Less Debate, More Dialogue

(Another article I wrote for the campus newspaper at the University of South Dakota, the Volante.)

Election Day 2010 has come and gone, and South Dakota has dispatched a new congressperson to aid in the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Regular readers might be able to guess my feelings about the election results. However, this is not a screed about how Republican rule will destroy America. Truth be told, the changeover in the House will not greatly affect politics in this country. Government will not all of a sudden become more efficient or less corrupt. Problems like poverty and war will not miraculously vanish. And our leaders will still bitch at each other instead of finding real solutions to our problems.

For proof of this, look no further than our very own campus. A week before the election, the Political Science League held its annual party debate. Neither the College Republicans nor College Democrats offered any novel answers to problems such as education and health care. Instead, they mostly spent their time regurgitating party slogans and attacking each other. If these are the leaders of tomorrow, I see little reason to believe that a transient alteration in the makeup of the House is going to change anything.

It doesn’t have to be like this though. Author and peace activist Louise Diamond draws a marked contrast between debate and dialogue as two different modes of communication. When we debate, she explains, we focus on positions, which are usually mutually exclusive. When we dialogue, however, we peel away the vituperative veneer of opinion to focus on the needs and concerns, the hopes and the fears that underlie our politics. The former is adversarial and antagonistic, whereas the latter is respectful and constructive.

Being something of an amateur linguist, I decided to look into the roots of these two words, to check if Ms. Diamond's distinction was appropriate on etymological as well as conceptual grounds. It turns out the word debate originally comes from the Old French verb debatre, which means "to beat, to batter". Dialogue, on the other hand, derives from the Greek dialogos, which consists of the Greek dyo "two" and logos, familiar to any Biblical scholar as "word" but here meaning "speech, discourse".

That makes sense. Instead of coming together to talk, to engage in a productive dialogue, our leaders seem bent on battering one another into submission. If we take the word at face value, there is no such thing as a “healthy” debate.

As citizens and students, we are far from guiltless in perpetuating this culture of discord. How often do we embroil ourselves in a heated wall-to-wall on Facebook, knowing full well that neither party is going to budge? Therefore – as ever – any change in the government is going to have to start with us. When we discuss the latest news with our friends, or with our enemies for that matter, we must learn to be respectful of differing opinions. Reconciling deeply held opinions is not terribly important. Recognizing the needs that undergird those opinions is.

As I face the disheartening prospect of members of the Tea Party in Congress, however much I may disagree with them, I must recognize that they are not raving lunatics; they are real people with real concerns. Because I believe their policies to be misguided does not detract from the intensity of their passion and the reality of their fears. They are not acting out of spite. They are acting out of genuine concern for the well-being of themselves and their loved ones. They are afraid that their families, their religion, and their livelihoods are being threatened. They need to know that they have control over their own lives, just the same as I do.

Our task, not just in the political sphere but also in our everyday lives, is to find ways to address those needs and desires, shared by us all alike. What we need is dialogue, a conversation where the participants are more concerned about finding a solution than getting their way, where doing the right thing means more than being right. That means we have to start listening for what lies beneath the surface. Once we learn to do that, we may discover, much to our surprise, that we have more in common than we would ever have thought possible.