Further Thoughts on Pluralism, Diversity and Wholeness
Tom Atlee, the founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, recently wrote a blog post on how the co-intelligence framework sees enormous value in “diversity as a resource for collective wisdom and resourcefulness.” As a way to honor our own internal “diversity of perspectives” at CII, on this and other topics, I wanted to add a few thoughts to his.
To begin with, I want to honor what a charged topic this is… while “diversity” also has a more general meaning, I want to acknowledge that in the U.S. and elsewhere it has become a code word to refer to People of Color, and often to Black and Afro-American people in particular. As a result, as Tom acknowledges, choosing to use the word “diversity” more generally “risks misunderstanding”...
And so I want to share that I personally feel some concern about attempting to “reclaim” the word “diversity”. Maybe we could share it, instead? :-)
It seems key to pause here first, to acknowledge and honor the ongoing liberation struggles, and the larger context where this term is often used as shorthand way of pointing to these struggles.
And at the same time, we also want to explore this word’s broader sense. So might we find a way to be “pluralists” about the word itself, and acknowledge that words mean different things to different people – and that this might be ok, as long as we are clear about which meaning we are invoking?
If so, there’s another word I feel drawn to speak about here, in addition to “diversity”….. and it’s the word “resources”. I resonate deeply with the perspective that human beings are not “resources”, despite the unfortunate labeling of people as such in corporations... and also, plant beings and animal beings and rivers and minerals and the Earth itself, are not “resources” in the sense of something to be used and exploited…
At the same time, a diversity of perspectives (what we mean by “diversity”...) can indeed be a “resource”, in the sense of something with which we can be in relationship, and from which we can draw strength…. And so here I want to underscore the need to honor and respect the situated human beings who embody these diverse perspectives, given that “perspectives” don’t tend to exist in a vacuum.
And once again, I want to pause to acknowledge and honor what a charged topic this is… when Tom writes that “culture wars, polarization, and hunger for unity [are] all natural during this stage of our societies’ evolution”, I have some sense of what he means… AND at the same time, my felt sense wants to add something… “Yes, AND… this is all so painful….” I find myself not wanting to minimize in any way, all of the pain that is present in this “natural” process…
At the same time, I also get that it can be helpful to “normalize” it… as in, “We’ve never had a multi-racial democracy before; of course it’s challenging! And YES, we CAN do it…”
Furthermore, I get that it can be really hard to imagine “peaceful coexistence” with those who are currently spewing hatred at you. I’ve written before about one of my heras, Deeyah Khan – a Muslim filmmaker raised in Europe, who traveled to Charlottesville to meet with members of the White Right, and to ask them why they claim to hate her, and others like her…
As Tom points out, “diversity can stretch beyond our tolerance level”; and so we need “potent interactive engagement settings and processes that help us tolerate and creatively utilize diversity that might otherwise challenge our capacities.” In this example, it seems to me that Deeyah Khan’s camera person who accompanied her to film the interviews, was a significant part of creating a context of greater safety. This helped to generate a “potent interactive engagement setting” where she could have powerful interviews with these people, and create her extraordinary film. Of course, it still took an enormous amount of courage to do what she did…
As another example of a “potent interactive engagement setting”, we might consider campus “free speech” controversies, where the current alternatives seem limited to either banning a controversial speaker, or else giving them a platform. What about the possibility of having a speaker with highly controversial views as part of a strongly-facilitated panel, one designed to include speakers with a wide range of perspectives? Such a panel could be designed along the lines of Edwin Rutsch’s Empathy Circles, where every speaker needs to reflect the previous speaker back to the previous speaker’s satisfaction, before taking their turn… a deceptively simple process that Edwin has applied successfully in highly charged contexts.
And what kind of “wisdom” might we gain from something like this? Well, as Jedediah Britton-Purdy wrote in a recent article in The Atlantic, where he explores the value of learning to “non-defensively meet serious disagreement”:
“My job is teaching, and although a liberal is not supposed to say this, too much of what happens in the classroom assumes that everyone there has the same broadly progressive politics, and that only a fool or a jerk would disagree. This is not just a failure to welcome those who don’t agree into the conversation, all but guaranteeing that they silently dig in to whatever they already believe. It also lets down students who think of themselves as progressives, who lose the tempering of inconvenient facts, countervailing arguments, the sheer social weight of disagreement, which requires the civic and political work of argument. No one’s faith, lived experience, or personal “truth” is exempt from the burdens of conversation. At its best, sustained conversation wins converts in both directions and, more important, may transform moral horror at someone disagreeing with you into trust that people who disagree can also listen, reflect, and do things together.”
In closing, I want to return to the other usage of the term “diversity”. I’m wondering how “diversity work”, in the more conventional sense of prejudice reduction work, might benefit from a pluralistic approach. I’m wondering about this, as my experience has been that there are many different models within DEI work, based on different assumptions about human beings and how human beings learn and grow. Yet to my knowledge, few useful distinctions have been made, between different kinds of DEI work.
As an analogy, we might think of how the work of psychotherapy offers many different modalities; there is Freudian psychoanalysis and humanistic therapy and CBT and somatically-oriented approaches, to name just a few. These different approaches are based on different principles and offer different practices. Likewise, I have experienced a significant variety of approaches in the different kinds of DEI work that practitioners offer. Yet these differences too often go unnamed.
So yes, let’s explore the skillful ways in which the gift of human diversity (broadly speaking), can help us generate more wholeness and wisdom, qualities of which we are in great need. And also, let’s explore how taking a pluralist approach toward healing the wounds of racism, sexism, and all the other isms, might help us discover more effective ways to move forward with that ongoing, unfinished work. My hunch is that there may be significant overlaps between these two much-needed foci…
Read more of Rosa’s articles at the Listening Arts blog
