image by Aidan Jones

In 2000, I worked for Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. I drove a cleaning truck around the state of Florida for a month, wearing a janitor’s outfit and scrubbing floors for TV cameras while accusing both Democratic and Republican politicians of taking dirty money. “Ralph Nader wants to clean corporate cash out of politics!” I’d holler, and raise my mop angrily for the media.

Some days, we also canvassed the streets and handed out flyers. Inevitably I would find myself in an impassioned argument with a Bush or Gore supporter, and I spent hours pleading Nader’s case. Over the several weeks I spent doing this, I worked tirelessly, met a lot of great people, and had a good time. But what I didn’t do is convince anyone to change their minds.

This experience came back to me a few weeks ago, when I went to a friend’s house for a discussion group about Bright Green thinking. We started out slightly contentious and cranky, but then a funny thing happened as we continued to talk and listen to each other. Something actually grew up between us in the room—a shared understanding of Bright Green and some commonality in where each of us might take and use these new ideas. Each of us left energized and with a broader perspective than we had when we walked in.

When was the last time you were able to argue someone into changing his or her mind? Have you ever? Looking back on my 36 years of having and defending very strong opinions on a wide variety of topics, I don’t know that I ever have. And yet, although we each walked into the Bright Green discussion with wildly divergent thoughts about what’s wrong with the environment and how to fix it, we walked out with a shared understanding. We certainly hadn’t become entirely of one mind, but we built a foundation for further conversation and action.

Afterward, I chatted with one of the participants, a young teacher at a middle school in the Bronx. She told me that this discussion group was strange to her, because although we all had and expressed our different ideas, we didn’t fight with each other. Mulling this over, I realized that our facilitator had very consciously created this dynamic of collaborative creation, and how wise she was to do so.

What did she do? First off, she instructed each of us to listen carefully to whoever was speaking, without interrupting or jumping ahead to whatever we wanted to say in response. Secondly, she very consciously listened for and built on ideas expressed by each participant. Put another way, she listened for the highest piece of the truth.that each of us brought with us, and led the conversation by building upon those truths. Instead of looking for things to disagree with, she looked for agreement.

Thinking back, this skill was what was missing from my Nader 2000 experience. If I listened to the people I talked to, it was only to determine what issue they were concerned about so I could trot out the corresponding talking points. I put a lot more effort into putting my arguments together than I did into paying attention and connecting with the people I met. And, of course, it’s not just me. From office politics to 24-hour news programs to political debates at progressive meetings, most of us are far more concerned with making our points than we are with communicating with each other.

When we listen for agreements in our conversations, though, something really astounding happens—we are able to build something together. Instead of separating ourselves by ever finer gradients of opinion, we construct a new way of looking at an issue through each person’s contributions. And in this way, each contributor becomes a partial owner of the newly created, shared, intersubjective point of view.

Of course this doesn’t mean that there are no differences in people’s thinking. Nor does it mean that everyone’s ideas are equally well-thought out and valid. Some contributions do indeed hit closer to the mark than others, and we must make judgements and draw distinctions to the best of our ability. What’s important is doing this in such a way that everyone is brought up to the highest available level of wisdom, rather than brought down to the lowest.

The way we relate to each other defines much of our culture—in it we show how much we value each other, and we set the stage for what we can create together. Making the effort to interact with each other on the basis of agreement shows a great deal of respect for our shared humanity and fosters a sense of possibility. I’m just getting to the point where I can see when someone is doing this and notice the mechanism by which it works. My next goal is to get better at practicing this skill so that I can leave behind my history of polarizing argument and separation, and instead be a part of building a new way culture based on what we share.