Unspoken assumptions in conversation

Recent exposure to David Bohm and Peter Block prompted the following thoughts . . . My assumption is that comments are welcome!

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The meaning of a conversation isn’t just the content. It’s also what didn’t get said and why what did get said, did.

The freedom of conversers to speak, the sense of being equal (or not), of being allowed to make a mistake, to risk something perhaps . . . all these influence how and what is spoken. We usually don’t talk about these aspects of conversation but they’re there and they’re often the determining factors too.

Meetings have strong hidden dynamics as well. The way a meeting is structured, including the room set-up and all the rules (both the spoken and the usually present unspoken ones) help determine the outcome of the meeting. They might be the most important things. Who talks first and last and gets to make decisions? Who says when a speaker is done and who determines the agenda? Whoever it is, this person or persons is in control. Or rather the underlying assumptions that give this power are. Process and structure are king and queen. This is true with our self-conversation as well, our conversation and meetings with ourselves.

Almost all conversations and meetings in our culture start off with a large set of assumptions that it’s not very polite to speak about. That we don’t really speak about them or notice them is one of the assumptions – we assume that examination is either not important or unchangeable.

This is quite familiar to us. Who hasn’t felt profoundly that the public conversation was incredibly missing in an area that we can see is just so obvious? Collectively we live in a sea of cultural assumptions and linguistic tracks that determine how and what we think. The assumptions may be true and functional, or not. But that they’re there is the way it’s been forever, what we grew up in. And we go along with it because that’s how it’s done.

Trouble is . . . the unspoken assumptions of our culture may be seriously out of step with a vital planetary reality. For example, business as usual means expansion yet expansion will lead to collapse as overuse cripples nature’s regenerative capacity. But business is just a subset of how we think and converse and meet. Could these  too be out of step with what’s needed? Many think they are. Folks who care to can take a hard look and make up their own mind.

Most of what we’re now thinking as a culture is hard to look at. It’s murky and dark. We’re conditioned to not look at it and there’s little positive incentive to do so. But we share this not looking just as we share what we don’t look at. We don’t like to look is because our shared reality is to use David Bohm’s word, incoherent. It’s filled with uncomfortable discordant meanings that make talking about them extra hard.

But they’re there just the same and there’s no escaping them. All our daily thoughts, deep and shallow, rest on the shared meaning that we participate in with others. They spring out of the ground that we share in common. We can see this with language which most of us can agree is very much shared. Language is a way of dealing with meanings that other language speakers understand. There can be no individual language.

At present our shared meaning is confused and troubled. We don’t know how to relate to different assumptions from our own and we feel how profound the gaps are.

Like every problem, this one allows for a host of possibile solutions, but that’s for a future post.