#287: The Need For Dialog
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. Following is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
How do we have dialogue with each other if we disagree on so much? There have been several attempts all across—not just the US but the West itself—of people trying to reach out to each other, trying to figure out what others are thinking, how to build community.
One of the main requirements for democracy, of course, is that we all kind of work together as the people. This is why we get together, come together, elect governments, are politically active, and we typically encounter each other in our diversity of being and of thought.
Now with the COVID pandemic that somehow is still here but that we try to ignore, a lot of things have changed. But they are just, you could say, the accumulation point of changes that have been described for a while already. You can look at books like The Lonely Crowd and Bowling Alone. These are old already—they’re from just after World War II, even before the internet became what it is.
There’s something that has happened to our societies that has, to use Riesman’s language in The Lonely Crowd, transformed us away from tradition or inner-directed to other-directed. We are not as able as we maybe used to be to define ourselves as coherent beings that, in all our complexities… We seem to be very prone to how we want to appear to others. We are also easily prone to trends, to issues of the day, and let ourselves be defined by that. Maybe that’s part of the problem, and we are easily succumbing to our innate groupishness—that human tendency of being tribal.
Some researchers believe that we really can know 100, maybe 120 people by name, and beyond that it becomes abstract. Yes, we are the result of evolution. But evolution has kind of had to compete with the stabilization that human societies have given us. The evolutionary pressure has stopped in some ways since urbanization. But we are still stuck at this small group tribal level.
We are people who have to cooperate with huge masses of other people and other opinions, even though we are built for a much smaller, much more homogeneous, much more family-oriented group of people that are more like us. This is why we have all these problems of relating to others, of thinking about differences as identity-forming. We are caught in this situation now where our inherent groupishness is emphasized by all these trends that we see in society and especially online. Maybe that is part of the problem.
We seem to succumb more and more to what we call essentialism. Essentialism means that we give superficial characteristics like skin color, eye color, body weight, nose shape, hair—whatever—much more importance than we should. We see as identity-forming things also like sex, gender, all of these kinds of attributes and predilections that we have. We think that all of these different things, whether it’s ethnicity or whatever people call race, gender, sex, ability, class, are identity-forming and that they can be predictably used to think about why others think a certain way.
If you see a person of a certain group and you define that group by certain characteristics, you assume they think a certain way. It seems that notwithstanding all theoretical warnings against essentializing identity, this thing is back with a vengeance.
If you want to be within your own group seen as a good person, you have to do certain things. You have to say certain things. You have to signal certain things. You have to do a whole parade of things that make it maybe very easy for others to recognize what you’re for, but make it maybe difficult for you when you notice that you’re not in as close alignment as you would hope with others.
But news flash: we are never in close alignment with others. We are all different. We may discover that there may be agreements across certain groups and disagreements within groups, and then groups can even splinter. We see this in politics, and this has been present in Europe much earlier than the United States. Many Americans are confused what that is, but Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany wouldn’t get along. Labour and Tories in the UK—mountains between them, presumably. Here we’re talking about democratic parties. I’m not even talking about extremists.
Extremists are sometimes curiously able, in their fight against society as it is, to join ranks of the other side. That’s why you see some weird coalitions on the extreme right and the extreme left both supporting Putin’s Russia, just for an example.
Nevertheless, we live in a democratic society, whether or not you like the government, and we need to engage with each other. We can create as many spaces as we would like of homogeneity, but even there, differences may eventually pop up because we are all different. We are all complex beings and we are all intelligent—not always intelligent in the same way. But most humans are not as dumb as people think they are if they don’t like them.
Just think about traffic. How many traffic accidents would there really have to be if everybody was as dumb as we thought they would be? Humans are rather amazingly intelligent on some levels. Most other animals too. Maybe that is something we should start assuming about each other—that we are not necessarily all dumb, and especially that the political opponent is not necessarily dumb but has other interests to take care of.
Whether or not we like it, we are confronted in life with opinions of others, with the needs of others, with a diversity of viewpoints and identities—and they’re not necessarily the same—that we need to handle somehow.
We have seen in the last years an attempt, mostly by the political left, to try to shame people into behaving the way they were supposed to. I would say oftentimes with good intentions, but the methodology is where it matters. If you want to say there are some men that are behaving in a toxic way in society, I think that is legitimate. But you can’t turn this into “all men are toxic.”
