from my buddy Charles

My good friend (and expat Iron Chef) Charles writes:

I read your write-up of the Spirituali-Tea. Not bad for not having recorded the session. Did you take notes, or was that all from memory? I found the reference to the comment by Father Komonchak quite amusing. I can definitely see his point. Agreeing to disagree can be a weaseling way out of dialogue, depending on when the clause is invoked. I've found, though, that when two people who disagree on a fundamental issue, there are only three possible outcomes. The least likely (in my experience) is that one person will change their mind. The other two outcomes are that the argument continues (sometimes in future sessions) or that it doesn't. And the only way to really end an argument/discussion where neither party is going to change their mind is to agree to disagree.

Of course, this assumes that the goal of any discussion is to get the other person to change their mind, or at the very least to grant you your point. If this is not the case, and the participants are willing to simply discuss their views, then there doesn't necessarily have to be a "winner" or "loser," per se. But that type of discussion is based on the "agree to disagree" principle from the very start, i.e., "we may hold irreconcilable viewpoints, but we are going to discuss them in a civil manner without trying to sway the other person." (To take the assumptions one level further, all of this assumes that there are indeed irreconcilable viewpoints, but I think that is a valid assumption.)

So I think that ultimately all discussions carried out from irreconcilable viewpoints (note that the irreconcilability doesn't necessarily have to be mutual--discussant A can be willing to embrace discussant B's viewpoint, but B might not be willing to accept certain aspects of A's viewpoint) will boil down to either agreeing to disagree or a failure of the discussion. But it makes a big difference when you decided to invoke the "agree to disagree" clause--whether it is before or after you have made an attempt to understand the other person's point of view.

So, anyway, I thought that was interesting.

Agreed. Timing matters. Giving up prematurely can be problematic. Closing off discussion because one thinks one already knows its outcome borders on arrogance. This was the complaint of religious conservatives who found themselves largely excluded from the table during events like the Parliament of the World's Religions (1993). There might have been an assumption by religious liberals that conservatives wouldn't have anything new or surprising to say. Yet at the same time, it's true that we can often use our common sense in determining whether a discussion is going to go nowhere, at which point it becomes, as Bruce Lee would say, a matter of not wasting one's precious time on fruitless action (see Joe Hyams's stories about Bruce Lee in his short book Zen in the Martial Arts).

And, yeah-- that was from memory, so there are large gaps, things that happened that I didn't note.

Here's one thing that just came to me: one student, who may have been the lone Baha'i, asked me a good question: "Can you give a one-sentence definition of religious pluralism?" I gave her a flat (but I hope civil) "No" in response. The problem is that there are many kinds of pluralism-- a pluralism of pluralisms-- and I'd love to sit down with a group of people and just go through a rundown of the different types, allowing listeners to chew them over and talk about each type's merits and demerits. In fact, I think I'm going to do a YouTube vid on the topic, and another vid about the critiques of the various positions. Basically, I'll be rehashing material I already covered in my book, but it'll be good practice for me as I refine my still-rough on-camera presence.


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