Clashing monologues

A local phenomenon of Mahurangi is a weekly walking group of women.  Twenty or more of them meet at the specified time and place and then set forth at a brisk pace.  At the end of their walk they treat themselves to coffee and muffins in one of the local cafes.  It is a good idea not to be in that café when they arrive and take over. 

But to get to my point…  If you are hanging around, one might say contemplatively, at a spot being approached by this group in their orbit of the vicinity, you hear them before you see them.  Strangers and others without local knowledge tend to think there is suddenly some looming threat, a plague of locusts perhaps, or an Aussie secret surveillance drone.  It is simply that the women are all talking simultaneously.  It is an extraordinary sound, made even more so by the doppler effect as they pass.  No one of them is listening, or at any rate hearing, any other, much as they may think they are.   Each of them is telling her monologue.  At best, there is a process in which one of them is silent while the next one speaks – but she then responds with her narrative and how she felt. 

In the Guardian Weekly recently, Charlie Brooker identified that 99% of all human discourse is little more than a series of clashing monologues.  We need to be seen and heard to be present and existing, the more so as others are proclaiming their existence to us.  In what is normally called dialogue, Person A speaks part of his narrative, and Person B responds with his story.  I am thinking of people I know who, whatever you say to them, will respond with something about themselves, replete with First Person pronouns. 

The opposite of this is listening, hearing, understanding, not feeling under any obligation to respond unless it is about the speaker’s subject or issue.  This can’t be done by anyone who constantly needs their own presence to be validated and affirmed.  Neither is it done by those who all their lives have assumed, been formed and trained, that all you have to do in conversation is say something about yourself.   An exception maybe is Sybil Fawlty, who actually did listen to her callers and customers, not responding about herself, but intoning, I know… I know…

Not only the walking group – and I do admit it’s difficult to have meaningful dialogue while briskly walking – they could simply shut up -- but cocktail parties also, many social things I have given up attending, church “study” groups, telephone conversations, are really a series of clashing monologues. 

The Guardian writer cites also what happens with cellphone texting, Facebook, Twitter and the like.   We’ve already boiled communication down to acronyms, emoticons and shrtnd sntnces, all of which are simply more efficient ways of transmitting the PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE signal from the fragile core of our souls out into the wider world.  Whenever it’s possible our youth reach for their cellphones and text:  I’m here.  Where are you?  I’m bored.  Any suggestions?   There may also be photos, a real reinforcement of existence. 

I am indebted to Charlie Brooker however for a valuable insight into TV soaps.  For years it has puzzled me why I immediately get impatient with the script writing and dialogue on Coronation Street.  It is unreal in some way.  It is often too quick-witted, fluent and clever to be credible.  And I get very weary of the relentless antagonism, the abuse accusation, vilification.  But the real problem is not that.  Brooker points out that the characters on Coronation Street and Eastenders actually listen to each other.  In real life, especially under stress but also in their relaxed moments, they would rarely do that.  It is unreal because it is not the way discourse is done in such a suburb of Manchester, or in most other places.  They react with such rage at times precisely because they have listened and heard.  Usually they have heard wrongly – but the point here is that the script writers are giving us dialogue instead of clashing monologues. 

A tyranny of meetings

An item in the Guardian Weekly [03.05.13] speculated on how fine the world would be without meetings.  It claimed that the average office worker, presumably in the UK, spends more than 16 hours a week in meetings.  That is two “working” days.  The average civil servant allegedly spends 22 hours a week.  Many of these meetings are utterly pointless, says the writer.  Certainly, the process consumes many man and woman hours pointlessly. 

It was meetings which finally did me in with the church.   The church loves meetings, much as the USA loves firearms.   The church has assemblies, synods, boards, presbyteries, councils, committees, commissions, task forces, work groups, study meetings.   Year after year I attended and helped service these things.  Looking back now in wonder, it’s hard to see what it was all for.  I could have been doing something useful and/or pleasurable. 

These meetings were regularly scheduled, monthly, quarterly, annual – and at least in the Presbyterian Church we had sophisticated provision for special meetings should the need arise.  In hunc effectum meant that the meeting could discuss only the issue for which it had been called.   Pro re nata meant that it was called to discuss some matter which was urgent and unforeseen.    We all felt quite important on these occasions. 

Of course the Reformation, in trying to get rid of prince bishops and all manner of autocrats, needed then to set up committees.  The church became meeting-ridden.    With the bishop you had only the risk that he might be a bad bishop and exercise his power oppressively.  (Well, it was a real danger…)  With the presbytery, committee, synod, whatever, you now risked an entire morass of competing power agendas, often decided by the loudest or most persistent mediocrities.   I have seen a presbytery or assembly make a heroic and visionary decision, but it tends to be rare.   The decision usually is the end result of desultory discussion, and is some anaemic compromise which most can live with for a while.  

Passionate discussion is a real danger in committees and synods – it means that the outcome will be a matter of counting heads, and some people will get very hurt.  Truth is not discovered down that road. 

Now…!  Of course, getting people together to discuss something important is clearly a good thing to do.  They feel included, and it opens the possibility of a good decision.   We call it democracy.   So what I am referring to here is the oppressive culture of meetings, compulsory governance by meetings, the building of plush boardrooms with cocktail cabinets – and all the meeting-politics that constitute this culture.  Power gets used and abused.  People get defeated.  It can be a terrifying culture when your reputation and your future are at the mercy of a bunch of people who have their own agendas and opinions, and may by no means be filled with goodwill.  It is hard to see how such a context can achieve anything other than perpetuate itself. 

What would I put in their place?  No idea.  But it would be instructive to decree, say, a week or a month even without any meetings.  None, for any reason whatever.  See the result.  Was there chaos?  Or did people with responsibility simply make responsible decisions when necessary?   Who knows?  Nobody knows, because we haven’t done it.