The Dialogue Venture

Posts Tagged ‘dialogue’

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.

Is Facebook good for working out ideas in dialogue or conversation? I’m thinking yes and no.

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?

Last month I learned something new about myself.

Having wrestled with mental health issues for 40-odd years, I’m always fine-tuning the way I manage them. During a particularly low time last month, I happened to spend a delightful weekend at a fun event with friends. Then I took Monday afternoon off to go skiing. Lo and behold, I felt better.

I am now referring to this as “turning on the cut-loose full blast.” (Perhaps “opening a can o’ cut-loose” sounds better. Open to suggestions here.)

What baffles me about this is my age. It’s not like I’m 23 and learning all kinds of things about myself. I’m middle-aged by anyone’s definition. And I’ve spent decades digging around in my psyche.

Bottom line, I know myself well—and I don’t.

This tells me that our self-images are always incomplete, constantly in process (to a greater or lesser extent). Sometimes we change and our self-images are slow to catch up. Sometimes our self-images are inaccurate from the get-go. Whatever the case, there’s value in remaining open to “I don’t know,” even when the topic is our very own selves.

This goes double for other people. We build images of others almost without thinking. If someone tells me x about you, that can influence my thinking. While reading something you wrote, I pick up messages that may—or may not—reflect who you essentially are.

Then I meet you, and the fun begins. Quite naturally, I filter what you say through my image of you. But what if my image is inaccurate? That means I’m not really hearing what you say. And we can’t have a serious dialogue if we can’t hear each other.

I’ve written about the value of laying aside one’s preconceptions to come to dialogue “empty”: free of filters and assumptions and ready to listen with full attention. This, I think, applies to our self-images and our other-images too. By admitting I don’t know you inside and out, I free myself to listen deeply. By admitting I don’t know myself inside and out, I make room for your words to bring parts of myself—even unknown parts—to the surface.

My father-in-law quotes T. S. Eliot as writing, “Each time we meet, we are strangers.” By holding that thought in our dialogue, we allow ourselves to hear each other afresh.

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 next three weeks have me engaged in activities that, unfortunately, will take me away from our weekly discussion here. I’ll pick up again with new thoughts in January, but in the meantime, here are a few worthwhile sources to check out: 

• The Interfaith Amigos. A priest, a rabbi, and an imam discuss—with extraordinary grace and intelligence—the very issues we cover here. Check out, for instance, their article about dialogue with people who believe their way is The Only Way.
• The Clearness Committee. A brilliant method for hearing the Divine voice, Clearness Committees come to us from the Quakers. A person with a life decision or issue gathers five or six others whose entire job is to ask honest, open-ended questions—no judgment, no advice, no chitchat—in an atmosphere of quiet attention. Typically, these questions (and the person’s responses) generate ever deeper questions and responses, clearing the way for the person to hear the “divine teacher” within. I’ve participated in one or two of these, and they can be life-changing for both the “focus person” and the questioners.
• The Prior’s Column. The prior of “my” monastery (I’m an associate) has lived the spiritual life for many years, and his insights—particularly around meditation, prayer, and the monastic way—carry a great deal of wisdom.

That’s it for now. I wish you the most blessed of holidays.

We had set up the parameters for a robust dialogue. Jane would lay out her view of the issue (the George W. Bush presidency; she was pro). Then I would share my (con) perspective. Neither of us could interrupt the other. There would be plenty of time for thoughtful questions later. We grabbed the Cheez-It® crackers, settled into comfy chairs, and got started.

It went well for a while. I was learning things about the conservative perspective I had never appreciated before. I could see Jane’s point (though I still disagreed with her assessment). This was progress.

Then other people joined us. And the dialogue became something else.

These folks did nothing wrong. They simply weren’t privy to what we were trying to do. So rather than listen in silence, they did what people often do: inject opinions, argue points, present counterarguments. Our dialogue became conversation, in which (according to Robert Apatow) “people express different views on a range of subjects without concern for where the conversation goes.”

So what? Here’s so what: We have deeply ingrained patterns that drive the way we discuss sensitive issues, especially politics. We know how to react with anger, defensiveness, and generalizations about the “other side.” So reacting in another way—especially an “opposite” way that tries to hear and connect with others—requires great care, deliberate planning, and attentive execution. Dialogue facilitators, like those who belong to NCDD, have spent careers doing just that.

In other words: Dialogue must be intentional.

Jane, bless her, was all about being intentional. Soon after the first people drifted in, she explained exactly what we were about and, in the process, invited others into the dialogue. We got back on track. But if she hadn’t intervened, we would have lost the ensuing dialogue and all the lessons held therein.

There’s nothing wrong with conversation. It’s one of life’s great treasures. But it is not dialogue. And we need dialogue in the continuing effort to reach across divides.

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.