Chapter 11

Politics, Art, Religion

After the members of a group have come to know one another well enough through self-talk and small talk, a good conversationalist will try to get the conversation to a more significant level. The higher level is that in which people discuss not merely personalities, not merely facts, but ideas, theories, and attitudes. When we read in books that Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, and Reynolds had great conversation, that latter is what is meant. For keen minds, well informed and alert, this is the only type of talk which can hold their interest and keep them from retiring to books or sports, both more satisfying than gossip or small talk. A gifted person, if he must be in company, either wants thought-provoking conversation — or a good game of bridge or poker. If too many in a crowd simply cannot enjoy provocative talk, then it is better after a while to play bridge or to go home.

Everyone, the man with the two talents as well as the man with the five, can and should train himself to enjoy thoughtful conversation. The most effective step is a simple act of the will. In such conversation, it is probable that more of the talking will be done by the man with the five talents, and more of the listening by the fellow with the two. But this need not make it less enjoyable for the latter. Many a college student has enjoyed a lecture thoroughly even though the presumably five-talented professor did all the talking. Learning something new is in itself one of mankind's most distinctive pleasures. If a person determines to learn something new out of a discussion of the relative merits of classical music and "swing," or the difference between socialism and democracy, or the quarrel between the American Federation of Labor and the CIO, or the meaning of secularism and personalism, then he will get something from the conversation, and deep down in his heart he will enjoy it. He will also be an asset to it, a stimulant to the conversation, for he will be a constructive listener. He may next manage to read a few articles on those themes, after which he will enjoy conversation about them actively as well as passively and begin to throw his weight around in it.

A person is not an important conversationalist until he can enjoy and discuss ideas and attitudes. Conversation in this country is believed to be especially weak on this level. Our small talk has been elevated to an art, but a kind of intellectual egalitarianism to the effect that one idea is as good as another and that under no circumstances is anyone to be disturbed in his beliefs, has thrown something like a social taboo on grappling conversationally with ideas.

This type of conversation often naturally becomes discussion, though it should not become a debate or contest. The proper attitude is signalized in the comment the Scotchman, Dr. Campbell, made to Samuel Johnson, when the latter during a tour of the Hebrides, started disputing a point of husbandry. "Come," said Dr. Campbell, "we do not want to get the better of one another: we want to increase each other's ideas" (quoted from Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Good Talk, p. 162). Whereas one can state a fact in one sentence, one usually needs a whole paragraph to state an idea or attitude. For that reason talk to increase ideas, requiring reasoning and evidence, is a discussion.

But it should avoid the tone of argument. While serious, it must remain courteous and pleasant. It ought not to sound as if it were a contest for victory, but a fair exchange for better understanding. As the danger in gossip is detraction, in discussion it is acrimony and passion. While talking ideas you should constantly remind yourself to be good-natured about it and to make it easy for the other to remain good-natured, too. When it becomes otherwise, it defeats its purpose. People meet and talk, first, to go away better friends than ever; secondly, to understand each other better and to develop respect for each other's viewpoints; and thirdly, possibly to revise these viewpoints and to adjust them mutually so as to bring them more in line with the real truth of things. Conversation, particularly on the discussion level, is the method of spreading truth through friendship. Whenever a person's manner of discussion jeopardizes this friendly feeling, then he is promoting his ego but not advancing the truth.

Naturally, when a person defends ideas that may involve his whole purpose of existence, it is not always easy for him to stay good-natured. As someone has wittily remarked, "Of course there are two sides to every question, if we really are not interested in either of them" {Daily News, Greensboro, N. C, quoted from Reader's Digest, Jan., 1950). If one is keenly interested, dispassionateness is very, very difficult. It is the result both of will and of discipline. But unless one have it, one has no right to get into a discussion.

This does not mean that you must keep smiling. At important points your mien and manner may be quite serious, and your voice may convey considerable feeling and intensity.

But at the end of a tense paragraph, you must be able to relax, and perhaps almost to smile, so that everyone feels that there was nothing personal in the intensity, only a love of the truth. An important technique is to keep your voice low. The hotter the discussion gets, the more others tend to raise their voice, the more you should keep yours gentle and low. A low voice can show more intensity than a loud one, but a loud one more easily sounds ill-tempered or angry. Since it is your responsibility not only to stay good-natured yourself but to help others remain so, you will inject a lighter note, a compliment, or even a pun, when things get too serious. As a last resort, you may even say, "I wonder whether we cannot approach this in a more calm manner."

