#240: Thoughts on Bridging with Irwin and Pip
CONVERSATION WITH IRWIN
I shared this note below this morning with a dear dear friend and then with Irwin. Amazing thinking I received back from Irwin…. Not a surprise. I hope it makes a difference. It is a bit longer than normal Writer’s Circle notes.
Irwin,
I scribbled this quick note today for a friend who is super engaged in aiming to contribute to the world. He was disappointed that perhaps the Democrats might not win the Senate. As you know I am pretty apolitical (though I am pro legislating and governing –just that “political” super mean win at all costs part gets me queasy). So I asked him what legislation he might want changed or enacted. He gave me fairly crisp clear answers.
I thought that altering the legislation (which may be a good idea) likely won’t get us far unless we alter this notion of a tug of war along a spectrum and break free from that spectrum reductionism that has been forced on to 330million people. It would be an amazing accomplishment and better than tug-of-war.
I shared this note with him today Irwin…. pip
(My Sunday morning text to a friend)
I think there is a surface level discussion that usually gets attention.
And then there is below the surface.
I think one of our collective weaknesses is that our individual world views are very limited in understanding the whole. Reasonable. In itself not a problem. None of us have a “god-like” clarity at all. We each see a smidge of a gigantic whole.
But we really don’t like when we experience people disagreeing with our world view.
There aren’t many who actively choose to challenge or expand their world view and find that exciting even. And not that many who can listen to others world views without seeing it as “opposite” and challenging and suggesting that they are wrong.
We separate easily.
We reduce down “others” into categories or along a “spectrum” that suggests, indeed, they are “opposite” us when more accurately they are different. Different is NOT the same as opposite. The spectrum doesn’t accommodate 330 million “different” so we boil us humans down to a single spectrum with “poles”. And we sell it. Big $$. And we call it “narratives”. Aye ye ye.
We don’t really know what the “other” truly thinks.
Eventually we can horribly turn a difference in degree into a “difference of kind” and humans at that point justify that it is ok to do completely horrendous things to one another.
I think if we can make more space for hearing others a bit more and more with a space from compassion we will experience a collective compassion which will be an incredible place to then solve the problems we face.
This isn’t utopia. It happens in small bits every day It can expand. And we also require a multi-generational willingness of patience to expand this capacity of all of us. In the meantime some of what happens at the surface will be re arranging deck chairs and that may be veery wise for now.
AND perhaps we are wise to do our best to attend to what we can in the meantime as best possible and perhaps to hopefully massively inspire local answers. Thousands and millions of them.
We don’t have to listen to or build with our big enemy today (too high a degree of difficulty) but maybe we each stretch 10% this year and another 10% next and the power of compounding of 8-10 years of even just 20% of us stretching in that fashion will change the world massively.
I am a dreamer. And maybe that’s one role I can pitch in
(From Irwin Kula)
Pip:
I have read your text twice and every single insight here is illuminating and right on.
This is actually a protocol for a flourishing human being and culture. It is psychologically, sociologically and conceptually deep and eloquent.
You recognize our limitations as individual human beings as to how many perspectives we can possibly see. Teachers, mentors, guides, novels, movies, comics, wisdom texts, friends etc etc all help us see/feel more perspectives. Holding multiple perspectives is the expanding of consciousness- it is hard work that requires practice. Healthy relationships and communities are the spaces in which this should happen - these are spaces that don’t merely confirm our existing worldview, opinions, and predispositions - but help us seek ever more truth about our “selves” and the world. This is the Community For Change we build together! As Whitman wrote “I contain multitudes” how much more so do we as collectives! Nurturing and honoring the virtues of Humility and Curiosity are key....by the way WE can beautifully model these virtues.
You acknowledge the inevitable fear/destabilization we feel when we hear a perspective that is strange to us. There are serious reasons for this that contemporary psychology has a good beat on. Our world view is an adaptive strategy to maintain order in our psychic life...there is a too muchness to our psyche and our mental apparatus is not developed enough to digest and metabolize our Reality...the range of emotions in experiencing life erupt and overwhelm us and so we dosage reality ...our world views are this filters and dosages of reality. When we hear a view that destabilizes us it is picking at something we have repressed - some shortcoming or flaw we are ashamed of or something or some quality we envy or idealize about the other. It is painful and so we rigidify and hold on to our view for dear life. We can learn how to deal with the too muchness of our psyche and the strange feelings another’s view reflexively evokes. No wonder every wisdom tradition teaches to embrace and love the stranger—the stranger within—what we repress- and the stranger without.
Yes, how WE Reduce the other to an abstraction!!! This is an age old strategy to get a handle on things. Generalizing and pattern making is one of the great capacities of human beings AND it always filters out part of reality. Or as I said on radio Friday evening...there aren’t 70 million Trumpsters...there are millions of people for a myriad of reasons who voted for Trump and if “we” really listened and tried to understand many of those reasons we would feel plenty destabilized about our own being right about stuff. It is much easier and far less painful to how we see ourselves to just turn 70 million fellow citizens into a “them”.
This happens in small bits!!! Yes yes yes! Always too slow for some and too fast for others and just right for some...this is the Goldilocks rule of psychological and cultural change...always too hot for some and too cold for others and just right for some...we barely get pacing balanced in our individual life. Doing it as a collective is a helluva adventure.
Social or collective transformational is always multi-generational —utopian fantasies become dystopian nightmares- better to just connect small, local, intimate, steps to magnificent aspirations and insure we keep walking forward together every day. This is tying a conservative temperament to a progressive vision.
Yes! Our job is not to listen to those furthest from us who we seem to have the biggest disagreements with. Start small. Start small perhaps with the people we love, with friends and colleagues, and coworkers and neighbors with whom we moderately disagree and build up...transformation of the collective happens one relationship at a time. By the way this is why Biden has to put conservatives and progressives in his cabinet- and then share the conversations. As you well know listening that stretches us means we change in the encounter as much as the other —in other words this isn’t about “us” converting “them” rather in the listening to the other something new emerges in both of us. Just imagine if each of the 70 million people on “each side” picked one person to stretch with...
Yes you are a dreamer...and what a gift it is to be able to dream and you are much more than a dreamer as you have disciplined your dream to use all of who you are - mind and heart and all your experiences be they public or familial -to help make people and this world better.
What a great text to start my day with!!!!!
Happy Sunday,
Me