Humainologie dialogue next Wednesday August 12
- Arthur Clark
- Aug 6, 2020
- 8 min read
"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand." --Karl A. Menninger
The practice of dialogue as developed by William Isaacs (a student of David Bohm’s) in his book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is based on listening, respecting, voicing, and suspending. For the benefit of newcomers to our dialogue events, a synopsis of David Bohm’s book On Dialogue is appended below. (Those who have been with our dialogues for a while are already familiar with the synopsis.) Here is a related TED dialogue (can you imagine?) called to my attention by Rob McMillen.
When it comes to finding happiness and purpose in each day of your life, imagination is more important than knowledge. I’ll illustrate that point with an example from my own experience this morning. I had decided to suggest we explore the theme of creativity and mental health a little further next week, with specific reference to that surrealist idea of connecting two or more things that previously had not been thought of as related.
This idea can be developed as a skill. (Imagination can be strengthened by intentionally putting it into practice.) For example, surrealism and pragmatism might seem unrelated. Okay then, how about “surrealist pragmatism”? What on earth is that? After the surrealist word association came to me, I began to wonder what it meant. Almost immediately it became obvious. I’ll give an example of a surreal pragmatist in action. Vicky Kleinhenz is a surreal pragmatist, and one morning a friend calls to ask if Vicky can take a couple of dogs for a walk in the afternoon each day because the friend has to leave town for a week. Vicky has a commitment to her mom, whom she visits every afternoon in a nursing home. She wants to make those visits with her mother times of joy for her aging parent, who’s done so much for Vicky; and she’s delighted with the opportunity the friend has given her because she knows those dogs will make her afternoon visits with her mom more joyful. She can hardly restrain her enthusiasm as she agrees to her friend’s request. That’s surrealist pragmatism in action. John Doe, who does not have Vicky’s creativity, received exactly the same request from a friend and said no he couldn’t walk the friend’s dogs in the afternoon because he had to visit his mom at that time of day. (His mother loves animals, but John failed to make the connection.)
Surrealist pragmatism is the ability to improvise solutions to practical problems by on-the-spot association of two or more things that, before the problem had presented itself, had seemed unrelated to each other.
The surreal pragmatist sees opportunity in every difficulty. That said, let’s explore the theme of creativity and mental health a little further next Wednesday. I’ll follow up with a good question along those lines, probably Sunday or Monday when I receive the Zoom link from Greg.
Toot sweet,
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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