Dialogue Is a Search for Peace
A Meditation on Conflict, Polarization, and the Costs of One-Sided Commitments
“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” ~ Baruch Spinoza
“If you want peace, work for justice.” ~ Paul VI
“We can hold a conflictive view of reality without making conflict the ultimate shape of that reality.” ~ Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S.
In hard times, we must be very clear about what dialogue is and is not.
Dialogue is the foundation of political reality and politics itself. Politics is a shared, discursive commitment to address conflicts without any kind of violence, collaborating through discourse to build the world up rather than engage in violence that burns the world down when we experience conflict. Politics results from dialogue, a shared commitment to speak with and listen to one another. Without dialogue, civilization itself begins to unravel because a civilization, after all, only is a collaborative project that a human community undertakes together by means of politics.
The recurring motif of that brief description of dialogue and its relationship to our world is that dialogue must be something shared. Dialogue presumes commitments that are mutual and an activity that is collaborative. When such commitments are absent, dialogue is not possible. In fact, a one-sided commitment to dialogue can be profoundly dangerous.
Hard times are those times in which the presumption of a shared commitment is less justified than presuming commitments to dialogue are not shared. Easy times are not times when there is no conflict or injustice. Such times never have existed. Rather, easy times are the times in which the social expectation of a shared commitment has operative power because shame and stigma can attach to behaviors that are selfish, one-sided, and contrary to dialogue. Shame and stigma do not always attach to those behaviors in easy times. Yet it is more likely in easy times than in hard times that they will.
In hard times it is important to know that one-sided dialogue is not safe, and the commitment to dialogue is not furthered by one-sided dialogue. In hard times, we must do the work that precedes dialogue. We must claim the social space for dialogue where shame and stigma can be attached to those who refuse to share the commitment to dialogue. In hard times, to create a dialogical climate and return to easy times, we must evict the refusal to dialogue. In such times, our commitment to dialogue must bring us to conflict. Sometimes it must bring us to unpleasant, uncomfortable conflict.
These reflections are spurred by events.
This week has brought the inevitable denouement that followed the CNN town hall event with Donald Trump: Chris Licht has been sacked, he no longer is the chair and chief executive of CNN. The firing had a sort of awful inevitability that began with Licht’s early pledges to “move CNN toward the ideological center.”
The political center is a problematic concept. Its orientation is not actually to politics, but to partisanship. Politics has no center. Politics is oriented toward a particular community, the reality of that community’s shared experience and the dialogue among its members. In politics we would speak of a consensus, the nearest a community can come to an agreement about facts and the community’s sense of how to respond to those facts. The center that more commonly we speak about is a middle position between two sides. That notion can be innocuous and even helpful in easy times when discourse can presume shared commitments to dialogue. The center, in such a case, generally would reflect a consensus view. In hard times no such consensus concerning facts and responses to facts is possible, and the notion of a center becomes destructive. In such cases, not only do selfish and one-sided people pollute the possibility of consensus with disinformation and falsehood, but extremism itself distorts the sense of where the center is. Seeking the center between the Democratic and Republican parties of 1960 is a much different notion from seeking the center between the Republican Party of 1960 and the Socialist Party of 1900. The center will lie in a different place. When one party has been overwhelmed by extremism, we are in hard times where the center may not be a desirable position. Such times call for an off-center position with hopes to recover an orientation to a factually-informed consensus.
This was the very problem that Chris Licht faced and failed to solve. A damning profile in The Atlantic illustrated how unprepared Licht was to face the catastrophe that haunts CNN and the nation. Licht said in that profile that—
I think [Trump] changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it. And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.
This is heart of the matter, the hope to find an objective center in an extreme situation. Licht is correct that Trump caught the media and everyone else off guard. Even now we are improvising our responses to Trump’s extremism all across our political community. For all of the sensibly correct things that Licht says in that profile about the importance of facts and truth, the question remains whether a center can be claimed at all while the whole spectrum has been tilted toward its edge.
“Being in the game with the jersey” is the problem for Licht. It should be. The sort of quasi-advocacy he’s talking about is alien to the canons of journalism (which were crafted during easy times). It is not dissimilar to problems I have faced as a professor of political science. In journalism as much as in teaching, it is urgently important to avoid every appearance of partisanship. To favor one partisan perspective or another is to fail in a vocation defined by allegiance to dispassionate objectivity in public affairs. Yet, in hard times, earnest dependence on a shared center gives advantages to the disinformers and liars who dwell at the fringes. The journalist as much as the professor (I know) must face the hard truth that the center is a poor substitute for the deeper demand of their professions. In hard times, we must risk appearing partisan when we defend what is political. The center always is a false idol even in easy times because the center is partisan in its orientation. The falseness of claiming the center as a way to avoid partisan bias whether in easy times or in hard times snaps into focus.
The journalist and the professor always are “in the game with the jersey.” The jersey has vertical, black-and-white stripes. Some fouls are so gross that a side must be chosen. Some fouls forfeit a right to play the game at all. And, someone has to say that.
