Abstract
Dialogue is one of the buzzwords of our time. There is widespread conviction that if only people would enter into dialogue, peace would break out. But there is very little Socratic dialogue in the world today. Our discourse tends to be aggressive, a tradition we inherited from the ancient Greeks. In the democratic assemblies of Athens, citizens learned to debate competitively, to marshal arguments logically and effectively and to argue their case in order to win. They practised rhetorical ploys to undermine their opponents’ position and had no qualms about discrediting them and their cause in order to marginalise their policies. The object was to defeat one's opponent: nobody was expected to change his mind, be converted to the other side, or enter empathically into the rival viewpoint.
As we have seen, the type of dialogue invented by Socrates was quite different. Like all Athenians, Socrates had taken part in these debates but he did not like them. If he were one of those ‘clever and disputatious debaters’, he told the ambitious young aristocrat Meno, he would simply state his opinion and ask Meno to refute it. But this was not appropriate in a dialogue between people who ‘are friends, as you and I are, and want to discuss with each other’. In true dialogue, participants ‘must answer in a manner more gentle and more proper to discussion’. The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants—and because its purpose was that everybody should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win.
Plato described the dialogue as a communal meditation that was hard work, requiring ‘a great expense of time and trouble’, but like his master, he insisted that it be conducted in a kindly, compassionate manner. It would not bring transcendent insight unless ‘questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice’. Nobody must be pushed into a position about which he felt uncomfortable. Each participant should ‘make place for the other’ in his mind, listening intently and sympathetically to the ideas of his partners in dialogue and allowing them to unsettle his own convictions. In return, they would permit their minds to be informed and changed by his contribution.
Both the Buddha and Confucius seem to have conducted discussion in a similar manner. Confucius always developed his insights in conversation, because in his view we needed this friendly interaction to achieve maturity. In Chinese script, ren had two elements: the simple ideogram of a human being and two horizontal strokes indicating human relations. Ren can, therefore, be translated as ‘co-humanity’. Cooperation required ren's ‘softness’ and ‘pliability’, and Confucius would probably have appreciated the ritual of the Socratic dialogue, which demanded that participants ‘yield’ to one another instead of holding rigidly to their own opinions. In the Analects, we see him mildly scolding his pupils, pushing them to the limit of their ability, but never bullying them. Easy-going, affable and calm, Confucius listened to them carefully and was always ready to concede their point of view. He was no sage, he would protest; his only talent was an ‘unwearying effort to learn and unflagging patience in teaching others’.
The Buddha too taught his monks to converse kindly and courteously with one another. His lay disciple King Pasenadi of Kosala was extremely impressed by the friendliness of the Buddhist community, which was in marked contrast to the royal court where everybody was on the lookout for himself and chronically quarrelsome. When he sat with his council, he complained, he was constantly interrupted and sometimes even heckled. But when he visited the Buddha, he saw monks ‘living together as uncontentiously as milk with water and looking at one another with kind eyes, … smiling, courteous, sincerely happy… their minds remaining as gentle as wild deer’. One day, he told the Buddha about a conversation with his wife in which they had both admitted that nothing was more important to them than their own selves. Instead of lecturing the king on the ‘unskilful’ nature of egotism or launching into a discussion of anatta (‘no-self’), the Buddha entered into Pasenadi's position, starting from where his disciple actually was rather than where the Buddha thought he ought to be. He suggested that if the king found that there was nothing dearer to him than himself, he should reflect that everybody else felt exactly the same. Therefore, the Buddha concluded, ‘a person who loves the self should not harm the self of others’.
