“I might disagree with your opinion, but I am willing to give my life for your right to express it”
-Voltaire
In today’s atmosphere when hundreds of voices from the internet blare in our heads, reverberating exponentially our own opinions, such that it thickens the edges of the horizon of our minds. In this context, when different worldviews become a matter of heated contest, it has become all the more important to question how malleable our mind is.
Why can't every conversation we make, be the most alive and active effort at engagement, which is truly enabling? Which may help us to get rid of our fears and apprehensions of communication, breaking shackles of vulnerabilities that holds us back. That's what I thought should be the purpose of communication.
Merely stating your stand or being a deaf audience to another's standpoint is as good as making no conversation. That's not an exchange. Also telling someone to expand their perception because they don't run the same trajectory of thought, is going to be nothing but a clash of our egos. In philosophy Habermas defined the ideal speech condition as- when both parties are equally receptive to listen and willing to reform their idea in light of new reasoning without any preoccupied notions, can an ideal communication take place. Moreover, it’s equally important to give due acknowledgement to why people think the way they do. As Marx said “our material reality determines our ideological reality and not just vice-a-versa as generally believed.” Therefore people with different material reality, will have different sets of values and will perceive things in a different way. Without giving due thought to the former, makes us highly susceptible to acting judgemental and prejudiced.
Now, having made the space truly resistance free, is there any possibility of enabling each other to expand our perceptions by providing alternative lenses. Again, when someone is trying to adapt to new lenses, there would be questions, doubts, sometimes guided by wrong biases also. The key is- to be patient and help them identify these biases. That's what learning is about, to realise and re-establish already established knowledge for your own self. That's what education is.
J.S.Mill remarked “if you shun any voice or opinion, however false it may appear to you, truth may run a chance of fading into obscurity.” Implying that every narrative has a figment of truth in it. A stats/event is a fact. How you perceive it-is your truth. And your truth can be different from mine. But should that mean we stand right where we began, within the iron bars of our limited perception? The answer is -No. Because, by now we would have gone through an exchange. We might not reach one common conclusion ( I highly doubt if there's ever any “The Conclusion”.) Yet it would be wrong to conclude there's no consensus, as there would be sub areas of agreements and disagreements both. Nonetheless, we certainly have reached a wider, ever-encompassing vantage point, to perceive a broader picture of reality. Establishing truer understanding is always a work-in-progress.
Often at the end, I've realised, reality is never as simple as we had imagined. Every time we revisit our prior notions, digging and exchanging are our only tools to make better sense of it,. Here I’ll let Sophie from the film- Da Vinci Code, to speak for me "We are what we protect, what we stand for." In my case it is the freedom of expression, the value that I hold dearest to me. Staying malleable is, how I think, we can preserve and nurture it.