Death or Dialogue: From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue

Abstract

lbe Way ForwardThe future offers two alternatives: death or dialogue.This statement is not overdramatization.In the past it was possible, indeed, unavoidable, for most human beings to live out their lives in isolation from the vast majority of their fellows, without even having a faint awareness of, let alone interest in, their very existence.At most, and for most, occasional tales of distant denizens occupied their moments of leisure and satisfied their curiosity.Everyone for the most part talked to their own cultural selves.Even the rare descriptions of the "other" hardly ever came from the others themselves, but from some of their own who had heard, or heard of, the other.Put briefly, until the edge of the present era, humans lived in the Age of Monologue.That age is now passing.We are now poised at the entrance to the Age of Dialogue.We travel all over the globe, and large elements of the entire globe come to us.There can hardly be a U.S. campus which does not echo with foreign accents and languages.Our streets, businesses, and homes are visibly filled with overseas products.We hear constantly about our massive trade deficit and the overwhelming debts second and third world countries owe us.Through our Asian-made television sets we invite into our living rooms myriads of people from strange nations, cultures, and religions.We can no longer ignore the "others," but we can close our minds and spirits to them, look at them with fear and misunderstanding, come to resent them, and perhaps even hate them.This way of encounter leads to hostility and eventually war and death.For example, one of the fundamental reasons why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 was because Japanese leadership perceived the U.S. as a basic economic threat to their well being.The American response was eventually to drop atomic bombs on "the Japs," annihilating hundreds of thousands of human beings in two brief instants.Today nuclear, ecological, or other catastrophic devastation lies just a little further down the path of Monologue.It is only by struggling out of the self-centered monologic mindset into dialogue with others as they really are, and not as we have Grand Valley Reriew • 57

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