Like Socrates, the Buddha believed that knowledge was a process of self-discovery. You did not gain insight by accepting the opinions of other people but by finding the truth within yourself. Even laypeople could achieve this. The Kalamans, a tribal people living on the northernmost fringe of the Ganges basin who were trying to find their place in the new urban civilisation, sent a delegation to the Buddha. They were utterly confused: one teacher after another had descended upon them, but each had simply promoted his own teachings and poured scorn on all the others. How could they tell who was right? ‘Come, Kalamans,’ the Buddha said, ‘do not be satisfied with hearsay or taking truth on trust.’ Instead of reeling off his own dharma and giving the bewildered Kalamans yet another doctrine to puzzle over, he told them that they were expecting other people to give them the answer, when if they looked into their own minds, they would find that they knew it already. Step by step, he helped them to draw upon their own experience. Was greed good or bad? Had they not noticed that when somebody was consumed by greed, he could become aggressive and even steal or lie? And had they observed that hatred simply made the hater unhappy? Yes, the Kalamans had noticed all this. So, the Buddha concluded, they had not needed him at all: they knew his dharma already. If instead of giving rein to their hatred and greed, they tried to live more kindly and generously, they would find that they were happier.
We do not engage in many dialogues like this today. The debates in our parliamentary institutions, the media, academia and the law courts are essentially competitive. It is not enough for us to seek the truth; we also want to defeat and even humiliate our opponents. The malice and bullying tactics decried by Socrates are embraced with enthusiasm as part of the fun. A great deal of this type of discourse is a display of ego. There is no question of anybody admitting that she does not know the answer or has doubts about the validity of her case—even about complex issues for which there are no easy answers. Admitting that your opponents may have a valid point seems unthinkable. The last thing anybody intends is a change of mind. But while aggressive debate may be useful in politics, it is unlikely to transform hearts and minds—especially when an issue arouses passions that are already bitter and entrenched.
In our highly contentious world, we need to develop a twenty-first-century form of Socrates’ compassionate discourse. For some years now, I have tried to counter the stereotypical view of Islam that has been current in the West for centuries but has become more prevalent since the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Like any received idea, it is based on what the Buddha called ‘hearsay’ rather than accurate knowledge and understanding. So when politicians or pundits have insisted that Islam is an inherently violent, intolerant faith or inveigh furiously against the practice of veiling, I have written articles, based on my study of Islamic history, to challenge this. But I have recently decided that this is counterproductive. All that happens is that my article is virulently attacked and my assailants rehearse the old ideas again with greater venom. As a result, the intellectual atmosphere becomes even more polluted and people remain entrenched in angry negativity. As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if they are criticised or corrected. Perhaps it would be better to take a leaf out of the Buddha's book, and start from where people actually are rather than where we think they ought to be. In such public debates, instead of trying to bludgeon other people to accept our own point of view, we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them.
We should make a point of asking ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth; whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling; and whether we are ‘making place for the other’ in our minds in the Socratic manner. Above all, we need to listen. All too often in an argument or debate, we simply listen to other participants in order to twist their words or use them to further our own cause. True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry speech in particular requires careful decoding. We should make an effort to hear the pain or fear that surface in body language, tone of voice and choice of imagery.
To take just one example: every single one of the fundamentalist movements that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; and each one began with what was perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment. History shows that to attack any fundamentalist movement, either militarily, politically or in the media, is counter—productive because the assault merely convinces its adherents that their enemies really are bent on their destruction. If we analyse fundamentalist discourse as carefully as we interpret a poem or an important political speech, ferreting out the underlying emotions and intentions of the poet or speaker, this fear and humiliation immediately become apparent. Instead of ridiculing fundamentalist mythology, we should reflect seriously on the fact that it often expresses anxieties that no society can safely ignore. It is difficult to achieve this kind of dispassion, because any fundamentalist position is a profound challenge to principles and ideals, such as free speech or the rights of women, which are sacred to their liberal opponents. But aggression, righteous condemnation and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack; we have seen what happens when fundamentalist fear hardens into rage.
Language is based on trust. We have to assume, at least initially, that our interlocutor is speaking the truth and telling us something of value. Logicians have argued that the truth of an individual sentence can be assessed only by considering the whole context. It cannot be seen in isolation but is part of a ‘conceptual scheme’, a fabric of interwoven sentences. We cannot understand the ideas expressed unless we are familiar with this ‘conceptual scheme’ in its entirety. Thus the sentence ‘the law is an ass’ is explicable only in a particular framework. Linguists point out that in day-today communication, when we hear a statement that at first seems odd or false we automatically try to find a context in which it makes sense, because we want to understand what is being said to us. The same mechanism is at work when we try to translate a text written in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law ‘the principle of charity’; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us we seek an ‘interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus’.