If you want to say historically it has been the case that some white people have enslaved Africans or people coming from Africa in the United States—it’s more complicated than that. There have also been Africans enslaving Africans and Native Americans enslaving Africans and other Native Americans. And there have been white people who were indentured servants. There have been white people who never owned any slaves. But systemically, especially in the American South but also in parts of the North, the institution of slavery in the United States was something where there was mostly a situation in which white versus black was the dominating narrative, which then also continued into segregation.
However, that doesn’t mean that currently people living here are personally guilty. There’s historical responsibility maybe, but there’s not necessarily a personal guilt unless you own slaves now. There is no personal guilt attached. You may want to realize how your family history may ask of you to behave a certain way, but that’s a different matter. Also, every one of us who owns a smartphone is in some way complicit in forms of slavery and labor practices that we wouldn’t tolerate in our own countries.
But the way people talked about it—the fervor, the simplifications, again, the essentialism—has poisoned the discourse. Now if you even mention the word diversity, no one wants to talk about it. That has to do also with how we talk to each other, with how we try to communicate the problem.
If you call all men toxic, then you see the rise of Andrew Tate who said, “Well, you know, you already think we are, so here I am.” If you criticize people for not being sensitive and caring enough, maybe some people don’t react okay then—no, they will double down and say, “Okay, then I’m just going to behave as the asshole you already think I am.” What do you think people will do if confronted like this?
If you ask people, “How could you vote the way you did? Look at what is happening,” what reaction do you think this will get? Do you expect contrition? Do you expect, “Okay then, I won’t do it another time”? No.
The result that these recriminations have is people withdraw and they don’t speak anymore to each other. That goes also for the political right. If you tell people you’re just part of a conspiracy against the little people, you’re just part of a conspiracy against white people, you’re just part of a conspiracy against men—that doesn’t work either.
All this putting each other into boxes, all these recriminations, all this fervor directed against each other—it’s divisive, we all know that, but it also doesn’t lead anywhere good because how can we then position ourselves in a way that we start listening to each other?
If the Democratic Party thinks that’s the way to win elections, they need to do some rethinking. If the Republican Party thinks they can keep this up right now and keep winning elections, they may also have to think again.
There have been countless examples where liberal families have figured out there are some of their children may turn to be conservatives and vice versa. There may have been cases also where people were homophobes and turn out one of their kids or grandkids turn out to be gay. Humans are complex. You may be a men’s rights activist and have daughters. How do you deal with that?
Life in its complexity asks us always to rethink our positions. Why not do it now? Why wait for some life event that makes you rethink things?
My research subject was aging. Most younger people think, “Oh, these old people, I’ll never be like this. Look at them. They can hardly walk. They can hardly think. They all look ugly and I’m never going to be old.” Well, unless your life ends early, you will become old. You’ll be one of those people and you’ll discover that no, it’s maybe not as bad.
I have some gray hair coming in and I have some hair disappearing. Would I want to be young again? No, no, no, no, no, no. All the stuff I would have to read again. All the television shows and movies I wouldn’t pay attention to nowadays that I had the pleasure of watching. All the experiences I’ve had—no, I wouldn’t want to be young again. Young people today live under so much stress and I couldn’t even imagine looking at the world like this because they’re living in an unadulterated version of this stress, of this divisiveness, of this pressure to be good or seduction to be bad.
The complexity that we have to have as human beings is completely eradicated by the algorithmic world they’re living in. We as a people need to model a certain behavior.
I’ve been involved in some attempts to create dialogue—not debate. Don’t debate people. Debate is useless. Debate is just for entertainment. Most of the time when we see people debating, they’ll just talk over each other. I’m German. Germans do that all the time, but maybe not helpful. Germany also has had a rather unfortunate history in some respects. Anyhow…
If we want to talk to each other, we need to enter these conversations in some spirit of dialogue. Let the other person talk. Assume that the other person may have their own reasons, good or bad, for why they think or act a certain way. Try to put yourself into their shoes. As we used to say all the time, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is not appropriation. It’s the willingness to be empathetic, to find community, to find commonality, to find shared humanity or shared being with the other person.
Dialogue asks us to expand our consciousness to accept the consciousness of others. In that, the challenge is how do we do that? How do we put ourselves in a position that honors the other person as who they are and does not put up too many barriers?
I’m realizing this has gotten much longer and I’ve meandered in a direction that I didn’t think it would go. I’ll end this here and probably do a follow-up.
