Dialogue will bring new dimensions to our post-pandemic recovery
COVID-19 has brought up an unprecedented global collective experience that is challenging the way we live.
The need and demand to revisit and rebuild our modus operandi in terms of a new economy and society is palpable.
How can we ensure that a post COVID-19 scenario can trigger the best of humanity and activate resilience to transition into a world where humans and nature can thrive? How can we shape a post-crisis scenario with a fresh narrative?
Moments before the outbreak, we found ourselves in a reality where technological innovations had never been so fast. The market had never been so global, human beings had never been so interconnected, and the abundance of information had never been so much at our fingertips.
We’d never been so hyper.
The whole world had never been so close, yet we had never been so strangely lost. We were already seeing signals that the system was breaking down — for some, climate change and increasing polarization were a symptom of a fractured society hurtling towards growth at any cost.
In 1971, the philosopher and literary critic George Steiner identified flaws in the fabric of Western culture from which he thought immense dehumanization with catastrophic consequences would occur.
One of the fundamental cracks has its origin in an analysis of human relations based on Hegel’s theory that “self-identity is defined against the identity of others”, resulting in a “trend that aims to pulverize the rival”.
How do we truly perceive one another? According to Steiner, without structure and guidance humanity can slip between the cracks.
In Europe, in 1789 a guiding religious structure was desecrated in Paris with the French Revolution, and in 1989 a structure based on ideologies collapsed together with the Berlin wall. Could it be that without further collective reference points, we were left unstructured in a hyper modern era of great disorientation?
According to French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky, “We have never had so much information, nor so much accessibility, and yet there has never been less understanding of the world or between us, human beings.”
Now, in a post-COVID scenario, questions arise.
How will the future look? How to guide ourselves — individually and collectively? How do we begin to understand each other? How can we construct a coherent culture together?
In order to observe the origins of cultural composition, we can look at one of the canonical symbols of culture: The Tower of Babel.
According to the story, humanity was uniform, speaking a single language. Construction begins on a city and a tower, high enough to reach the sky. Watching the city and the tower, God mixes their voices so that they cannot understand each other and disperses them all over the world.
Babel means in Hebrew “to confuse”. Confusing in turn means “taking one thing for another”, “making it impossible to distinguish”. Could there be, in the intention to “un-confuse”, an orientation to turn the tower around and exit this pandemonium?
In this process, could we once again better understand each other?
The relevance of exploring new forms of a humane dialogue is current and challenging.
Most of us, in a conversation, do not listen with the intention of understanding — we listen with the intention of responding.
We urgently need to exercise understanding, learn to listen, suspend judgement. How can we practice a radically new vision of dialogue — a process that could collectively “un-confuse” us all?
A dialogue is not a discussion. The etymological roots of discussion are in “to shake apart” — to break things up into tiny pieces so they can be carefully analyzed by different points of view, in order to enable a ping-pong of arguments, where the goal is to win the game.
Dialogue, which comes from the ancient Greek [διάλογος, dialogos], means “through the word” — symbolizing a collective attempt to create meaning, where every input is of importance, the need to defend an opinion is suspended, since if one wins everybody wins.
The dialogue process proposed by one of Physics greatest scientists, David Bohm, is embedded in a distinctive relationship between individual and thought. For Bohm, thought cannot be appropriated by an individual. What people take to be their own personal thinking is actually a huge flow in the history of collective thought.
In the last years of his life Bohm developed the technique that became known as Bohm Dialogue — “a stream of meaning flowing among and through and between us, making the entire thought process visible”.
Instead of imposing our opinion on others, we invite others to add new dimensions to what we are thinking about.
For some it might be extremely challenging to enter a space where there is no agenda nor a goal in sight, but what if, it is precisely in this freedom that thought flows towards its highest collective potential?
How courageous are we to dare and playfully experiment with new forms of understanding each other? How ripe are we to transform culture by activating small groups of people willing to start?
Are we ready to step into the unknown and collectively move beyond disorientation, past cultural decomposition and on the path to “un-confusing” one another?
The first Dialogues for Action from Moments Matter, supported by EIT-Climate KIC, takes place on the 26th and 27th June. See the full programme of dialogues and ways to participate here.
