In 1935, the late British author and journalist Rebecca West wrote, “There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”[1] Her words may be several decades old, but they perfectly describe much of our public discourse. Whether it is the talking heads on television, political or social commentators on cable, or social media users online, we seem no longer capable of listening to one another. All we care to talk about is what we know.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we all fantasized about how the internet would bring our world closer together. Our current reality is not what many of us had in mind. What it did was bring together people who believed the same things. It gave them digital platforms to recycle and redistribute the same groupthink with those who thought like them. It has metastasized to the point where most feel little obligation to expose themselves to any type of diversity of thought or objective reflection, given all the content that reinforces their confidence in their correctness. They stream and follow those who think like them, act like them, and in many cases, look like them.
We have so saturated ourselves in our own opinions that we can no longer envision the world functioning correctly unless it adheres to our principles. Religion, politics, race, justice, equality, and the environment are vital systems in any civilized society. They must be examined at the highest levels of our governments and academia, in our churches and corporate areas, and in our most cherished and intimate spaces, such as our living rooms and bedrooms. Yet, in today’s world, these systems are considered too toxic for dialogue. They bear this categorization, not because they are inherently problematic, but due to the visceral and polarizing reactions they provoke in those who cannot see beyond their own vested interests.
We must be better than that. We must do better than that. There is nothing more meaningful than the people who matter most to us: our family, friends, and peers. They bring wholeness and security to our existence. Many of us could not have survived much of our lives had they not been there for us. It is this treasure of healthy human relationships that we must nurture, protect, and promote. To invest oneself in the lives of others is to invest in humanity itself. It is the essence of what it means to be part of a community. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best:
We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.[2]
CONCLUSION
[1] Rebecca West, The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England. 1956 (Reprint of 1935 edition), p.63. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/04/conversation/#note-8126-7 [2] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/publications/knock-midnight-inspiration-great-sermons-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr-10.
Cover Photo for series by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels. Cover Design by Terrence Jones.
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