On Dialogue as Peace Technology
It is easy in our ‘new is better’ world to assume we have little or nothing to learn from those cultures we call indigenous or folk cultures, but we could not be more wrong about this. While these cultures originally gave rise to all the rest, they are perhaps the most neglected of all we might rightly recognize for their wisdom. But it is to our own detriment that we ignore the lessons that many ancient and still-living primal cultures have to teach us.
We should all be so wise as to gather nightly around the campfire to share the ultimate intrinsic goods of food and drink, talk and laughter, music and dance with one another and our young. If ancient and indigenous peoples understood one thing better than those of us raised in modern cultures, it is the power and value of play and all these intrinsic goods of living.
And among the many things they understood better than most today is that the living word is chief among the intrinsic goods of life. This daily habit of putting "our minds together as one mind"(Nelson, 2008) in dialogue is a more joyous experience than we might conceive, at least those of us in the modern world who habitually retire every evening to the isolation of our homes where we live vicariously through out televisions.
The first advantage of the ancient ways then is that those who live in oral cultures are never lonely for long, as Smith says, for the daily lessons they learn in solitude are nightly shared in the company of their family and friends. They make the most of every opportunity to come together in talking circles to enjoy the ongoing discussions that give meaning to their lives, as well as structure to their education.
“Like bands of blind Homers,” they “gather each evening around their fires” to “revere and rehearse their heritage endlessly…original language breathing new life into familiar themes…each supplementing and correcting the accounts of others.” [p.234]
stories
These circles of discussion, Manitonquat says, allow each to focus on different perspectives, often with “no one speaking twice until everyone has spoken once.”(OI, p.26) And while elders may speak first because they have the longest perspective, “we value equally the thoughts of the young who may have new ideas.”(OI, p, 20)
This practice encourages all to be both students and teachers as they share what they had discovered with others who might benefit from their learning experience. One can imagine how ‘the hunt’ or ‘the meal’ or ‘the children’ or ‘the teachings of the ancestors’ could arouse energetic discussions, all contributing their perspective to the whole ongoing dialogue.
But there is more going on here than what Parmenides might call mere “idle talk.”[2] For as individuals seek answers to intrinsically generated questions (remember, “Nothing is an answer if you haven't asked the question”), a kind of collective learning takes place that allows for what these days is called ‘the wisdom of crowds.’ The more diverse voices who participate in any given dialogue, the more likely there will be those who have to teach whatever a given person needs to learn, and vice versa. Because we are all teachers, just as we are all students, we can all learn from each other’s experience, rather than having to learn everything on our own, the hard way, or from some designated teacher who is supposed to be an expert. In this process, like dialectic philosophers, we search for truth together. For when we inquire of anything from all angles, every new point of view adds perspective and insight to what is not seen or understood with fewer angles of approach. In this way, the whole truth becomes a meaningful ideal as each voice adds to the cumulative understanding of all. Weaving perspectives together in this fashion is precisely what the mind is good for, and it is for this very purpose that ancient and many modern primal peoples gather each and every evening to celebrate the good fortune of their continued existence.
“What is important for us to understand,” Smith says, “is the impact of this ongoing, empowering seminar on its participants. Everyone feeds the living reservoir of knowledge while receiving from it its answering flows of information that stocks and shapes their lives.”[3] “[T]he overriding advantage of speech over writing is what it does for memory.” “Everything their ancestors learned with difficulty, from healing herbs to stirring legends, is now stored in their collective memory, and there only."[4]
In other words, this emphasis that primal peoples put on what Smith calls “the living word” ensured that, "They remember what is important, and forget the rest."[5] And what is lost without this ongoing process is no small matter – indeed, nothing less than the understanding of what is important.
What Plato called gnosis is that understanding which is beyond words. And it is in this light that the written word can be “the first step in forgetting,”[6] if we rely too heavily upon it.
Living in our age, we cannot say enough good about the value of literacy, but the ancients did not share our enthusiasm for the written word. By their lights, “Having libraries to fall back on, literate peoples grow slack in recall.” What’s more, “Because writing has no limits, it can also proliferate to the point where trees obscure the woods," the result being that, "Minds swamped with information can have difficulty seeing what is important.” (p.234)
A glance inside most modern schools will illustrate the ultimate effect of this cause, and the dearth of dialogue is usually the first thing to give it away. In our time, what we call ‘knowledge’ takes its place on library shelves so that a college graduate know where to look for it, at least, but for the most part, they do not carry even the most important aspects of what they’ve learned within themselves. In western culture, at least, we all tend to leave the actual ‘knowing’ to ‘the experts’. And if we do endeavor to learn from them, we are not actually learning as the original explorer did, but rather simply take their word for it. In this way, we have built a vast body of what we call ‘knowledge’ – but is it really?[7] What does it mean, after all, to know something?
