Richard Horner's Second Question

Piggybacking off the previous post, Dr. Horner wrote a second question on the board on that first day of class that was strongly related to the first question discussed below. Dr. Horner briefly mentions this second question at the end of the below article I linked to, but it is worth its own post here. While his first question was "What frames what?", his second question was "With whom are you in conversation?" As important as the first question clearly is, the conclusions we draw from that question are often greatly influenced by our answer to this second question.

One way to gauge the vibrancy and diversity of our conversation partners is to assess how easily we can answer the first question. If we don't have any real trouble or hesitancy answering the first question, it might well be a sign that we are too sheltered when it comes to our conversation partners (it could also be that we're choosing not to engage the question with any depth). If we're only interacting with people whose views we basically agree with, we are probably only reinforcing our own blindspots regarding our first-order framing principles. If we are supremely confident to the point of arrogance that our worldview is absolutely correct from top to bottom, it can often demonstrate that our interaction with competing worldviews is not very regular or in-depth.

Notice also the exact terminology Dr. Horner uses in this second question. His question is not 'with whom are you in argument', or 'with whom are you in debate'. Horner uses the word 'conversation' for a reason. While conversation can include argumentation and debate, it encompasses much more than that. Ideally, conversation is an attempt to understand through sharing that entails some degree of vulnerability. Conversation is not merely a brute communication tool, but a tool of learning. If this is correct, that means 'conversation' is something that occurs between people who are different, not people who are the same. If people are the same, then is 'conversation' really necessary since people who are the same already understand each other and have little to learn from each other? 'Conversation', at least at the fallen human level, is an attempt to forge a bridge of understanding and mutual learning between different people believing different things.

So in answering this second question, it's not enough to say my conversation partners are diverse because I regularly debate people I disagree with in order to feel more confident about my own positions. It's not enough to say I've exposed myself to different worldviews if my purpose is primarily to debunk these worldviews. These are half-baked notions of 'conversation', and we're seeing the fruits all around us as our culture continues to spiral ever farther into mutual disrespect and rampant misunderstanding. To be in healthy 'conversation' is to walk a very fine line where on the one hand, I truly believe what I believe, while on the other hand, truly believing that people who believe differently can still teach me vitally important things and are worthy of trying to understand, and certainly worthy of my respect. This is where Dr. Horner is trying to get us when asking this second question. It offers a friendly but robust challenge for us to really contemplate how we're doing in the area of authentic 'conversation'.

How do we really relate to our conversation partners? Do we genuinely believe we can learn from them enough to sincerely try to understand them without doing a Nitzchean power-play on them? Horner is right in the article below that on some level, everybody is in the conversion business. But this desire (need?) to convert has to be tempered by the wisdom that genuine and respectful understanding is the the best way to thoughtfully engage each other on the very framing principles that often arouse our strongest urge to convert. In doing this, we might well find that our own framing principles are in need of tweaking, which better enables us to answer Horner's first question with a better self-awareness of what's really driving us. And if in the process of truly engaging the second question, some of the rough edges come off of our framing principles, that might well be a good thing. Not all rough edges are bad, but some are. Too many rough edges in our framing principles does not bode well when it comes to positively assessing what the second question looks like in our lives.