Intelligent conversation
How can a conversation grow in intelligence? What might that mean for a small group of people or a family? What satisfactions does an intelligent conversation give?
I spent a lot of my life marvelling that other people had informed opinions about important matters. I concluded that they were a different sort of species. I felt excluded by something that I didn’t even understand. How I might step into the charmed circle was not even a question for me. And I don’t know what changed.
On my degree course (in Geology!) I remember a particular tutorial where I had to prepare a five-minute presentation on some fossil species. Not my forte, neither the fossils nor the presentation. Panicking somewhat, I presented what I knew and my presentation lasted fifty-five minutes: you could have knocked me down with a feather.
Much, much later I did a little university lecturing, in Business for IT. Two hundred and fifty unmotivated students for two hours, many of them Kuwaitis on government scholarships. What transpired was the same lesson: I found I could entertain on a random subject for as long as required and the few keen students were interested in what I had to say.
In a rather different genre, I have done three father-of-the-bride wedding speeches and a funeral eulogy. The issue is more that I go off-piste with a direction that I suddenly find interesting and forget many points that I previously found to be important. I quite like props for engaging attention: I have used a jar of chutney and a block of cheddar (can you guess?) and I have donned a large yellow polythene sheet designed to keep race bikes dry.
On what used to be home turf, giving an hour’s talk about something at SCiO, I took to deliberately not using either notes or the dreaded PowerPoint — for the terror and joy of finding out what I needed to say. The weirdest surprise was to find myself talking repeatedly about the fairies at the bottom of the garden and noticing that I looked at the same old geezer every time I did!
All those incredibly unimpressive anecdotes are there to try to deflect the notion that an intelligent conversation is somehow structured and planned, that it deals in an orderly way with its subject matter, or even that its subject matter is obvious and identifiable. Those things I find decidedly unintelligent, and to use a word we lit on before, plonky.
The issue I want to sneak up on is that we need to take issues by surprise. The more we inhabit a safe and understood world, the less intelligent our conversation will be, the more likely we are to retread old ground, to deepen unhelpful ruts in our thinking.
Here is Jeffery Shampnois:
The same relentless energy driving a toddler in its Terrible Twos still drives that voice in my head. However, when I see a toddler, I know I’m in the presence of a genius, albeit a naïve one. It’s not the size of the intellect, but the velocity of learning that describes its intelligence. I, on the other hand, tend to move in well-worn circles, constrained by prejudice and vested interest. I’ve learned to “circle the wagons”, so to speak, around particular conclusions.
Co-creation of reality in New Thought
We have said again and again in these blog pieces that we are not individuals. Of course, if we were truly individuals with a disjunction between our thought about the world and world itself, conversation of any sort would be extremely difficult. But rather we experience thoughts dropping into our consciousness and we don’t know whose they are.[1] We swim in a sea of social understandings that we can neither escape from nor fully master.
There is an exercise I used to do, described by Kuhlewind. You decide on a mundane object — I chose a wine bottle. For five minutes, you observe new thoughts about the object appear in your mind. It seems impossible that there is so much to think. Then, the same object the next day, and more new thoughts. I did a month with no sign of slowing down of the flow. We are not individuals and neither are we our thoughts.
Conversation must have an element of play. It must create realities as part of the conversation, as experimental gambits. Children of six readily inhabit “imaginary” worlds that we find strange: the invisible friend, the magical abilities, the complex rules of evolving games. We are apt to call this childish and dismiss its foundational aspects. Note that all reality comes about in the same way, but some of it is sanctioned by authority figures as fully grown-up.
The implied hypothetical “what if the world worked like this?” needs to be present if we are to take our own stuckness and stodginess by surprise. The sheer energising nature of an intelligent conversation comes when we let go of the socially agreed reality and allow something else to be co-created. We either become like poor schoolteachers, full of answers, or we become like challenging schoolkids who know never to accept those answers, simply because they are boring.
My pet hates in this dimension are: petty bureaucrats like bank managers, for whom the rules are everything; and economists who believe the world can be reduced to choices about stuff. We live next door to two economists with two bright kids, but intelligent conversations among them do not happen. There are interminable negotiations about the rules of whatever game is being played, negotiations that are quite imaginative, but the whole exercise is sterile.
There is explicit, spoken conversation and there are more intuitive mental exchanges. There are many people in the world with whom in the right time and place I can exchange thoughts without speech. This is more important than it may seem at first sight, because in the sudden recognition of a reality that has been co-created, there is a pre-conception to support the perception, and that pre-conception has been shared, probably out of consciousness.
