In the communication curriculum that Lori and I have come to value and teach, originally developed at the University of Minnesota Family Study Center, approaching an issue together involves processing a series of elements. While in no particular order, each element requires its own care and reflection. It all hinges on the naming of sensory data (the likes of which a camera or a microphone might record). Within a household that "data" might involve dirty dishes or missed appointments or bills that need to be paid. Ordinarily, establishing the data is simple. The process gets more challenging when it moves on to consider, among other things, the unique thinking with which we surround that data - thoughts shaped by past experiences, parental influences, religious beliefs, cultural norms, prejudices, etc., and then the emotions those thoughts arouse. But it all hinges on that common recognition of - agreement upon - the data; the facts.
As suggested, once upon a time that was the easy part. We could generally agree on the due date of a bill or the languishing existence of the greasy skillet. Culturally speaking, however, that has somehow become the hard part.
No wonder we have come to find ourselves at the throat of each other in recent years. Somehow it has come to be the case that we can't even agree on the facts - the 'is-ness" of our common reality. Orange is green and yellow is purple and up is down and 2+2=5 -- or 20 or 2000 if that better suits our agenda. Never mind what the recording captured me saying, it never came out of my mouth. If I say there were a thousand on the lawn, then the photograph showing a total of 12 is fake; "doctored"; maliciously tampered with and falsified. If I don't like "your facts", I'll simply assert "my own" that better reinforce my point of view.
Word is that we are engulfed in a tsunami of "fake news." The inevitable implication is that we can trust nothing, not even our own eyes and ears.
Back to that communication theory, it is difficult to parse out our respective thoughts and emotions, or consider what we are really after and the actions we are willing to undertake in their pursuit, if we can't even agree on the data about which we are purportedly thinking, and to which we are presumably reacting. We are islands of righteously fortified, well-insulated ignorance. Or as the band, Stealers Wheel sang in the heyday of my youth, "Clowns to the left of me; jokers to the right. Here I am: stuck in the middle with you." And I don't really trust you.
The inevitable destination of such personal and collective delusion is depravity. We can speak from experience, because we have collectively arrived there, unpacked, and made of it a home. Through our indulgence of the lie - our refusal to agree on the simplest facts, we have, as Thurman predicted all those decades ago, become deception itself; the moral mercury of life reduced to zero. We are told it is all in the service of "greatness," but that, too, is a fiction. In the eyes of the rest of the world, such faux "greatness" is variously the stuff of derision, mockery, or disconcerted perplexity.
In fact, it isn't even particularly new. But, then, what is? As the writer of Ecclesiastes wryly observed, "There is nothing new under the sun."
The 19th century hymn writer James Russell Lowell insisted,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future...
Truth. Not wrong.
The key is not will-power or asserted imagination, but simple honesty.
Truthfulness sways the future.
Once inserted in the lock, the key doesn't take strength to turn; rather, simple...
...humility.
We have to give up believing that we are the only person, and the only set of opinions, in the room who matter. And then, even when it disfavors us, and despite its occasional sour taste, to acknowledge the facts.
And speak the truth.
Only then can we truly begin to communicate.
And get the bills paid and the dishes washed and who knows what else?
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