The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Irshad Manji: Episode 6

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

COVID-19 has fast-forwarded us into a confusing and uncertain future. Nowhere are the accelerating forces of the pandemic more evident than in our democracy. We are being challenged by rising authoritarian regimes, a reckoning on race, and intense debates on cancel culture, identity politics and free speech. The Spring 2021 Munk Dialogues host some of the world's brightest thinkers for in-depth, one hour conversions on the fate and future of democracy in a world remade by COVID-19. This episode features Irshad Manji in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. The conversation explores finding common ground in our polarized society, and what attitudes that can help us open up to different points of view. Irshad Manji is a bestselling author, commentator and founder of the award winning Moral Courage Project. She has taught at New York University, the University of Southern California and, since 2018, in Oxford University's Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights. Irshad's latest bestseller is Don't Label Me. For more information on the Munk Dialogues visit www.munkdebates.com/dialogues. The Munk Dialogues are a project of the Munk Debates and the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. They are sponsored by Gluskin Sheff, Onex, Bond Brand Loyalty and Torys, LLP. If you like what the Munk Dialogues are all about consider becoming a Supporting Member of the Munk Debates at www.munkdebates.com/membership. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates, podcasts and dialogues, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents).Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. The following is Irshad Manji's Monk Dialogue on the fate and future of our democracy. This is the final chapter in our six-part series this spring on how COVID-19 has reshaped our democracies and how our democracies can respond to the big challenges they face, from a reckoning on race, to polarization within our society, to the threat that authoritarian regimes pose abroad. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ershad Manji, an award-winning author, commentator, and leader of the Moral Courage Project.

Here's that conversation now. We're extremely fortunate to have our, as our guest in this final monk dialogue, Irshad Manji. She's an acclaimed educator, activist, and author. She's a fellow at the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human writes. She's the founder of a really neat project that we will get into called the Moral Courage Project. And she's written a series of internationally best-selling books. We've got two of these up on the screen, her most recent, Ala Liberty and Love. And 2009, Teen, Don't Label Me, which will be the focus of

our extended conversation over the next hour. Irshad, great to be in dialogue with you. Richard, I must say I always enjoy being in the ear of my Canadian peeps. I know we have an international audience tonight as well, but lovely to be with you. No, lovely likewise. Irshad, I want to begin with a question that has kind of stalked these conversations over the last three months from the very beginning. And it goes something like this. We live in a moment right now where we can acknowledge that as a society,

we have ways to connect with each other like we've never had before. Not all of us, but a great number of us are also more prosperous, more well-off than we have ever been before. Not only in recent history, you could say arguably in the scope of human history. Yet despite all these things that are seemingly going right for our society, that are possibly positive sources for this moment in history, we are a peoples filled with fear and hate for each other. How do you explain this incredible dichotomy between so much of what is great about this moment, about progress writ large, yet this inability on our part to have civil, substantive conversations about what we all want to be together?

Well, I'm not so sure that all of us want to be together. And maybe that's the first premise that we need to puncture if we're going to. going to be focusing on solutions. Not everybody wants to coexist peacefully. More do than not, I'm happy to say, if surveys and polls are any indication. And the real challenge then, Roger, is how? What skills do we need as individuals and as communities to communicate across lines of difference in disagreement. But before we go there, I want to address your question head on. Despite all the prosperity for many of us today, why is there so much hatred and disgust with one another? And I would say that there are at least three factors, some environmental and some innate to human beings.

The environmental factors have to do with, of course, the fact that we are immersed in technologies that are deliberately designed to amp up our emotions. And the fact is that we human beings think first and foremost emotionally. We do not think with reason. We think with our emotions. And I'll get to that in just a moment. But it's not only social media. It's also legacy media.

You know, media outlets that we used to trust. implicitly, whether it is the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, you know, CBS, ABC, CBC. The fact is that business models in media are changing. Time was when media used to make profit from advertising, and advertising needed to reach a huge swath, a cross-section of audiences. So, you know, it needed to have a message. that would appeal to many people at once. That's no longer true. We're living in a niche society,

and that means advertisers now play to very thin segments of our communities. And moreover, media outlets know this. So far from raking it in through advertising, they're now raking it in through subscriptions. And, you know, it's easy to hate watch and hate listen and hate read something if you're not paying for it. But if you're paying for it, you don't want your assumptions challenged. You want your biases confirmed.

And so that is even more of an incentive for media outlets to run news and opinions that engage in confirmation bias. Now, I've given you, you know, a couple of environmental factors. Why, though, was it easier, you know, 20, 30 years ago to reach consensus? Well, in part because we didn't have these environmental factors at play, but also because we were more in control of our primitive brains. And this is where we get to the biological reasons. all human beings, regardless of culture and background, all human beings who are born with brains are born with a primitive portion of the brain that is the home of the ego.

