Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting
sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine
discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds
which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this
country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action
is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of
talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put
into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an
insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents
still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion
of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and
effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points
are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So
conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside
of our personal contacts.
Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire.
An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is
popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man,
a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have
met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them
go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving
for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without
some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it
important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color
of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten
of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and
approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of
their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all
doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world,
all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education,
all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of
journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack
of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can
smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are
using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and
because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they
should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as
in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find,
is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which
stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious
of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid
platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in
thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless
realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a
measuring-stick for human conduct, another a social goal towards
which he works. Concepts emerge which to half the company represent
a mental vacuum, and to the other half imply a warm blow of virtue.
World-philosophies which might be recognized are shabbily ignored. The
feeble sparring of their distorted shadows is taken for discussion, and
the company separates with a vague feeling of having occupied itself
for an evening with something profitably mental.
All the time, however, it is these fundamental philosophies which
are the real antagonists, and not the concrete ideas which are the
subjects of discussion. A good discussion passes rapidly into an
examination of those presuppositions. It is more interested in charting
out the minds of the other talkers than in winning small victories or
getting agreements. Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering
the hidden categories and secret springs of emotion that underlie
“opinions” on things. It seeks that common background and store of
meanings in which alone diverse opinions can really meet and operate.
We can no longer tolerate reasons which are only retrospective props
for action that was really impulsive in its origin. No more should
we tolerate in discussion that stubborn voicing of attitudes which
seem axiomatic to the speaker only because he has never examined the
structure of his own thought. It is popular nowadays to welcome the
expression of every new attitude. But a discussion should be tolerant
and hospitable only after the ground has been cleared. You must be
very sure that what you have to deal with is a real attitude and not
a counterfeit. Discussion remains mere talk if it remains content
with the expression of an “opinion” and does not put the expressor
to immediate cross-examination to discover in the name of what
Weltanschauung the opinion came.
Discussion should be one of the most important things in the world, for
it is almost our only arena of thinking. It is here that all the jumble
of ideas and impressions that we get from reading and watching are
dramatically placed in conflict. Here only is there a genuine challenge
to put them into some sort of order. Without discussion intellectual
experience is only an exercise in a private gymnasium. It has never
been put to the test, never had to give an account of itself. It is
some such motive that impels people to discussion; though they are
too often content with the jousting of pasteboard knights. But a good
discussion is not only a conflict. It is fundamentally a coöperation.
It progresses towards some common understanding. This does not mean
that it must end in agreement. A discussion will have been adequate if
it has done no more than set the problem in its significant terms, or
even defined the purpose that makes such a setting significant. You
turn up things in your mind that would have remained buried without the
incision of some new idea. The effort to say exactly what you mean,
sharpening your idea to the point that will drive home to others, is
itself invigorating. A good discussion tones up your mind, concentrates
its loose particles, gives form and direction. When all say exactly
what they mean, then for the first time understanding--the goal of
discussion--is possible.
Discussion demands a mutual trustfulness, a mutual candor. But this
very trustfulness makes discussion vulnerable. It is particularly open
to the attack of the person who sees in the group a forum. The physical
signs of such a misinterpretation are familiar. The eye becomes
slightly dilated, the voice more orotund. The suggestion develops
into an exposition, the exposition into an apologia or recrimination.
Discussion is slain. Another enemy is the person who sidetracks a
sentence and then proceeds in a leisurely way to unload its freight
into his own wagon. But in a good discussion the traffic is kept
constantly moving in both directions along a rather rigid line of
track, and the freight arrives somewhere. Some people have a fatal gift
of derailment. Wit is perhaps the most common means. Discussion has no
greater enemies than those who can catch an idea and touch it off into
a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it.
Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be
rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely
realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces
the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and
anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly
what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He
studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for
advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and
phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches
indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full
freight of significance intended.
The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking.
A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes
part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means
becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are
personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who
instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences
have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group.
The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment
where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an
instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not
lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue.