Humainologie dialogue including a synopsis of the book On Dialogue by David Bohm
- Arthur Clark
- Jul 8, 2020
- 7 min read
There were many highlights of the dialogue yesterday evening, and (for me at least) there was an unforgettable moment that came in the last few minutes after most participants had left the meeting. I had presented a hypothetical scenario: An angry, racist white man is screaming at you (but not threatening you physically). How do you respond? As an afterthought I added: Let’s say you are prescient and you suspect this man is going to go home that night and commit suicide unless you can reach through his racism and his anger and save his life. What would you do? And Nyabuoy responded that she would ask him whether he had time to go for coffee so that she could listen to him and understand his concerns.
Being able to respond so empathically in a real-life situation would take practice, practice, practice. We might even invent an empathic listening game here in Calgary, that would include challenging situations like the one Nyabuoy responded to.
The Black Lives Matter movement is contributing to many positive changes. However, concerns have been raised about some of the effects on freedom of speech. The New York Times on July 8 carried an article about an open letter (to be published in Harpers magazine) signed by about 150 prominent people
making the point that justice and freedom of speech are mutually supportive. If you compromise one, you jeopardize the other. The letter was initiated by an African-American writer and the signatories are from very diverse ethnic backgrounds and political viewpoints.
It seems timely to send you again that synopsis of David Bohm’s book On Dialogue because it provides the conceptual framework for our dialogues here in Calgary. Many of you will have seen it in September of last year. I think we are truly becoming very accomplished dialogue artists, and making history every week, with the vision of a “moveable feast,” our city as a microcosm of healthy global community.
After the Zoom dialogue last night, I watched the movie “12 Years a Slave,”
based on a true story. Set in the timeframe 1840-1855, it tells the story of a free African American man who is an accomplished violinist, lives in Saratoga, New York, and is lured to Washington DC where he is kidnapped, taken to Georgia, and sold into slavery. I would recommend watching this film, as painful as it is. We could discuss it at one of our future dialogues if you are interested.
We could revisit the topic of Identity Travel next Wednesday. I plan to circulate a synopsis of a book I am currently reading, highly relevant to our dialogue yesterday. I expect to have it done by Monday or Tuesday of next week.
Arthur
Book: (David Bohm) On Dialogue (1996)
“It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds or otherwise defends his own ideas. Why then is it so difficult to bring about such communication?” - David Bohm
David Bohm (1917-1992) was a theoretical physicist. He thought about very basic aspects of reality. It was his book on dialogue that prompted me to start a weekly dialogue series in Calgary. He believes, based on his thinking about it and his experience with it, that dialogue can – if practiced for that purpose and in the right way – lead to a new and evolving collective consciousness. It is the lack of this collective consciousness that is the source of our divisiveness and the great danger to our future survival and flourishing.
The dialogue group as Bohm practiced it had twenty to forty people, large enough to represent the entire society. The participants sit in a circle (or two concentric circles). There may be a facilitator at first, but it will be important to move beyond that. The dialogue is not designed to “solve problems,” so Bohm is envisioning something different from “dialogue” as it might be practiced in a corporation. There may be a theme for the dialogue, although later the dialogue group may be able to set aside even that and transform their culture and themselves each time they meet. This is about transformation of consciousness, individually and collectively, not about solving specific problems.
Everything human civilization has accomplished originates in thought, and yet we don’t pay much attention to the process of thinking itself. Not only that! What we human beings have been able to do depends on communicating our thoughts. And we haven’t payed sufficient attention to our communication either. This is about something more primal than technology. His book opens with this: “During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, television, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communications which puts each part of the world into almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.” People living in different nations or belonging to different ethnic groups or political parties can scarcely talk with each other or truly understand each other.
Our technology is more than sufficient to enable excellent international communication. The major obstacle to achieving excellent international communication is not a technological one. Instead, the obstacle is located at the level of the individual’s thought and communication skills. Getting past this obstacle is the way to find a far brighter future for our children and grandchildren. Call it empathy. To state it differently: What we can do with dialogue right here in Calgary might be vastly more important for human survival than what technical experts are doing in Silicon Valley.
