The Conversational Nature of Reality

Reflections on the antidebate, and the frontier between the self and the world.

I have about two weeks to finish writing a short book. All my hope now lies in the ambiguity of the terms short, and book.

I promised I would write a manuscript of 40,000 words in a moment of optimistic fervor while preparing a funding application for a two-year project at Perspectiva called The Antidebate which is a fledgling social practice that seeks to combine the best features of debate and dialogue. The antidebate was an attempt to create a format and method for public conversations that could be more worthy of the challenges of our times and that would somehow speak to the growing epistemic demands of citizenship (which I’ll be writing about here soon). There is no draft manuscript yet, and my Word document is parched like a dry riverbank, but there are huge puddles of relevant text sloshing around in my laptop and other digital habitats, so it’s time for the rain dance to summon the stream into being.

The antidebate became a three-year project due to the pandemic, but also because I couldn’t quite figure out what it was supposed to be. In all honesty, while I had high hopes for the antidebate being Perspectiva’s flagship project, it has become more like our ‘problem child’ because it risks looking like a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. At the same time, I still care about it and believe in it, and I am beginning to feel its best days are yet to come. A participant at the antidebate at the Realisation festival said: "I found the process revelatory, thrilling...”

As you can see from the website description, the idea was to create a new social practice that is somehow - and how is the challenge - better suited to the challenges of our times than debate, and somehow - and how is the challenge - more than dialogue.

The Executive Summary of our funding application in 2020 goes as follows:

In principle, debates clarify disagreements and bring everyone closer to the truth in a convivial dialectical process. In practice, participants clamor for attention, stoking tribal sentiment in memorable attack lines, soundbites, and strawman arguments. A combination of endemic polarisation, weakening attention spans, enervated critical thinking, and social media incentive structures have undermined debate as a social good; it feels ill-suited to our epistemic needs and civic challenges. The US Presidential Debate in September 2020 was a nadir for the practice, described by The Guardian as 'debate apocalypse'. Creating 'better debates' may not actually be feasible, and while dialogue is commendable, it's not clear it can cut through to shape culture at scale. The question becomes: What kinds of speaking, listening and thinking should we seek to encourage in the public sphere? Perhaps we need an *antidote* to debate, rooted in the principles of good debating, yet fundamentally reconceiving their purpose to be closer in spirit to dialogue. The antidebate is a nascent methodology that seeks to do that. There’s still an entertaining public contest, but ‘victory’ depends on the virtues of intellectual humility, empathy, and truth-seeking communication and the 'game’ being played is not about winning an argument but demonstrating superior sensibilities of understanding. Over two years we will develop the philosophical and methodological basis of a new social practice, design and test evaluation rubrics, host public prototypes, disseminate recordings and commentary online, and create a book-length guide for others to create their own, and a short documentary to promote the praxis. The emphasis will be on establishing the form, ethos and ambience of antidebates, and learning from workshop iterations. We’ll prepare a larger application to scale the practice, because we believe the antidebate could potentially help promote intellectual humility around the world.

Well.

As always it hasn’t quite turned out as promised. That’s why I am writing this post about the conversational nature of reality which is an idea from the poet David Whyte and is described in more detail below, but it’s about the frontier between what is us and what is not us, the place where we are truly alive, and it’s an idea that recognizes that ‘things not going to plan’, for from being a failure, is the defining feature of life.

You’ll have to wait for the book to get a fuller picture of what has happened to the antidebate, and what we plan for it, but the offering as a whole is a study in the realm of praxis - the process through which theory and practice enter into conversation with each other. It will be a book of three parts of very different genres that still somehow - and how is the challenge - talk to each other. Part one is a philosophical disquisition that critiques what debate has become, a review of conversational practices in our metacrisis context and considers what follows for experimental social practices - what we need to try to do; part two is the personal and organisational story of an attempt to create something new and the difficulty of translating theory into practice - there were moments of great promise but also lots of antiheroic feelings of wanting to give it up and let it go; and finally, since I have ultimately come to believe in the project, and since - not least due to the initiative of Michael Bready - we have been successfully trialing the antidebate in school and community contexts outside of Perspectiva’s main orbit, the third part is a kind of how-to manual to encourage others to create antidebates of their own.

If you can’t wait to know more, my last public reflection on the antidebate is here, and the last video of the process we shared on YouTube is here, but things have moved on a fair bit since then (for instance, we are not using Polis any more).

There is plenty of scope for variation with the process, with items added or subtracted depending on the time available and the nature of the inquiry, but it’s beginning to look like the default process is a three-hour session with about twenty people, ideally aged 16-25. We are also beginning to see it as a resolutely offline activity.

