Ideas - The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 1: Why we need to have a conversation about conversations

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Ever felt that no one is really listening? In the first of his 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, novelist and poet Ian Williams explores why we need to have a conversation about conversations. His five-part lecture series confronts the deterioration of civic and civil discourse and asks us to reconsider the act of conversing as the sincere, open exchange of thoughts and feelings.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Why can't we talk to each other anymore? What makes good communication anyway?

And how does conversation need to change so we can get away from the angry crosstalk that defines our social and political interactions? In the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, Ian Williams wants to start a conversation about conversations. He argues conversation is something we make, just like we design the physical buildings in which we live. And that means it can be remade. Ian Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His first novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize in 2019, and he teaches at the University of Toronto. Ian's Massey lectures are called What I Mean to Say, remaking conversation in our time. They were recorded on a cross-Canada tour, with stops in Sydney, Iqaluit, Saskatoon, Victoria and Toronto.

In a talk about conversations, there are, of course, examples of conversations. In each city, two other readers joined Ian on stage. Throughout this lecture, you'll also hear CBC Cape Breton's Steve Sutherland and Wendy Bergfeldt. They play many different roles, characters both real and imagined. One of the roles that Wendy plays is Edna, a recurring character in the lectures who pops up to offer editorial comments and disagreements. In the first lecture, Ian invites us to stop imagining each other in ways that are self-serving and to remember that half

of a good conversation is in fact listening. Today on Ideas, from Highland Arts Theatre in Sydney, Nova Scotia, here's the first lecture, Ian Williams with Why We Need to Have a Conversation About Conversations. Hi, good night everyone. It's our first time here in Sydney, my first time in Sydney as well. And we've been here a couple of days and it's absolutely wonderful. I don't know why you would ever want to leave this region. Yeah, we all love,

we were saying this after visiting the bookstore, we love how you engage with each other here. Everybody knows something about everybody else. So it's an honor to be here. Welcome to lecture number one, why we need to have a conversation about conversations. It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much.

That's Yogi Berra. Hey, stranger. Long time no see. Busy. I didn't see you at Marianne's send-off. Family emergency. Is everything okay? Yeah, you know, just a thing. A thing with my mother, you know?

I'm sorry. Yeah. Do you have siblings? No, only child. One too many if you ask me. Not to get all Roe versus Wade. Anyway, a lot of people show up? No, no, not too many.

I got a gift card on behalf of the group. Everybody's busy, busy. Yeah, we all need assistance. I guess AI isn't too far off. We could have slaves. I mean, you know, not the real slaves. I mean, you know, like AI slaves, right? Right, right, yeah.

You know, but chances are they'll enslave us first. What we all need is a little woman named Edna to follow us around with a little steno pad and a golf pencil, and then whenever you're a little off, she's right there to catch you. Now, look, it was nice seeing you. Enough small talk. Sorry about your childhood, not sure about your politics. Let's get right to it.

It's important for us to talk about conversations at this particular moment for several reasons. First, we need to address the deterioration of civic and civil discourse. On the civic side, we speak to each other as if we have all become two-dimensional profiles without history, family, or feelings. On the civil side, our leaders speak to us, goad us with incendiary rhetoric. We fall for it. Their inflammatory language combined with the usual hot air, combined with a stressed, seething citizenry,

is enough friction to cause wildfires across our democracies. Here's what I mean. Remember this? So I want to go back to this one issue though because the media has been focused on this and they're attacking you. Under no circumstances you are promising America tonight would you ever abuse power as retribution against anybody? Except for day one. Except for? He's going crazy. Except for day one. Meaning?

I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill. That's not retribution. I'm going to be. He keeps, we love this guy. He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling.

After that, I'm not a dictator, okay? Second, our conversations increasingly exist in a new dimension, the online space. Social media in particular is changing how we regard each other and how we converse. Online, we can don flattering masks, monstrous ones, or remain anonymous. Online, we can make false and hurtful comments, yet escape consequences. Online, we are emboldened to attack, counterattack, gloat when we win, parade our victimization when we lose, all in the video game that we have traded our lives to play.