Not to knock the power of the written word, mind you, for without those precious texts that we are fortunate enough to have preserved or recovered from ancient times (the Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Tao te Ching, Plato’s Dialogues, to name a few) we would be at an even greater loss – as we were for nearly two millennia without the Gnostic Gospels, that were, like so many other great works of literature, so thoroughly purged from our intellectual history. But it could be argued that some books have actually been the greatest obstacle to truth, especially as they claim exclusivity, implying all others to be wrong.
As Elaine Pagels, Howard Zinn, and many other scholars have observed, "history has been written by the winners,"(*) who have incentive and opportunity to retell history the way they want it to appear, regardless of how it actually happened. And thereafter, how often has the proclamation ‘It is written!” ended all discussion, thwarted all dialogue, and along with it, all real learning? With the consequent that, too often, what has been called ‘education’ is more like a game of telephone in which the original message becomes more and more garbled as generation after generation passes it on…with both accidental and deliberate errors.
For this and other reasons, the history of human thought is not primarily to be found in books, but first and foremost in the experiences that trigger shared memory – our own childhood memories as well as the memories of our cultural childhoods.
And “If exclusive orality protects human memory," Smith says, “it also guards…the capacity to experience the sacred through non-verbal channels," leaving "their eyes free to notice other sacred conduits” (other than books, that is), such as "virgin nature and sacred art…"[8] By contrast, cultures that look to their sacred texts for revelations tend to “marginalizes other windows to the divine.”[p.234] For the fact that might surprise some of us today is that, “during most of human history people have found their sacred texts in song and dance and paintings and stone more than in writing.”(p.6)
Good news is that habits can be broken…better yet, we can stop teaching them to begin with…must stop teaching our young the same bad habits we have such a hard time changing in ourselves!
NOTES:
Smith gracefully illuminates how we have taken a step backward, in a sense, in the 4000 years of recorded history from those three million years of human existence that preceded the written word. In that relatively short time, we have practically replaced 'the living word' with its written, and too often dead, counterpart. While literacy is certainly an improvement in many, even most, ways (since preservation of knowledge to spark later memory is certainly a worthy purpose), it accomplishes at least one less-than-desirable side-effect – it allows us 'to ignore' so much that waits on library shelves to be understood, which can actually, inadvertently, encouraging 'ignorance' in the process. As precious as books are (and Smith is an example of how wonderfully powerful a book can be in sparking ancient memory), the written word can be, as Plato says, "the first step in forgetting." By filing away our knowledge on library shelves, we eliminate the need to recall and rehearse the valuable lessons of the past, and the price we pay is the lost benefit of having to learn and to teach truth continually, and the practical value of understanding in our daily lives. The sheer volume of books available to us obscures the forest through the trees. By contrast, Whereas in oral cultures, emphasis on the living word ensured that, "They remember what is important, and forget the rest."(Smith, p. 234) Primal peoples gathered every evening to explore and extol the lessons of the day, to enjoy stories of past heroes and great teachers who actualized their highest potentials, and who live on in daily conversation to inspire others – especially children – who would do the same. They understood that it is dialogue that keeps understanding alive in the heart, which is at least as important as keeping knowledge in books on library shelves. Dialogue activates the mind.
By contrast, once literate cultures began putting their wisdom into writing, intuitive understanding was easily lost, if only because it was then so easy to destroy, or at least to put high on the library shelves. "Minds swamped with information can have difficulty seeing what is important… Having libraries to fall back on, literate peoples grow slack in recall… Because writing has no limits, it can also proliferate to the point where trees obscure the woods."( Smith, p.234)) "Everything their ancestors learned with difficulty, from healing herbs to stirring legends, is now stored in their collective memory, and there only."(Smith, p.234) And "If exclusive orality protects human memory," Smith says," it also guards…the capacity to experience the sacred through non-verbal channels," leaving "their eyes free to notice other sacred conduits (other than books, that is)," such as "virgin nature and sacred art…"(Smith, p. 234)
As oral cultures understood, the written word diminishes the strength of memory and the efficacy of consciousness, as books rest on library shelves, rather than reside as understanding in our hearts. And as physical entities, they can easily be destroyed, rendering the next generation and all that follow ignorant of what is being missed.
And all it would take is one malevolent tyrant, or any few who could enforce silence over the others, to plunge humanity into darkness. It takes hardly more than one generation for the great forgetting to take place, before what was once clear becomes only a vague memory…if that. Add to this the power of rhetoric to demonize the past (take the word pagan, for instance), and the brainwashing is complete, as the baby goes out with the bathwater. But the sheer volume of ancient texts that have been rediscovered in recent decades reveal the same synchronized voices, “like lines converging on a common center.”