In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth. As Donald Davidson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, explains, ‘Making sense of the utterances and behaviour of others, even their most aberrant behaviour, requires us to find a great deal of truth and reason in them’. If we cannot do that, we will dismiss the speaker as irrational, nonsensical and basically inhuman. ‘Charity,’ Davidson continues, ‘is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters’. This is how Jews such as Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 bce to 45 ce), who were trained in Greek philosophy, approached the Torah. Instead of dismissing these ancient Hebrew texts as barbaric, they devised an allegorical interpretation that made them right according to their own Hellenistic standards, translating them into a more familiar idiom. They could not have achieved this had they not made a charitable assumption when studying these scriptures and finding thus a good deal of truth and reason in them.
The ‘principle of charity’ and the ‘science of compassion’ are both crucial to any attempt to understand discourse and ideas that initially seem baffling, distressing and alien; we have to recreate the context in which such words are spoken—historical, cultural, political, intellectual—question them deeply and, as the footnote on the ‘science of compassion advised, drive our understanding to the point where we have ‘an immediate human grasp of what a given position meant’. With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, ‘feeling the same’. In other words, we have to see where people are coming from. In this way, we can broaden our perspective and ‘make place for the other’. We can ignore this compassionate imperative only if we do not wish to understand other people—an ethically problematic position.
There are of course times when we are required to be assertive. Even when we have gone through this process and understood the context in which a terrorist conceived his idea, we cannot, if we take the Golden Rule as our criterion, condone the course of action he has chosen. We have, however, broadened our horizons by developing an informed understanding of the possible frustration, humiliation and despair of his situation and can now empathise with the plight of many of his innocent compatriots or coreligionists, who may feel something similar but have not resorted to criminal vengeance. Yet we must still dissociate ourselves from his atrocity. Nor should the ‘principle of charity’ make us passive and supine in the face of injustice, cruelty and discrimination. As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain. But it is no good responding to injustice with hatred and contempt. This, again, will simply inspire further antagonism and make matters worse. When we speak out in the defence of decent values we must make sure that we understand the context fully and do not dismiss the values of our opponents as barbaric, simply because they seem alien to us. We may find that we have the same values but express them in a radically different way.
How do we assert a strongly felt conviction with compassion? St Paul provides us with a useful checklist in the famous description of love quoted earlier. Charity is ‘patient and kind’; it ‘is never boastful, never conceited, never rude’; never envious or ‘quick to take offence’. Charity ‘keeps no score of wrongs’ and ‘takes no pleasure in the wrongdoing of others’. If we are quick to take offence and positively smack our lips in self-righteous delight at the wrongdoing of others, we will fail this test. If we speak impatiently, rudely or unkindly we may be in danger of bringing ourselves down to the level of intolerance we are condemning. An older translation rendered the phrase ‘never boastful, never conceited’ as ‘charity… is not puffed up’. Our critique should not inflate the ego. Sometimes when people are inveighing against an abuse or crime, they seem almost to swell before our eyes with delicious self-congratulation.
Gandhi left us a fine example of compassionate assertiveness: advocating non-violent resistance, he frequently asked people to consider whether they fought to change things or to punish. When Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, Gandhi believed, he was urging them to show courage in the face of hostility. This was the way to transform hatred and contempt into respect. But non-violence did not mean compliance with injustice: his opponents could have his dead body, Gandhi would insist, but not his obedience.
During this step, we try to make ourselves mindful of the way we speak to others. When you argue, do you get carried away by your own cleverness and deliberately inflict pain on your opponent? Do you get personal? Will the points you make further the cause of understanding or are they exacerbating an already inflammatory situation? Are you really listening open-heartedly to your opponent? What would happen if—while debating a trivial matter that would have no serious consequences—you allowed yourself to lose the argument? After a contentious discussion, conduct a post-mortem with yourself: can you really back up everything you said in the heat of the moment? Did you really know what you were talking about, or were you depending on ‘hearsay’? And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind.