Dialogue: Speaking to Listen, Listening to Speak

David Bohm. On Dialogue. Edited by Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, 1996. William Isaacs. Dialogue and Art of Thinking Together. New York: Currency/Random House, 1999. Daniel Yankelovich. The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Linda Ellinor and Glenna Gerard. Dialogue: Rediscover Transforming Power of Conversation. New York: Wiley, 1998. WHEN I recently told a friend that I was reading about Dialogue Theory, he asked, Why don't you read Plato? He's absolute word on Absolutely - in a sense. In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates seems quite master of a dialogue of sorts when he triumphs over Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles by asserting that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Though not entirely a convincing coup de theatre in name of virtue, final scene unfolds in earnest when Socrates confounds Callicles by insisting the choice before you now is either to prove me wrong in my conviction that happy owe their happiness to possession of uprightness and discipline, and miserable their misery to possession of vice, or else, if what I say is true, to examine what follows from it. (1) In convincing Callicles that only two choices lay before him, Socrates wins argument and emerges as superhero of his time in matters of human conduct. But what if Socrates and friends - and especially his enemies - lived in our time? What if, transported into future and made wretched by twenty-four centuries of human failure, they decided that point of their debate was not to discover who could edge closer to prevailing image of elusive truth? What if goal was to sacrifice all else in interest of consensus, to find common ground? Despite my natural inclination for debate, I did not disagree with my friend about his conception of dialogue. Rather, I decided to practice Dialogue by attempting to better understand it through this brief review of four books on subject. Dialogue Is ... What exactly is Dialogue as described by physicist and philosopher David Bohm? Etymologizing word, Bohm notes that Greek word dia means through, and logos means word. Through words, Dialogue intends not to evoke argument but to focus on what causes communication barriers. It seeks a means for people to discover and analyze prejudices and assumptions that influence their beliefs and feelings, and to openly share their realizations. Dialogue can occur with an individual in solitary contemplation or between individuals, groups, and even nations. Widely acknowledged as an authority on Dialogue, Bohm saw Dialogue as a way of understanding abysmal state of communication among human beings. Illustrations abound of how Dialogue has become an endangered communicative exercise - in fact, nearly extinct in some cultures. For examples, see Allan Bloom's The Closing of American Mind, Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, Nat Hentoff's Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee, Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America, Thomas Sowell's The Vision of Anointed, and numerous other books throughout political spectrum. On Dialogue by David Bohm David Bohm's legacy crosses worlds of science and language. His championing of a causal interpretation of quantum physics led to lengthy conversations with Einstein, but it won him little respect among most scientists, who preferred orthodox indeterminate approach espoused by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Copenhagen School theorists (and subjects of Michael Frayn's Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen). In early 1950s, Bohm stood fast against Senator Joseph McCarthy's inquiries, which seriously damaged his professional standing in United States and caused him to live and work abroad until his retirement in 1987 and his death five years later. …