Bohm emphasizes a point we are already familiar with: Human thought does not provide an objective representation of reality. (The map is not the territory.) He develops this idea further: Our thought processes tend to see the diverse and unified parts of reality as fragments. It’s as if we were trying to understand a gear wheel or a minute hand when they can only be understood if we see them as parts of a clock. As a result, we come up with ideas like nationalism when we should be thinking about our species first, and only secondarily about parts of it. We come up with environmentally destructive innovations because we didn’t include the natural world in our thinking. Our thinking is about fragments of the whole, so we make a big mess. We need another way of thinking to use alongside that fragmented way of thinking.
Bohm refers to participatory thought (which is described as having been much more common in tribal cultures than it is today – a bit ironic because “tribalism” itself is NOT participatory thinking) and literal thought (which is dominant today). A contemporary example of participatory thought is when someone identifies with a nation: “If my nation is attacked, it is an attack on me.” Participatory thought has the (potential) advantage that the person sees himself or herself as part of a larger whole. Yet as mentioned previously that nationalism is itself still fragmented, for any group of people is a fragment of something much larger. The participatory thought that preceded the transition to agricultural societies was perhaps closer to that. Once we began to function in agricultural societies, there was a growing need for literal thought. And we need it even more today, just to get through the day, with just about everything we do hour to hour.
With literal thought, we think we are seeing things “as they really are,” but this is not the case. Literal thought is a very modern way of thinking in which we see fragments in isolation. It is necessary, but extremely limited.
There is a distinction between a “problem” and a “paradox.” A problem is there to be solved, whereas a paradox cannot be “solved,” but it creates difficulties which at times can be daunting, or even life-threatening. An example of a paradox might be found in a man’s susceptibility to flattery. He might think of this as a problem and try to solve it by telling himself to recognize flattery and reject it. However, his susceptibility may be arising from low self-esteem, so it becomes self-negating to block the positive feelings aroused in him by flattery. Nationalism is another example of a paradox cited by Bohm.
Then there is our tendency to distinguish the observer from the observed. We have assumptions and when we “observe something” we usually fail to understand the full extent to which our assumptions are shaping what we observe. The “something” we are observing might be another ethnic group or a chair across the room or someone we’re in love with or a part of our own body or a new idea we’ve just heard. We see ourselves as separate from what we are observing. If a blind man with a cane holds that cane tightly, he may feel the cane as part of himself; but if he holds it loosely, he may think of the cane as something else, while his hand is part of himself. But then he may realize his hand is not really he himself, the thinker, and so he might work his way backward to locate the real self, the observer, only at the end of that search realizing there is nothing there. Well, not nothing, but just a particle of something larger, flowing. In the same way a physicist interested in light may study “particles” or “waves” and reach a point where she realizes the “particle” doesn’t really exist in isolation, just as each of us does not exist in isolation nor any moment in time. Our assumptions as “observers” are usually hidden from us as we observe. If I can develop awareness of this aspect of reality, it may enable me to listen to another person speaking as if I were listening to a voice within myself.
It can also build a “proprioception of thought” that could give us an advantage in our lives. Proprioception is a familiar term. It serves us well as we walk or reach for a glass of water. We move our limbs in space and the sensory feedback lets us know where our legs are or where our hand is. Yet we have very little proprioception of thought, as indicated in the foregoing paragraph about how we don’t realize the extent to which our observations are shaped by our assumptions. An ability to suspend our identity as we express our ideas – that is, to step back from our way of thinking – would steadily enhance our proprioception of thought. We might then be so far advanced beyond our former abilities that it might seem to us we had acquired some magic. We might look back on our former selves (when we lacked this proprioception of thought) as having been handicapped persons.
“I think,” he writes, “that there is the possibility of the transformation of consciousness, both individually and collectively. It’s important that it happen together – it’s got to be both. And therefore, this whole question – of communication and the ability to dialogue, the ability to participate in communication – is crucial.”
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