Reading books like Solving Tough Problems challenges me. Can we solve the problem of animal exploitation through extreme opposition (even if we are right)? Alternatively, what would an open way look like? Can we listen to our opponents and work with people who disagree with us to find solutions? Does listening and respecting others weaken our position, or does it make it more likely that we can succeed?
Sometimes it just feels right to keep, defend, and hold a position. Animals are not ours to use, in any way. My instinct is that this is unquestionably correct — and I am compelled to stand up against those who use or abuse (or endorse the use and abuse of) animal.
Adam Kahane has worked with disparate groups in some of the tensest and toughest situations of our time. After facilitating groundbreaking dialogues between a spectrum of blacks and whites in barely-post-apartheid South Africa, he has worked to explore (and advocate for) the potential of dialogue as an alternative to unilateral or violent solutions to problems.
This book is essentially about listening. He looks at what makes for successful dialogue, and the kinds of listening and speaking that happen in meetings, conversations, and dialogues.
Kinds of listening
The first is downloading, which is speaking without listening to others. Each participant knows what she thinks already and only waits to present her position. She only listens to herself, and only hears whatever supports her own position. The possibility of different factions coming to any sort of agreement is essentially zero. Positions are set and likely only become more hardened. Kahane writes:
The first is “downloading,” or listening from within our own story, but without being conscious that what we are saying and hearing is no more than a story. When we download we are deaf to other stories; we only hear that which confirms our own story. This is the kind of nonlistening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators, experts, and people who are arrogant or angry.
The second kind opens up to some listening, but this takes the form of debate. Kahane describes this as “listen[ing] to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or courtroom.”
Neither of these ways of listening and talking opens up the possibility of creation of anything new. We evaluate and choose from the ideas presented.
Both of these kinds of interaction are very common. This is what we see everyday in our lives. Just watching my own conversations through the day, I see many examples of downloading and debating. And very little else.
It feels to me that most vegan outreach and animal rights/protection (or whatever term you want to use) work involves these 2 kinds of communication. There is a lot of talk about empathy and compassion, but how often to we really try to see what our opponents see and feel how they feel? Do we try to know and understand them?
Do we even need to?
When we open up our listening we are receptive to new ideas. Kahane calls this “reflective dialogue.” Speaking of his South African project, Kahane writes:
The members of the Mont Fleur team had listened, not only openly, but also reflectively. When they listened, they were not just reloading their old tapes. They were receptive to new ideas. More than that, they were willing to be influenced and changed. They held their ideas lightly; they noticed and questioned their own thinking; they separated themselves from their ideas (“I am not my ideas, and so you and I can reject them without rejecting me”). They “suspended” their ideas, as if on strings from the ceiling, and walked around and looked at these ideas from different perspectives.
This reflective openness is an openness not only to new ideas, but to new ideas about yourself.
We cannot develop creative solutions to complex human problems unless we can see, hear, open up to, and include the humanity of all of the stakeholders and of ourselves.... This kind of listening is not sympathy, participating in someone else’s feeling from alongside them. It is empathy, participating from within them. This is the kind of listening that enables us not only to consider alternative existing ideas but to generate new ones.”
New understanding and new ideas can come out of this sort of dialogue. When we listen to others and ourselves in this way we gain a greater understanding of why we think the way we do. Opening up ourselves to feel what others are feeling, to really knowing and understanding them, can create new ideas and new solutions.
There is a 4th stage called “generative dialogue.” Kahane describes this as “listen[ing] not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system.” This is dialogue where the group begins to think as a group, instead of a collection of individuals. In generative dialogue, we not only “listen and be, but we also need to talk and act.” This is “open speaking” and “open talking.”
How can this apply to anyone working towards animal rights? Can it be applied to that struggle?
What we can do
In the conclusion of the book, Kahane asks:
How can we solve our tough problems without resorting to force? How can we overcome the apartheid syndrome in our homes, workplaces, communities and countries, and globally? How can we heal our world’s gaping wounds?
The way we treat animals and the rest of the natural world is very definitely on of our world’s gaping wounds. It is a huge and chronic problem for which we present a vegan lifestyle as a solution. Do we too often resort to force to push this solution? Force is not always physical force, but can be enforcement through laws or peer pressure.
What would it even look like to involve representatives of every group that has a stake in the question to dialogue about it? Chances are some would not even recognize that there is a problem. I can’t really even imagine what it would look like to have animal rights activists, animal welfare organizations, veterinarians, farmers, scientists, pet store owners, and more in one room trying to dialogue. That it would even be possible for all of these people to talk to each other openly, to reflectively dialogue, seems almost completely impossible.
But what we can do is try to at least speak to each other and listen to each other within the animal protection movement in this way. I can imagine representatives from across the whole range of groups working to protect animals, welfare to abolition, rights to humane use, sitting down to talk and create new solutions to the problem. In this way positive ways of interacting and working together can be modeled, which may spread across the entire movement.
Then, when we’re on the street talking to people, we may end up being as open to everyone’s perspective as we are dedicated to promoting our own perspective.
Kahane sees the solution to the difficult questions we face as coming out of dialogue:
We have to shift from downloading and debating to reflective and generative dialogue. We have to choose an open way over a closed way.
He presents 10 simple but not easy suggestions for getting started in this shift:
- Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are talking and listening.
- Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting.
- Remember that you don’t know the truth about anything.
Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in the system.
- Reflect on your own role in the system.
- Listen with empathy.
- Listen to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all of you.
- Stop talking.
- Relax and be fully present.
- Try out these suggestions and notice what happens.
In closing, he writes:
Every one of us gets to choose, in every encounter every day, which world we will contribute to bringing into reality. When we choose the closed way, we participate in creating a world filled with force and fear. When we choose an open way, we participate in creating another, better world.
If we truly want to see a compassionate world where people respect and try to empathically understand all of the beings who live with us on this planet, we need to start living that world in ourselves.
Open space begins with a circle – we gather in a circle, itself a challenge to the normal state of affairs in the world. The circle puts us all on equal footing, no matter our status outside the space.