Dialogue in the Digital Age

Why it Matters How We Read and What We Say

Patrick Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000330694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

Combining literary criticism and theory with anthropology and cognitive science, this highly relevant book argues that we are fundamentally shaped by dialogue. Patrick Grant looks at the manner in which dialogue informs and connects the personal, political, and religious dimensions of human experience and how literacy is being eroded through many factors, including advances in digital technology.

The book begins by tracing the history of evolved communication skills and looks at ways in which interconnections among tragedy, the limits of language, and the silence of abjection contribute to an adequate understanding of dialogue. Looking at examples such as "truth decay" in journalism and falling literacy levels in school, alongside literary texts from Malory and Shakespeare, Grant shows how literature and criticism embody the essential values of dialogue. The maintenance of complex reading and interpretive skills is recommended for the recuperation of dialogue and for a better understanding of its fundamental significance in the shaping of our personal and social lives.

Tapping into debates about the value of literature and the humanities, and the challenges posed by digitalization, this book will be of interest and significance to people working in a wide range of subjects, including literary studies, communication studies, digital humanities, social policy, and anthropology.

1 Why dialogue? A brief introduction

Discussions about dialogue take us a long way back – at least to Plato, whose magisterial reflections on the topic some 2,500 years ago are a “shoreless sea”,¹ as Robert N. Bellah says, that through the ages has attracted a vast flotilla of further adventurers and explorers.

Central to Plato’s view of dialogue is the idea that people learn how to think and to re-evaluate their most deeply held ideas and convictions by entering into discussion with one another in a co-operative, if also mutually challenging, spirit. This spirit is acquired by practice and is marked by a willingness to participate in the process of discovering where a particular line of enquiry might lead. The personalities of the participants are part of this process because the feeling-structures that underlie and inform thinking also help to shape people’s moral, aesthetic, and religious evaluations and commitments. In short, dialogical thinking is embodied, and is not limited to an exchange of abstract ideas; rather, in dialogue thinking remains complex and open-ended just as persons also are open-ended, always unfinished.

Most discussions of dialogue, as well as most written dialogues, return more or less to these core concerns. This book is no exception, and throughout, following Plato, I emphasize that the dialogical and the personal are closely interconnected. I do so in response especially to the prevailing climate of the times today, in which a virtual sacralizing of the individual is accompanied by an equivalent diminishment of the idea of the person, so that the differences between individuals and persons are hardly noticed at all. The political implications of those differences are therefore also likewise largely ignored.

Not-so-free enterprise

From its beginnings – roughly, let us say, with the decline of feudalism – the free-enterprise system has depended on the versatility and dynamism of the markets to channel the flow of capital, and on the state to protect the markets from criminal interference and unfair practices. As Robert Heilbroner says, “there has never been such a social mechanism for sustained economic progress”, and yet throughout its history the free-enterprise system – or capitalism – has generated “wealth and misery simultaneously”. That is, at every phase capitalism has brought about new forms of suffering and deprivation as a side effect of its success. Because the logic of the markets is, as Heilbroner says, “as impersonal as that of military tactics”,² the dehumanizing consequences of this “mechanism” for progress are often written off more or less as collateral damage. Plenty of conscionable people, of course, have attended – and go on attending – philanthropically to the casualties of the system that they nonetheless simultaneously perpetuate. But however admirable, the goodwill of private individuals has hardly been sufficient to offset a great many widespread and often cruel inequalities as well as a great deal of avoidable suffering.

Political processes in many countries have indeed done much to correct at least some of the worst depredations of capitalist excess – through labor laws, public health, social security, and so on. And yet, on a massive scale, transnational capital today continues to outreach the political checks that would modify the indifference with which profits continue to be put before people. Also, with the morphing of industrial capital into financial capital, new crises have arisen from within the system and continue to be absorbed by it. As always, the main driver of the process at large, whether on the expanding out-of-control perimeter or at the established, unassailable center, is self-interest, the law of each against all in the drive to get ahead. Under such conditions, it is entirely understandable that a high value should be placed on the idea of individual freedom, even though, as a moment’s reflection confirms, within such a dispensation people are not so much free as isolated, insofar as each is in competition with all the others. The market might well be free, but the “individuals” who are hard at work within it are a great deal less self-determining than they often think.