A game whose main purpose is to amass social points and influence. Third, we are living in closer proximity to people who are different from us. Other cultures, perspectives, and values can no longer be overwritten or ignored. Silenced people are speaking. Oppressed groups are pressing. The period of Western dominance is being tried in the courts of conscience. Our increased contact with difference is urging us to actively negotiate our relationships to each other and to the space, both physical and ideological, that we share.

Finally, we need to address recent aggressive attempts to silence certain voices. Muffling mechanisms have evolved over time, but they seem especially virulent and ferocious in our moment. Campaigns of censorship are so organized that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call them militarized. Mobs drag people through the streets and execute them for their sins. We call this cancelling. You should be making a clearer distinction between insidious, subtle, bloodless cancelling and the more blunt act of public executions. You're being too metaphoric about mobs dragging people through the streets. There are degrees to these things. There's one kind of censorship mechanism via the court of

public opinion and another kind of silencing via the state, such as shutting down protests or book bans or literally killing people. I hear you, Edna, but still. We demonize people who disagree with us. The pressure does not come entirely from external sources. The mob has insidiously infiltrated us and become part of our own regulatory forces so that we silence ourselves. We are afraid to have conversations. Headlines scream about silencing.

Third of UK librarians asked to censor or remove books, research reveals. Calls to ban books on the rise in Canada. So is opposition to any bans. Florida School District pulls dictionaries and encyclopedias as part of inappropriate content review. Canada Public School removes all books published before 2008 over equity concerns. There's a greater danger in not having the conversation about the state of our world, by which I mean the state of our lives, than in having it.

If we don't talk, we risk imagining each other in ways that are self-serving. We use each other as props to confirm our treasured biases, to invent malice, and to scapegoat for social problems. Conversations act as a corrective to our assumptions and delusions. I've been saying that we need to talk to each other, and I equally mean that we need to listen to each other. To listen without agenda or strategy. You remember Fight Club, when Jack shares why he loves the support group so much? If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, you their full attention. If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you.

People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. We should listen to people as if they were dying. I'll offer this thesis. We can talk about anything if we know how. And I'll offer its antithesis. We should still talk in good faith even if we don't know how. What do we need to talk about? You mean like now? The climate, the wars, democracy and authoritarianism, gender and sexuality,

race, technologies deep reach into our lives, big pharma, housing affordability, why 1.1% of people control 45.8% of global wealth. And as if that's not bad enough, to have meaningful conversations, we need to address the history of each topic, the how we got here. Now the enormity of each subject is daunting. Under the heading of gender and sexuality, say, we could discuss consent, censorship in school libraries, gender-neutral bathrooms, fashion, sexualized images, a woman's right to her body. Each of those subjects fray into endless threads of considerations. These subjects often appear abstract and systemic, and we prefer to talk about matters that have more direct and immediate impact on our lives. Yet the subjects that seem more practical and urgent

are often proxies for the abstract and systemic ones. Instead of addressing climate catastrophe, we talk about the weather. To discuss the infiltration of technology into our lives, a parent might ask another parent, so when did you allow your child to use a tablet? At work, instead of discussing indigeneity, we ask, what's the step beyond land acknowledgements for my organization? In the checkout line, when we want answers to our eroding wealth, we ask, have you noticed the price of olive oil recently? Sigh. The big issues feel overwhelming and the small ones feel trivial. They both seem impervious to my worry. What can I, with my sad loyalty points card, do about the price of olive oil?

What can talking do to change anything? Oblique answer number one. Artists face a version of this question all the time. Does art change anything? Most people who ask this question have already decided that art is useless. The artist must then defend their vocation, justify the necessity of art, and beg for their right to exist. Or not. More than once, Or not. More than once, Oscar Wilde shrugged. Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It's not meant to instruct or to influence action in any way. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. Some artists have embraced the idea of uselessness and liberated

themselves from its punitive judgment the way the lgbt plus community has reclaimed the word queer the indigenous indian and the black community has reclaimed some taboo words also the line of reasoning is that if conversations about important topics are useless, and I don't think they are, then we should just relax and have them without worrying about the outcome. Conversations are an art. Oblique answer number two. I'll fictionalize something that is all too true. Scene.

