The Great Between

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “sidling up to difference” reminds me of something I read from Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life. The book is a profoundly beautiful exploration of circles of trust, a method for people to reconnect with their own souls through supportive communities. (I highly recommend it; it’s my new favorite book!)

Palmer says that when seeking to reconnect with our souls, it’s important to keep in mind that the soul is shy, easily scared away by the noise of everyday interactions:

Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree…and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance…A circle of trust is a group of people who know how to sit quietly “in the woods” with each other and wait for the shy soul to show up.

One of the book’s chapters is called “The Truth told Slant,” and starts off with an Emily Dickinson poem:

When seeking something as deep and vital as Truth or the soul, it can be best to take a roundabout, “sidling up,” slanted approach. To approach indirectly, rather than chasing it down.

This concept is powerful for me, and counterintuitive. I have always been a direct communicator, both with myself and with others. I know my own feelings and why I feel them. When I have a disagreement with someone, my approach is to talk it out. When I realized I didn’t understand conservative perspectives, I went straight to the Republican Party and asked if there were people who would talk to me. When there’s a problem to solve or a task to accomplish, I tackle it head on, making lists and plowing through them. I’m a linear thinker, and I sometimes get irritated with more circular thinkers, people who go off on tangents or don’t give direct answers.

Here in the reserved Midwest, the lighthearted word “Coasty” describes louder, ruder, more direct people from either coast. I don’t completely fit the stereotype, which includes Ugg boots, loud cell phone conversations, and maybe some swear words. But I’m subtly different from many Midwesterners. I wear my heart on my sleeve and speak up about things that bother me. I’m one of the most likely people, for instance, to say I’d rather go to this restaurant than that one, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’ll do whatever everyone else wants to do.”

So the concept of “telling the Truth slant” is foreign to me. And once I read it, it made so much sense. Telling someone the truth about what restaurant I want to go to is one thing. But truth-telling about Right and Wrong and how to live your life is entirely different. I may see clearly that a friend shouldn’t be dating the man she’s with, or that another has an alcohol problem, or that someone should switch careers. In politics, I may be absolutely certain that my view is right and yours is wrong—global warming is a fact, people, not open for debate! But simply telling you the Truth, as I see it, is often totally ineffective. A person will only receive Truth when she is open to it. And as Palmer describes, in most of our daily interactions, we are too busy and distracted to listen to our own soul, our own inner Truth, and to be open.

Often the best way for me to help you arrive at the Truth is not to say it directly. Instead, the best thing might be to give you supported, loving space. Perhaps to tell you about my own experience, but to do so in a way that doesn’t pressure you. In A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer uses the word “abstain”: I can abstain from advice-giving or direct argument, even if I think I know the answer. Indirect communication can ultimately be most powerful.

This next week or two I’ll be exploring avoidance, and the way that avoidance can be a useful tool for political dialogue.

At first glance, avoiding talking about something probably sounds like a bad thing. In American culture, if you and I are unable to talk about something, it feels like a failure in our relationship. There are all sorts of metaphors about avoiding avoidance: the topic is the elephant in the room; it needs to be aired out and not bottled up, etc.

But I’ve come across several resources that describe how avoidance, at times, can be good. I’ll post about each of these resources separately because they each deserve thoughtful attention.

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Today’s resource is an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah for the the Civil Conversations Project. The show is called “Sidling Up to Difference.” Appiah is a Princeton professor of philosophy, and happens to be the Ghanaian-British-American “whose parents’ marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

In the interview, Appiah talks about how sometimes, approaching our differences head-on is less productive than simply spending time together. For example, speaking of bridging the religious gap between himself and Muslims:

Sometimes people think that, you know, the only way to deal with these big differences between religions or around moral questions is to kind of face up to the difference directly. But I think often…sidling up to it is better… [S]idling up to it can be done by not facing Islam, but facing Leyla and Ahmed and Mohammed with whom you don’t talk about religions most of the time. You talk about soccer or you talk about, you know, rock music or whatever it is that you have in common as an interest.

And the thing that binds me…to people on other sides of religious boundaries isn’t one thing, right? What binds me to Islam is my Sunni friends and my Shiite friends, my Israeli friends… What I have in common with these very diverse group of Muslims…is different in each case. So that breaks up the sense of them as a kind of monolithic “them.”

Sidling up is what many of us do unintentionally. If I’m chatting with my neighbor at a block party, I’m not likely to bring up the fact that she has huge “Bush-Cheney” and “I Stand With Walker” bumper stickers on her SUV. I’m more likely to ask about her kids, her work, etc. It isn’t always polite to bring up politics, unless we know we’re on the same side.

Reach Out Wisconsin is unusual this way. We encourage people to talk politics with strangers! We hope that the space we provide is safe and friendly enough for people to ask the questions that they are too shy or polite to ask at the block party.

Appiah, by the way, indicates how important this kind of political peacemaking is. In the interview, he describes the anger he feels at times towards conservatives and says, “I wish I spent more of my time around people that disagreed with me more about politics.” He goes on to describe essentially what Reach Out is doing, saying we need more of this:

[I]f we were to spend more of our time…getting together with people in our communities and talking about these things in a way that brought us to a deeper understanding of each other, that would be well worth it, I think.

And the republic would work better because you would be thinking about Joe and Mary and not about conservative Republicans or liberal Democrats and you would know that you knew some awfully nice people who were, for some bizarre reason, not convinced that you are completely correct about every political question.

We in Reach Out hope that, at some point in the future, Americans will be able to talk politics without fear of anger or rudeness. But even if/when the divide becomes less bitter, I think there will be great value in Appiah’s sidling up approach. We already incorporate this approach into Reach Out Wisconsin a little bit. We encourage participants to tell their personal stories, and not only stories about politics: where they’re from, what their family is like, what work they do. Getting to know each other as people eases tension.

Listening to Appiah, I realized that our instinctive avoidance of certain topics, in our daily life, need not be seen as a failure. Knowing that discussion won’t be productive if we’re not listening to each other, we can pick and choose when to talk about touchy subjects. And the rest of the time, we can work to build bridges between each other by finding things that we do have in common.