It is not as easy as it sounds. The evidence says CNN still has a hard time with this challenge. CNN has not embraced yet the uncomfortable need to join the conflict.
On May 28, the Holy See published “Towards Full Presence: A Pastoral Reflection on Social Media.” The document from the Dicastery for Communication expresses its hope that Christians can be “loving neighbors” who have “peaceful, meaningful, and caring relationships on social media.” Yet the Dicastery is alert to the “pitfalls” of “indifference, polarization, and extremism” that emerge because social media most typically presents a user with a “filtered bubble.” “Towards Full Presence” invites Catholics to “co-create healthier online experiences where people can engage in conversations and overcome disagreements with a spirit of mutual listening.”
And we should say that, at face value and as an abstract matter, that is as true as it is to say that journalists and professors should resist every impulse to present themselves as partisans. There is every reason to say that believers bear a responsibility to be partners in dialogue in social media spaces as much as anywhere else. Utilizing the Parable of the Beaten Man (Lk 10:29-37) much as Pope Francis’s wonderful encyclical on social friendship, Fratelli Tutti, does, “Toward Full Presence” reminds us to be like the Samaritan in the parable who “breaks down the ‘social divide.’”
Yet it seems important also to say that breaking down the social divide is not the extent of the Samaritan stranger’s actions. That breaking of the divide has priority in the story in a sense of chronology, but not in a moral sense. In a moral sense, the Samaritan’s tending to the vulnerable person has priority and it is the point of the story. “Towards Full Presence” does not engage this dimension directly. The document tells us that—
Social action mobilized through social media has had a greater impact and is often more effective in transforming the world than a superficial debate regarding ideas. The debates are usually limited by the number of characters allowed and the speed with which people react to comments, not to mention emotional ad hominem arguments – attacks directed at the person speaking, regardless of the overall topic being discussed.
We are reminded of how often social media conversations descend into ugliness and to be alert when we encounter the occasional beaten man along the side of the road while we are online. Yet the document does not directly engage the problem of the persons who created the situation that revealed the kind Samaritan’s quality of love and generousness. “Towards Full Presence” does not address the problem of ‘the robbers’ on social media, those who will not join dialogue and whose actions frustrate the possibility of relationships. Indeed, “Towards Full Presence” somewhat evades this problem, calling all users to avoid “polemical and superficial, and thus divisive, communication” as though any of us might be robbers. Indeed, we all are sinners and each of us makes mistakes. Yet there is another category of persons at work online and in the world for whom dialogue is not a possibility. They are invincibly committed to polarization and division, and such persons set the stage for the parable as much as they set the pace of the discourse online.
“How can we help heal a toxic digital environment? How can we promote hospitality and opportunities for healing and reconciliation?” These are necessary questions that “Towards Full Presence” asks. Yet to ask them in the climate of social media, we must recognize that parables, like analogies, at some point break down. They cease to be helpful. When the Samaritan encounters the beaten man along the side of the road, he responds with charity and love to care for the vulnerable person. What if the Samaritan had come along earlier, during the robbery and the beating? What would have been the loving response in that situation?
Quite often because of the quicker pace of events in social media spaces, that is the more apt question. It is the circumstance we face most often. And, how should a call to “healing and reconciliation” seem to us in the moment when a vulnerable person is being attacked? What is our Christian duty in that moment? It is not clear that the answer of “Towards Full Presence”—”react with silence so as not to dignify this false dynamic”—would have been good advice to give to the Samaritan encountering the beating in progress. The faith that calls us to charity and love becomes complex in those moments, and our Tradition has struggled with that complexity since the beginning. Augustine permits us to tell a lie if it will save a life. Augustine and Aquinas tell us we may kill in defense of others (“Those who wage war justly aim at peace”). These situations do not reflect the Christian ideal. Rather, they reflect a response in love to circumstances where healing and reconciliation are not yet appropriate.
In the final analysis, the protagonist of the parable is not the Samaritan. The way we name that parable ordinarily conceals that fact. The beaten man is the focus of the story because the story is here to tell us so. It is not for the Samaritan (or the Dicastery for Communications) to tell us when is the time for healing. It is the victim alone who knows when the time for reconciliation has come.
The difficult spaces where the Christian ideal meets the stubborn realities of life in this world always have preoccupied me. Twenty years ago I wrote about Dietrich Boenhoffer and his moral struggle still to defend pacifism while committing himself to kill Hitler. For most of us, the stakes will never be so high. Our struggle for peace in the world will take a more mundane shape.
I include myself. Throughout my career I have struggled to be committed to dialogue in these increasingly hard times, navigating the treacherous waters where insisting on dialogue and everything dialogue means more and more often risked presenting me outside the center and giving an impression of partisanship. Of course, that isn’t even the difficult part. The difficult part is insisting that way on dialogue while also preserving enough humility not to forget I may not always have the full perspective or the right answer. The danger of hard times is that I might become so used to meeting others who aren’t interested in dialogue that I might forget to approach others as though they are interested in dialogue, as though only I am somehow am the hero of s story of dialogue in public discourse.