Two characters attend marriage counseling. During the fourth session, the husband asks, when is the advice going to come? I'm paying for all these sessions and all we do is talk for an hour. There's a long silence. The wife looks down, embarrassed. The therapist looks up from her notepad and meets the husband's eye. She says, the talk is the therapy. Similarly, we do not know what change will come about by talking about the big challenges to our society. The purpose of these conversations is not to immediately solve world hunger. Only Miss America contestants can do that. Leave the jokes to the pros, my friend.

You just ride your little high horse. On the flip side, I realize that we've been talking for a long time about, say, poverty, and that each step can be bogged down in talk. So we need to know how to move conversations forward along an appropriate timeline and to realize that each generation is introduced to the problem in a new way and that sadly, some problems will always be with us.

What can't we talk about? We're advised to avoid talking about politics, religion, death, race, money. You mean class. And certain aspects of other people's personal lives, such as sex. Who said everything is about sex except sex, which is about power? We're hesitant to broach these topics because, as theorist Sarah Ahmed writes, if you name the problem, you become the problem. In other words, what we talk about has a way of contaminating who we are. We protect our reputations and personas by filtering the

information people receive about us. Even in our sexually liberated age, if you're a woman who talks too explicitly about her sex life, you may be cast as a certain kind of woman. We're all entrepreneurs concerned about our brand. We're all leaders of autocratic countries with slick foreign policy and massive defense budgets. There are many reasons why we avoid talking about politics, religion, death, race, money, and sex. These topics make us uncomfortable. They are matters on which we hold sharply divergent viewpoints. They require sophistication that is often beyond our knowledge. We tell ourselves that we want to respect other people's privacy. We would never admit that we avoid these topics

because we don't care. But think about it for a minute. Does everyone really avoid these subjects? I don't think so. Rather, these are subjects that straight white men don't need to engage with regularly. Don't go there, please. But for people who are racialized or belong to a sexual minority, I reckon that not a day goes by without their engagement in these subjects. Furthermore, I reckon that they have rich, sensitive, life-changing conversations with people they trust, and that these conversations become the rebar that strengthens these communities. I want to dwell on this point a little longer

because the things we don't talk about often point to an invisible privileged segment of our identity. A man might not talk about gender because, A, truly he may not perceive it as a problem when his salary is deposited into his account, or B, he's aware that wage disparity is a problem for some people but has separated their struggle from his hard-earned money. He is not aware of the details of the problem and sees no need to expose his privilege by agitating the system on behalf of his female colleagues. In other words, the discomfort around certain subjects

is largely felt by the privileged person who does not see themselves as having anything to gain from the conversation and therefore has systemically marginalized that conversation, prevented its airing, and actively maintained codes to blacklist the subject as impolite, indelicate, taboo. So, shall we try? Let's spin the wheel. Politics, religion, death, race, money, sex, politics, religion, death, race, money, sex, politics, religion, death, race, money, sex, politics, religion, religion, religion, religion. Let's talk about religion then.

Religion. Let's talk about religion then. God. True story. You're with a friend in a lounge in Alberta doing laptop work. A woman starts playing a nearby piano. It's a cresting arpeggiated piece with a flowy left hand and a melodic right hand. In a movie, the heroine's face would be shot through a rain-streaked train window. When the woman lifts her hands from the keyboard, you and your friend applaud her. She is bashful at first, then she comes over and joins you. Your augmented reality eye renders her face as a green wireframe hologram and flashes the word stranger, stranger over it. She sits on the couch next to you and you issue compliments about the piece. Apparently, she composed it herself during the pandemic to, quote, stay sane. Five minutes into the conversation, somehow the stranger,

your friend, and you are talking about AI taking over the planet. You don't remember any of this? Here's a transcript. Whatever the tech people do, they can't make robots get off a plane and embrace each other and share our human life force. I'm hoping that the AI robots with this high IQ are going to realize that the human race needs to survive. May they have mercy on us. You know, when you stopped and apologized for the mistake, I was like, don't apologize. That's what makes you human. Yeah, that's part of it.

