A Dialogue on Dialogue

Jon:
So, we both saw the same 4 talks [on Monday], and we each came away with an impression about the opening anecdotes of a speaker. For me, it was the speech by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier: he opened his speech speaking about Rwanda's efforts at rebuilding and reconciliation, their efforts to "reconstitute" themselves, and also mentioned that Germany has been faced with the same task twice in recent history. I'm not entirely sure which two he was referring to; it may have been the rebuilding efforts after the two world wars, or was it rebuilding after WWII and re-unification? Let's just round it up to three for now.

Steinmeier went on to speak about ways of promoting reason, peace, and stability in foreign countries, especially using cultural outreach. But the examples he chose in his introduction struck me because they are in fact perfect examples of two times Germany has been on the wrong side of history.

In Rwanda, it was the German East Africa colonial project that first put the minority Tutsis in power in the 1880s; the reason was that they were considered to be more civilized, and they were more inclined to cooperate with their new colonial rulers, thus promoting stability. Of course, they oppressed the majority Hutu population for 8 decades, until the Hutu revolt in the early 1960s. After that, Hutus took power and turned the tables, oppressing the formerly-powerful Tutsi minority, often violently. This led, 3 decades later, to the civil war that escalated into one of the worst genocides in modern history.

After World War I, Germany was again on the wrong side of history, but this time they were the victims of outside power imposed on them. The allied powers insisted on huge reparation payments from Germany to compensate for wartime losses; Germany was in no position to refuse. This led to the economic devastation of the Weimar Republic; we certainly know how Germany "reconstituted" itself after that.

All this is very germane to Germany's foreign policy positions towards Greece and Ukraine today. Greece's current debts, their inability to pay them, and Germany's insistence that they impose suffering on their own people couldn't be a more perfect analog for Germany's situation after WWI. Previous Greek governments made bad decisions, ran up huge debts, deceived the European Community about the state of their finances, and put the country in a situation where they are unable to pay back the money they were lent. Now, a new government is in place, trying to pick up the pieces of the devastation left behind by the crisis, and Germany, Finland, and the ECB are insisting that Greece must pay, regardless of whether they can afford it or not, and regardless of what suffering that might impose on the Greek people.

In Ukraine, the picking of sides, funding of war, and subsequent value extraction and profiteering is eerily reminiscent of colonial projects like Rwanda, where whatever faction was seen as most likely to be friendly and acquiescent to the colonizer's preferred world order was supported, and then used to extract resources and value from the colonized country once they gained power. (Of course, today we are a little bit less explicit about how we colonize; we don't like to call it colonization. But whether it is done with guns, tanks, missiles, or international finance, it's still colonization. Let's call a spade a spade.)

Natália:

Starting with an anecdote is a well-known trick, right? But it's not really up to the task of calling a spade a spade, I don't think. It allows the speaker to establish some connection with the listener and to exemplify the argument that will unfold, but it works very, very selectively. What you just said about the foreign minister's talk--the memorial in Ruanda--I must say, did grab my attention. And though he said he didn't choose it to make an "emotional impact," well, it did have one... his verbal negation of such an intention does nothing to erase the actual performance of the anecdote; it is more like a part of his show.

But the anecdote that most intrigued me at the conference today was used by Gabriel Motzkin. It says on his biography that he directs an institute "committed to the advancement of humanistic, democratic and liberal values." His talk, which was part of the panel on traditions and source of dialogue, dealt with dialogue as a rational negotiation. He claimed that language allows us to take part on someone else's cognitive process. For him, using language is a way to participate of the other person's flow of conscience. I didn't agree with most of his arguments, mostly because they we premised on--surprise, surprise--"humanistic and liberal values," but what was most striking for me was that his own talk contradicted his very argument on rational dialogue.

He started his talk by invoking the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortez: "When Cortez came to the New world, I don't know how he managed to make an alliance with 3 indigenous nations without speaking a single word of their language!" I'm paraphrasing, but very closely... I'm just baffled by him saying it like this!

How did Cortéz manage? Well, the short answer is: he had an interpreter, that is how!

Malintzin, or La Malinche, or Doña Marina was an indigenous woman who was given to the Spaniards as a slave. It turned out that she was pretty good at communicating; she knew the language of the Nahua and also other Mayan dialects. Eventually she learned Spanish too. She was so important for Cortéz's project that many codices depict the conquest showing the two of them always together. Sometimes she is shown even alone in depictions of negotiations! They were so close that some historians refer to them both by the same name of Malintzin: hers! When Chimalpahin (a Nahua historian born in 1579) set out to copy Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la Indias y Conquista de México, he ended up making many ammendments and corrections to it, improving its accuracy from a Nahua's perspective. On chapter 123 of Chimalpahin's version of the book, we read that Cortéz spoke "through his interpreter Malintzin (who was always there to help the captain)." La Malinche was crucial for the Spanish, so much so that later, when a Mexican nationalist discourse started to affirm the indigenous roots of Mexican identity, she was portrayed her as a traitor to her people. To be called a malinchista is an insult in Mexico.

