13. Alan Alda

Alan Alda, the famous television and movie star, was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Screen Actors Guild. He is remembered by many television viewers as Hawkeye in the long-running series, M*A*S*H. The series was about an Army surgical hospital during the Korean War. One hundred six million viewers watched the series finale, and Stephanie Nolasco’s profile of Alda appeared on Fox News. Some things about Alda that Nolasco reported sound like clues for being the people we are created to be.

In Post #7 entitled Dialogue, I wrote this statement: “I view dialogue to be a seminal clue to discovering and living with liberating truth.” When I read Nolasco’s profile, I saw that Alda had launched a podcast “to encourage meaningful conversations that lead to better understanding of one another.”

Alda said that he and his M*A*S*H cast mates were always determined to better understand one another over the years. They spent time chatting and kidding one another before each show. Those friendly exchanges helped the cast members to connect when the cameras were turned on. “And it turned our performances into something much more alive than it would have been otherwise. It was the essence of the show.”

Alda’s podcast, Clear+Vivid, with the subtitle “Relating is Everything,” includes conversations about connecting and communicating. “Clear and Vivid® is a series of Alan Alda’s spirited conversations with people who know how hard it is, and yet how good it feels, to really connect with other people — whether it’s one person, an audience or a whole country. … With his unique blend of humor and insight, Alda explores the ways we can connect better with one another in every area of our lives. Something we need now more than ever.”

A recent podcast included this insight: “Jaron Lanier was there at the beginning. He helped build the Internet, and he was one of the creators of virtual reality. But now, he thinks something has gone very wrong with our new digital world. Actually, something very, very wrong. And this at a time when we communicate with one another, it seems, more through social media than actual socialization.”

Alan: “Our conversations on this podcast often touch on empathy because it seems to me that’s central to good communication and to good relations with other people. I was interested to see in your book that you feel that these platforms that we’re talking about break down the ability, they inhibit the ability of people to have empathy for one another. Am I right about that?”

Jaron: “The problem is when everybody is being given different experience feeds and those feeds are calculated to certain ends or try to manipulate them, then it follows by definition that people will have less common experiences with each other.”

Alan: “We don’t hear from anybody who doesn’t share our point of view so we don’t have the opportunity to take on the point of view of another person, which is one of the functions of empathy.”

Jaron: “We don’t know what the other people have experienced. We haven’t been in a common environment and perceived it differently. We’ve been in different environments that are invisible to each other. That circumstance makes it exceptionally hard to gain a sense of sympathy or empathy for anyone else. … You can reach people through neutral email systems all kinds of ways that aren’t part of the manipulation engine.”

Alan: “Is there anyone for whom you just can’t feel empathy?”

Jaron: “There are horrible people in the world. There are people who were appalling who we just have to exclude from our empathy, Nazis and so on. The problem is they’re getting to be enough of them that we risk narrowing the world to the point where we can’t do anything with it if we exclude them, so it’s hard, it’s really hard. This is what I keep on coming back to if our technologies are bringing out the worst in people. I think if we can try to not bring out the worst in people at least we can make that question less difficult to answer.”

Q: To what extent do you feel that your use of social media reduces your experience of empathetic dialogue?