I could never sit down and recite a poem without having it in front of me. And you were just playing without all the notes in front of you. A robot would play it perfectly. That's interesting. As a child, I was able to get a front of you. A robot would play it perfectly. That's interesting. As a child, I was able to get a year of lessons. We had an upright piano and we grew up on a farm. And of course we had chores and it seemed like we had no time to do much of anything, but it was the one thing my parents gave me as much time as I wanted to play the piano. So it became self-teaching, right? And what

you do as a child is you learn to use your ear. You hear someone singing and you sit down and you figure out what key it is. You know, the minute you started playing, we could hear something different happening. Something special is happening. I love you guys. Why can't we say that more? I mean, if you think about animals, you know, we don't put up barriers. Why do we do that? And it would be great to like meet a stranger and not be terrified of them.

Like you shared something you did well and we appreciated it. Maybe we need to say this kind of thing more to each other. You guys made my day. And you know, that really touches my heart. We really need to do these things more often. Yeah, to be courageous with each other. Sometimes when I'm driving home from work, I go through this Wendy's. So I was driving through this Wendy's to pick up a Diet Coke for my trip home. And I see this guy I often see there. You

could tell he was homeless, maybe drugs, I don't know. But he was there, and my immediate reaction was, am I safe, right? Right. And then I looked, and normally I don't look, but I looked over and into his eyes, and it was like he communicated to me with no words that he was hungry. So I rolled down my window, and I took some money from my dash, and I gave him the money money and I looked him in the eyes and out of my mouth came, God loves you so much. And I didn't say that. It just came out of my mouth. Yeah. Like you had to tell him something. And he didn't even want the money. He was just

like his eyeballs like this because he was so happy to hear that he wasn't forgotten or something. And there's another thing you can't do with robots. You can't produce that humanity, right? I've been a very fortunate person where I haven't had to go through something like that. How could that possibly give me the right not to treat him like the human being he is? Hey, thanks for the story. And thanks for the company, too. Okay, you guys, I have to go. Sounds fake, right? Sounds like bad writing. Sounds scripted. It's true, though. I assure you there's a very nice, very successful woman in Alberta playing piano in the evenings and remembering

values she learned on a farm. I will admit that something like panic rises in my chest when conversations take a sudden turn towards the religious. Conversations about God tend to be crusades and conversion, else indictments, political or moral. It took a while to get to God. You'll notice that we didn't program the conversation in that direction. So when her story climaxes with God loves you so much, we're all surprised. The stranger herself was surprised to find herself saying it to the unhoused man. And the reason for her telling us that story was unclear, to the unhoused man. And the reason for her telling us that story was unclear, but it seemed appropriate, even important for her to share. I suspect her synapses were firing away, linking interactions with strangers. We reminded her of a recent encounter with another stranger.

Aligned with that stranger, we were also the vicarious recipients of the God loves you so much. we were also the vicarious recipients of the God loves you so much. It's hard to say what a particular conversation about politics, religion, death, race, money, sex would look like because conversations depend on context. They originate from some specific desire or direction. So to discuss religion, it might be within the context of its force in American politics, or a local church's liberal bent with the drum kit in the choir loft, or about a college student's loss of faith and the liberation and terror she feels at adopting a new paradigm to view the world, or as with our stranger friend in Alberta, through spare change at a burger place. These are all religious issues, but the kinds of conversations required for each are different. My purpose here is not to have these conversations. That would derail us into a separate project

altogether. I'm not interested in persuading you in any direction on these difficult subjects. Rather, I simply wish to put them on the table again. Do anything you want with them, except ignore them. Would you kindly illustrate the earlier thesis with an example? Would you kindly illustrate the earlier thesis with an example? Please? Please? Pretty please.

Remember the thesis? We can talk about anything if we know how? I had a colleague who could say the most pointed and damning things in meetings, but she said them so sweetly and earnestly that no one faulted her for them. She never seemed mean-spirited, even when her phrasing wasn't particularly gracious. Something in her voice and her placid, even joking expression allowed her to say anything. She wore dresses in winter and breezed through rooms without a single enemy. You'd be a monster to say a bad word about her. I think tone is everything.

Would you kindly illustrate the earlier antithesis with an example? Please, please, pretty please? The antithesis. We should still talk, even if we don't know how. In our conversation with the spontaneous pianist from Alberta, neither my friend nor I knew what to make of the religious turn. He's an atheist, and I'm wary of the political co-opting of religion. But if you excavate one of her stories, you'll see that she planted a treasure map for us. As a girl, she didn't know how to play piano.

