Rewind with Todd Boyle: Sharon Schuman

Presenter: Todd Boyle remembers the late Sharon Schuman, as she draws from her book to discuss Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World. With a summary of the 47-minute video recorded Nov. 4, 2017 with Church Women United of Lane County, here’s Sharon Schuman:

Sharon Schuman (Nov. 4, 2017): Well, this is a great opportunity for me because, like many people, I was frustrated about the state of our civic life, I guess you would have to say, the ability of democracy to sustain itself.

[00:00:32] I had the opportunity for many years to teach with political theorists—I’m in literature myself—and I got to asking a lot of the big questions, and it really boils down to: Are people capable of making the decisions that need to be made to sustain democracy? It’s really that simple.

[00:00:49] I was talking for the Register-Guard at a gathering they had of 150 people to talk about polarization and I had been writing in the newspaper about the seductions of polarization, how we like to think we personally are not the polarized type.

[00:01:07] But, you know, there’s a lot of things that it does for us. It makes us feel better about ourselves ’cause other people agree with us. We get a sense of community with people we’ve never even met, ’cause they’re online. We get a sense of superiority about all those stupid people over there who disagree with us. We relish the prospect of winning at the next election because maybe we lost at the last one.

[00:01:27] And honestly, it’s pretty easy to get into this polarized thinking because you don’t really have to think very hard. You just go, ‘Boom,’ we’re there, path of least resistance. And it gives, I think, an illusory, a false idea of freedom because they think, ‘I can do something about this. I can speak, I can act out,’ when actually, what you’re doing is just making more noise in the echo chamber.

[00:01:49] And we also know what the downside is: People don’t listen to each other, there’s a total lack of communication, we feel deeply frustrated. The political world moves more and more toward paralysis. They can’t get a darn thing done.

[00:02:04] And we as citizens feel more and more isolated. Even though we’ve got our little echo chambers, we feel kind of powerless to actually do anything to make a difference that’s important. And there’s a fundamental, I think, widespread sense of despair that comes across the populace. It’s sort of a civic problem.

[00:02:23] For me, it revolves on our ideas about freedom, what’s at the root of all of this. And most of us think about freedom in two basic ways:

[00:02:34] We all have this idea: ‘Leave me alone to do as I please, as long as I don’t hurt anybody else. Don’t mess with me, I want to be free to do as I please.’ This is a very fundamental idea of freedom. We call it autonomy, and John Stuart Mill wrote a whole book about it, and John Locke wrote about it, lots of important political philosophers wrote about it. And we all take it seriously. I myself like this sense of freedom. I want to do as I please, as long as I don’t hurt anybody.

[00:03:03] But there’s a lot of problems with this idea of freedom: We protect it by having rights. We pass legislation, we go to court, we elect candidates on the basis of the fact that they will protect our right to be free in this way. And you see this language in a lot of the really big polarized debates.

[00:03:26] Like, think about abortion: There’s the right to life versus the right to choose. They’re both trying to protect our right. Well, the way you protect those rights is by passing laws. The way you’re passing those laws is to have campaigns. The way you campaign is to collect a lot of money and make a lot of flamboyant statements, get people really riled up so they’ll vote the way you want them to vote, and you’ll have the power to enact the protection of the right that you think is important.

[00:03:57] So autonomy, which involves protecting your right to do as you please, leads to a kind of fixation with power and results, which often leads to this polarized encampment because that’s the way you win elections, okay? So I feel like it’s an important freedom I cherish myself, but it has a downside which is very, very dangerous.

[00:04:23] There’s a second form of freedom, which I call enlightenment, from Plato’s Republic, and it’s all about when you can leave the cave of illusion where we normally dwell and confront the light of truth, the good, then you can become an enlightened person and then it’s up to the philosopher-king to go back into that cave and try to convert others.

[00:04:47] The truth will set you free. You know what the truth is. You know what the truth is, and all you need is for all those unenlightened idiots out there to just agree with you, right?

[00:05:02] Well, you can see how this might easily become a problem. Because different people have different ideas of what the truth is. It’s a problem with polarization too, because you just think of those hordes, those hordes of people who disagree with you about gun control or disagree with you about immigration, or whatever it is, the death penalty, you just dismiss them as fools. You’re enlightened and if you can’t just get them to sit down and listen to you and then say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right,’ (which isn’t going to happen very often) you just dismiss them.

[00:05:40] So the idea of freedom as knowing the truth, and the idea of freedom as protecting your autonomy, your right to do as you please, these both feed into polarization. That was my starting point.

[00:05:53] And so I came up with another idea of freedom, something I call Dialogic Freedom. It’s the whole idea is, you think about yourself, ‘As I become more free, I get more free, the better able I am to see from the perspectives of other people and to take interaction in a world that they share with me.’ So it’s very much, it’s an idea of freedom that’s dependent on the fact that we live among others.

