Lebanon and Communication

There's an old saying that shows up in free speech and journalism circles that seems relevant these days:

The answer to bad speech is more speech.

The saying often serves as a response to people who are pushing censorship in a newspaper, or are protesting something they have read and found vile. The phrase is another way of saying "if you don't like it, write a response in the form of a letter or column that we can run in the paper." Yeah, there's a certain amount of self-interest on the part of newspapers in that statement, but I think the underlying principle is clear: Jaw, jaw, is better than war, war. Communication can be constructive and move a discussion forward, whereas a lack of communication - as Hannah Arendt has pointed out - often leads to violence (or at least conflict). People familiar with the situation in the Lebanon School District might recognize the situation - my opinion is that what I perceive as massive failures in communication have led to a lot of the present conflict. Certainly disagreements over education policy alone are not enough to provoke the kind of behaviors that have been present in Lebanon recently.

There is a large part of me that doesn't like the above saying. Or, at the least, I think it has limits. Certain speech is "bad" enough, I think, to warrant pretty severe responses that may take forms other than speech (for example, hate speech and threats of violence). But by and large, as someone who still half-heartedly believes in the Enlightenment and definitely believes in the power of stories, I think responding to speech one dislikes with more speech is, in general, a great response.

Or, to get at this another way: I think Lebanon needs some Habermasian Communicative Action. (And yes, I am aware that I just outed myself as a huge pretentious nerd...again. It's what I've got.)

From Wikipedia:

...communicative action is a social action that can be compared to instrumental action (self-interested), normative action (adapted to a shared value system) or dramaturgical action (one which is designed to be seen by others and to optimize our public self-image). Habermas claims that all of those actions are parasitic upon the communicative action, which goes beyond them.

Communicative action, in comparison to the others mentioned in the quote, has as a primary priority the successful communication of the intention of communication itself. That is, while other forms of communication are often accompanied by some additional instrumental (that is, ends-seeking) motive, the only additional motive present in communicative action is that of making sure the communication is successfully understood. This serves to build trust, solidarity, and community.

Wikipedia also adds "[Communicative Action] has the goal of mutual understanding, and [believes] that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding." I think that's accurate. Communicative action requires and contains a level of trust.

Finally, one particularly solid definition, again from Wikipedia:

Habermas uses this concept to describe agency in the form of communication, which under his understanding is restricted to deliberation, i.e the free exchange of beliefs and intentions under the absence of domination. [Italics added]

So: Communicative action builds trust and solidarity by allowing the free exchange of ideas, beliefs, and opinions without fear of domination.

Personally, I think Habermas' Communicative Action is one of the best tools I've ever run across, period. It's applicable in a huge variety of situations, including, I think, Lebanon.

Here's the thing: This blog, and its author, get a fair amount of dirt - calls, emails, side conversations, etc - about what's going on in the district. Much of this is given with an understanding of confidentiality - and that requirement is often based on the fear of what would happen if certain people found out who was saying what, and to whom.

This is a problem. This whole environment, in which people are distinctly not free - afraid, even! - to speak their mind for fear of retaliation is, I think, one of the root causes of the myriad of problems plaguing the district right now. There are so many rumors going around, factions being formed and reformed, longstanding gossip chains, etc., that it's really hard to be open and honest. Certainly this blogger has refrained from saying plenty of things for fear of being outed - and that fear of being outed is based on a fear of retaliation for speaking freely.

Basically, I think the people of Lebanon would really stand to benefit from implementing something like communicative action. At the least, I would like to see an increasing level of honesty and trust in communication - radical trust, not mutually assured destruction-style trust - from folks who are involved and have something to say. The answer to bad speech is more speech, and in this case, what I've seen is mostly bad speech in the Habermasian sense: Veiled references to other people, backhanded references to events with the presumption that everyone shares the same understanding of what happened at said event (which is almost never true), and baseless claims that come from a place of anger, not a place of seeking understanding. As a result of all, much of the sense of community and trust that Lebanon used to have regarding its schools is gone. Instead, I see lots of assumptions being made about the motivations of others - and those kinds of assumptions are almost always wrong, because we can't really know what's in the mind of another person. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that in many cases, people are not assuming anything positive about those they are working or talking with.

I would love to see an answer to bad speech that comes in the form of good speech: Speech that doesn't assume it has an opponent, and doesn't assume that opponent is evil; speech that doesn't make blanket claims about either the state of the world or the intentions of an individual; and speech that acknowledges the nature of the situation: That despite a myriad of personal and policy differences, the staff, parents, and teachers - and students! - are ultimately all in this together regardless, and there is a certain amount of trust and professionalism that's necessary if anything positive is going to be accomplished.

Finally, I think it's necessary for someone to take the first steps and start talking in the open about what's going on without accusations and without judgments. When Lebanon Truth first started their blog using the full name "Lebanon Truth and Reconciliation," I thought the name was overblown and overly dramatic. Now I'm not so sure: Certainly Lebanon is not dealing with anything on the scale of South African apartheid, but Lebanon could sure use some truth and reconciliation right now. From everybody.

One might note two things at this point:

1) That I stated I would be writing about Lebanon less. I should amend that: I will write about Lebanon whenever it strikes me. It might strike me less in the future; it might not.

2) But Dap, you might say, with the reinstatement of Robinson, isn't everything over? No, of course not: the underlying and fundamental conflicts are still present. The bad attitudes and poisoned relationships are still present. A tremendous amount of healing of the process needs to happen before the LCSD is a healthy community again. Just as it took quite some time to get where Lebanon is now, it will take quite some time of hard, positive relationship-building before things get to a really healthy place.