She had some lessons, sure, but she really taught herself. When you don't know something, in her words, what you do as a child is you learn to use your ear. as a child is you learn to use your ear. On Ideas, you're listening to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, by novelist and poet Ian Williams. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Nala Ayyad. is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story,

we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short-sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. In the first 2024 CBC Massey Lecture, novelist and poet Ian Williams embarks on a project to rehabilitate our conversations. We kicked off this year's tour in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the very first time the Massey Lectures have gone to Cape Breton. From Highland Arts Theatre, here's Ian Williams with why we need to have a conversation about conversations. The problem of persuasion. Here's the story of a word. Conversation was born etymologically

from Latin parents. Con, meaning with, plus versare, meaning to turn. This couple also gave birth to Conversation's twin, Conversion. The twins liked similar activities, including persuasion. Conversare means keep company with. Isn't that lovely? Conversation involves intimacy with another person. In fact, around 1510, the word came to mean sexual intercourse, but that's not the case anymore. Conversation had a bit of a reputation. But let's backtrack a little. As early as 1340, conversation is still not primarily about words. Rather, it refers to a manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society. Conversation is more about behavior than language. Over 200 years later, in 1586, the word settles into our common understanding of it. Quote, an interchange of thoughts and words, familiar discourse or talk. So as you can see, conversation has been through a lot.

It has 11 meanings, many of them dead. Its twin conversion is alive and well, but conversation is not nearly as determined or ambitious. Conversion wants followers. Conversation wants friends. It's hard to find a term for the person in the conversation since the speaker and listener are constantly in flux. Interlocutor is awkward and academic. Partner is my favorite term. I don't mean partner as some kind of sidekick, but an equal participant in the conversation, whether listening or speaking. Equal, like a squash partner. Aristotle believed that a rhetorical

situation had three features, a speaker, an audience, and a subject. It's often visualized as a triangle. In a true conversation, Aristotle's triangle needs at least one major modification. The idea of speaker and audience is more fluid. One is constantly moving between the two roles, or said differently, the speaker and listener change into each other. They are not opponents. Difficult conversations often have an element of persuasion. Our partner holds an opinion that differs from our own, and we want them to see the light and walk toward it. If our partner could simply understand things from our perspective, things as they are, then surely they would have no choice but to concede the error of their ways

and cast themselves before us apologetically. Alternatively, difficult conversations occur when we do not want to be persuaded of our partner's position. We have already decided that it is wrong. Either way, conversations are difficult not only because of subject matter, remember the list, politics, religion, death, race, money, class, sex, but they're difficult because of predetermined intransigence. Conversational partners bring different levels of engagement to a subject. For example, you may have been thinking about electric vehicles for years, while I've only read a couple of articles about them. The knowledge imbalance gives one person an advantage. But here's a radical, brain-splitting thing to attempt in a difficult conversation.

Try to loosen your grasp on your convictions. When you listen, try to truly set aside your convictions, lay down your defenses, and instead inhabit the other person's perspective completely. This goes beyond understanding what they believe to understanding how their opinion is linked to their sense of self, why they hold on to it, what need it meets, how they arrived at it, who led them there, whom they trust, all those elements need space within a conversation until the victory is not in winning them over, but in truly understanding them better. You may be wondering, without convergence to a shared opinion, how will I know the conversation is over? I think the conversation will exhaust itself quite

naturally once there's no resistance. There may not be perfect overlap of opinion, no alignment event like an eclipse, but there will be a mirroring effect where your partner will mirror your openness and relaxation. The harmony is not in subject, but in the spirit of reciprocity that connects the two partners. That's hippie talk. Fair, Edna, that's fair. I admit that it's incredibly difficult to achieve a harmonic balance while in disagreement without being patronizing, without saying things like, help me understand, or parroting back like a therapist, what I hear you saying is blah blah blah. The language that opens up the space might seem

inauthentic and prepackaged, but that's no reason to dismiss the approach. It's like a poet giving up on language entirely because of bad song lyrics. Instead, this is my invitation to find language within your own vocabulary and according to your relationship with your partner. There are ways of checking your understanding and clarifying misunderstandings. There are ways of checking your understanding and clarifying misunderstandings. But why must I always take the high road? I can't be the only open one in this conversation while the other person assails me with their perspective.