A climate of the times

Ironically, in the present cultural phase the atomizing of individuals and the depersonalizing mechanisms that bring it about are greatly heightened by the communication technologies so remarkably developed by the digital revolution. Cell phones, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, emails, and the World Wide Web enable a hyper-communication that all too often turns out to be barely communication at all. One problem is simply that tsunamis of information without context have a fragmenting effect that makes it difficult to develop any patiently consolidated store of personal knowledge from which coherent discourse can be shaped. Even for the many people who bring to bear a developed critical perspective, the task of sifting through the sheer volume of information (and misinformation) is prohibitively taxing and time consuming. Consequently, it is not hard to notice today how a widespread skepticism about public discourse is accompanied by a privileging of emotion over reason – the Like button, as it were – accompanied by a readiness to disregard evidence and reasoned argument. It is hardly surprising that a recent RAND report describes a steady “truth decay” in journalism in the United States during the past three decades as news coverage has shifted increasingly “to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion”, while “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism”.³ In addition, a rapid increase in mass surveillance, the widespread political and commercial deployment of algorithms developed by Big Data, the use of “persuasive design” technologies, and targeted advertising are producing the exact opposite of the individual self-determination and freedom that these various thriving enterprises claim to champion.

To make matters more challenging, literacy rates in the United States and Canada today are a cause for serious concern. In the United States, almost one third of the population is “illiterate or barely literate”, and approximately 50 percent of adults “can’t read a book written at eighth-grade level”. In Canada, some 43 percent of adults have low literacy skills – that is, “too low to be fully competent in most jobs in our modern economy”. A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2012) assessed literacy among 16- to 19-year-olds in 23 countries. The United Kingdom was in 23rd place, the United States 21st, and Canada 17th.⁴ Maryanne Wolf, who writes well about the effects of digital technology on children’s learning, reports that “a full two-thirds of U.S. children in the fourth grade do not read at a ‘proficient’ level”. She presents evidence that children who are allowed a lot of screen time do not read, analyze, or comprehend as well as children whose screen time is restricted. Although good reading skills are necessary to “maintain the intellectual, social, and economic health of our country”, at the moment “two-thirds or more of future U.S. citizens are not even close”.⁵ Wolf does not recommend trying, somehow, to turn back the clock. Rather, we should focus on developing biliterate skills, so that the patient work of learning to read, think, and communicate is not neglected, even as more of people’s time is taken up by the different kind of attention cultivated by digital communication.

In view of all this, my main point is simple enough: the domain of the abbreviated text message, the Facebook outrage, the 140-character public-policy statement, together with the general, enervating confusion caused by information overload and what the TV commentator Van Jones felicitously calls “cancel culture; call-out culture”⁶ (by which he means, I take it, the fashionable strategy of immediate hostile rejection of a dissenting point of view followed immediately by accusation), is not at all what I take dialogue to be. Also, although these indicators of malaise are specific to the present times, it is worth noticing that they reproduce – even as they intensify – the basic alienations caused by a system that from the start has fetishized self-interest and individualism at the expense of the personal. Here, I take “personal” in a quite traditional sense to indicate a way of understanding human beings and the cultural and political means by which they organize their common life. That is, individuals are said to enter into personhood through relationship, entailing a recognition in the other of a sentience and intentionality akin to one’s own, together with a shared sense of strangeness, or difference. Because the personal develops always from and through the interpersonal, it follows that in the social sphere the good of all is returned as the good of each, so that the realization of communal goals is also the self-creation of those agents, or persons, who bring them about.⁷ The analogue of this process in the realm of verbal discourse is what I mean by dialogue.

Embodied mosaic

The analogy between dialogue and the personal remains at the heart of what I want to say in the following pages. Also, I want to suggest that in dialogue the full range of human language comes into play, so that language is not confined to its depersonalizing, instrumental uses. Rapid symbolic speech, which is unique to Homo sapiens, is an immensely powerful evolutionary advantage, but it is also a mosaic of discrete structures and skills. As the evolutionary principle of the conservation of gains reminds us, new skills build on and incorporate earlier ones, so that a breakdown at an underlying level will disrupt whatever more specialized abilities develop afterwards. It is likely that the earliest underpinnings of human speech were in what Darwin calls “rudimentary song” – that is, cries and signals presumably expressing fear, pain, triumph, alarm, and so on. Over time, further layers of communication were added through aggregation and syntheses to produce a complex network, not always without internal frictions. As Merlin Donald shows in detail, bodily gestures developed toward mimetic displays and, with the advent of spoken language, into storytelling, dance, and ritual.⁸ The eventual development of second-order thinking (reflection on the process itself of thinking), and the advent of writing and printing, rapidly increased the power of language and brought about a radical reorganization of human society. Today, digital communication technologies are developing at such speed that a major challenge is to understand how the entire computational turn belongs within the story as a whole and how to manage it while remaining mindful of the earlier strata that continue to underpin and sustain it.