I like the way that “Towards Full Presence” describes this—these problems demand “a contemplative approach.” Our engagement in discourse not only should reflect our spiritual practice, but it is a spiritual practice, itself. When we encounter one another we also encounter ourselves. It is a test each time that asks us whether we are able to put the other on the same level with ourselves, really listen and hear them. Can we engage with humility and gentleness? Do we love the other so much as to begin by presuming their good intentions, hearing what they say in its best construction rather than scouring it for weaknesses we can exploit?
And yet, there are boundaries. There are times when we must defend a side, when we must defend the vulnerable, when our commitment to peace must take precedence over our desire for dialogue. Dialogue is a search for peace. Yet, peace is not an absence of conflict. Peace has a content, which is justice. When we say that we value dialogue, really we value peace. A commitment to dialogue that overlooks the preference we always must have for the vulnerable and the marginal, for the whole community and every member, or the empirical facts and truth of a situation cannot really be dialogue at all because it is not at the service of true peace. Conflict is not the opposite of peace. And peace is dialogue’s purpose. When we engage in conflict at the service of peace, we are engaged in a peaceful act.
This is not easy. In fact, it is dangerous. More than enough conflict has been justified in the name of peace for us to be certain that this is treacherous business. And yet, it remains true that conflict does not exclude peacefulness when our commitment to peace is a commitment to justice. I am grateful to have known and been mentored by the late Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S., who wrote so clearly and helpfully about how deeply this challenge should reach into our Christian lives—
Church leaders, who are concerned about preserving the unity of the church, are keenly aware of how damaging divisiveness is to the church as the body of Christ. While that concern for patient attention to all and to inclusion is important, it cannot be used as an excuse for trucking with the narrative of the lie. The church must stand for truth in its entirety and with all its uncomfortableness if it is to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The entirety of the truth sometimes will bring us to conflict. It cannot be avoided here in the world where we find ourselves. Our reality is conflictive. It is for us to be conflictive when our reality demands that we engage a conflict in the name of peace so that dialogue may become possible. Conflict will come, but we must be determined that conflict will not have the last word.
So then what can guide us as we encounter conflicts in church life and in social life? How can I know that I am in fact engaging in a discourse or a conflict that aims at peace in its fullest sense? What can reassure me that I am building up the world with a spirit of dialogue that searches for peace, not a variety of violence that burns the world down?
It seems to me, first, we must be honest with ourselves about why we are in the conversation at all. What are my commitments? What are the things I am not willing to say?
Second, we must retain an uncompromising attachment to the dignity of the person or persons with whom we are engaged. At the first instinct to use language that demeans another person or reduces what they are saying to the worst possibility, then we know our intentions are compromised and we must withdraw.
Finally, we must constantly entertain the possibility that we are wrong in what we are saying and about our own intentions at every step. This is not to say we must engage in self-doubt. Self-doubt is unproductive, and in many cases it would be unjustified. Especially for those of us who have been engaged a long time in this sort of search for dialogue, it is possible to feel sure about some things if only because we have been in the same conversation so many times: like teaching, we encounter the same questions and we can feel confident about what we say. Yet it remains that case that even the material we teach for a long time changes and the teacher must keep current. Even our practiced confidence must leave ample space for humility. The humility to know that the world is bigger than we imagine and always changing is the humility that is required.
Those guideposts seem necessary, and one more thing: we certainly will fail. We must know we certainly will fail. We will fail to convince people uninterested in dialogue to change their minds, and we will fail sometimes ourselves to engage an authentic search for peace. Yet failure does not license us to stop trying. Failure is an option, always. To end the search for peace never is an option.
A mistaken notion about dialogue and peace can cause us to withhold ourselves from conflict. Often the call to civility or respectfulness can be heard telling us that we should not be parties to conflict at all. Notions about civility and respect nurtured in easy times are false teachers who fail to prepare us well for the intimate moral challenges of hard times. We must be more cleareyed, more sober, and, as Bonhoeffer suggested, “live in the rough and tumble of the world” while holding fast to what we believe knowing we will make mistakes.
Dialogue is a search for peace that cannot presume peace will be discovered. Peace is eschatological—it cannot exist in our world, and yet our constant obligation is to engage in the search for peace that makes peace as real as it can be in this world. There will be many occasions that oblige us to ‘put on a jersey and get into the game,’ to act as parties in conflicts. In hard times, those occasions may be more numerous. They even may be nearly-constant. The obligation does not change. Only by accepting that obligation each time it arises can we play our part to call others back to what is shared, the spirit of dialogue that upholds our social life. Believers especially must respond to this obligation.
In hard times especially, conflict is our calling as citizens and believers. Only if we embark on conflict willingly and mindfully can we give voice to the values that our faith and our civilization prize most, asserting the importance of what is shared by all for all and with all.