All so fair, Edna. It's true. Sometimes it's impossible for someone to see your side. And I don't mean because of bias or anything ideological. I mean that some people have a reduced empathetic capacity and may never agree to these rules of engagement. In fact, they see your perspective taking as capitulation. And yet, the alternation of freedom and restraint, And yet, the alternation of freedom and restraint, of speaking and silence, of sharing and withholding, is the force that moderates our conversations.

Each partner is empowered by that force. By comparison to such beautiful, self-regulating energy, the aims of persuasion are crass. What qualifies as a conversation? When writer Sheila Hetty talks to a coin, can we count that as a conversation? In her book Motherhood, she takes her conflicted feelings about whether she should have children to the universe via a coin. If she flips two or three heads, the universe is telling her yes. If she flips two or three tails, the answer is no. Should I have a child with Miles? No.

Should I have a child at all? Yes. So then I should leave Miles? No. Should I have an affair with another man while I'm with Miles and raise the child as Miles's own, deceiving him about the providence of that child? Yes. I don't think that's a good idea. Are you saying that I shouldn't have a child with Miles because there would be too much stress on the relationship and too much on each one of us individually? Yes. Then I should have Miles' child but raise it with another man? Yes. Should I get pregnant this year? No. Next year? Yes. How old will the child be when we separate? One? No. Two?

Yes. And how old will the child be when I find another? Three? No. Four? No. Five? No.

Six? Yes. And will those four years be a big pain in the ass? No. Will they be a kind of a joy? No. Will they be like any other years? Yes. This conversation is one-sided on both sides. All one partner does is ask questions and all the other does is reply yes or no. And slyly, Hedy keeps asking questions until she's satisfied with the answer she receives.

asking questions until she's satisfied with the answer she receives. Conversations aren't simply tools for our own affirmation. You don't stop talking to someone because they say things you don't like. Oh, but we do. Well, on the flip side, we don't keep talking to someone until they say what we want them to. Oh, child, bless your sweet, deluded soul. Oh. Not every verbal interaction between two people counts as a conversation. A conversation is not the same as an argument, an interview, a debate, a discussion, class participation.

The differences can be hard to identify, but you intuitively know when a conversation has become something else. Conversations are so slippery. I mean, these categories collide constantly. Any single verbal exchange can slide between categories from minute to minute. So while you're having a conversation, there's always something else going on between the participants that has nothing to do with the words involved. You been on a date lately?

That's private. Conversation is an open exchange of thoughts and feelings. It occurs between two people who care for each other on some level. At least that's the kind of utopian conversation I have in mind. The kind that we have over dinner tables. From the front seat to the back seat of the car, while taking a long walk along the boardwalk, perhaps with a dog between us. What are the features of a conversation? One, a conversation requires a partner.

Right. Without a partner, you're doing something like thinking aloud or monologuing. If instead of a partner, you have an audience, then you are making a speech, teaching, performing, but you're likely not having a conversation. Are you and I partners? Is this a conversation? The limitation of a lecture means that I can't really have a conversation with you, at least not before I've stopped talking. Yet, as I talk, you are present in my mind and in my line of sight, mostly raising objections. I consider what values we share.

I'm aware of the areas in which I am not expert, areas where there is no clarity, and those are the areas where you remonstrate most loudly. I can also see you turning away from me and having a conversation with someone else, equipped with a bit more meta-understanding of the immense social endeavor that a conversation represents. In terms of the propagation of the species, conversation is right up there with having children. How else have our ideas been transmitted except through this process of assertion and response?

