The Dialogue Venture

Archive for the ‘Dialogue and Current Events’ Category

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. 

A funny thing happened on the way to this post. It leads to a question and a sidebar that might change the question. (Got that?)

My original plan was to reflect on Cynthia Tucker’s column “Obama tried too hard to work with Republicans,” which appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her thesis is that “the president has made some of his biggest mistakes trying to woo a GOP opposition that has committed itself to frustrating him at every turn.”

This perspective on the last two years—which I share—leads to the question: how can we dialogue with those who refuse to dialogue?

This is not the same as holding a difficult dialogue, or dialoguing with difficult people. Several of my “dialogue partners” in years past have disagreed with almost everything I said. But despite their contentious words and occasional exasperation with me, they kept going. They saw the value in the dialogue itself.

No, I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about those who, like my perception of congressional Republicans and many in the Tea Party movement, prefer to fight the opposition at every turn rather than talk together.

I tend to think that, in a world with so many complex issues and so many people to address them, it’s more effective to sidestep the anti-dialoguers, at least for the time being, and seek out those willing to dialogue, whatever their point of view. My hope is that by doing so, we might eventually build a critical mass of people committed to dialogue—enough, maybe, to make dialogue the preferred method of addressing issues.

And now the sidebar (which maybe changes the question):

While preparing to write this post, I started reading the comments to Tucker’s column. Nearly all of them are angry, derisive, devoid of facts, and poorly spelled (yes, this matters to a writer). But they also reveal that the commenters are working from an entirely different narrative: that, far from seeking bipartisanship, the president shut out his opposition and “rammed his legislation down the throats” of the people.

It’s easy for me to simply attribute this reaction to the loose-cannon right-wing media: Beck, Hannity, et al. That could be true. But these commenters think I get all my ideas from the loose-cannon left-wing media. (I don’t.) And the assigning of blame doesn’t get us anywhere anyway.

So let’s refine our original question: what if the steadfast refusal to dialogue stems from something more fundamental—and maybe resolvable—in the issue at hand, like the sides’ working from two contradictory narratives? If instead of refusing to dialogue, we acknowledged the two narratives and explored their validity in more depth, might that change the dynamic? Could it soften the anger on both sides and allow them to talk further?

Maybe the larger question is, how far do we pursue dialogue in such difficult circumstances, and when do we decide it’s not worth the effort? How do we know when to fish or cut bait?

I did not see this coming, and frankly, I’m pretty embarrassed about it.

A while back, I wrote a column on the still-hypothetical “national conversation on race.” A dear colleague emailed me this week to point out, graciously and civilly, that the ideas in the column had “white as normal” written all over them.

She’s right.

Like many other white people, I tend to see myself as more or less normal. I don’t see how my ideas arise in part from my position in society: membership in the privileged race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. I think I think like an everyday person. I actually think—at least to some extent—like a white, middle-class, male, straight person.  (If you think this is a tempest in a teapot, check out the Witnessing Whiteness book and blog, or the ten misunderstandings white liberals have about race. Or enjoy Colbert’s take on the issue.)

My colleague’s comment horrified me. The last thing I ever want to do is exclude people, however unconsciously. Yet if it’s unconscious, how do I know I’m doing it?

Shelly Tochluk, the author of Witnessing Whiteness, provides an interesting way to think about this. In writing about her attempts to foster discussions around race at her college, she notes:

I’m not perfect, and neither has been the enactment of my anti-racist practice on campus. I know that. But, I also know that taking one step at a time, continuing to reflect, and continuing to try and rectify and challenge areas where I’m not as good I want to be is a powerful thing…and essential for those of us who need to stay motivated to keep stretching ourselves.

After ruminating on this awhile, I’ve come out with four lessons for myself. I would love to hear what you think of them. 

1. Everyone has to start somewhere. That somewhere is usually with one’s own story, background, experience, etc. The ideas I have are inextricably bound up with who I am. You might say that the best I can offer to the world is who I am.
2. Who I am is severely limited. Same with who you are, or the neighbor down the street, or Barack Obama. Each of us is exactly one person, with exactly one person’s perspective.
3. To expand my perspective, I need you. Specifically, I need to listen to you. Verbal dialogue lies at the heart of that listening. But it could also mean reading the books you love, absorbing the music you enjoy, hanging out with the people you hang out with.
4. This type of dialogue is hard work, and it leaves us extraordinarily vulnerable. It calls for an inner strength that few can muster alone. That’s one reason I believe people of faith are so well qualified for dialogue. They don’t need to muster the inner strength alone because they’re not alone. With the presence of the Divine to encourage them, they are emboldened to take the risks needed to reach out and be reached out to.

When I think about this last point, it brings to mind a prayer at the end of the Episcopal Mass: “Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.” Serving, loving, and listening take strength and courage. So when we screw up and get slapped down—as we inevitably will when pursuing dialogue—we acknowledge our blind spots and go to the Source of that courage. Then, refreshed, we return to the fray.