[00:06:22] It’s not ‘Leave me alone to do as I please,’ or ‘I see the truth.’ It’s something different. And it involves this freedom to navigate the perspectives of others.

[00:06:31] I stole the idea of the dialogic—it’s a dialogue between us and others—from Mikhail Bakhtin, who lived during the Stalin era. And he said: When we speak to each other, it’s a two-sided thing. Before he said that, what the intellectuals were always saying was, ‘I get an idea in my head, I put it into words, I lob that idea to your head, you decode it, you put it in your head, and that’s called communication.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no. The meaning gets created right between us.’

[00:07:07] ‘The product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee.’ That’s the way he put it in a book he wrote.

[00:07:16] I want to illustrate this with one of my favorite moments from literature. How many of you have read The Iliad? I don’t want to wreck it for anybody who hasn’t read it. [audience laughing] But, you know, Troy burns, it’s kind of a sad tale of war.

[00:07:33] Achilles killed Priam’s son Hector a couple of days before, and has spent all his time going around the gates of Troy, flaunting the corpse by dragging it behind his horse and bumping the head on the bricks in the field or the dirt, and, you know, defiling the corpse. And Priam wants to bury his son. He wants to bury him. And so he has to get to Achilles to beg him to release the corpse.

[00:08:03] Well, Achilles is an angry guy. He could snap Priam’s neck like a twig if he pleased, or he could just lose control of himself and kill him for whatever reason. I mean, he’s an angry man, and so here’s Priam:

[00:08:17] He gets on his knees in front of Achilles, and he says, ‘I put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son.’

[00:08:26] Now, he has to play this very carefully, otherwise Achilles will get angry and kill him. So: anticipating how his listener thinks, anticipating how empathy can be created:

What Priam does is he gets Achilles to think about his own father at home, worrying about his son, not knowing whether his son is alive or dead, and then he gets him thinking about his father and the people around him who are trying to take over the lands because only an old man is in charge. He gets to thinking about how sad that father would be if his own son died, and he gets empathy going with Achilles.

[00:09:05] It’s a masterful, a masterful analysis of that, the two-sided nature of making a decision because indeed Achilles does decide to release the corpse.

[00:09:15] How many of you read The Inferno of Dante? Another great work. He’s going through hell interviewing people. That’s what The Inferno is all about. But they don’t all have to talk. They can’t all talk. And they don’t all choose to talk.

[00:09:27] Dante the Pilgrim calls to Paolo and Francesca, who are fused together because they’re in the fifth circle of Hell, devoted to lust. He says to them, ‘Oh wearied souls, come speak with us.’ Francesca responds because she is receptive to Dante’s compassion because he calls them, ‘Oh wearied souls.’ He’s showing some empathy toward them.

She responds, she said, ‘For pitying us in this, our evil end.’ She hears the pity in his voice. And so there’s a two-sidedness before she agrees to talk. It wouldn’t happen at all if they didn’t sense his empathy. So there’s this two-sidedness to the decision they make to come and talk to him.

[00:10:12] Two-sided is shorthand for many-sided, and this is a leap I want you to try to make here with me. We all answer not just to the person we’re talking with and the person we’re looking at and the one person who might be right here in front of us.

We are answering to the values that we hold, we answer to our friends, we answer to our family, we answer to the colleagues we work with, our religious traditions, our religious convictions—they are all important kind of advisors in our life and we take them into consideration when we go to make an important decision.

[00:10:50] And part of what I want to say about polarization is: If we look within ourselves and try to figure out the complexity of things that are entering into a particular position we take on a particular subject, we might be able to find things about it that we answer to, that actually are in common with people who disagree with us. They answer to some of the same things but they come to different conclusions.

[00:11:14] So we’ve got these unifying forces in our lives, the ideas and values that we hold dear, the various political narratives or patterns we see somewhere, but there’s fragmenting forces at the same time.

And this is important because polarization depends on constantly having that unifying force at the front to simplify everything and say, ‘If you’re with me you’re with me, if you’re against me,’ there’s an excess of unifying forces in the polarized mind.

[00:11:45] So, but if we can be aware of the fragmenting forces that are quite legitimate in our own thinking, this I think is a positive thing. It helps us become more free. So there might be competing ideas that even we entertain to some of our main ideas that we feel committed to.

[00:12:03] There certainly are all of those little events that happen every day. Every moment of every day is different from the moment before and not the same as any moment that will happen in any other day. So these events are unrepeatable. I mean, we might be happy, but we’re not happy in the same way. We might go out to take a run, but it won’t be exactly the same run we had before. Moment by moment, our lives are completely unique.

[00:12:30] And that’s kind of a force for chaos. It’s fun, but you can’t put it in a neat little box. The various forces for chaos in life are going to continue swirling about us, and we have to balance that. We have to balance those things all the time. And to pretend that life isn’t complex is a recipe for polarization.

