Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Welcome to Family Policy Matters, part one of our special two-part Christmas season show on the art of conversation with historian and author Dr.
Wilfred McClay. This is such an appropriate topic and a season where we celebrate the loving gift of God interjecting his own son onto the earth to grow up in a normal family. With all of its messiness, so that he could show us how to reconcile with God and, of course, each other.
Well, according to our guests today, part of the way we can reconcile with each other is to recover a more humane, rooted, and meaningful way of engaging. Dr. Wilfred McClay sees good conversation as a profound expression of human dignity. Today, we explore the cultural, educational, and spiritual implications of that vision as we prepare our hearts for the Christmas season. Dr.
Wilfred McClay, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Thank you, Tracy. It's wonderful to be with you. All right.
So, Dr. McClay, you have said the art of conversation is practically extinct.
Now, why do you believe that authentic conversation has become so rare? If I could, let me give your audience and you a sense of how I came to such a statement, because this really began with my thinking about and writing about free speech. And the support of the ideal of free speech is almost universal, and especially among conservatives who think that free speech means they'll finally get a voice in the academy, which they have not had. And I can attest to that, although I don't complain about it. But there's a problem, I think, with making free speech an idol.
It is that free speech doesn't tell you anything about whether anybody's listening. The art of conversation involves both speaking freely and listening intently and responsibly to what the other person has to say. by emphasizing free speech. And not emphasizing the responsibility to listen to one another, we're missing something very important. We're heading towards a society of people who go around delivering monologues to which nobody responds except with their own monologue.
And I think that's really unfortunate because conversation involves the exchange of opinions, views, thoughts, tastes, whatever, in which each iteration, everything I say to you, you send back to me with something added. And I add something and send it back to you. And so there's this additive or dialectical thing that goes on. And it's something that I don't even think AI can duplicate this because each little intervention is going to involve something new being added. And it is a way of drawing closer to a person in a whole way, in a holistic way, not just as somebody who has X, Y, Z opinions.
going to tell you what they are and you're going to sit still for that. It involves listening and then coming back and then saying, well, I don't know, you might be mistaken about this, and I have a different view. And well, you have that view because blah, blah, blah.
Well, maybe I do, maybe I don't. And then you're off and running with a real conversation. Where there's an underlying respect for one another, respect for one another in our totality as human beings and not just as the bearers of opinions with a right to speak them.
So I think in terms of conversations being genuine two-way mutual reciprocal events, You don't see a lot of that. I certainly don't. And I'm open to, I love conversation. It's the best thing about the many good things about my wife, she is endlessly interesting, and fun, and enlightening, and challenging, and all of these things in conversation. I think it's something that you can have best with people you know very well, like the members of your family.
Might be harder with parents and children because there's that authority issue always in the background. But it's definitely an ideal to be striven for, even in parent-child communications, I think. Is that mutuality and mutual respect, receptiveness to one another? These are really moral virtues. And why do we not have these as much?
I think it's a reflection on the sort of, I mean, look, I think things like social media and people spending half of their time, three-quarters of the time staring at the screens, not really having conversations, having interaction, having communication content. But conversation is when there's another presence. I think you and I can have a conversation, even though we've never met in person. But it's a rare thing. And we have it because we both come to this with a desire to know.
to know something about what human beings need, what they're not getting in our current state of affairs. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens about issues that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished. For more information about NC Family and how you can partner with us in pursuit of this vision, visit our website at ncfamily.org and be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts, and Family North Carolina magazine.
You can also follow us on social media at NC Family Policy. That's at NC Family Policy. Let's talk about this because you mentioned a lot of attitudes that people should have or should bring to a good conversation. Then you mentioned respect and mutual admiration. And I think so oftentimes there's a vilification of those people, and there's a sense that we can't even give them the space to give their opinion because it's so evil.
So, how do we get past that? How do we get to a place where we can just relax and listen? You know, one of the ways you do it is find the topics that you can talk about. And the saying that you can't should never talk about politics and religion, I think that's regrettable. The very best friends I have, the very best conversationalists I know, nothing is really off limits to them.
Yeah, but I think for people where you have less developed relationships, you should find the areas of commonality, the things that you can talk about. And remember, being able to talk about something doesn't mean we all agree. I don't think if you get a dinner table where everybody around the dinner table agrees that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler or whatever, that's not going to make for an interesting conversation. What makes for an interesting conversation is the shades of opinion that people legitimately have on this subject. And by the way, I just want to make myself clear, I do not believe that he is the reincarnation of Hitler, but I'm willing to listen to people who have different views.