In our case right now, the assertion will be more sustained and uninterrupted than the response. But ultimately, the responders always have the last word. In fact, the conversations we have are determined to a degree by the people we can talk to. The implications are obvious. In the availability of conversations, we perceive the original feedback loop or echo chamber of hearing familiar opinions. Even if we disagree with our partner, the liberal, our partner, the conservative, we can predict exactly what they will say. That predictability is partly their fault, through the rote repetition of positions, and partly ours, because we stopped listening a while ago

and have cast them as stereotype. Two, a conversation is an exchange between two or more people. An exchange. Conversation requires back and forth. It's in the negotiation between the self and the other that true conversation lies. What is being exchanged? Content in the form of ideas, opinions, experiences, sure, but more

importantly, a good conversation is an exchange of position and perspective. This happens rapidly sometimes. So think about a violin concerto, where the violin speaks and the orchestra listens, and then the orchestra speaks and the violin listens. They speak excitedly to each other. They mimic each other's tone. They mock each other gently. They quibble.

But the moments of exchange where they switch positions are really instructive. Another way of thinking about conversation is as a translation of our interior lives to someone on the outside. As good translators, we have to consider the language and readiness of the person we're speaking to, as well as our fidelity to ourselves and the necessary compromises to be understood by another person and other contextual factors that indicate how we should release ourselves.

Sometimes there are translation errors, but if you have ever been in a foreign country trying to communicate, you will appreciate how translation becomes less an issue of correctness and more one of intention and generosity. Three, a conversation requires a shared language. At minimum, a conversation needs two participants, a common language, and some motivation.

The common language part is so obvious that it's easy to forget, but it's extremely important. Many Canadians can go their entire lifetimes without having a conversation with a person in China, although there are over a billion people there. And if we have a conversation with them, it would likely be on our terms rather than theirs. The rest of the world moves towards English speakers in a way that does not demand much adjustment from us. I think foreign languages remind us of our outsider status. They humble us. We reflect on ourselves in the pause during which we wait to understand or be understood. Language crossing is becoming increasingly common with

powerful real-time translation software, but there's still a lag in the conversation. Spontaneity is lacking. For me, all communication is predicated on language. Four, in a conversation, we have the promise of civility and mutuality. Or at least the hope of it. Civility and mutuality are not always natural. They are constructed agreements. As with a building, the structural integrity is more important than the cladding. We approach conversations as engineers, framers, plumbers. Conversations are mutually built and mutually maintained.

From time to time, we inspect them for truth and clean them for our health. All partners have contracts in making conversations habitable. Architecturally, the ideal conversation is symmetrical, meaning there's a balance of speaking and listening, of enthusiasm, of goodwill, of intent, of power, at least within the conversational space. Disrupt any of those features and the dynamic becomes unpleasantly asymmetrical. Five, the shape of a conversation is determined by time and space available. Yeah, the occasion matters. The truth spoken at the wrong time may not incline your partner toward you.

We see how important context is in our online asynchronous conversations. One never knows when the message will be received and what state the receiver will find themselves. So a lot of ill will and misinterpretation result from ascribing the feelings of the present state to a possibly neutral state. We know, for example, it's best not to respond to an email thread at 2 a.m. when all of our insecurities are peaking. when all of our insecurities are peaking. A conversation has a sense of progress, of growing over time, of being alive for a fixed duration and then expiring.

Although its content may be some past event, the actual conversation is ever-moving toward the future. One speaker surprises the other. A conversation occurs in a physical setting. In fact, some of the words we use to describe conversations hint at this spatial element. A conversation can wander, meander. A conversation can be deep. It transports us to a different space. A conversation unfolds,

much like a paper map unfolds from a tiny rectangle into an enormous square. A good conversation gives the impression of expansion as it progresses. The whole city is ours to explore by whichever route we choose.

Will I love the child more than anything? Yes. Will the child be a girl? No. An attractive child? No. A plain child? No.

A drop-dead gorgeous child? Yes. Is any of the above true? No. Is there any use in any of this if none of it's true? No. Hedy talks to a coin. A child talks to their stuffed animals. I think we humans are wired

to talk to anything. I will confess that the conversations I dislike the most are those where I disagree sharply with people and I'm meant to absorb their unrelenting perspective. It's not so much the subject matter part, but the part of the conversation where I feel I must withhold what I think. Maybe my reaction is determined by politeness or unfamiliarity or power dynamics within the group. Friendships can be rooted in this one-sidedness. One becomes a kind of service animal for the offloading of that person's day. The partner can't go forward until they've taken care of their own needs at whatever expense to the other person. Well, look, it was nice seeing you. Hey, hey, hey,