About a week before Terry Jones hit the news, I started to read the Qur’an.

This is an imperfect venture if there ever was one. Not knowing the original Arabic, I’m relying on an English translation. Because the book is difficult even for scholars, I should probably be using commentaries. If I fuss with these “shoulds” and imperfections, however, I’ll never do it. So I pick up the holy book of my Muslim friends and struggle along.

While I’m not terribly far in, some things are already becoming apparent. The language is masterful, even in English. Many of the concepts also appear in the Bible: God’s justice and mercy, the imperative to care for the vulnerable, warnings to unbelievers. The text is sprinkled with pithy wisdom that stops me short and commands my attention. Reading it appears to feed my soul.

What a shame to burn something like that.

But what do reading the Qur’an (and similar practices) have to do with dialogue? They deepen dialogue in at least two respects.

First, a large part of dialogue involves listening with an open heart. We tend to think of this in terms of face-to-face listening: I grab a coffee with a Muslim friend and listen while he explains his faith to me. But this listening gets even deeper when we immerse ourselves in what the other is immersed in. Think of it as the difference between tolerating your spouse’s passion for opera, attending Carmen with her, and taking an opera appreciation course.

Second, as we’ve discussed before, one great way to break through our stereotypes of a particular group is to spend time with members of that group. We get to know them even more intimately when we experience the things that make them tick. Let’s say you believe that all French hate Americans. Then Jacques shows up at work one day and befriends you, which throws serious doubt on your stereotype. What finishes it off, though, is visiting Normandy and enjoying a warm welcome from everyone you meet.

It’s the difference between listening to others and—however temporarily or imperfectly—entering their world.

This is not an either/or thing. Even when we enter their world, we will need their help to fully understand what’s going on. Though I’m reading the Qur’an on my own, I’ll eventually need the insight of scholars to interpret the sometimes baffling text. And of course, time and energy and other commitments inevitably constrain us from immersing ourselves in every other person’s life, in every other culture, at this level.

But imagine what would happen if all of us did this with even one person, or one group—especially a group we see as our adversary. How much could this advance the cause of peace?

Somewhere along the line, someone gave me a book of New York Times crossword puzzles from the 1970s. It, in turn, has given me culture shock. Take this clue:

114    Kin of N.Y.S.E. and Amex

First, you have to realize that this Amex does not refer to American Express, but to the American Stock Exchange, which always made the nightly news in the 1970s but doesn’t even exist today. Then you have to discard the first thing that comes to mind—NASDAQ—because NASDAQ had just started in 1971 and was not a major player at the time. The answer? OTC, as in over-the-counter trading.

Examples of this abound. The answers to some clues are trendy words that no one uses anymore. The whole style of Times crosswords—the clues they use, the way they integrate themes—was different back then. There’s an implicit assumption that most puzzle solvers had learned at least some Latin.

In other words, working these puzzles requires a thoroughgoing mindshift back to the seventies. If you want to understand these puzzles, you have to enter the creator’s world.

Right there is your window on some of the hardest work in dialogue.

It’s one thing to dialogue within our frameworks; it’s quite another to sit down with someone from a different framework entirely. I can talk with my ex-Marine neighbor about the Afghan war and know that, even if we disagree on policy, we can pretty much grasp each other’s mindsets because we share so much: a common language, cultural background, socioeconomic status, etc. If I’m talking with a refugee from Vietnam, all that goes out the window. The work becomes much more difficult.

If I want to understand her, I have to enter her world.

Doing so might help us connect much more effectively with people who are very different from us. What makes this essential today is that most of the world is very different from us, and we come into contact with those people more and more. As a result, a straight, white, middle-class, Christian framework—which would have served me famously in the 1950s—will not get me far in understanding Muslims building an Islamic center near Ground Zero, or gay Americans who fear violence from anti-gay activists, or the struggles of low-income people to make ends meet.

By making the mindshift, we can connect with our wonderfully diverse neighbors. By connecting, we lay the foundation for dialogue. With that foundation in place, we have a way forward when the inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings arise. The difficult work is more than worth the effort.

Have you ever tried talking with someone from a very different background or point of view? Were you able to make the mindshift? Your stories can help all of us, so feel free to share them here.

Note: I’ll be hosting my family for a reunion in a few days, so there’ll be no post next week. Watch this space around September 3 for the next post.

OK, so I’m a dark mood this week. You could make a case that everyone should feel kind of dark, with the terrible news from Pakistan and China and Russia and other points. I could use a little “quotidianism,” as Bill Griffith puts it.

The clouds over those countries are literal, of natural causes, and I pray with all my heart for the deliverance of their victims. Over in the U.S. however, we have metaphorical clouds, of human origin, that hang over our society.

We can clear them away. But we don’t.

