Last week I gave a presentation to a lecture club on how to restore civil to discourse. This was a very different request for me. The value was simply being civil to one another and not having to get along at work, make company decisions or build collaboration in the workplace.
I googled "civil discourse" just to check out its definition. I stopped at the first definitions and descriptions I found in Wikipedia: "Civil discourse is engagement in conversation intended to enhance understanding. It is the language of dispassionate objectivity. It requires respect. It neither diminishes a person's moral worth, nor questions their good judgment; it avoids hostility, direct antagonism, or excessive persuasion; it requires modesty and an appreciation for the other participant's experiences."
Whoa! That's enough right there! Tall order! It seems to me that the crux of the matter is in "the language of dispassionate objectivity". We aren't dispassionate and objective about what we care about and believe. Sometimes, we honestly don't want any other understanding but our own because, after all, we are right!
Our inclination is to avoid situations or to "prepare for battle" when we face the possibility of getting into an argument, getting defensive, offending someone or appearing impolite. Sometimes we decide to just keep quiet or "not go there".
There are trade-offs when we don't talk about things that matter to us. One trade-off is we all lose out on sharing what is important to us and learning from one another. There is something lost when we aren't, as we say, "up-front". A second trade-off is that when we stay stuck in our fears and judgments, we don't change the energy around important issues that we really must engage in together for the sake of our common humanity.
What can we do with the challenges to being dispassionate and objective? I think there are three things. One is to pay attention to our common human needs, that is the basic human longings that we all share. There is nothing dispassionate or objective about our needs. Everything we say or do is an expression of our basic needs. We can at least assume that civil discourse challenges us to care about everyone's needs such as to be heard, to be understood, to be respected, to be appreciated. Mindful of our common needs, we can say simple things to support conversation that enhances understanding. For example: "I am not seeing your point. Could you tell me more about how you get to your point-of-view?"
A second thing we can do to engage in civil discourse is to listen. I like to think in terms of "generous listening". We cannot listen generously if we are holding on to judgments such as right vs. wrong, yes this vs. no that, moral vs. immoral, just vs. unjust, conservative vs. progressive, right wing vs. left wing, Republican vs. Democrat. We can shift away from these kinds of polarizations by engaging in an attitude and spirit of genuine curiosity. We say that we really learn about anything only when we have asked the questions to make way for the learning. The same is true for human beings. We learn only a little bit about one another through our observations and what we pick up in our experience. We learn the most from what we ask.
A third thing we can do to engage in civil discourse is to request it. It helps to acknowledge the challenges of being dispassionate and objective. We can say something like: "I get all worked up about this. It seems you do, too. I would like to understand why you think the way you do and vice versa. Can we take some time for a conversation this afternoon and agree not to get into an argument?"
For me the best time with the lecture club was the conversations among the fifty people who came. We had the opportunity to learn from one another with stories, examples and questions about restoring civil to discourse in families, among friends and colleagues, and in workplaces and organizations. May they have many more such conversations.