And the ego exists to basically keep us alive. But the problem is that the ego cannot easily distinguish between mortal danger and mere discomfort. And so when we are being disagreed with and feel a discomfort with it, which most of us do, and when that discomfort is exacerbated by the social and legacy media models that we now swim in, we react defensively. And that means that we're not willing to listen. what we do is we judge. And more often than not, we judge our other to be an existential threat.

Now, that, of course, is an illusion. Merely by being disagreed with much more often than not, you are not going to die. But the ego doesn't know this and throws everything it can to protect us in what it assumes is a life and death situation. This is why it actually takes what I call moral courage to tame the ego brain, to speak truth to power, not just to powers out there, you know, the system, but also to the system that lives inside of us, namely that primitive part of the brain that wants us to believe we better, you know, fight back or flee if we're going to survive. and we've got to remind ourselves, almost like a habit, that we don't have to cave to the ego. This is why I put so much focus on education and not merely on technology.

Yeah, it's ways of thinking. It's a kind of neural pathway that is getting grooved deeper and deeper by, as you say, the kind of anxiety that social media, legacy media is invoking in us all To explore that concept a bit deeper, I want to read to you what I thought was a very powerful quote from your most recent book, Don't Label Me. It's a little bit long, so just bear with me, but I think it really unpacks a lot of your key ideas. The quote goes something like this. In America's transactional culture, diversity amounts to slapping labels on individuals.

People wind up being packaged like products, crammed into prefabricated molds, presumed indistinguishable from others in the same category. category, handy for a momentary purpose, and destined to be disposed of afterwards. A lot to unpack there, but these are, I think, weighty, meaty ideas that I want to explore with you, and especially this idea of disposal, what kind of happens at the end of this journey of labeling and where people ultimately end up and why they maybe feel the way they feel, which is very alienated and angry with their own disposability. in contemporary culture. Yeah, and I can well imagine that people who have just heard what you've said

would think, quite rightly, that much of America, the over-educated elites of America have disposed of the working class in America. Those who live in what some elites have just blithely labeled flyover country. Well, flyover country, the heartland of America is where people live. A lot of people live. And, you know, they've been ridiculed and mocked for a good 20, 30 years. And in large part, you know, that is the reason Trump was elected, basically as payback for the humiliation that they have felt. But there's another side as well. right, to the disposing and discarding of human beings. Obviously, in 400 years of, since the founding of the United States, if you judge by the 1619 project, you know, minorities and poor people have been used and exploited and discarded when they've no longer been convenient. So what all of this shows, is that human beings, regardless of their class, their race, their gender, their sexual identity,

human beings respond badly to being scorned and being treated as disposable. Which is so interesting because today, in the name of rectifying that injustice, so many of the social justice movements continue to treat other human beings as worthy of being unworthy, of worthy of being discarded. I'll give you one quick example. You know, people who fight for causes are constantly looking for allies, right? That's the word, allies. these allies are not recruited because they are like the people fighting the causes, human beings. They're recruited for their convenience.

We want your body to show up at a particular time, at a particular place. We will expect you to toe the line, not disagree or argue with any premise of the cause. And the moment you begin to ask uncomfortable questions, you are no longer useful to us. In fact, you are a traitor and a sellout. And that is the kind of transactional culture that I'm talking about, that even in the name of treating people with more dignity in social justice movements, we get the kind of human behavior by leaders of social justice. justice movements that treats allies in a less than dignified way. So we've really got to peel back the layers of who and what we have become in this one-click consumerist culture and realize that we will never change the game, Redyard, never transform

unless we are willing to glimpse the humanity, not just of the people who are in our own tribes, but especially of the people who are, quote, inconvenient to us. Well, let's go a bit deeper on that because, you know, I think many people would agree with you immediately that we need to, we need to somehow find a way to have not acceptance necessarily. You're not about, you're not advocating that you have to share another person's view or theory of the case, but you have to have some empathy, some kind of, ability to situate yourself in their position. Yet, Earshot, so much of our popular culture

seems to be just wired against exactly that. It's, as you say, it's confirmation bias. We live in tribes, we consume micro media that, as you say, fuels that kind of tribal identity. These are big social forces that are atomizing us, that are pushing us apart, that are stripping us. of empathy.

