“What is Dialogue” video series: part 3

Today we release part 3 of our video series on dialogue.  Xenia dialogue fellows, community leaders, and friends of Xenia take up the question: what is dialogue, and how can it change the way we interact with each other?

Reflections On Help and Service.

At the Xenia Institute’s Fifth Annual Sam Matthews Social Justice Award Banquet, Commissioner Lisa Schmidt, of the Norman Human Rights Commission, gave a fascinating keynote address over the difference between help and service.

She began with a quote by Dr. Rachel Naomi Reman M.D.:

When you help you see life as weak, when you fix you see life as broken, when you serve you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego and service the work of the soul.

Commissioner Schmidt went on to discuss how the difference between helping and serving is one of intention and relation with others:

Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality, it is not a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to help those of lesser strength.

I found this to be an amazing distinction and immediately starting reflecting on how help and service are used is realms such as the non-for-profit sector or foreign aid programs. For example, like many soon-to-be collage graduates, I hope to volunteer with the Peace Corps and serve in another country for 2 years working on development projects. Notice the term “serve”. I found interesting that Peace Corp recruitment focuses on the word “service”. Initially I thought it was an attempt to appeal to the American patriotic spirit à la military terminology, but now I see it in a different light. Perhaps someone in the Peace Corp advertising department read Dr. Remen’s work. More likely they learned it from hard experience by going into communities and realizing that the people didn’t want “help” but rather partnership.

At a discussion led by Ghanaian activist Franciska Issaka, which I was fortunate enought to attend,  she at one point said that that members of her community love when international volunteers come to work with them, but they dislike when people come to direct or guide them. Looking back on this remark I now see how it exemplifies this distinction between help and service. One is a situation of equality where all are working together while the other is a situation of an inherent inequality between those charge and those in need–take this too far and it begins to smack of  Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden“.

Please understand that no one is saying that helping others is a bad thing, simply that you must be aware of how your aid and intentions are perceived by those you aid (and by yourself). Helping someone get out of a burning car, helping someone cross the street, helping someone figure out how to use a computer. It is not bad to offer your help, indeed sometimes you might think it necessary for the safety of the other. But in doing so you are placing yourself in a position of authority, (i.e. I’m stronger, more knowledgeable, am in control, etc), which others might or might not appreciate—especially if they didn’t ask for your aid. As Commissioner Schmidt said:

People can feel this inequality and when you help you can inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them. We may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity, and wholeness.

So what does it mean to serve someone instead of help them? When you serve you are relating all that you are, (strengths, weaknesses, dreams, and doubts), to all that is the other. It is a yin-yang partnership of equality, where each person has skills which they can use to support where the other less able. When you serve you realize that you are learning as much as you teach and that no matter how “superior” you might appear in relation to another person you are equals. For example, you may have gone to university while they never completed a formal education, but at the same time they may be better able to operate in a rough economy because they were doing so while you were spending time in school. Service is realizing the cost-benefit analysis of experience and the knowledge that it all comes out in the wash (and that we’re all cleaner for it)

It seems to me that the challenge for those interested in social justice, non-for-profit work, foreign aid, etc. is to pay attention to when we’re helping as opposed to serving. What would the world look like if  the development programs of the IMF and World Bank were focused on serving those interested in shifting to an industrialized economy rather than to “help people help themselves“. How would the welfare system function if policy makers actually paid attention to the thoughts and suggestions of those using it? What would schools be like is we stopped helping at risk students and started serving them instead?

To end this discussion on intentions, respect, help and service, I will close with another quote by Dr. Reman:

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Reader Madness!

I am continuously amazed by the lengths the public school system takes in order  to sanitize its curriculum of any “inappropriate” or “offensive” material (i.e. anything that upsets or embarrasses parents to discus with their children), but this latest act of censorship really made me blink: schools in the Southern Californian school district of Menifee have banned the Merriam-Weber Dictionary due to its containing a definition of “oral sex”.  The definition given by the dictionary is as follows: “oral stimulation of the genitalia: Cunnilingus, Fellatio”. This is hardly a graphic definition of the term, especially as compared to what can be found on UrbanDictionary.com or anywhere else online. However a parent complained and the dictionary was thus removed from all schools in the district. According to the Menifee local news:

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. The dictionaries were initially purchased a few years ago for fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms districtwide, according to a memo to the superintendent.