That particular view is ridiculous. I think a willingness to listen, a willingness to listen to others, and to take that, you know, we all concentrate so much on rights in our society and not on responsibilities. And I think the right to speak, the right to speak freely, is a precious right, but it comes with a responsibility to have a proper regard for the person you're talking to. You know, we talk about conversation partners. That's not just a turn of phrase.
It's a real issue. that you have to think of conversation as a partnership. The way I think of it sometimes is like in tennis. uh when you're you're not a competitive tennis player as i'm not I'm not good enough to be, but I love nothing more than just having a volley back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Keep the volley going.
Not try to score points, not try to smash the shot that's going to win for me, but to keep the volley going. That's an image of a conversation. I think a conversation is more meaningful than that, but it's an image of what is involved. You really. You need to think about your audience.
You need to think about your conversation partner, just as you think about your partner in any other thing. Rock climbing. You want to be aware of your partner.
So it's that lack of awareness of the other person, the degree to which we seem to be just situated in the cave of our fixed ideas. The only point of coming into contact with other people is to repeat them and to, as they say these days, own them. That is, if they have opposing points of view, not to converse, but to put them down, put them in their place. We've got to overcome that. And I think one of the ways, it's a small thing, but one of the ways we can do it is by example.
try to set the example. In our conversational venues, of how you do it, how you have a conversation. But the very best conversations are born of a special kind of friendship. C.S. Lewis talks about this a lot in his book, The Four Loves, about the lordliness, as he calls it, of friendship, that friendship is something where you don't bring the baggage of who you are, where you come from to discussion.
What you bring is a shared desire to know the truth about something and to speak the truth together. That sounds very idealistic, very philosophical. I happen to think that's actually what goes on.
Now, you know, I'm not saying every interaction has to be that kind of conversation. You know, if you get together with your neighbor for a coffee clatch and you want to have a little mixture of political conversation, gossip, talking about your kids. That's really good. That's wonderful. It's not conversation in the fullest way where you go deep into the things that in your mind and your heart that matter the most to you.
And one other thing I mentioned in the article, and I would definitely emphasize, is I'm making it sound like a serious thing. Eat your broccoli, have a conversation. It should be fun. It should be playful. Play.
is a part of an element of conversation to deal playfully with ideas, with alternative ideas, not with you know, there are certain things that you can't deal with playfully. Obviously. But for the most part, to have a kind of easy Teasing relationship with the other person is a wonderful accoutrement in making a conversation. But I think you have to meet people where they are. I know you wanted to ask me about how can people do this better.
be better at it. And I think that's one way is to Think about what you want to say, but also think about who you're saying it to. You gave a speech to the Michael Okashat Association about this very topic. And one of the things that you said, that he said, was call a conversation a quote unrehearsed intellectual adventure. And that gets a lot of what you're talking about: the fun, not knowing where you're going to end up just kind of discovering as you go.
Exactly. I mean, that unrehearsed because you don't come in speaking your talking points. I mean, you know, I've spent a lot of time in Washington and, you know, conversations, you know, you may not see the piece of paper with the talking points in front of somebody, but that's what you're dealing with is people who, and they haven't really thought beyond the talking points. They haven't gone behind them. They know that that's what, that's the currency of the land in.
The kind of environment in which your conversations are all instrumental. They're toward a particular end. That's one of the things Oakeshott, and thank you for mentioning him, says that conversation, true conversation should not be instrumental. It shouldn't be something, okay, we're having this conversation for a purpose. No, we're having it because of the sort of delight.
Of this verbal exchange that we have as two different human beings. Who have some similar, some different points of view about things. And you never know, it's an adventure, Tracy, because I never know what you're gonna come out with. You never know what I'm gonna come out with. It's gonna make me.
look away from my talking points and say, well, gosh, you know? I don't let me think about that, and then I come up with a response. It's a fresh response to circumstances that you have presented me with. And on and on it goes. It is an intellectual adventure.
When properly undertaken, but you have to have people who are simpatico on a deep level in some ways to even get it off the ground. Right.
So, I do want to talk about this more, but we are about out of time for this first part of our conversation. Let's revisit this. Dr. Wilfred McClay, we will talk to you next week. Thanks for joining us today on Family Policy Matters.
Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy.
Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
