Conflict often cracks the door that leads to
healthy dialogue and we must put our foot in the opening. David Bohm (1994)
said that conflict was incoherence. People never have legitimate
grounds on which to differ, only confusion. War is sustained
incoherence, sustained confusion, so too are feuds between families and
disagreements of all sorts.
There is a simple, elegant solution to
every dilemma that presents itself to symbol processing systems or
social systems and it is understanding, unraveling the knot of
incoherence. Bohm said that confusion is analogous to a thought
cancer. It begins to destroy the good cells of clarity around it.
We drag our thoughts (thinking we did
before) into our current life situation, along with our felts (feeling
we did before) and together they pre-empt our understanding of the
reality that is being presented to us now. It is in this way that
confusion is handed down from generation to generation, that is, from
episode to episode of our lives. Conflict has the capacity to cause
people to think rather than drag in what they have already thought, to
feel, rather than to load their brains with the chemicals of feelings
they had before. When conflict arises, we should seize the moment and
not let it pass without investing it with thinking and feeling.
Not only do we tend to use thoughts and
felts rather than thinking and feeling, we often raise monuments to
systems of thoughts and felts and worship at their alters. Science,
rationality, divine authority and even intuition, have their own
hallowed traditions. Most people worship at one or the other of these
“churches”.
Imagine if you will, four people who
believe themselves to be authoritative on the same subject. One relies
on “scientific evidence” another on rational thought, a third on a
scriptural text and yet another on her intuitive capacity. Their
conversation is likely to be conflicted because they cannot agree on
something as basic as what they will treat as knowledge or wisdom.
A person who believes in knowledge
derived from science and another who believes in God-breathed
understanding, will have countless non-starting discussions, when they
seek to reason together. They might as well be thousands of physical
miles apart for all the good being together in one room will do them,
because the distance between the thought systems in which they believe
is so great.
Still the situation sits there to be
readily resolved. Two fresh human beings, two human beings who were not
so far gone down the narrow paths of their disparate knowledge
traditions, could comprehend the reality and fix on a solution without
much effort. However, our two combatants are likely to rage at one
another for days, weeks, years, for lifetimes. Incoherence is their
inheritance.
Dialogue (conversational attack on
confusion) can be achieved between the separate traditions our
combatants worship in. Conflict opens doors on each side. All they
need do is open the door and enter.
Genuine dialogue entails listening
without referring the messages to thoughts and feelings from your sacred
traditions. It means speaking coherently about what you are thinking,
what you are feeling, especially as these are determined by what you are
hearing from the other person. The telltale product of dialogue is
that both people (all people, if there are more than two) reach new
understanding.
One person at the table says, “I hear
what you are saying, and it sounds plausible, but it violates the memory
of my ancestors, and I am their representative at this table.” Another
person at the table says, “I could not care less about your ancestors, I
have my own ancestors of thought and felt to defend.” Everyone at the
table is an ambassador for different traditions of thoughts and felts
and determined to defend the flags and honor of their kingdom of origin.
They might just as well be speaking in
different languages without interpreters, for all the good their time
talking does them. Wisdom sits there in the middle of the table,
winking at them, nodding knowingly, but alas, frowning in sadness when
the conversation winds down, everyone pushes back from the table and all
walk out of the room.
Rather than hailing from different
knowledge traditions, they may be from different power positions. Locally, one person may be talking from the position of authority given
to him by the organization. “Do the rest of you not understand?”, he
says. “Can you not hear that mine is the voice being raised on behalf
of the organization for which we all work?”
Another person at the table says, “Do
the rest of you not understand? I am speaking as the smartest person in
my college graduating class. Another speaks from the power of her
experience recalling what she believes to be this same conversation
before when subsequent events proved her correct (not realizing that
those events are gone forever and that these are new events), another
from the mountaintop of his emotion believing that what he says must be
correct or otherwise why would he believe it so emotionally.
Real conflict, times when those sitting
at the table begin to change because they are forced to react to the
input of others, provide learning opportunities, fleeting seconds when
the person with organizational authority sees that there may be
understanding beyond the bounds of that protected by his title, when the
self-proclaimed “smartest person in the room” realizes that these
commoners may have struck on pearls of insight, the person with vast
experiences notices the “newness” of the current case, when the
emotional mountain climber looks around and sees that the others are
climbing the same mountain.
In this precious present, it would be
so healing for one of those at the table or perhaps someone new to the
table, to throw down a heavy object breaking the quiet with sound and
announce that for the next little while, no one will be permitted to
speak or listen in the spirit of anything more than the sense flowing
from the mouths of those in the room. No more grandmotherly nostrums,
no more of grandfatherly clichés, no more homespun platitude from the
mind of a great aunt or uncle. For the sake of understanding, we will
speak and listen in a way that defies tradition.
Reference
Bohm, David. (1994). Thought as a system. London: Routledge.
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