Here’s what I’m talking about. It’s no secret that the state of dialogue in our “public square” is embarrassingly poor. Elected officials denigrate each other’s ideas, regardless of their merit, to score political points. Media—partly from time constraints, partly for other reasons—reduce complex issues to either/ors. Governments gridlock because legislators won’t talk to each other; they have too much at stake (i.e., their jobs) to give ground.

Big deal, you might say. Americans have been fighting and loathing one another since the founding of the republic. We’ve always muddled through before, and we will again. 

Maybe. But it’s not a slam-dunk. 

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote last week about the growing talk of—get this—secession from the Union. People like Texas governor Rick Perry are actively floating the idea. 

I have enough confidence in the stability of our system and the sanity of our citizens—most of them—to believe secession is no more than a tempest in a teapot. But it’s not completely impossible. And the cost? Remember the last time we went through this, oh, 150 years ago? 

The rancor in the public square, and the resulting ill-defined rage that leave millions of voters seething, inherently destabilize us. Angry people can do stupid things. A group of enraged citizens—say, a single state that decides to secede—can do serious harm.

This isn’t the only place where the rancor costs us. If our Congress chose to dialogue and deliberate rather than posture and shout, perhaps we might have made progress on a climate change bill, or shoring up entitlement programs. As it is, the pitched battles of the past two years have left our legislators exhausted, having spent all their political capital, and thus wary of taking on anything else.

But if the experts are right, lack of movement on either could lead to a major disruption of our society—at best.

As my blessed sister-in-law says, “Words mean things.” If we use them to fight with the “enemy,” we risk doing serious damage. If we use them in dialogue, we have a chance to take on—maybe even resolve—the giant challenges of our age.

Uncle Sam wants YOU

to learn English

—bumper sticker

I saw this bumper sticker while driving up the interstate yesterday, and after the automatic cringe, it got me thinking about a much larger question than the wrangle over English speaking.

To get to that question, however, let’s probe the bumper sticker a bit more. It seems self-evident that learning the language of the country where you live carries many advantages. If I moved to France (please, O Lord), I could get a job, buy stamps, and find a good dentist way more easily by knowing and speaking French. On a broader level, I could contribute more of myself to my new community—through volunteering, writing, promoting political candidates, etc.—by knowing and speaking French.

So in the United States, learning English enables you to transact your business and make a difference in ways that not learning English can’t. Because of this, you might even say that Uncle Sam would be delighted if non-English-speakers learned English, so they can bring their whole selves to the public square.

None of that changes the fact that the bumper sticker is aggressive and cringeworthy. So here comes the larger question:

How on earth can we hear truth—even a grain of it—in an opinion expressed so offensively?

In an ideal world, of course, the people who express opinions this way would become more civil in their speech and their inner lives. In our imperfect world, there’s a strong temptation to simply ignore these folks. And to ignore any hint of what they express.

Maybe that’s the right thing to do. But here’s why it might not be.

I remember a cartoon in which one fellow at a bar said to another, “All I know is, if you’re against pollution, it can’t be all bad.” See the problem? As we dismiss someone we find obnoxious, we also dismiss his perspective—lock, stock, and barrel—and wind up in a place where we don’t want to be.

Examples? Here’s one to start us off: I’m very worried about the growth of the national debt. Have been since long before it became the cause célèbre of the right wing. But I find it very hard to express that opinion when the more rabid wing of the Tea Party has shouted it—and various distortions of it—from the housetops. I feel almost squeezed into the position of “If you’re against the national debt, it can’t be all bad.”

I’ll bet you can think of a hundred other examples. Go for it. Write about them in the Comments section below.

Marianne Williamson’s letter to Sarah Palin didn’t exactly make front-page news when it first came out. But it’s required reading for anyone who cares about dialogue.

Williamson, a spiritual teacher who, by her own admission, is not a conservative, wrote her letter when Palin was using the language of guns to encourage “taking aim” at her opponents. In theory, Williamson could have joined the popular chorus in mocking Palin mercilessly.

Instead, she tried to engage Palin. And the way she did it is enlightening.

Right from the start, Williamson admitted her position in the public square—both what separates her from Palin and, unusually, where they find common ground. “I don’t share your politics but I do share your country,” she wrote. “I am writing to you now as a fellow American and also as a woman who, like you, puts my spiritual journey above all else.” By asserting that common ground, she looked to build trust where none existed before.

Then she went one step further. Rather than diss Palin’s recent book from afar, she made the effort to read it. What a concept! Williamson found a lot to like and said so, establishing more solidarity. She also found a lot to dislike and said that too—in a respectful, civil manner.

Then she made her plea: a carefully reasoned argument for Palin to stop using gun metaphors in her public appearances.

I could describe the letter more, but check it out and you’ll see what I mean. If we could bring such honesty and gentleness to our own dialogues—if we could first seek out common ground and strive to build trust—we just might connect with our adversaries as never before. Part of building that trust involves absorbing, in depth, what “the other side” believes; in doing so, we show a respect that will come through in our dialogues.

Have you ever reached out to an adversary like this? How did you do it? What were the results? Do tell.