1 - What Ever Happened to Dialogue?

What Ever Happened to Dialogue?
Hugh T. Kerr

There is an old story about a man who answered the phone and, after some conversation, said, "No, I can't have lunch with you tomorrow; I have to get my hair cut." His wife, hearing the discussion, asked him what kind of reason that was for declining an invitation. And he replied, "If you don't want to do something, one reason is as good as another." Old story maybe, but it belongs in a contemporary context that is far from funny. Conversation, dialogue, rational discourse, panel discussions, conferences, debates-all are becoming increasingly difficult and irrelevant in our day. Decisions, convictions, opinions, commitments, reasons for thinking or acting almost never emerge from a rational give and take but for other reasons that may be non-rational.

The current failure to communicate is not a "problem of communication" as if it could be solved by discovering better media. We have more media than we know what to do with. Our problem is that so many of us don't want to communicate in the first place, partly because we have nothing to say to each other, and partly because everybody seems to be mad at everybody else.

When a student complained to his teacher that the school was interfering with his civil rights by not allowing him to participate in administrative decisions, the teacher asked him what he meant by "civil rights." To which the student replied with feeling, "Definitions are irrelevant; I'm talking about facts." Dialogue has become difficult because different groups speak different languages. There

2 - What Ever Happened to Dialogue?

is no "universe of discourse," which philosophers used to assume as the premise for logical argument. Opposing factions are not on the same wave length or else they tune each other out. Conversation has a hard time getting started and often ends in a shouting-match. Consider some random and melancholy examples.

Item: Lyndon B. Johnson, whose favorite text was "Come now, let us reason together" (Isa. 1: 18), came into the Presidency on a platform of consensus but left office amid unprecedented national dissension.

Item: Richard M. Nixon touched an exposed nerve and drew applause in his Inaugural when he noted: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Item: At Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., where a special recruiting program enrolled more black students this year than ever before, the newly formed Afro-American Society set up its own residence dormitory, holds its own dances, eats together in the refectory, and some of the members won't even speak to white students. As one of them put it: "The whites seem to think I'm some sort of textbook for their liberalism, but personally I don't give a damn for educating white boys about what it's like to be black."

Item: After months of fruitless haggling, the Paris peace "talks" devoted ten weeks to a discussion of the shape of the table, finally agreeing that it should be round. When Henry Cabot Lodge was initiated into the "Grand Salle des Fetes" of the old Majestic Hotel which is now the Paris "International Conference Center," there were no greetings, no handshakes, and no agenda.

Item: Some time before the encyclical Humanae Vitae and frequently since, disruption in the Roman Catholic Church has been increasing. Pope Paul VI has been methodically closing the windows and doors opened buoyantly by his predecessor, John XXIII. The hope that Vatican Council II would lead to "collegiality," with more dialogue among all levels of the hierarchy, seems forlorn at the moment.

Item: At San Francisco State College, a months' old student strike has reached a stalemate. The students demand that their complaints

3 - What Ever Happened to Dialogue?

be accepted without negotiation, discussion, or compromise. Acting President S. I. Hayakawa is best known as an authority on semantics.

Item: The Reader's Digest, which is in favor of sweetness and light, and very much against the clergy's social or political involvement, recently switched by running an article which began with a paragraph based on a Gallup Poll. "Does the Christian faith have any practical relevance in dealing with the twin agonies of poverty and race in the United States today? Well, it depends upon whom you ask. The clergy overwhelmingly say yes. But through its actions if not its words the laity, all too often, says no."

Item: While students at Brandeis occupied the Communications Center Building, urging that more black students be admitted, the former President of the University, Dr. Abram Sacher, was in Africa recruiting prospective candidates.

Item: At Northwestern University's "Symposium Week," a panel of experts, speaking on the topic "Confronting Change," were shouted down by students who insisted that the format was too authoritarian.

Item: The decentralized school program in New York City, which poses an important educational innovation that deserves debate and discussion, has degenerated into a feud between the community and the United Federation of Teachers, on the one hand, and an ugly name-calling stand-off between blacks and Jews, on the other hand, two minority groups that might be expected to work together.

Item: Two clippings lie side by side on my desk. One is an article from the December issue of the A.A.U.P. (American Association of University Professors) Bulletin, entitled, "To Encourage Reason on the Campus: A Proposal for a New College Course in Thinking and Writing." The other is a news release on the December conference in Princeton of a distinguished group of experts, sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom and chaired by Dr. Carl Kaysen, Director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The article claims that students can think and speak more clearly if they are required to write more essays. The conference, which included many authors of books and essays, never got off the ground and came to no agreement on anything.

4 - What Ever Happened to Dialogue?

Item: In Commonweal's special "Israel" number, the editorial quotes I. F. Stone as saying: "If God as some now say is dead, he no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab Jewish problem."

Item: Question on a physics examination: "Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer." The student's answer: "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building." When asked by his professor if he really knew the conventional method, he replied that he did, but that there were many other valid and interesting answers. Another: "Take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent's door . . . 'Mr. Superintendent, here I have a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of this building, I will give you this barometer.'" The student on further questioning said he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him "how to think."

If these items belong on the docket, we all have some radical restructuring to do in our understanding of people, problems, and methods of communication. Preachers, theologians, and teachers will be increasingly confronted by the dilemma that their profession implies speaking, talking, writing while fewer and fewer are in the mood for listening or hearing. What ever happened to dialogue? It became radicalized, politicized, Balkanized, polarized.