before you go, would you mind keeping that thing about my mother between us? Oh, you didn't tell me much, but okay. Again, nice seeing you. Don't be a stranger. Hey, hey, hey, before you go, how long do you think the snow is going to last? Not sure, but they're cancelling flights. Man, my neighbour aims a snowblower into my driveway and it just piles up after I've cleared it. He's some kind of immigrant. Oh. Yeah, I try telling him to point it the other way, but I don't even

know if he speaks English. There are like 10 of them over there. Nobody speaks English. Why do we keep letting these people into our country? What are we trying to prove, eh? Yeah. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get to Florida to see my mother. The flights are canceled. Yeah. That's why I hate traveling in winter. I get stressed out at the airport with the delays and the price of water, removing your shoes, the tiny shampoos, and the plastic bags and all that stuff. All because of some terrorists. It was supposed to be temporary, and now it's all you can't get away from. And you can barely get a single almond on a flight these days.

And you've got to pay extra if you want your almonds salted. your almonds salted. What is this feeling after a conversation that is unrequited? Emptiness, yes. An actual emptiness in the chest cavity. Then after the conversation, my heart quickens. That's anger. I've been suckered again. I expected a conversation rather than a performance. I was free to leave, as always, but I was tricked into believing myself necessary. When my presence in a conversation is irrelevant,

my existence becomes expendable. The partner could be talking to anyone. Something has been taken from me in these encounters, and not just my time. My pride, my dignity, my agency, all stolen stealthily. It's the opposite feeling of being called to witness someone's life in a way where your presence affirms them, reassures them, says, I share this experience with you. I will remember it for you. It did not just happen to you. From here on, the indignity that was committed against you was against me as well. Such is my love for you. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time ever, the Mass is in Cape Breton. And Ian Williams' first visit, thank you for making it such a warm one.

I think we are the opposite of left empty and unfulfilled by that conversation we just had. Based on your criteria for a good conversation, I'm wondering what is a recent great conversation you've had or one of those ones that you don't like so much well they're probably the same conversation right the really good conversation was also a conversation I didn't want to have with a friend and I felt like the distance between us growing and you know I was you know the games you play in friendships right where you're passive-aggressive and so I went silent I went dark on him and then he kept reaching out and kept like talking over me. And eventually we just had like, we actually just talked it out. And we know we're middle-aged men in our sort of mid forties or so. And we had

never had this kind of conversation in like 20 something years of friendship. And it was open. It was to the point, everything came out on the table. It was uncomfortable and challenging and all of that. But the fact that we were having it really sort of leveled us up. Like he would listen to me and then he would sort of like test what he thought I was saying. And then I would test an assumption about him. Like, you think I'm being selfish? Well, I didn't say selfish. I said self-centered. Right? Like these kinds of micro adjustments that we kept making with each other until we finally had like a clearer picture and we realized that for 20 years we had uh like misapprehended each other right or we had seen each other in one way and forever like lit the friend in that way and

we needed to change our lighting and to change our position so we could see um around this person and sometimes things have to sort of hit that crisis point, right? That really sort of critical moment where you're like, it's either we split up and go our separate ways, or we figured a way to actually be honest now, right? And we chose the latter. Yeah. What a great note to end on. Ladies and gentlemen, Ian Williams. On Ideas, you've been listening to Why We Need to Have a Conversation About Conversations. It's the first of the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, by novelist and poet Ian Williams.

This lecture was recorded at Highland Arts Theatre in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Special thanks to Steve Sutherland and Wendy Bergfeld at CBC Cape Breton, the readers in this lecture. And thank you to Olivia Adlaka for technical production, and to Don Monroe for helping us make the first Massey Lecture in Cape Breton a reality. You can get the entire 2024 CBC Massey Lectures series at cbc.ca slash massys after the broadcast week. You can also stream episodes through the CBC News app or download the lectures from your favourite podcast app. Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures, titled What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time. Our partners in the Massey Lecture

Series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anansi Press. The Massey Lecture Series is produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter. Online production by Althea Manassan, Ben Shannon,

and Sinisa Jolic. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.