It is easy in our ‘new is better’ world to assume we have little or nothing to learn from those cultures we call indigenous or folk cultures, but we could not be more wrong about this. While these cultures originally gave rise to all the rest, they are perhaps the most neglected of all we might rightly recognize for their wisdom. But it is to our own detriment that we ignore the lessons that many ancient and still-living primal cultures have to teach us.
We should all be so wise as to gather nightly around the campfire to share the ultimate intrinsic goods of food and drink, talk and laughter, music and dance with one another and our young. If ancient and indigenous peoples understood one thing better than those of us raised in modern cultures, it is the power and value of play and all these intrinsic goods of living.
And among the many things they understood better than most today is that the living word is chief among the intrinsic goods of life. This daily habit of putting "our minds together as one mind"(Nelson, 2008) in dialogue is a more joyous experience than we might conceive, at least those of us in the modern world who habitually retire every evening to the isolation of our homes where we live vicariously through out televisions.
The first advantage of the ancient ways then is that those who live in oral cultures are never lonely for long, as Smith says, for the daily lessons they learn in solitude are nightly shared in the company of their family and friends. They make the most of every opportunity to come together in talking circles to enjoy the ongoing discussions that give meaning to their lives, as well as structure to their education.
“Like bands of blind Homers,” they “gather each evening around their fires” to “revere and rehearse their heritage endlessly…original language breathing new life into familiar themes…each supplementing and correcting the accounts of others.” [p.234]
stories
These circles of discussion, Manitonquat says, allow each to focus on different perspectives, often with “no one speaking twice until everyone has spoken once.”(OI, p.26) And while elders may speak first because they have the longest perspective, “we value equally the thoughts of the young who may have new ideas.”(OI, p, 20)
This practice encourages all to be both students and teachers as they share what they had discovered with others who might benefit from their learning experience. One can imagine how ‘the hunt’ or ‘the meal’ or ‘the children’ or ‘the teachings of the ancestors’ could arouse energetic discussions, all contributing their perspective to the whole ongoing dialogue.
But there is more going on here than what Parmenides might call mere “idle talk.”[2] For as individuals seek answers to intrinsically generated questions (remember, “Nothing is an answer if you haven't asked the question”), a kind of collective learning takes place that allows for what these days is called ‘the wisdom of crowds.’ The more diverse voices who participate in any given dialogue, the more likely there will be those who have to teach whatever a given person needs to learn, and vice versa. Because we are all teachers, just as we are all students, we can all learn from each other’s experience, rather than having to learn everything on our own, the hard way, or from some designated teacher who is supposed to be an expert. In this process, like dialectic philosophers, we search for truth together. For when we inquire of anything from all angles, every new point of view adds perspective and insight to what is not seen or understood with fewer angles of approach. In this way, the whole truth becomes a meaningful ideal as each voice adds to the cumulative understanding of all. Weaving perspectives together in this fashion is precisely what the mind is good for, and it is for this very purpose that ancient and many modern primal peoples gather each and every evening to celebrate the good fortune of their continued existence.
“What is important for us to understand,” Smith says, “is the impact of this ongoing, empowering seminar on its participants. Everyone feeds the living reservoir of knowledge while receiving from it its answering flows of information that stocks and shapes their lives.”[3] “[T]he overriding advantage of speech over writing is what it does for memory.” “Everything their ancestors learned with difficulty, from healing herbs to stirring legends, is now stored in their collective memory, and there only."[4]
In other words, this emphasis that primal peoples put on what Smith calls “the living word” ensured that, "They remember what is important, and forget the rest."[5] And what is lost without this ongoing process is no small matter – indeed, nothing less than the understanding of what is important.
What Plato called gnosis is that understanding which is beyond words. And it is in this light that the written word can be “the first step in forgetting,”[6] if we rely too heavily upon it.
Living in our age, we cannot say enough good about the value of literacy, but the ancients did not share our enthusiasm for the written word. By their lights, “Having libraries to fall back on, literate peoples grow slack in recall.” What’s more, “Because writing has no limits, it can also proliferate to the point where trees obscure the woods," the result being that, "Minds swamped with information can have difficulty seeing what is important.” (p.234)
A glance inside most modern schools will illustrate the ultimate effect of this cause, and the dearth of dialogue is usually the first thing to give it away. In our time, what we call ‘knowledge’ takes its place on library shelves so that a college graduate know where to look for it, at least, but for the most part, they do not carry even the most important aspects of what they’ve learned within themselves. In western culture, at least, we all tend to leave the actual ‘knowing’ to ‘the experts’. And if we do endeavor to learn from them, we are not actually learning as the original explorer did, but rather simply take their word for it. In this way, we have built a vast body of what we call ‘knowledge’ – but is it really?[7] What does it mean, after all, to know something?