As in all conversation but even more so in discussion is it important not to interrupt others, while at the same time to accept interruptions patiently and good-naturedly one's self. It is also important to frame one's points within the limits of paragraphs, one paragraph at a time. A person must manage to let others state their case, no matter how much his whole nature feels that the truth is being crucified. This requires great character and will power — and a continuing determination not to make one's will prevail at the cost of amiability.

You must at all times avoid sarcasm and scorn. You will be unmistakably respectful toward everybody's viewpoint, no matter how wrongheaded it may seem. Being respectful does not mean compromising with the truth; it means wording your disagreement graciously. As someone said, "To disagree without being disagreeable is the highest art of conversation." If someone said, "If you want peace, prepare for war," and you reply, "That's old pagan nonsense," your wording will provoke resentment and heat. But if you say, "That statement has many great men to back it, but it is a pagan survival nonetheless," you are differing from the other respectfully. In some such way every disagreement ought to be introduced. One must not contradict people head on. A good conversationalist will look for some phase of his opponent's position with which he can agree before he will state his objection. He will point out any little plank of agreement in order to minimize the area of disagreement. In that way, the other will want to co-operate in decreasing the area still more.

It is well to make it a rule never to argue on a point until you can see some reason or validity in the other's case. There must be some. A person civilized enough to be in the same room with me, I reason, could not hold a position in which there is not some sense somewhere. I must try to find it — and hasten to acknowledge it.

Very many people make the mistake of thinking that they weaken their position if they make any concession to the opponent. It is the tragedy of war politicians that they think they have to keep talking as if the enemy were all wrong and they themselves all right. There ought to be an international law that in every wartime speech a politician must spend a quarter of his time stating the merits of the other side. To do so would be both justice and expediency. In conversation, a person will not evade concessions, he will yearn to make them. You will eagerly say when you can, "Yes, the way you present it, your idea seems to be workable." If you smile, you can even more effectively say, "With the greatest reluctance I grant you are right on that point."

The purpose of discussion is, not to win, but to get at the truth. When someone else seems to have hit even a little fraction of it, you should be happy to recognize it. To have the habit of doing so will make you welcome to any discussion and will tend to keep it on an agreeable plane. Others, seeing your willingness to recognize a point, will almost feel guilty if they do not recognize yours, too. If a person really has the better case, that is, the truth, he will gain acceptance for it more quickly if he concedes and so disposes of all the minor points in which the other is right. He thus achieves the good will for his case, without which anyone convinced against his will "is of the same opinion still."

No matter how much of a specialist or authority one may be on a question, one may not in conversation use a positive or dogmatic tone. No matter how positively right a specialist knows himself to be, his tone must suggest being open to argument, and being willing to revise, in the light of the opposing comments, if not his ideas, at least his method or evidence. If in his heart, he feels, not anger or disgust at man's stupidity and wrongheadedness, but sorrow for mankind's tragic condition of being able to see things only as "through a glass darkly," and therefore of being wrong much of the time, he will more easily retain a considerate manner. If you keep reminding yourself that being human, you no doubt are often wrong, too, you can be sympathetic without condescension. Such a considerate attitude will beget the like in others. It will make them wish they could agree with you.

This is the real art of the serious conversationalist, a manner so modest and conciliatory that everybody would like to be on his side if they could only see things his way. And good will wins more converts than good syllogisms. On the other hand, one positive, dogmatic statement, such as, "Free verse is simply a low form of poetry, that's all there is to it," will make everyone secretly hope that the speaker will fall over a dangling participle before the evening is over. The greatest authority in the world is not long welcome in a group, if he is positive and dogmatic.

Yet it is also true that the value of an authority should be to get the truth advanced a little faster, to help prevent inconclusive discussion. Therefore it seems to me a recognized authority on a topic may occasionally settle futile discussion on a point by saying, "While I hate to seem positive as to whether French or Spanish is more widely spoken, yet since our topic of languages has so many more significant and disputable phases, I would like to adduce that the best almanacs definitely state that some one hundred million people speak Spanish and only sixty million French. What is not settled is which language is richer in idiom." Now and then, it seems to me, a person who is a specialist has a right to shift the discussion from an easily verifiable point to a more profitable one. But always tactfully, and not often. One must remember that people are gathered conversationally, not to hear the truth as from an oracle, but by a groping exchange of evidence and reasons, and among blind alleys, pleasantly if slowly to come to feel the truth, as well as to find it.

