Like you, I am very interested in having productive (judged how?) dialogues with others who don’t necessarily think as I do. But like you, I seem to find that in such potential conversations, those people are not genuinely interested in listening or learning. [What it takes to bridge the national divide, Ken Trainor, Viewpoints, Feb. 2]
If I were in a discussion with 10 people, I don’t really believe that I’d be able to persuade at least nine of them toward my point of view. So going in with that expectation, or lack of it, my objective is really to listen and understand. Sure, I’d love to persuade all 10 of them with facts, logic and emotion. But I don’t think that’s the way to approach any kind of true dialogue. Only by genuinely listening can defenses be lowered. Maybe that’s the secret to getting the “other side” to listen genuinely, too.
Part of the issue for me is that our culture seems to love dichotomous thinking. We like to put people into neat categories. (The book, The Coddling of the American Mind, does a great job of examining this point. They talk about one of the three great untruths being a belief that people are either good or evil.)
I don’t think people can always easily be divided into liberal or conservative. To me, what is at the heart of any such dialogue is the answer to the question, “What are your values?” I think our greatest chance of building bridges is to discover the values that people who appear to be on opposite sides hold in common. I think it could be very enlightening if people talked about what it is they value and how their behavior is consistent or inconsistent with that. And then, how do they feel about what they discover?
Of course, you have to start with people who are willing to talk about their values.
Jim Parks
Elmhurst