Now, back to Motzkin talk. Why do I care that he erased Malinztin from the anecdote? First, I don't like the masculinist bias that it implies. If portraying Malintzin as a traitor is not necessarily a compliment, at least it puts her in the history as an important actor. But to invoke precisely this anecdote in a talk about the importance of language for dialogue and NOT EVEN MENTION the interpreter, well, that is what I call a blind spot!

Secondly, it would have been nice to use the story of Malintzin to exemplify precisely the importance, and the limits, of language in negotiations. It would be interesting to discuss the particular double bind in which she was placed regarding loyalty. Who was she supposed to be loyal to, exactly? To her "own people"? Which one, the people of Paynala (rule by the Aztecs) or the people of Potonchán (who were Mayan), both of whom disposed of her as a slave? Or was it OK for her to help the Spanish, given that they gave her protection? What about her conversion to cristianity, when she received the name of Doña Marina? Was it OK to be loyal to her new religion, even if it meant that a bunch of people died? Doesn't the conversion mean that her people now were somebody else? But all of this would only be possible if we were in another world, one where Prof. Motzkin had a little bit more sensitivity about cultural differences and about the lived experience of "the Other" and didn't only invoke anecdotes about far far away places just for the sake of a lecture pun.

Jon: 

Maybe that's why it was the anecdotes that grabbed both of our attention in the talks we didn't like: the anecdotes were microcosms of the blind spots in the broader talks. I also disliked Motzkin's talk; it clearly came from someone who loves a good argument.

There's this school of thought that you can get to the best answer through a process of arguing, by having a battle of ideas, by throwing your premises to the wolves (your interlocutors!) and letting them be torn apart if they can be. Whatever is left standing must be what is best.

My dad had a saying that he'd often have to bring up over the dinner table when I was growing up: 'Conversation is not a martial art.' (I, my sister, and my mom all needed this reminder all too often.) It took me a while, but as an adult I eventually realized how true that was, and tried to put it into action in my daily life. Conversation as conflict, the idea of knowledge production coming from a "battle of ideas"; these are not intellectual practices that actually lead to the best outcomes, as their practitioners believe. They privilege the voices of people who enjoy conflict (and have the freedom and agency to fearlessly engage in conflict), and silence the voices of many others. They exacerbate power differences, and make it riskier for the less-powerful to enter the discussion. They annihilate interesting ideas that are still gestational, or that come from people without training in the rhetorical-martial arts.

This idea is also, I find, spiritually linked to the idea of the market as a sort of oracle, or rather as a truth-determining machine. I'm referring here to the belief that the market will choose the best option from an array of choices, and so, even if no one individual in the market can truly know the best outcome, the winner must have been the one that was best. I won't go into the many, many reasons I believe that to be wrong, but suffice it to say that it shares a lot of the same problems with the adversarial model of knowledge generation.

Natália:

Yes, what you said just before resonates well with Karen Barad's comments on the practice of critique. She says that we are usually very thorougly trained in critique in school. It is all that we practice: find out what is wrong with what someone said and argue against it. Martial art indeed! But there is another, even more important aspect of practicing critical thinking, which is to attend to the real life implications of ideas. And like you said, sometimes our ideas are just an embryo, they are the tiny starters of something else, that might end up being really cool and useful. But if our mode of critique is satisfied with just the "wrong" part, we are very likely to ignore the productive parts, and throw the baby with the bath water, as the saying goes.

Now, I know that what I'you and I are doing right now is precisely to critique the two speakers, but there is an important point regarding our critiques, I think. I am concerned with the erasures that they performed in their talks. The problem is related to what you said about trusting the markets to "choose the best." What I see as the result of this mode of thinking is the imposition of only one way, only one standard, only one solution. But we all know how much diversity we have in our beautiful planet Earth, how can we possibly think that there is only one way, one solution to address a need or a problem? There can be many, there are many, and it is actually healthier if we embrace that. We don't always need to have the best of something, we might be OK with just a makeshift version that allows us to move on. And if we allow this to be, we might even discover that what we thought of as "not the best" is in fact the very best for some occasion.