However, despite all these cautions to the "brain trusters," the best conversationalist in matters of art, politics, sociology, and religion in the long run is the fellow who sees through life's glass less darkly than the rest. It is the person who in the fields where man's thought and research are engaged is most often right. Though people cannot recognize it as easily, it is just as important for a good conversationalist to have a high record for the truth as for a weatherman to have it for rain and a doctor for cures. All human thinking is a gigantic, restless effort to see better the ways of God to man and of man to God. The conversationalist who does most to scatter such light is the best one. Such a one must be a good and honest thinker, who painstakingly tries to see what is the best, truest, and wisest in the realms of man's vast activities and thoughts.

In national and political matters a good talker will be principled rather than partisan. Conversationally he will be less Democrat or Republican than an informal judge who weighs all the parties and their platforms on the scales of justice and wisdom, as against political expediency. One must feel of a good talker that he is never a partisan of anything but the good and the true. As soon as he seems to stand for any one party, right or wrong, he will degenerate from a conversationalist to a propagandist.

Nationally and internationally, a Christian conversationalist will try to correct the prejudices and errors of history, the lies and misrepresentations of war propaganda. Remembering Goethe's words that "national hatred is something peculiar" and that a sufficiently cultured person "stands to a certain extent above nations" (Conversations with Ecker-mann, March 14, 1830), he will strive to minimize national, racial, and ideological hatreds. He will promote international peace and understanding by siding strictly with truth and justice, on whichever side or nation these happen to lie. He will realize that a prophet's hardest duty is to point out that justice does not always lie with one's own country. His motto must be that so wonderfully proclaimed by Carl Schurz in his anti-imperialist speech in Chicago, in 1899, "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."

In matters of art and literature, a good conversationalist will know something about the best books, paintings, music, sculpture, and architecture, and he will listen eagerly to someone who knows more. What is even more important than encyclopedic knowledge about these things is good taste and a good critical sense. He ought to be a factor in helping people distinguish good art from bad, the beautiful from the "phoney," the wholesome from the harmful. But because taste in art is such a sensitive index of people's total cultural level, he must be particularly tactful in stating his judgments. If one person calls Edgar Guest the greatest modern poet, and another suggests that anyone who likes Guest must have primitive tastes, he himself violates all canons of good taste. The saying, De gustibus non est disputandum, "One cannot dispute matters of taste," really means that taste is so revealing and personal a matter that people are too sensitive about it to have it questioned. One must therefore be particularly careful to keep all discussion of such matters on an impersonal level.

The saying should not mean that there are no standards of taste, that one "taste" is as good as another. That is no more true than that one religion is as good as another. Art makes right reason and the will of God prevail at higher and at lower levels, more perfectly or less perfectly. Good taste shows a cultivated preference for art, which fulfills this function most perfectly. This taste a good conversationalist should possess. Sometimes if his personal preference is contrary, he should at least recognize the better art. A person, for example, who knows better, but nevertheless, insists that he himself likes Walt Whitman more than any other poet is an interesting conversational asset. But if he actually believed that Whitman is the greatest poet and urged others to think so too, his critical judgment would be wrong. If wrong in many other matters, it would soon be recognized as unsound by everybody and discounted.

Ultimately, nothing is good which is not sound or true or right. Christ was listened to by multitudes and has been quoted ever since, not merely because of his choice language, but because of the choice truths his language expressed. One never has the moral right to be wrong. It is always a conversationalist's duty to promote the true, the just, the beautiful. A person who has not done any real studying and thinking upon artistic matters is not justified in assuming that he knows anything worth while on such topics. He should, therefore, instead of promulgating his ideas, listen and ask and learn. It is just as certainly evil, if not as immediately disastrous, for a person to promote false ideas and attitudes in cultural matters as it is for a doctor to recommend poisonous prescriptions.

