HEART TO HEART

Theodore Zeldin took the opportunity of the centenary of the Entente Cordiale to restate his point about the value of intimacy. His book An Intimate History Of Humanity contends that all the most important changes in society happen in the forum of one-to-one conversations. In an effort to stimulate better dialogues, Zeldin has set up the Oxford Muse website, where people can “write self-portraits of two or three thousand words in which they set down what is most important to them”. This idea excited me immediately. I wondered what my friends would write, and what I would write.

Zeldin: “the world is still full of people who are too timid or polite to say what they think, or too conformist to think for themselves. We are schooled to be hypocrites and we all wear masks. The hidden thoughts in other people’s heads are the darkness that surrounds us.”

All of this is especially relevant now in London, where egomaniacs on both sides in the “war on terror”, by repeating slogans for public consumption, have brought us to the point where we are afraid of actually being blown apart.

How often, stung, do we adopt a rather hectoring tone as a kind of Devil’s advocate? Or, alternatively, prune the rough edges off some of our opinions to drift more easily with the general flow of the conversation? In these situations, nothing interesting results; far from being the kind of world-changing total communication Zeldin writes about, this hardly qualifies as a dialogue.

For that to happen, one thing is necessary: tolerance. Or, as someone said on the radio this morning, perhaps “acceptance” would be a better word, since tolerance implies suppressed annoyance. Dialogue cannot take place unless you recognise that, no matter how absurd a person’s beliefs may appear, given that the person is actually sane, there is a personal narrative which can explain how the beliefs were arrived at. (The same is true of the insane, though unearthing the narrative may require a specialist.)

Understanding this narrative may bring about a situation where beliefs can be quietly, effectively, challenged. And perhaps these will be your beliefs. No one walks away unchanged.

the Oxford Muse foundation