Conversations that seek genuine understanding by all sides ultimately require a common frame of reference. If we aren’t talking about the same things, how can we understand one another?
We usually refer to this as talking past one another. Sometimes this happens because we haven’t taken the time to understand what our conversation partner is trying to say. We are distracted and focused on something else. Increasingly, our public discourse–that which we all see on the airwaves, on the internet and in print–is mere polemic in service of some political or economic interest. There is no genuine attempt to explore the issues, only to advance a particular view of them–often for pay as is the case with public relations agencies and also fake think tank academics who merely parrot the positions of their funders.
We like to regard ourselves as living in an age of enlightenment. But enlightenment only occurs when we are intellectually honest. What intellectual honesty requires is the ability to entertain ideas and accept evidence that contradict our current views and to evaluate those ideas and evidence on some basis other than a financial or political interest.
The late William Catton, the sociologist and ecologist who stands as the 20th century prophet of our predicament, laid out this problem in his last book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. By bottleneck Catton means a dramatic reduction in human population over the coming century due to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, soil erosion and other problems and the attendant chaos these will bring to our current governance and economic arrangements.
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