I’ve made the entirely unconscious transition from wanting to be the sort of person who had informed opinions about things to being an avid participant in all sorts of conversations including intelligent ones. What can we say about a process that takes a group of people from talking endless platitudes at each other to playfully co-creating their reality?
In the discipline of improvised theatre, ‘improv’, spontaneous imaginative response is developed. It works best when the actors give their assent to the developing theme. One of the first rules of improv is to accept the ‘gifts’ that others offer into the scene. Arguing and trying to shape the theme results in unconvincing dialogue and relationships that are not engaging. Just as in Kuhlewind’s exercise, our thoughts are explicitly not our own, in improv we also suppress our conscious need to control.[2]
And just like the improbable endless supply of thoughts, the subject matter for improv is infinite in an unlikely way. Instead of feeling that I have limited information about a narrow range of topics and staying within the comfort zone of subjects that are at least a little known and understood, we can in practice become, for the duration, quite other people with quite distinct concerns.
Let’s be very specific here. The thing that kills conversation fastest is spending your time thinking what you are going to say next, with an eye of course on how people might respond to that. You are playing snooker, not having a conversation at all. To be the witty conversation partner that you might aspire to be, you have to let go of your sense of who you are. Of course, thinking that you must not think of what to say next is just as bad, if not worse.
Two steps to the edge of the known universe
Hang on, you say. I know intelligent conversation is its own joy, but isn’t it a bit self-indulgent? Isn’t the real cutting edge of thinking and discussing somewhere else, with high paid professionals and academic intellectuals? Well here’s a thing: no, it isn’t, not in my experience. I have found it is usually two steps to the edge of the known universe, to the farthest extremes of what we think we know and what we know we think.
I even think there is a reason for that. People who are paid to think and explore, are paid on the proposition that what they discover can be monetised. All those people doing trials of different diets have a common flaw: they can only succeed by finding something that people will pay for: either patients or food companies selling to patients for instance. All those people doing drugs trials for pharmaceutical companies with never do trials that show that the drugs are not needed if lifestyle changes are made. The whole world of thought has been thoroughly subverted and corrupted into looking for solutions that can be sold.
Which leaves people interested in having an intelligent conversation in an enviable position. All the work spotting the thinking mistakes and finding the obvious solutions to the conundrums of modern living are sitting there waiting to be noticed. All the ownership of knowledge by frankly awful human beings is there to be punctured and made fun of. A world of thinking liberation awaits just around the corner. Exploration really is fun and so rewarding.
Love actually
When you are in love with someone, everything they say is fascinating. Everything is a revelation and a source of new interest in new things. The world becomes distinctly larger and fresher and more inviting. It is almost a precondition of intelligent conversation that we love our conversation partners in that selfless way. Love that is even remotely controlling does not work. If we want to improve our loved ones, we are lost.
It is even the case that being in a landscape we love and with animals we love is liberating of our intelligence. I think of that as the heart swelling and finding a way to expression that other people want to respond to. A good walk in a great place is as close to a recipe for conversation as I am prepared to go. I have had conversations so intense that I seem hardly to notice where I am, but I think that is not a good description. I think the magic of place is still doing its work.
Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
Anne Truitt
Growing
A conversation grows over the hours, days, months and years given to it. It is the very model of something that cannot remain what it is, but is ceaselessly transformed. With a very small number of my colleagues I can trace conversations over many years that have more energy now than ever.
Similarly, a conversation that is loaded with expectations often runs into the sand, becomes less and less engaging or illuminating. It seems never to get the air it needs to breathe. It may have energy but it is not intelligent: it doesn’t grow.
This week my extended family, three generations, will meet up with another such for a few days camping. An event that has been at least attempted once a year for many years. There are many many (m times n) conversations embedded in that. They will take off effortlessly the way they always do and cover some weighty matters. My opposite number Peter, so to speak, sat opposite me at dinner our first night in college and events have transpired to throw us together. It would be a reasonable description to say that some conversation needed to happen through us.
[1] There’s a phenomenon in the restaurant business in which people will tend to order the same dishes as other patrons, while believing that they’ve exercised independence of choice. Think on this the next time that a restaurant tells you that they’ve run out of a particular thing; it may not be down to the supply chain!
[2] Indeed, the desire to plan and control breaks the scene. Whatever notion you preconceive will be wrong and out of place in the moment. Improv flows because it must.