That truth and error are serious matters becomes apparent when we relate them to religion. This is often held to be so sacred and "touchy" a subject as to be shunned as a topic of conversation. Americans who on the one hand pride themselves on their tolerance, on the other place a sort of conversational taboo on religion. To cap matters, they then complain that conversation in our time does not flourish as it is supposed to have done in the ancient Greek symposia, or in the Johnson-Goldsmith era, or in the French salons. They fear to discuss religion, but they want the kind of conversation that sparkled in the salons of Madame Rambouillet, Voltaire, and Madame de Sevigne!

Someone has rightly said that every civilization is built around the core of a religion. One can just as truly say that conversation cannot soar to its proper heights if it consciously by-passes man's supreme problem and interest — how to get to heaven. Great conversation, even if it is not directly about religion, must flutter about in the light of it. When Milton was looking for a theme for his masterpiece, he concluded that the most vital topic in the world was the ways of God to man, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Man's highest form of public speaking is the sermon. De Quincey called "The weekly sermons of Christendom . . . that vast pulpit literature." So man's most vital conversation is talk about religion.

It should not be avoided as a topic; it should on the contrary be striven for and worked up to as often as time and place permit. It is said that people are yearning for more religious knowledge and certitude. If they are true to their spiritual nature, they certainly are. To deny them that search in conversation is to drive them to bridge and golf, good things but not as good as throwing ideas about in conversation.

However, the more important a topic is the more wisely and ably ought it to be managed. Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici wrote something to the effect that virtually only religion and morality are worth arguing about but that one has no business doing it if one cannot do it well. He wrote,

I have no Genius to disputes in Religion; and have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of Truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage. . . . Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the cause of Verity (Part 1, Sec. 6).

All the rules for good conversation and discussion hold for the topic of religion, plus a few more. One must be doubly sure that one knows what one is talking about, or else play the role of listener and questioner, reserving one's judgment. More than ever, one must be able to be good-natured in the discussion. No matter how much it means to a person, he must not argue angrily or harshly. This point needs particular emphasis, because in discussing religion one is dealing with a topic on which one may not compromise. One may not for the sake of good-fellowship agree to anything, which in conscience one believes to be wrong.

How to be intolerant of error yet tolerant and kindly and sympathetic toward those whom we believe in error is the problem and the achievement of the gracious Christian conversationalist, according to St. Paul's ideal. If anyone cannot embody this ideal reasonably well, then he ought to avoid religious discussion. In all but religious disputes, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose" (op. cit., Part II, Sec. 3). I think you can most easily acquire the faculty of kindliness in religious discussion if you recognize clearly that if everybody had the full truth or saw all its implications, then talk would be superfluous. Therefore, instead of being irritated by people's errors, you should be glad of the opportunity of being apprized of them, for only so can you try to correct them. Perhaps one should feel about error as a young American felt when he witnessed the first bullfight. He said, "Lord, I do not want any bullfighter to get hurt, but if it be Thy will that one is to get hurt, let it happen while I am here to see it!" If no one were ever in error, how could we perform the blessed work mentioned by St. James (5:20), namely, that of bringing a sinner back from his "misguided way," which means saving a soul from death and covering a multitude of sins. Instead, therefore, of being angry at people in error we ought rather to welcome the opportunity their error represents.

If everybody agreed, we would not need to talk about it, and we could not help anyone to a better understanding. All sarcasm, irony, irritableness must, therefore, be resolutely banned from a religious discussion. One must talk and act as if everybody were in good faith. We must realize fully that if a person who is in the wrong has tried his best to understand and is living up to his beliefs to the best of his ability, the God of Mercy will deal mercifully with him. Even more than in other types of discussion, you may not be positive, overbearing, dogmatic, for it isn't firmness in the right that offends, but positiveness in assertion. If you say, "However much I dislike differing with you, being my kindly hostess, nevertheless I must declare that to me it is not enough to have a religion but very important to try to have the right one," any civilized person will accept that in good spirit. But if you were to say, "There's where you are wrong" or "That's all wrong" or "I don't see how you can say that," then you would be positive and assertive in a way which will harden rather than soften error.

Before actively participating in a religious discussion you ought to have read about the chief religious problems and thought about them. I would go so far as to say that you ought to have rehearsed the problems in imaginary conversations in your own mind. Riding in a streetcar, you might, for example, have said to yourself, "If the fellow opposite me asked what use confession is, what would I say?" Regarding this and other questions you might in this way rehearse for eventual real conversations.