*

The quick version of the antidebate story is this: My initial plans for the project were much too grandiose, even hubristic, and quite far from the spirit of intellectual humility that was supposed to define the project. Turning theory into practice is very difficult, and the attempt to do so can make you look absurd. As the annoying saying goes: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. And yet, don’t we have to try? As Peter Sloterdijk puts it in You Must Change your Life (p11):

“In truth, the crossing from nature to culture and vice versa has always stood wide open. It leads across an easily accessible bridge: the practising life.”

And yet, I have felt the weight of trying to create a new social practice, and have often doubted myself. I also feel I am not well suited to the task, being more like a director than a producer at heart. I won’t say who, but three close friends and colleagues politely asked to be relieved of their responsibilities towards the project, I think mostly becuase they weren’t enjoying it and couldn’t see where it was going. One of them even said of my relationship with the antidebate - with all due affection but a certain amount of warranted exasperation - “Why won’t he just let it die?!”

And to be fair to them, while I always had some kind of idea of what I wanted and received a lot of input from others along the way, I have been leading from confusion, hoping that somehow - and the how is the challenge - that if we kept showing up and trying things out, some further clarity would emerge, or someone else might figure out what was supposed to be happening.

The underlying emphasis of the antidebate has therefore evolved from attempting to elicit a kind of spiritual aporia experience - a kind of generative perplexity arising between two people deeply trying to understand each other - to a more plural attempt to experience participatory knowing of some of the preconditions for deep democracy- in which we see and feel our differences more clearly. And now, while both those antecedents are still latent and relevant, the antidebate is starting to look more like a form of what Margaret Mead called prefigurative culture in which younger generations show the way in how we navigate complex and contested issues in a public space. At the time of writing, Perspectiva’s view is that the antidebate’s future might well be mostly with secondary schools and universities.

*

In the first part of the book, I outline several frameworks and practices to help better situate the praxis, and the one that I think means the most to me is this idea of ‘the conversational nature of reality’ from David Whyte, who is probably my favourite poet.

The following extracts come from Whyte’s TED talk and his interview On Being both of which I can heartily recommend. (An aside: I was once on On Being too).

Whyte describes the origin of ‘the conversational nature of reality’ to Krista Tippett as follows:

I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was really interested in the way that the “I” deepened, the more you paid attention. And in Galapagos I began to realize that because I was in deeply attentive states, hour after hour, watching animals and birds and landscapes — and that’s all I did for almost two years — I began to realize that my identity depended, not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself, and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

And I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you; that whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it, but the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass, and what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier.

But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you.

John O’Donohue, a mutual friend of both of us, used to say that one of the necessary tasks is this radical letting alone of yourself and the world — letting the world speak in its own voice and letting this deeper sense of yourself speak out.

In that extract, you can see glimpses of the aporic perplexity I mentioned, and also the scope for deep democracy in at least this sense: living in an open society means we want the future to be open to surprises, and it is often other people who surprise us, both in what they say and do, and in how they bring out aspects of ourselves that we were not fully aware of - we want the praxis to accommodate that. The idea that half of what is about to occur is unknown to us is described more vividly in his Ted talk where he says (at 11:22): “Most human beings are at war with reality fifty-percent of the time”.

Whyte describes the main phenomenon in terms of frontiers in his TED talk:

The conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world --whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or a love relationship, whatever you desire of your children, whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you, or your world -- will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen.

But equally, whatever the world desires of us --whatever our partner, our child, our colleague, our industry, our future demands of us, will also not happen.

And what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.

And this frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world is the only place, actually, where things are real. But it's quite astonishing, how little time we spend at this conversational frontier, and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another.”

The conversational nature of reality was never an explicit feature of the antidebate project, but there is so much in Whyte’s idea that helps to make sense of the process so far, and the case for the future of the praxis.

First, since one aim of the antidebate is to create better kinds of conversation, the idea that reality is fundamentally conversational becomes, in a way, axiomatic, and inspirational; it means conversation is somehow both subject and object, not just in the words we say, but in our very existence as beings that relate to ourselves, to others and the wider world.

Second, ‘the frontier between what you think is you (your point of view) and what you think is not you (an opposing point of view) is 'a frontier…a meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world…the only place where things are real." So often we pass such moments by, but they are potentially teachable moments, and perhaps even generative of a new kind of citizenry that is self-aware, solidaristic, perspectival, and at ease with generative conflict.

Third, the point of the antidebate is somehow - and the how is the challenge - to get people to that conversational frontier.

I believe the antidebate has a future! Watch this space.