idea—but not the one we would have imagined.

Clearly this process takes time and focused thought. It also takes a safe place where people feel free to toss out these embryonic idea shards without fear of judgment.

It takes privacy. It takes confidentiality.

If one of those shards gets broadcast—exposing the speaker to possible ridicule and hostility—the whole dialogue may be threatened.

One of the most eye-opening leaks from WikiLeaks concerns the backchannel conversation among Chinese and U.S. diplomats over North Korea. Judging from media portrayals of Chinese leaders—not to mention the tension in U.S.-China relations—I find it remarkable that they have spoken so openly with their American counterparts about so substantial a change in their thinking. Clearly, the two sides are making space for new ideas toward a different approach.

But with diplomatic flare-ups in that part of the world often just one careless remark away, the only way to talk about the issue was in strict confidentiality. The leak may well have damaged the effort.

Similarly, when the Public Conversations Project convened a groundbreaking dialogue between pro-choice and pro-life leaders, several of the participants expressed a need for confidentiality to avoid the potential reactions from, among others, their own constituencies. Privacy was essential if the dialogue was to flourish.

Time. Focused thought. Privacy. American culture doesn’t exactly promote any of these necessities for dialogue. So in our own attempts at dialogue, we must be intentional in carving out space for these necessities, as appropriate for the situation, to reach across divides and fulfill our goals.

Last week I wrote a column about “truth indifference,” which has pervaded the public square of late. In the last U.S. elections alone, candidates and pundits on both sides made claims without any regard for fact, let alone nuance.

That very day, Thomas Friedman wrote a column on a classic example of truth indifference: a report that the president’s recent trip to Asia cost $200 million a day. After Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.; no relation) cited the statistic as fact on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, Cooper did some digging—and found only the flimsiest of sources for the story. Nonetheless, the “fact” had made its way into talk radio and the blogosphere.

Friedman’s column is invaluable (and great) reading all by itself, so I won’t try to summarize further. However, a few sentences in his final paragraph are worth repeating, because they eloquently capture the stakes involved in truth indifference: 

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues—deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate—let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together.

The truth can be extremely difficult to ferret out. But only if we agree on the quest for truth—the commitment to stay open-minded, to separate fact from opinion, whatever the results—can we have any basis for dialogue across divides. 

Have you run across examples of truth indifference? Feel free to share them here.

“Post-election time for us to come together,” intoned the headline for Wednesday’s Ironton Tribune editorial.

Please forgive me a bit of cynicism here. It just all sounds so familiar.

Maybe you’ve noticed the cycle. After a campaign of scurrilous accusations and character assassination, one candidate wins and everyone extols the healing process. Words spoken during the campaign are rapidly discounted. Voters and candidates alike speak of “coming together.” Then, in the next campaign, we go through the same destructive pattern.

And this is a good way to run a democracy? My concern is that it’s quite the opposite: that negative campaigning is poisoning the public well.*

One principle of advertising, including political advertising, is that if you repeat your message often enough, broadly enough, and loudly enough, people will remember it. So if I, as a candidate, flood the airwaves highlighting my opponent’s ties to the evil cretins of Wall Street, that image will stick in some minds. Of course, my opponent may do the same, casting me as an eccentric cat owner with mental health issues. (Oh wait, that one’s true.)

Let’s say for the moment that these personal attacks succeed. (The research on their effectiveness has yielded conflicting results.) But what do they succeed at? I suspect they not only help elect candidates in certain situations, but also deepen a more pervasive, undifferentiated cynicism among voters in general. Hear enough charges and countercharges, and you can justifiably think that “they’re all ethically challenged/owned by special interests/in it for themselves/etc.”

The results of a survey commissioned by the Project on Campaign Conduct may support this conclusion. It found that 59% of respondents believe all or most candidates twist the truth, 39% believe they lie to voters, and 88% believe at least some candidates deliberately make unfair attacks on their opponents.

So. What would happen if candidates called a cease-fire? If our campaigns were more civil, it might make more emotional room for actual ideas to come to the surface. If we see candidates behaving decently, it might increase our trust in them. If we see them openly wrestling with issues, we might think they’re legitimately concerned for our interests rather than simply promoting the party line. Their campaigns might even give us enough usable input to help us reason out the issues for ourselves.

I have no illusions that we’ll get there anytime soon. In an endeavor that’s all about winning, it’s easy to grab on to any competitive advantage, however dishonorable. But I believe that, at bottom, we’re better than this. And because candidates are the most visible elements of their campaigns, their example of civility could set the tone for a more civil America.

In the meantime, I think I’ll do my small part next election season—by muting every attack ad right from the start. Want to join me? Your brain will thank you.

*I’m talking here about personal attacks and deliberate distortions, not campaigning that legitimately—even bluntly—points out differences in candidates’ positions or relevant character flaws.