Having the opportunity to talk with our listeners on this show is a wonderful experience for me. I enjoy the give and take. I respect the earnest and constructive energy that many people bring to our discussions. I feel deepened by the chance to learn from people whose experience is very different from mine. And I also feel bumped and jostled by some of the discordant exchanges that our controversial and sensitive issues sometimes give rise to. I appreciate even the disturbing parts, because they prod me to new thinking. Lately, my experience doing this show has got me giving thought to the question: How should we talk with one another? Our answers to that question inescapably depend on what we want our conversations to achieve. Here are my criteria for a good conversation. It is one where we both learn from each other, where the creative moment of interaction leads the participants to discover and to articulate ideas we'd never entertained before, where the process of exchange increases the respect --even, if I may say, the love-- that we have for one another. My sense is that some of our listeners more or less share such goals, and that some do not. It has been an interesting experience for me to absorb what I get from those who do not. Let me use my experience in trying to converse with the more combative callers to illuminate some issues raised by the question, how should we talk with one another. Now, I cannot claim to know what these people want to accomplish in a conversation such as ours. But this is my impression of the goal that underlies their approach: a good conversation is one where those who are on the side of right triumph, and those who are on the side of wrong are cut down. To be seen as a person on the side of wrong is to be treated as one who should not be heard and cannot be trusted. Sometimes I find it difficult, in these interactions, to get a word in. When I do start a sentence, I often can't finish it. If I manage to complete my thought, my argument is not so much countered as rolled over, my questions are ignored. Sometimes a caller will dismiss my points with words of derision: "That's ridiculous," "That's nonsense"-- my position evidently not deserving further comment. Sometimes I am tagged with a label --in these parts "liberal" seems a favorite one for this purpose-- as though if the name can be made to stick then whatever I say can be dismissed by right-thinking people without further consideration. Sometimes my motives are impugned. A caller may declare me the undisclosed agent of some political interest. I've been accused of only pretending to be interested in genuine inquiry after the truth, with my real purposes being unscrupulous and manipulative. Being wrong, I am the enemy-- and not to be trusted. Not only am I wrong, it seems, but I am willfully --not innocently-- wrong. Now, I do not take any of this personally. I imagine that I am being treated in the way some people have learned that any person should be treated when he puts himself against the side of the righteous. I imagine if I were the child or the student of one of these people, and diverged from what my parent or teacher thought the true path, that I would be driven away from my point of view, or out of the conversation, by just such means. My fantasy goes further: when I am the recipient of such treatment --whether it be righteous wrath, or scornful humiliation, or bullying intimidation-- I imagine that I am being given a window into the caller's own formative experiences, how he was treated when growing up when he dared to voice a disapproved notion. It is there, above all that we learn how a conversation should be conducted with a person one believes to have left the right path. I suppose we all have to decide how to deal with others when they are, as we see it, in the wrong. While these callers are regarding me as a wrong-thinking person, I of course am usually seeing them, similarly, as being less right than I. But I'd rather not have an angry fight about it. When I do get angry, I do not think it's in response to their putting forward ideas I see as wrong-headed, but rather because I don't like being treated as an enemy. There are enemies in the world, I suppose, and sometimes fights are necessary. But for the most part I'd prefer a mutually respectful conversation of give and take. I've tried to understand where I differ from those callers whose rules of engagement are so different from mine. Part of the difference, I suspect, is that I am less sure that my rightness is complete. So I am more likely to entertain the possibility that I might learn something of value even from someone with whom I substantially disagree. A more fundamental reason, I expect, is that I believe that even people who seem to me profoundly mistaken are probably doing their best: most of them are trying to be right and to do good, I imagine, just as I am. And so, if they are wrong, they're innocently wrong, not willfully enlisted on the side of Satan. One's fellow fallible human beings are not fundamentally one's enemies. If one accepts my premise that people are generally doing their best, and are entitled to be esteemed for that, how should we talk with one another. I'd like to propose a few rules. First, we should really listen to each other, trying to hear what the other person is saying and to recognize what one can find that's valid in it. Second, we should listen with sympathy, trying to understand the human experience that gives rise to such perceptions and positions. And third, we should give respect to one another for the effort each of us is making to be a good human being. Being a good human being, and seeing ourselves and our world truly and without distortion-- these are no easy tasks. And they are tasks, I think, for which love and respect --and not hate and scorn-- better fortify us. ??