Tony Abbott has called for a national conversation. Does he mean a white paper by people he agrees with?
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Version 0 of 1. At his recent speech to the National Press Club, Tony Abbott called for “an honest national conversation”. It’s an admirable aspiration, but I’m pretty sure he was obscurely using the word “conversation” to mean “a white paper delivered by people who agree with me, followed by electoral acquiescence”. “Conversation” is an idea much bandied around but maddeningly imprecise. When Twitter invites us to “join the conversation”, they’re using the c-word to mean “exchange of bon mots shouted into the ether to prove moral and rhetorical superiority”. Participation in public conversation is potentially more accessible than at any previous point in history. Social media, we are told, means that public conversation has been democratised: we all have a platform from which to opine and the conventional gatekeepers of our cultural and intellectual life can no longer determine who gets a say. But so much of what falls under that label is often the antithesis of true, meaningful dialogue. I am the director of the Wheeler Centre, an organisation devoted to the art of public conversation. We stage more than 200 mostly-free talks a year and are committed to creating rigorous, stimulating events. But we’re yet to resolve the challenge of how to create genuine back and forth between the writers, thinkers, artists and experts on our stage and our audiences – how to create genuine discussion. And we’re yet to resolve it because it’s hard. The problems are threefold: failure to listen, reluctance to challenge and be challenged, and an anxiety about expertise and intellectualism. If we’re completely honest, we hanker after conversation as an opportunity to be heard rather than to listen. None of us really wants to hear from our peers and our neighbours. Talkback radio, letters to the paper, internet comment threads: our expectations around public contribution to public conversation are perilously low. In the world of writers’ festivals and public talks, members of the audience approach contributions from one another with a sense of fatigue at best, dread at worst. Melbourne cartoonist Oslo Davis spoke for audiences everywhere when a recent cartoon depicted an interviewer at a public talk offering the audience “…time for just one long-winded, self-indulgent question that relates to nothing we’ve been talking about.” An exchange where all participants are set to transmit and nobody to receive is no kind of conversation. Call it the “TEDification” of public life. The online behemoth with their slick production values, prodigiously successful output and eclectic mix (the TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) gets a great deal right, but let’s not call it conversation. This is public intellectualism as sales pitch, the idea as a fully-packaged product ready to be passed around and consumed. TED’s slogan, like much of its output, is immediately appealing but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: “ideas worth spreading”. A truly great idea shouldn’t just be spread. It should be met with another idea. It should be poked and prodded and challenged. It should be questioned. Detractors of TED point to the surprising fact that 80% of the presentations at their conferences end in a standing ovation. This is not about dialogue. This is affirmation. And it’s replicated in so many of the public conversations in which we participate. We surround ourselves with those who we know agree with us and will confirm our world views. Conversation need not be adversarial (and certainly shouldn’t be played to be won) but if it’s defined by timidity then it will disappoint. Which brings me to the third problem of public conversation. When our politicians and our mainstream media show such cavalier disregard for the voices of experts – when we don’t listen to our historians and our climate scientists, our economists and our humanitarians – then it’s natural to worry about whether the “right” people are being heard in public conversation. Free speech is all well and good but let’s not waste time on the bogus idea that all utterances are created equal. Empirical evidence should trump gut feelings. Knowledge deserves greater space than opinion. Forget the right to be a bigot, the bigger threat posed by free speech is the right to be banal. Despite these complications I’m optimistic because the appetite for public conversation is growing. The audiences we have at the Wheeler Centre rise to the opportunity and made their contributions thoughtful, surprising, considered and substantial. Sure, the occasional “where do you get your ideas from?” sneaks through, but on the whole audiences self regulate. We don’t all need to be experts. We just need to listen; to be confident about asking questions of one another, proffering our own contributions with humility and openness. True conversation can add to understanding, change minds, challenge preconceptions and break down tribalism. The prime minister is right to seek an “honest national conversation between all of us” but he’s wrong to think that such things can be called for and defined from above. They’re already going on all around us. How well they succeed is more about the spirit in which we join them, and our willingness to follow them to destinations unknown. Perhaps a white paper’s easier. |