Understand Then Be Understood: The Origins
This publication is the intersection of two important literary works whose advice is sorely needed in today’s increasingly partisan world: Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Mary Louise Pratt’s article “Arts of the Contact Zone.” The title of the publication comes from Stephen Covey’s fifth habit: seek first to understand and then be understood. He believes that too often “We’re filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really understand what’s going on inside another human being” (240, emphasis mine). In order to communicate more effectively and empathetically, we must consider other people’s feelings and have courage to express our own. In Covey words, “seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage. [Achieving an end result where both parties win] requires a high degree of both” (255).
NYU Professor Mary Louise Pratt believes, like Covey, in the importance of understanding and experiencing other points of view, albeit using a vastly different methodology. While teaching at Stanford in the late 1980s she and several colleagues set out to recreate the required Western Civilization course that wasn’t functioning as well as many professors would have liked. After much debate, the group settled on a course entitled Culture Ideas, Values. The professors abandoned the traditional structure of a lecturer-led class to one where students were challenged to engage and participate. Instead of the teacher trying to unify the world of the classroom by means of a monologue that rang equally true for all, students read texts that had specific historical relationships with their exact pasts. Pratt explains:
“The very nature of the course put ideas and identities on the line. All the students in the class had the experience, for example, of hearing their culture discussed and objectified in ways that horrified them; all the students saw their roots traced back to legacies of both glory and shame; all the students experienced face-to-face the ignorance and incomprehension, and occasionally the hostility, of others. In the absence of community values and the hope of synthesis, it was easy to forget the positives; the fact, for instance, that kinds of marginalization once taken for granted were gone. Virtually every student was having the experience of seeing the world described with him or her in it. Along with rage, incomprehension, and pain there were exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom–the joys of the contact zone. The sufferings and revelations were, at different moments to be sure, experienced by every student. No one was excluded, and no one was safe.”
As difficult as the class may have been at times, Pratt and her colleagues described the experiment as a success. Pratt says that the result was “the most exciting teaching we had ever done, and also the hardest.”
It is with these two paradigms in mind that I created this publication. Though it might seem contradictory to both ardently challenge opposing belief structures and still show genuine empathy towards those belief structures, I believe both can be done from the right frame of mind. There are enough things in this world that isolate us from one another: our political ideologies, our religious beliefs, our ethnicity, our standard of living, our personal biases and cultural sympathies, even the sports teams we follow. We tend to forget that we are all part of the same human family; we tend to forget we are all children of God.
As a writer and a critical thinker I am very good at asking questions and getting people (including myself) to challenge paradigms and orthodoxies. As a human being, I am pretty terrible at empathetically understanding another’s point of view before coming to conclusions or jumping in with my two cents. And so when I claim to have goals for this publication, I am doing so with the understanding that I am just as flawed as the next man or woman. I do not claim to have all the answers to the truths we are all seeking after. I plan to learn and grow as the next honest seeker of truth. And to that end, I am dedicated to making a space that is as as good-natured and thought-provoking as possible to achieve the maximum results.
To those who visit, post and publish to this publication: I encourage you to focus on the ties that bind rather than the things that separate us. I encourage you to find common ground with those from vastly different backgrounds and belief structures. I want believers to come together with atheists, liberals to come together with conservatives, pro-life activists to come together with pro-choice activists. I want #bluelivesmatter to listen to #blacklivesmatter and vice versa. I want all lives to really matter. I want Standing Rock supporters to learn about the moral case for fossil fuels, and for Big Oil to learn that land is much more than just land. I want VA reformers, environmentalists, climate change deniers, occupy types, feminists, anarchists, socialists and libertarians alike to learn to love their fellow men and women and not shy away from answering tough questions. I want each of us to have personal introspection, to open our hearts and find ways to come together on the issues. I want empathy to replace animosity. I want us to move past our differences and really reconcile with one another. I want us to experience the joys and triumphs of the contact zone.
From its inception the topics for this publication have centered on the 2016 Presidential election. As we move into 2017, the topics will be more wide ranging based on reader interest and board oversight: topics that you go back and forth on in your own head, topics we often struggle with ourselves, topics that are big in the news, or obscure topics that hardly see the light of day. But more important than the topics are how the publication will approach the topics.
All posts and publications will be inquisitive, empathetic and as open-minded as possible, while still being challenging to read. We will not be an echo chamber and we will not hide our biases, but that will not stop us from loving one another. For example, I have many friends on opposing sides of the ideological spectrum. I might disagree with them on many topics, but I also love them dearly. Maybe many of you are in the same situation. Maybe not. Whatever the case, the goal of Project November 9th will be to showcase the topics of our day from as many angles as possible, thus engaging (through mutual understanding and edifying conversation)as many readers and thinkers as we can.
Those who post and publish should feel free to comment and question to their heart’s content, but should first strive to show empathy for a point of view somewhat opposite from the their own. (This publication does not require sympathy or necessarily agreement, but it does require civility and empathy. There is an important difference.) Concessions need not be long, but they should be genuine. The goal of a posting should not be to shout someone down, prove someone wrong or win the argument. The goal should be to foster understanding and begin to build bridges where there are currently chasms of misunderstanding. God knows this world needs more humanity and those who post and comment on this site are going to make it happen.
