I had a moment of cynicism this past Sunday, and the lessons apply directly to dialogue.

As the rain from Irene poured onto our yard, we kept waiting for it to come into our basement. Every hour we walked downstairs and checked. Dry. Dry. Dry. Finally, at 11:30, we saw the first film of water on the basement floor. Much wet/dry vacuuming ensued, but the water level never went above a coating.

Meanwhile, on every TV channel, meteorologists shook their heads and reported that Irene was every bit as disastrous as predicted. At one point I turned to my wife and asked, “Is it possible they’re hyping this just a bit?”

As the day wore on, though, the news footage started to come in from Windham, and Schoharie, and Vermont. And I saw how horribly wrong I was.

In the past few days, this experience reminded me of a basic truth about dialogue as a way of life: the way of dialogue suspends judgment. It is so easy to seize on one factoid or limited perspective or shred of truth—especially if it comes from our own experience—and leap to a fully formed opinion about the whole situation.

I would submit that our culture supports this jumping to conclusions in several ways. The overwhelming volume of media—24/7, always on, always “breaking news”—almost demands that we process and evaluate information instantly just to keep up. Partly to accommodate the media, many pundits, elected leaders, and talk radio hosts reduce complex issues to sound bites, and it becomes easy to assume that the sound bite is the sum total of the issue.

Moreover, the cynicism that pervades much of postmodern life can color our judgment. On numerous occasions, I’ve seen our local meteorologists make a big deal of a weather event that didn’t live up to the hype. Because of that, I found it easy to assume that hype had become standard operating procedure for boosting ratings. I did not stop to consider just how difficult weather forecasting can be, how many variables are involved, or how swiftly conditions can change.

Living as people of dialogue—people oriented toward openness, toward listening, toward a passion for seeking out the reality of a situation, toward the importance of others’ perspectives—calls us to remain open to as many inputs as possible, and consider them with respect, before (and even after) coming to judgment. It’s why getting our news from “the other side” as well as “our side” is so important. It’s why the consultancy for which I work (The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc.) urges clients to include a broad cross-section of people in the discussion of an issue: hearing inputs from many perspectives leads to a more complete view of the issue, which in turn makes for more thoughtful analysis and better decisions.

What would happen if we took this open, reflective, think-before-you-judge approach on the federal debt, or on immigration, or even with our kids when they do something questionable? Could it work? What do you think?

If Michael Kitchens’ research is any indication, the answer to both questions is: not many. An assistant professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College, Kitchens conducted a study that investigated whether people’s religious backgrounds influenced their choice of media on religion. He and his students asked 213 participants to rate their preference for one of three fictitious research summaries: one with positive information about religion, one with negative information about religion, and one neutral.

You can guess what the study found. Religious people preferred the positive summary. Non-religious people preferred the negative summary.

In an article on his research, Kitchens extrapolates from these findings to the political realm. It makes sense, he writes, that “people’s political identity fuels the need to seek information that confirms” their beliefs. This, he reasons, has given rise to a fractured media landscape in which “media sources continue to validate people’s preconceived notions and worldviews.”

I think he’s spot-on here.  What surprises me, though, is his bleak outlook for the future: he says that “harmony is unattainable” and the best course of action is to learn how to conduct “a reasonable debate about ideas.”

But how do we even get to the debate if we are so suspicious of the “other side”? That suspicion comes from the same cycle that Kitchens is on about. As we take in the news media that agree with us, we inevitably hear criticisms of those who disagree. In today’s toxic public square, those criticisms are particularly nasty: we hear our adversaries’ motives questioned, their patriotism impugned, their truthfulness cast into doubt. So how can we approach them with anything that appears like listening?

What if, however, we took one simple step long before the debate: what if we all read or viewed media that disagree with us?

What if we all committed to reading one newsmagazine, watching one news program, or visiting one blog whose worldview is completely different from ours? We could do this not just across political lines, but across other divides too: divides of gender, color, sexual orientation, and yes, religion.

Here’s what I’ve seen happen: once we take in this media from proponents of the “other side,” we realize that their thinking has some rationality behind it, that their motives have more integrity than we’re led to believe, that maybe a few of their points make sense—even if we still disagree with them. This opens our minds a bit. The next time we approach these people or their ideas, we might be just a bit more inclined to listen, and our minds open wider.

Now I’m not talking about the ranting media—particularly the talk radio programs whose sole purpose is to inflame passions and get ratings. I’m talking about thoughtful columnists and pundits who believe something different. This is why I read David Brooks and Kathleen Parker as well as Cynthia Tucker. Maybe I need to suck it up and read George Will, too.

What about you? If you could read one columnist or magazine or blog from the “other side,” which would you pick? Share it here. It might just be a resource no one else has thought about.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yes: Facebook’s immediacy—the “have a thought/express a thought” dynamic—is great for setting the crowd mind loose on a half-formed idea. Let’s say I have a vaguely formed thought about parenting, or the federal budget deficit, or science and faith, and I want to develop it. In the spirit of “two heads are better than one,” I put it out there and let people express what they think. They build on one another’s thoughts, mix and match good insights, and voila! The idea gets better and more developed.

No: Half-formed ideas are quirky things. Some are perfect for Facebook as described above. Others, though, need time and, to use a gardening term, shade to reach full flower. The best place for these seedling insights is safe within the human brain, where they can float around, take shape, and combine with other ideas to form something bigger.

Any writer can tell you about the seedling insight. It may come in the form of a big theme for a book, a character trait in a novel, or the barest whisper of an association for a poem. It’s the sort of thing that could, if exposed too early or to the wrong people, get picked to death. Its originator can easily lose confidence, and a potentially good idea withers on the vine.

What determines how much you share? Some of it may have to do with the thought’s novelty. Fresh ideas are always welcome for kicking around, but if it’s too fresh or unusual, it may scare people too much to generate give-and-take on a casual site like Facebook. Personality and sensitivity play a big role too. The closer to one’s heart the thought is, the more time it needs to germinate internally. The more private I am as a person, the less personal information I’ll want to share. So an introvert could post something about mental health and public policy for reactions, but he probably won’t work through his own issues there. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

It’s curious that different dialogue technologies address ideas in different ways. Conversation Cafés, for instance, enable the free flow of any and every idea within certain parameters. Clearness Committees, on the other hand, provide hours of silence and reflective listening to allow one’s deepest thoughts to emerge.

What do you think? Do you ever use Facebook to generate dialogue, or even to run ideas past people? If so, how’s it worked for you? If not, would you ever use it? Why or why not?

—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.

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.

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.