Home Life

Mother was different. She was a patient listener, usually. I could talk with Mother about anything, and at length, and did for over half a century. In her presence I could express myself and dream dreams that had no possibility of being realized in the real world, knowing that I was not likely to be squelched. So I felt much closer to Mother than to Daddy.

On the other hand, Mother mostly just listened. She never said much, told me little of what she thought about my words, and gave little advice and few instructions. Except on one or two subjects--birdwatching was one--she rarely revealed much of her own thought, feeling, or dreams (I often wonder what they were). She just listened to my monologues, knowing that, listening, all by itself, offers the human soul some of the best therapy possible.

So I was raised in a home that knew little dialogue, a family with three brothers who, for the most part, each went his own way, only occasionally acknowledging the existence of the others. And I doubt that we were an unusual American family. And there are other nations whose societies echo this same experience.

I don’t know how well all of this describes the homes in which Mother and Daddy themselves grew up, but I have heard enough from cousins and other family members to believe their homes were much like mine, and that the pattern could be traced back, on both sides, for at least a generation or two before that. And I fear that my own daughters might see this as a description of their own father and their own experience.

(I must say that it was quite different with their mother. She and our daughters have dialogued; they have connected, not always in the best way, but they got involved in trying to know and be known. Something of this seems to have been true of my wife’s family. Not all families are like the one I was raised in, but many are, and they tend to reproduce.)

Somehow we don’t take time for each other; we don’t listen to those nearest to us. We are family, that is, we are familiar with each other, but don’t know each other. And thus we don’t know ourselves. Without the opportunity to learn what others feel and think, we don’t understand clearly our own inner life. Without sharing with someone else our thoughts and feeling about each other, our own self-perception remains out of focus. We can know ourselves in only dialogue with others.

Without dialogue I cannot become a whole person. If in the home we don’t all share our inner lives, we remain family, but are familiar with each other only in a limited sense. Without the exchange of ideas, plans, hopes, and fears, we never live in community on this earth. Our pain, our emptiness, and our horrors are in large measure, rooted in our lack of dialogue.

It is a historical commonplace that the declaration of war is immediately preceded by the announcement that “talks have broken off.” They usually have broken down because the negotiation between diplomats is, too often, an exchange of reciprocal monologues, each trying to convince the other side, never seeking to hear and understand the other’s heritage, position, predicament, or philosophy.

However, we are stuck with each other; our radical individualism and egoism cannot eliminate all the others--people, nature, and God--that are linked with our life. Sartre claimed that “hell is other people,” but he also tells us there is NO EXIT from this world of others. We are inescapably social, made for relationship, and directly linked with the natural order. We fail to take others into account at risk of denying our humanity and destroying hope for a human and global future.

Because everything is ultimately connected and interrelated in one great ecosystem, we must acknowledge otherness, listen and respond to it, and work toward a more satisfying harmony of all its parts, including that part which is our self. Apart from dialogue, we are doomed.

On the other hand, we have available a method of thinking and living that can clear the way to a much more promising, satisfying and humane future. That method is the dialectic, and the dialectic is the heart of this ongoing discussion of “considerate thinking.”