[00:12:49] That is the first aspect of understanding dialogic freedom: Recognizing that we live in a world where we’re balancing forces between unity and chaos.

[00:12:59] This is the second aspect: We want to be able to navigate the perspectives of others. This is a really important thing to be able to do, to be able to see from other people’s perspectives.

[00:13:11] If we, as individual human beings, could always understand everyone we’re talking with, we could understand how they think, we could understand where they were coming from, we could understand how they would come to the conclusions they would come to, wouldn’t that be interesting?

[00:13:24] Oh, first we’re going to have a definition here. Dialogic freedom, a two-sided act chosen within a field of unifying and fragmenting forces among layers of knowing that are never final. Never final, You could never know enough about trying to see from the perspective of another human being.

[00:13:44] As I thought more about this, I realized just as there’s downsides to autonomy and enlightenment, guess what? There’s downsides to dialogic freedom and I think they’re important to think about.

[00:13:56] We’ll go back to my friend Mikhail Bakhtin first, he says avoid pure empathizing, which is pathological, an infection with another’s suffering. It’s essential that we be able to return unto ourselves, into ourselves, because guess what? If you just duplicate the other person’s suffering, you’re suffering too, and you haven’t been able to help. You’re just both messed up suffering people. And so he says, watch out, you got to be able to return to yourself.

[00:14:28] Dante, he is so persuaded by the charismatic Francesca who says, “Oh, we’ve suffered so much, ‘his brother killed us right when we were in the middle of having sex and we love each other.’ And he faints in empathy for them. He says, “E caddi come corpo morto cade.’ Italian’s so much better than English sometimes. ‘I fell like a dying body falls.’ He so empathetic toward them in their plight.

[00:15:03] And so when he starts Canto 6, the next canto, it says, ‘Al tornar de la mente, che si chiuse‘ and which means, ‘At the returning of my mind, which had closed.’ Think about that language. My mind had closed. So you’re feeling very empathetic but you’re only reduplicating their suffering. It could turn to a shutdown of your mind ’cause your critical facilities, which would be saying, how can I help, what can I do? What do they really need? You know, whatever. Your mind has shut down. So you’ve got to watch out for that.

[00:15:38] Milton wrote a fabulous epic called Paradise Lost. One of the greatest works of literature in English. Eve says to Satan, ‘Of this tree we may not taste nor touch, God so commanded and left that command, soul daughter of his voice, the rest we live law to ourselves, our reason is our law.’

[00:16:01] So say you’re a nefarious character, someone up to no good, and somebody says to you, ‘I’ll do whatever is reasonable.’ What’s that an open invitation for? Being exceedingly reasonable in a kind of manipulative sort of way, and it is a virtuosic performance of using reason to try to convince somebody to do something.

[00:16:24] The only way she could really resist him is to say, ‘Well, we’re told not to, and we’re not going to,’ do you know, that just doesn’t work with people with a lot of critical thinking skills. They’ll use those critical thinking skills and she has them in abundance.

[00:16:36] But we don’t have to look back to Satan to see manipulative charlatans. You know, you got to watch out for them and heaven forbid, you got to not be one of them. So the problem, if you are really good at dialogic freedom, if you’re really good at seeing from the perspective of others, you will be tempted to manipulate others and don’t.

[00:16:57] So we are at the mercy of this very polarized thinking right now and more so than ever. And I’m trying to say that if we can embrace dialogic freedom and a more nuanced sense of seeing from the perspectives of others and understanding the complexity of our own thoughts and theirs, that we will be happier and better citizens.

[00:17:22] So as I was looking around for people who had done interesting things, I came across the Public Conversations Project, which is now called Essential Partners. And you can go to those websites and find out more about them.

[00:17:36] I read a lot of their materials and I came up with two things that I thought were really, really intriguing when they have these conversations, what they have people talk about is two questions.

[00:17:50] First, what events or personal experience has shaped your views. The emphasis is not on, ‘These are the arguments in favor of my position, you should agree with me or go home,’ but rather, ‘I had this experience,’ and as the person talks about that experience, they get a better self-understanding, and as you listen to that experience, you get to know them. You get to empathize.

[00:18:11] We actually did this at the Register-Guard gathering. It was amazing, 150 people were talking in small groups for about 15 minutes, going through this experience.

[00:18:20] What if you were to ask this question: Do you have mixed feelings or uncertainties about your own perspective? We all have these pushes and pulls in our thinking and the better we understand them, the better able we are to talk with somebody else without it degenerating into a quarrel or just silence.

Honestly, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere trying to change anybody’s mind on any particular issue.

[00:18:44] Presenter: Todd Boyle remembers the late Sharon Schuman. The original recording is available on Todd’s YouTube channel.

Rewind with Todd Boyle is produced by John Q for Whole Community News, KEPW 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks community radio.