It is not always easy to be mindful, however. A stock-market entrepreneur might all too readily ignore the stories and traditions underpinning a way of life in a local community that happens to present an investment opportunity. Likewise, the deliberate appropriation and manipulation of traditional narratives for merely instrumental purposes, such as the promotion of consumerism or political advantage, might all too readily ignore how ancient myths, stories, and ritual practices can connect people to the basic structures of their coexistence within nature in relation to each other. In turn, this coexistence depends on a pre-articulate recognition and respect (as Emmanuel Levinas strongly argues) that come about through personal, face-to-face meetings, and that cannot escape being undervalued by a culture that excessively promotes individualism and the instrumental uses of language. Instrumental and expedient modes of communication are of course useful – indeed, necessary – for practical purposes. But dialogue is based on an understanding (whether tacit or not) that a habitual curtailment of the full range of our language skills cuts us off from some significant aspect of what constitutes us as persons.

Art as dialogue

But how are we to deal with the fact that dialogue is usually considered to be oral, whereas our civilization has long since come to depend heavily on literacy? One answer is (as Walter Ong shows)⁹ that orality and literacy are interwoven, so that in a literate society, dialogue is inseparable from what is learned by reading. Plato was already struggling with this complexity. In the Phaedrus (275a), Socrates laments the fact that young people who focus too much on reading will be less able to remember well and, consequently, will be less able to participate in dialogue, which is oral. But throughout the Laws (from which Socrates is absent), a great many regulations are described as set down in writing because society cannot go on depending solely on oral tradition. This tension between the claims of orality and literacy is reproduced throughout the Dialogues, in which Socrates performs orally but is also a character in a literary work. In short, throughout the Dialogues oral discourse is written for readers, and if this were not the case, we could not understand the value that Plato attaches to dialogue in the first place. That is, his writing enables him to assess the oral from a critical point of view and attach a value to it. In so doing, he well knew that part of the price to be paid for the advantages of writing is that writing removes us from direct personal encounter with an interlocutor. Plato’s insistence on the true spirit of dialogue is therefore itself a warning against the depersonalizing aspects of the written word and, by extension, of concepts divorced from lived experience. Consequently, he takes care to compose the Dialogues as dramatized performances inhabited by a range of characters whose personalities shape the discussion, which in turn incorporates poetry, myth, metaphor, symbol, narrative, and literary allusions of many kinds, as well as the dialectic cut and thrust of argument. For Plato, the written word therefore re-creates an experience of oral discourse through the one mode of writing that is best ordered to do this, which is, broadly, what we now refer to as literature. The Dialogues do not fall into the chilly impersonality that Plato warns against because, through his literary art, they engage us as readers much as the participants within the dialogue itself are engaged with one another.

The ways in which art and literature are dialogical are explored by, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikhail Bakhtin, and the continuity they describe between the dialogical in art and in actual face-to-face exchange remains central to what I want to say in the following pages. And yet it is also the case that art and life are distinct. A painting of a person is not the actual person, and the audience at a tragic drama knows that the protagonist does not really die on stage. In much the same way, we know that burning a book and burning the author are crimes of a different order. That is, although art engages us dialogically, it also creates its own world, distinct from the face-to-face meetings that constitute the dialogical in our actual encounters with others. Nonetheless, we are to remember that art also connects us to the common world of our personal and social relationships. That is, books teach us how to live, and for humans, the art of living, we might say, is also the art of dialogue. Consequently, in a written discussion such as this one, examples from literature are especially helpful in showing how dialogue works. It is as if the dialogue of art is at once a mimesis and a touchstone for the art of dialogue.

What dialogue is (for now)

What, then, do I take dialogue to be? In a sentence, it is the open-ended process of people thinking creatively together, in which each discovers and decides how to respond by listening to the other. Dialogue is open-ended not least because the mosaic of language reaches back into the body that we do not completely know, just as we do n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Why dialogue? A brief introduction
• 2 A manner of speaking
• 3 Being not unrecognized
• 4 On the side of the sunflowers
• 5 Aporia and epiphany
• 6 In conclusion: To be continued
• Index