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

Now, I find it an interesting concept that the written word, ideas captured in symbols, can somehow be “age inappropriate”–or “age appropriate” for that matter.

What exactly does this mean? Is it that certain words should not be mentioned to those under, or perhaps over, a particular age? Or does it mean that there are some words that you simply can not understand based solely on your biological age–and that once you hit a certain age *ping!* you suddenly know what they mean? One of these is based on social taboos the other deals with physiological development. What makes the the concept of age appropriateness, as applied to writing, so confusing is that it contains elements of both.

Another issue that often overlooked in this debate is the difference between intellectual knowledge and visceral knowledge and how our understanding changes depending on the media through which we are exposed to information. There is a huge difference between reading a definition of oral sex in a dictionary versus seeing images, hearing a recording, or experiencing such an act first hand. In regards to writing, since it is a symbolic system, one must already possess some sort of context in which to interpret the information being presented–else it is nothing but meaningless words. Thus I would argue that banning a book because it is “age inappropriate” is unnecessary. Our understanding of a written work is dependent on the information we already possess before reading it. If a child is able to look up the definition of oral sex in the dictionary and understand what is being said, then they already had a context for understanding the topic (and instead of banning the dictionary the parents should be having a sit down talk with their child…). The fact that the child was curious enough about the topic to go and do research means that it is “age appropriate” for them to learn about to an extent–just not socially appropriate.

Building upon this last point I would also argue that our understanding of information is not dependent of age, rather it changes with age. If you watch young children playing you will quickly see that they understand  ”difficult” concepts such as life, death, sex, etc., for example when a kid yells “bang! I shot you with my laser so now you’re dead!”. They simply have a different level of awareness of such ideas than, say, a 30 year old. And this continues throughout life–how you understand something today will be different from how you understand it 10 years from now.

To return to our discussion of the California case, to say that the children can not be allowed to even learn about certain words (even through their own initiative) until their parents are ready seems a sure way to stifle curiosity, comprehension, awareness, and all those other wonderful things that make us human. And the simple fact is that the children are going to learn about the dirty facts of life, no matter how much their parents try to protect them from the world. This is especially true in regards to instinctively driven behavior, such as sex, where to deliberately try and keep someone in a state of ignorance will only cause them harm.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

It’s Important to Rescue the Frog

I bought into some Web hoaxery this week. Mea culpa, I believed something on YouTube before I checked it out. I really thought Glenn Beck killed a frog on TV:

Truthdig and other news outlets later reported that a slightly longer video clip had circulated through the Web, in which Beck states:

Forget the frog. I swear I thought they jumped right out. But they don’t. Forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. Forget about the Democrats, because most of them are fake. And forget about the frog, because it was fake!

And, sure enough, if you watch closely, you can tell that Beck doesn’t actually throw anything into the pot. There’s a little splashy sound, but no frogs were actually harmed in the making of that video.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying attention to what Beck was saying when I first watched the video. When Beck started relating the little axiom about how if you throw a frog into boiling water, it’ll just jump right out, but if you put a frog into cool water and then slowly raise the temperature to boiling, the frog will cook to death, I started thinking that the anecdote couldn’t possibly be true. I really hadn’t thought about that truthy little story before, but as I watched Beck seemingly grab the teeny weeny frog and make his way over to the steaming pot, the thought hamster running on the rodent wheel that is my brain started up and I started thinking “Frog + Boiling Water = FROG MURDER!”

Which was where my brain was when Beck mimicked throwing the frog into the pot. And, as a result, I was horrified by what I believed had happened to the frog.

After reading some analysis about the video — both from various bloggers and my very astute husband, who was not fooled — I took another look at the video and listened this time. And darn if the illusory death of the frog doesn’t perfectly and graphically illustrate the point Beck’s trying to make: That quick changes can kill us much more effectively than slow change.

This is contrary to the usual meaning of this story, which is usually interpreted to mean either that it’s easier to get people to accept change if if comes slowly and gradually, or that complacency kills. An L.A. Times story last year about opposition to same-sex marriage in the U.S. and Star Trek alumnus George Takei’s role as a marriage equality activist illustrates it this way:

Moore and Lux had never heard of West Hollywood. From their startled stares, it appeared they would have preferred never to have heard of it. Only Takei was a familiar face — but the notion that Mr. Sulu was now something of a gay activist just made matters worse.

“You watch this celebration and I honestly worry about indoctrination,” Lux said.

