Saturday, May 23, 2015

Seek First to Understand Others
EJ Dionne hit a home run again in an editorial reprinted in the ABJ today.  He argues for the democratic value of struggling to find the humility to balance our passion, and in terms of politics today to embrace the power of being passionate about moderation.

In doing so, he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr expressing an idea I have long held close to my heart as critically important for achieving agreements, transforming conflicts, and problem solving.  I believe I first encountered the idea in JS Mill's On Liberty.
Dionne does not quote Niebuhr and I could not find a quote or source on the web, but here is how Dionne paraphrases him (see below for RH quote):
"It is always wise to seek the truth in our opponents' error, and the error in our own truth." 
This idea overlaps with Getting To Yes where we find the assertion that we would be wise to reframe our conflicts from positions to interests...in other words,
"It is always wise to seek the truth value within the underlying interests/concerns in our opponents' position, and the hidden-in-plain sight positionality and posturing, blind spot and shadow side in our own truth."
Using GTY we first need to move from posturing about positions to focusing on and engaging about underlying interests an concerns.
Then using RH (and Gandhi or King) we need to identify from among the competing and overlapping interests & concerns that we and our opponents bring to any dispute the portions of truth contained in each (and all thinkers here would agree that no one person or party or sect or era has a monopoly on truth, so there is always some truth value to be found in the menu of concerns & interests driving on each side).
Niebuhr here is also intersecting with Steven Covey’s 5th of 7 habits of effective people:  seek first to understand, then to be understood.  And with St. Francis of Assisi’ who says ‘Oh master grant that I many never seek so much to be understood as to understand.”

Thanks EJ. 

There is a hot link from EJ Dionne's piece to a Richard Crouter book titled Reinhold Niebuhr: Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith, with the actual Niebuhr quote at the link provide, from page 134 of that book.   

"The fact is that any commitment, religious political or cultural, can lead to intolerance if there is not a residual awareness of the possibility of error in the truth in which we believe, and of the possibility of truth in the error against which we contend."

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