It is also very important that you do not hold provincial views of your religion. People can be as narrowly sectarian in religion as many persons, often the same ones, are narrowly nationalistic in their patriotism. While you hold the principles of your faith above reproach, you may not also hold that their application has always been above reproach. A Catholic who thinks Catholics have never done any wrong, that there was no sin in the Middle Ages, that wars are a Protestant invention, that there have never been persecutions in Catholic countries is not going to be a desirable champion of Catholicism. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of any Protestant thinking provincially, A person discussing religion should know the facts and should be wise enough to realize that every group of human beings in the course of their history, no matter what their religion or nationality, will commit many sins and often terrible wrongs. He should be imbued with the wisdom and spirit of a recent convert, who, on being asked, "Did becoming a Catholic stop your sinning?" answered, "No, but it complicated it considerably" (The Catholic Digest, May, 1949).

Instead of resenting charges or denying them brusquely or sarcastically, you ought gently, if firmly, to cross-question the one who makes them, in order to discover what fire, if any, there is behind the smoke. Then, if it concerns human failings, you should explain that no faith is free from sinful members, that any Church, yours included, is for sinners as well as for saints. If it concerns an article of faith, or a Church law, you ought to explain the reasons for it and show its basic justice, patiently and sympathetically. You must keep in mind that while many questions of faith and morals must be regarded as settled, there are also some which have not yet had definitive pronouncements, and that even with regard to the denned articles there are many unsettled problems of application. "The Catholic view," writes Father Vincent J. Flynn, "is that truth has been found; not all truth, but a very considerable segment" (Prose Readings, p. 491). It is the unfound segments that should keep us humble and open-minded in discussion. Another writer, Sister Mariella, says in a few sentences that should be inscribed in the heart of every Catholic apologist, "The Catholics have the full answer. But let us be honest. Let us not claim to have given that answer as yet" (" 'Catholic' Fiction"). All those answers which still need to be given are powerful reasons, even if the precepts of courtesy and charity weren't sufficient, why a we-know-it-all approach is a poor one for promoting a worth-while religious discussion. In a religious conversation your tone and manner will show that whatever your denomination, you realize that much needs still to be settled and that you yourself are humbly conscious of St. Paul's complaint that we see but darkly as through a glass, and yearn for more light, wherever it may come from. A truly Christian conversationalist will be on the lookout for the right time, place, and persons to raise the topic of conversation to the level of religion. He will guide it in that direction unobtrusively, naturally. There are several natural openings. You can comment about religious news items which appeared in the paper or which you heard on the radio. A plausible opening is a reference to a church affair, a picnic or social. Better still are comments on sermons recently heard. When Coolidge came home from a particular Sunday service it was natural for Mrs. Coolidge to ask him what the minister had preached about. In this instance

Coolidge answered, "Sin." When she persisted, "Well, what did he say about sin?" this great, conservative New Englander answered, "He was agin' it." Coolidge was not an effervescent conversationalist 1 But any moderately alert person, given such an opening, could carry the conversation into many of the most important problems that face our country — secularism, separation of Church and State, religious education; mixed marriage, divorce, birth control; conscience, free will, dogma and infallibility; psychiatry, confession, and peace of mind and soul; statism, communism, democracy; denominationalism, nationalism, racism; armaments, security, justice, and peace. Christianity touches upon all of man's most important problems. Its very mention is a challenge to secularism, which is the conspiracy of silence against it.

Christianity is the living body of all of man's most significant principles and truths. It is also the organism suffering most from every difference of sect and creed. Religion in conversation must have as its ultimate aim the eventual removal of dogmatic and sectarian differences. Theological truth is the most important truth, and religious unity the most important unity. Mankind has no cause to be smug until it has achieved these. Religious conversation must strive toward seeing and making others see and champion the truth, the way, and the light — in all matters that are stacked up along our individual and collective path to heaven. There we shall all have to get along together and to believe the same things.

To avoid life's most important topics in our conversation is to put them off to the next world — where we shall unavoidably have to meet them face to face. Talking about these  things wisely and courteously and  frequently here may be the factor which decides whether, when we meet these ideas in the next world, we shall enjoy them with the right crowd, or suffer from them with the wrong crowd!

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