Not to knock the power of the written word, mind you, for without those precious texts that we are fortunate enough to have preserved or recovered from ancient times (the Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Tao te Ching, Plato’s Dialogues, to name a few) we would be at an even greater loss – as we were for nearly two millennia without the Gnostic Gospels, that were, like so many other great works of literature, so thoroughly purged from our intellectual history. But it could be argued that some books have actually been the greatest obstacle to truth, especially as they claim exclusivity, implying all others to be wrong.
As Elaine Pagels, Howard Zinn, and many other scholars have observed, "history has been written by the winners,"(*) who have incentive and opportunity to retell history the way they want it to appear, regardless of how it actually happened. And thereafter, how often has the proclamation ‘It is written!” ended all discussion, thwarted all dialogue, and along with it, all real learning? With the consequent that, too often, what has been called ‘education’ is more like a game of telephone in which the original message becomes more and more garbled as generation after generation passes it on…with both accidental and deliberate errors.
For this and other reasons, the history of human thought is not primarily to be found in books, but first and foremost in the experiences that trigger shared memory – our own childhood memories as well as the memories of our cultural childhoods.
And “If exclusive orality protects human memory," Smith says, “it also guards…the capacity to experience the sacred through non-verbal channels," leaving "their eyes free to notice other sacred conduits” (other than books, that is), such as "virgin nature and sacred art…"[8] By contrast, cultures that look to their sacred texts for revelations tend to “marginalizes other windows to the divine.”[p.234] For the fact that might surprise some of us today is that, “during most of human history people have found their sacred texts in song and dance and paintings and stone more than in writing.”(p.6)
Good news is that habits can be broken…better yet, we can stop teaching them to begin with…must stop teaching our young the same bad habits we have such a hard time changing in ourselves!
NOTES:
Smith gracefully illuminates how we have taken a step backward, in a sense, in the 4000 years of recorded history from those three million years of human existence that preceded the written word. In that relatively short time, we have practically replaced 'the living word' with its written, and too often dead, counterpart. While literacy is certainly an improvement in many, even most, ways (since preservation of knowledge to spark later memory is certainly a worthy purpose), it accomplishes at least one less-than-desirable side-effect – it allows us 'to ignore' so much that waits on library shelves to be understood, which can actually, inadvertently, encouraging 'ignorance' in the process. As precious as books are (and Smith is an example of how wonderfully powerful a book can be in sparking ancient memory), the written word can be, as Plato says, "the first step in forgetting." By filing away our knowledge on library shelves, we eliminate the need to recall and rehearse the valuable lessons of the past, and the price we pay is the lost benefit of having to learn and to teach truth continually, and the practical value of understanding in our daily lives. The sheer volume of books available to us obscures the forest through the trees. By contrast, Whereas in oral cultures, emphasis on the living word ensured that, "They remember what is important, and forget the rest."(Smith, p. 234) Primal peoples gathered every evening to explore and extol the lessons of the day, to enjoy stories of past heroes and great teachers who actualized their highest potentials, and who live on in daily conversation to inspire others – especially children – who would do the same. They understood that it is dialogue that keeps understanding alive in the heart, which is at least as important as keeping knowledge in books on library shelves. Dialogue activates the mind.
By contrast, once literate cultures began putting their wisdom into writing, intuitive understanding was easily lost, if only because it was then so easy to destroy, or at least to put high on the library shelves. "Minds swamped with information can have difficulty seeing what is important… Having libraries to fall back on, literate peoples grow slack in recall… Because writing has no limits, it can also proliferate to the point where trees obscure the woods."( Smith, p.234)) "Everything their ancestors learned with difficulty, from healing herbs to stirring legends, is now stored in their collective memory, and there only."(Smith, p.234) And "If exclusive orality protects human memory," Smith says," it also guards…the capacity to experience the sacred through non-verbal channels," leaving "their eyes free to notice other sacred conduits (other than books, that is)," such as "virgin nature and sacred art…"(Smith, p. 234)
As oral cultures understood, the written word diminishes the strength of memory and the efficacy of consciousness, as books rest on library shelves, rather than reside as understanding in our hearts. And as physical entities, they can easily be destroyed, rendering the next generation and all that follow ignorant of what is being missed.
And all it would take is one malevolent tyrant, or any few who could enforce silence over the others, to plunge humanity into darkness. It takes hardly more than one generation for the great forgetting to take place, before what was once clear becomes only a vague memory…if that. Add to this the power of rhetoric to demonize the past (take the word pagan, for instance), and the brainwashing is complete, as the baby goes out with the bathwater. But the sheer volume of ancient texts that have been rediscovered in recent decades reveal the same synchronized voices, “like lines converging on a common center.”