“It’s like the frog-in-the-water syndrome,” Moore added in agreement. “You know, the frog doesn’t realize the water around it is heating up until it’s boiled. I worry that Americans will get used to these images and they’ll throw up their hands and say, ‘Who cares?’ “

It turns out that Beck is more in tune with the reality of the Boiling Frog than most people. According to Snopes.com, frogs do not quietly sit in the increasingly hotter water until they cook to death, but hop out long before the pot reaches the critical temperature. Snopes asked the University of Oklahoma’s own Dr. Victor Hutchison, whose research interests include “the physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior.” According to Hutchison:

The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.

(More fun with science: Frogs will stay in a pot of boiling water, but only if their brains are removed first. Which, actually, makes the story a little more damning on the group of people who are supposed to represent the frogs.)

So I guess the moral of that story is that Glenn Beck knows more about frog science than Al Gore, who cartoonily depicted the Boiling Frog story in his movie An Inconvenient Truth:

So if the Boiling Frog story isn’t true, why does it continue to dress up our various warnings? Some writers say it’s still a good and useful metaphor, as both Beck and Gore prove; others, like Atlantic blogger Jim Fallows and Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, say it’s time the frogs retired and got replaced by another phrase that’s both effective and true.

Maybe there’s a way to rehab the Boiling Frog story, maybe something like, “If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, you’ll flash-poach it to death; but for heaven’s sake, if you see a frog in a pot of hot water, rescue that sucker!” It lacks panache, sure. But the moral is: The fate of the frog — whether it’s supposed to represent us, others or an actual little Kermit — is up to us.

Is the Boiling Frog story still a useful metaphor? Or is there another, more accurate tale that can make the same point that’s more appropriate for the 21st century?

A Passion for Language

When Jews speak of studying the Talmud, they do not call it studying; they say that they are swimming the sea of Talmud.  There is simply too much to study, they must be born with the waves of the volumes of text.  Similarly, each time we open our mouths we are swimming in the meaning of the words which surrounds us.  Connotation, denotation, double entendre, euphemism, hyperbole, irony, sarcasm, analogy and so many other literary and rhetorical devices are the waves that crash over us.  Through these waves, we drive our ships of meaning, constructed of our communicative repertoire.  Good communication comes when our ships gracefully steer past each other, with a momentary connection, a glimpse of possibility.  Poor communication is the result of a head-on collision. Excellent communication happens when we abandon our boats, meet in the middle of the waves and allow ourselves to be rocked by the sea, guided by the ghostly patterns of the great communicators ancient and more contemporary, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In our time, where is the passion for language that characterized these great men?  My own passion for words was born out of two experiences: learning Latin, and writing academic papers in college.  In high school, I thought I was a poor writer.  I am not sure why but it may be because so many of our assignments were in creative rather than academic writing.  It was not until college that I began synthesizing complex ideas and translating them onto the page or occasional speech.  I discovered my passion for words, construction and phrase.  I remember writing a term paper for a Religious Studies class and leaving it around my parents’ house.  My father found and read it.  “Who taught you to write like this?” he said.  I did not know.  It just came out, poured onto the blank screen.  At the same time, a friend and I were learning Latin together.  It has been through learning another language that I gained an appreciation for my own.  I learned about dependent clauses, voices and moods, participles and gerunds, tenses and tempo.  Everything came together to create meaning, either in spoken words or on the page.  I recall translating the great orator Cicero’s speech against the Cataline conspiracy in the Roman senate.  My favorite line stays with me, “Do you not know that your plans lie open, Cataline?”

But, for my friend and I, the journey was not over.  We began to speak and write with the same concepts we had learned.  Our sentences, having not been lacking before, became more complex.  I remember being particularly frustrated every time some book or teacher would spout the old English class truism that sentences should never be constructed in passive voice.  (Note: Shout out to the nerds who noticed that was a passive sentence.)  I would always disagree.  Passive voice is an extremely useful construction, which makes the object, rather than the subject, the most important noun in the sentence.  To completely discount it is to deprive an author of a tool.

