Of Aspirations and Hopes, Part Two

As I was reading Scott London's essay 'Thinking Together: The Power of Deliberative Dialogue', I found myself nodding a lot. Caught up in a combination of reassuring resonance and insight being sparked, amongst the figurative lights coming on and bells ringing and chords being struck, I emailed out quotes to friends and colleagues.

I was sent down this path I'm on of contemplating a more focused civic activism courtesy of an email exchange with Raise the Hammer editor Ryan McGreal last summer. What gelled from our correspondence was a notion he'd posited that eventually morphed into the idea of 'increasing the relationship of engagement between residents and Councillors in local governance.'


Pretty soon after I began mulling over this concept (focusing on the notion of changing how people felt about municipal politics as well as how they participated, not on getting elected officials to be more accountable, transparent or even responsive), I realized that while to some civic activism organizations, turning around voter apathy, raising the turnout rate to much more respectable levels would be the most important goal imaginable, that it couldn't possibly be what was paramount to me.


And now, 'The Power of Deliberative Dialogue' was reminding me that the core of my ruminations is the idea of getting people engaged, which means communication, which means creating dialogue.


What London's essay pointed up all the more was that even beyond acknowledging that there simply isn't enough engagement going either way in local politics, it needs to be acknowledged that even worse, neither party has a facility in place with which quality engagement can be constructed. Sound communication. Constructive dialogue. How can there be, when there's been such an air of contention, of misapprehension, when there's been this wonky paradigm, this skewed construct that's never actually worked that well, but keeps being bought into, mostly because there's never been the impetus to migrate to something better...?


And yet even within this essay, direction can be found as to how to get to that better place, where 'deliberative dialogue' becomes part of the available mechanisms. Which actually leads me back to another of London's articles:

"Genuine understanding seems to be the exception rather than the norm in everyday communication. We speak at each other, or past each other. We speak different conceptual languages, hold different values, embody different ways of seeing the world.

Much of the time, we're not even listening to each other at all. The dialogue is a monologue. We fire salvos of information across the Internet, or shoot each other text messages, or blog or Twitter about ourselves. But is anyone paying attention? And if they are, do they catch our drift?

The trouble with much of what passes for communication today is that it's all crosstalk. It's a din, not a dialogue.

The noisy chatter reflects the fact that we don't really know how to engage one another in authentic conversations. We simply haven't learned the skills of listening closely to each other, of engaging in meaningful exchanges, and of finding shared sources of meaning. We lack the know-how and the tools."