But, as another friend asked recently, why is it important to me?  Why is it important that I write and speak a certain way?  Why is it important that I am overjoyed to be corrected when I use “him” instead of “he” in a sentence with an intransitive verb?  The best answer is that words are not to be taken lightly.  They are representations of ourselves, from one person to another.  We can choose them and construct them in a way that creates or destroys.  Had President Obama’s catch phrase during the 2008 campaign been, “Yes, I Can,” it would have not empowered the millions of Obama supporters the way that, “Yes, We Can” did.  But, Obama and his team crafted the words that captured the zeitgeist of his candidacy.  These words swept the nation and the election.

In addition, there is a beauty to words.  A conversation is a dance between interlocutors, alternating the role of leading the dance.  To take part in conversations like this is a special thing.  To have a rhythm, a banter is a particularly special thing.  It may be the most important part of a relationship to me.  I have befriended an unexpected friend because of the synthesis that occurs when we speak to each other.  Conversely, I have distanced myself from people with whom I had consistent miscommunications.

And so, to quote a poem from Taylor Mali whose video follows,

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

View Taylor Mali’s spoken word poem, “Totally Like, Whatever, You Know?” here.

How Do You Pronounce R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

Last week, in a post for the National Review, Mark Krikorian took exception with the way he’s expected to pronounce the name of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Krikorian wrote:

Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.

Several bloggers, including The American Scene and Paul Campos @Lawyers, Guns and Money already took Krikorian to task over his insistance that giving someone the simple respect of pronouncing their name the way they’d like it is one step closer to letting the activists win. Campos makes a great point in his post about how this isn’t the first time that a Supreme Court nominee has been gifted with the name that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue:

While Krikorian’s first post on this was silly, his followup is grotesque. I happen to remember the press conference at which Ronald Reagan introduced Antonin Scalia as his SCOTUS nominee. The very first question was how to pronounce the nominee’s name correctly. Has Krikorian ever anglicized the pronounciation of Scalia’s or Alito’s names? How about Sen. John Breaux? Etc. I bet you this principle of mispronouncing (Hispanic) names in order to hold back the dreaded tide of multi-culturalism occured to him about fifteen minutes ago, after someone whose name sounds a lot like his maid’s* got nominated to the Court.

This is actually all typical right-wing elite faux-populist posturing, of course. Anglicizing foreign names is something people are far more likely to do as you move down the SES scale. So, in winger land, it becomes an “authentic” thing to do, at least in a context in which you also have an irresistable urge to gratuitously insult America’s 30 million Hispanic voters. (I can well imagine Krikorian’s late employer’s reaction if he had asked him how the skiing was in Ge-Stad).

Slate, helpfully, included a recording of Sotomayor pronouncing her own name last week, for all it helps anyone with a stubbornly monolingual tongue (Chris Matthews @MSNBC, I’m looking at you …). What I find interesting about Krikorian’s umbrage is not necessarily that he’s expecting Sotomayor to change the way she says her own name in public, but that he believes he’s expected to change the way he says her name. I’m not sure if his reluctance stems from the fact  that he’s simply incapable of putting the emphasis on the last syllable and rolling his rrrs (hey, not everyone can do it, it’s not a shameful thing to lack that ability) or if he’s simply unable to give Sotomayor the hospitality and respect to make that linguistic attempt. This post seems to boil down to, “Don’t tell me to change.”

Sadly, this isn’t an uncommon problem in a pluralistic world, and there’s more barriers here than just a language one. Like Campos says, Krikorian seems to be  drawing a line between who’s an American and who isn’t, who’s welcome to be part of American civic and public life, and who isn’t, and who’s going to change and who isn’t. In this day and age the hard lines between people blur and change every second as human cultures experience the intermingling, constantly brushing-up-against-each-other of community. The old rules of total and instant assimilation, where we all speak only the dominant language, eat only the local foods and automatically change our names to indicate national loyalty (or even be loyal to a single nation! Watch me at World Cup qualifers, I’m in a tizzy when Japan and the U.S. meet!), no longer apply. What we find now — and always have — is that when boundaries fall away, transformation happens, and our defintions of ourselves and others are constantly in process. The real issue isn’t whether or not we should twist our tongues to pronounce words like Sotomayor, Ir-rawk and Pawkistan, but what might happen to us if we decide to deeply listen to how others speak the names of what’s dear to them, and then to try to echo them. In a world of many languages and worldviews, it’s vital that we come into relationship with others with a willingness to change not only the way we speak but the way we see and hear.

News for April 17

Obama Releases Torture Memos

The Justice Department on Thursday released memos detailing the interrogation techniques used by the CIA, methods approved by the Bush Administration for pulling information from al-Qaeda operatives. In “dozens of pages of dispassionate prose,” according to The New York Times, the memos outlined techniques such as keeping detainees awake for days at a time, using insects to exploit their fears and placing detainees in dark, cramped boxes. President Obama, meanwhile, said that none of the CIA operatives involved in the acts would be prosecuted. Reactions on the blogs range from horror at the banality with which torture has been regarded, and debates over whether and what kind of prosecutions should happen. Links include:

Obsidian Wings |   “When you read these sections, it might help to have this report from Physicians for Human Rights in the back of your mind. PHR tracked down eleven people who had been detained in Iraq and Guantanamo, and assessed their medical and psychiatric condition. They were not detained by the CIA, but many of the techniques used on them were similar. Here are the results of their psychiatric evaluations, from the Report’s Executive Summary.”

Glenn Greenwald @Salon |  “Needless to say, I vehemently disagree with anyone — including Obama — who believes that prosecutions are unwarranted.  These memos describe grotesque war crimes — legalized by classic banality-of-evil criminals and ordered by pure criminals — that must be prosecuted if the rule of law is to have any meaning.  But the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama’s to make; ultimately, it is Holder’s and/or a Special Prosectuor’s.  More importantly, Obama can only do so much by himself.  The Obama administration should, on its own, initiate criminal proceedings, but the citizenry also has responsibilities here.  These acts were carried out by our Government, and if we are really as repulsed by them as we claim, then the burden is on us to demand that something be done.”

Andrew Sullivan @The Atlantic |  “This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.”

The Anonymous Liberal |  “The people who should be punished are the people who gave the advice. The lawyers. The Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and David Addingtons of the world. Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos today. It is now up to us to make sure they generate the degree of outrage that they should.”

Matthew Yglesias @ThinkProgress |  “The OLC memos released today make for chilling reading. They also make it clear that we’re talking about interrogation methods that were whipped up by a group of people who were incredibly eager to torture some of their fellow human beings. They reflect the mindset of a group that regards the legal prohibition on torture as really sad, and thus something they need to find a way to get around. They achieved this by first concocting this weird definition of torture and then deviously coming up with all kinds of ways of torturing people that don’t fit the definition.”

• Related link: Is Torture Really Over?  |  Salon

Should We Start Planning for a Texas Republic?  |  FP Passport

So what would Texas look like as a foreign country? It would be the world’s thirteenth largest economy — bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

• Related link: Hey Rick, Can We Talk?  |  FiveThirtyEight
• Related link: Texas Will Seceded and You’ll Finally Get That Pony  |  Pandagon

Our Common Story  |  The Kitchen Table

I also want us, as Americans, to recognize that while our legal system may protect women and girls from these specific abuses, the lives of many American women and girls have much in common with the stories of our Afghanistan sisters. While the murder rate is at an all-time low in many communities, crimes of rape and sexual violence are at an all-time high. The prosecution of rape/sexual assault crimes in this country still puts the victim, and not just the accuser, on trial. Marital rape, date rape, and acquaintance rape are almost impossible to prosecute. The history of forced sterilization, particularly among women of color, rivals our perceptions of reproductive medicine in the so-called “developing” world. In ways, big and small, many women in the United States live in fear for their very lives due to sexual or domestic violence.

• Related link: Afghanistan’s Controversial Law Emboldens Women’s Rights Activists  |  CSMonitor.com

Unstable Journalism  |  The American Scene

Whether newspapers survive isn’t of intrinsic value — and lucky too, since so many are failing. But mitigating what’s being lost as they fold is more complicated than merely making sure that someone reports on the important stuff that its erstwhile staffers covered. Equally important is that people read the non-newspaper work in sufficient numbers to make it matter (which is tougher when everything is unbundled); that the power possessed by newspapers still resides in the fourth estate (or accrues to the people), rather than being absorbed by government; that the transition from newspapers to the institutions that take their place happens quickly enough to stave off a civic collapse.

I Don’t Believe in PC Speech  |  Womanist Musings

When we see negative stereotypes and shaming proliferate throughout a society, it is not about the group that it is being aimed at, rather it is a direct reflection of the fear and inferiority of the oppressor.  Just as we are a product of the social world that we are born into, so are they.  While dealing with an “ism” does not give one license to demean another, it is important to understand the impetus behind the actions, rather than dismissing the speaker as irrelevant.