I mean, how are you confident that we can find our way back or find our way to some sense of, I don't know, compassion? What's the right word? Well, I think, let me just say right off the top, I don't think I am confident to be blunt. I'm not even all that optimistic. What I am, however, here's the way. the good news. I am ever hopeful. And I'm an educator who is now dedicating her life to teaching the skills to develop that compassion. But before we get to the skills, let me explain why we ought to

bother becoming compassionate. And there's actually an element of enlightened self-interest here. say you've got a very strong point of view on an issue that, you know, matters deeply to you. And as a result of it mattering so much to you, you want other people, especially those who disagree with you to understand why you're right, which means that they need to understand where you're coming from. are you going to get them to understand by bulldozing them with your convictions, you know, by lording it over them, by labeling them stupid or weak or sinister or evil or a phobe of some kind? Is that what's going to open up their ears and their hearts? Clearly not. The reason, therefore, to develop the empathy of which you speak is precisely because you are much more likely to get a fair hearing if you first give a fair hearing to your other.

That is the ironclad, non-negotiable rule of human psychology. So with that in mind, you know, part of what teaching moral courage entails is teaching how to communicate, not what to think, but how to think and then how to express yourself in a way that doesn't immediately threaten those on the so-called other side. And Roger, it's not difficult. these skills. For example, the first thing you need to do is breathe, take a deep breath in order not to react, rather in order to respond. Why? Why does a deep breath matter? Because when you take that breath, you are slowing down the blood rush in your body. And therefore, you are giving your brain the oxygen that it needs to think clearly, which in turn, means that you can then shift from the primitive part of your brain, the ego brain, as I call it,

which reacts purely emotionally. And you can transition to the more evolved part of the brain, the part in which reason and emotion can coexist. Now, people forget when they are in a highly tense moment. They forget to breathe. And in fact, that's why it's. It's a very, It's got to become a habit. The moment you turn a skill into a habit, it becomes a no-brainer, literally, which means that your ego will not be resisting you doing it. So that's just one in a number of tips and techniques and tactics that I teach through Don't label me.

And now that I'm teaching both students and educators, students as young as seventh graders, all the way to graduate students and educators who recognize that whether it's biology, whether it is social studies, whether it's math, whether it's physical education. No matter the subject, we need to be able to integrate social emotional skills so that we humans can begin to collaborate and come up with truly, inclusive solutions to the, in fact, existential problems that, you know, this planet is facing. Without those skills, I do worry that we're toast. Let's talk a little bit about how you came to these insights there.

Because many people know you and associate you with a, frankly, a very lively at times, elbows up conversation about the future of Islam. a lot of your early life as a journalist and an author arguing forcefully for a kind of reformed Islam. You had many debates. I've read them. I've watched them where I'm not, that Irshad was not taking a big breath. That Irshad was, you know, in the fight, convinced of her righteousness, wanting to win. So what happened? Was this a gradual change that you had?

Was it an epiphany? Tell us a little bit about that story. It was definitely a journey. And at times, there were moments of epiphany, but mostly it was an incremental growth that ultimately made me realize. I was doing my cause no favors by treating every potentially healthy discussion as if it's a debate. So you are right, Rudyard. I made some big mistakes early on as I set out to advocate liberal reform in my faith of Islam.

I wish that I had studied neuroscience and cognitive psychology before I wrote my first best-selling book, The Trouble with Islam Today. And in fact, I will tell you, had I known then what I know now, I would have added a chapter to that book. And it would have been chapter one, which wouldn't have been about Islam at all. It would have been about how we human beings are wired to detect threat at every turn. And I would have pointed out that we are universally, you know, subject to the way our brains operate, which means that I am not picking on Muslims. I am not singling out Islam as the only religion or institution that needs to change. And had I done that, I'm not sure that, you know, I would have reached.

every person I wanted to, but at least I would have contextualized how much the problem is with us human beings and not just with the religions and communities to which we belong. That said, I remember, Rudyard, the turning point for me. And I tell this story and don't label me. I was getting ready for the most important media interview of my life. and I passed out in the makeup chair at NBC because I had been having panic attacks leading up to this point. And this was the third day of an international book tour for my second book, Allah, Liberty and Love. And I passed out because my conscience caught up with me.

I had been hearing the perky breakfast morning show chatter in the TVs surrounding me. in that makeup chair. And my conscience, the voice inside, asked me, is this who you are? Is this what you've devoted your life to? To sound bites and to quips? And as I say, I've been struggling with my health leading up to this point.

And in that moment, my lack of integrity zapped me. And I snapped. and I sunk into my chair and went into a seizure. I had to call off my book tour. And I had a whole summer of hard reflection to engage in. And it was at that point that I realized I had been treating myself as a commodity. And that that had to stop.

And moreover, that part of my recovery, My health recovery had to be to change myself in order to change the energy from toxic to constructive in the conversations that I was having about Islam. And one last piece of this story of IMA. The very first major conversation, public conversation I had after I recovered, was on a show on Al Jazeera. called head to head. Now talk about a debate, but I made an emotional pact with myself, Render. I said, when the host, who plays the role of my opponent, when he makes a good point, acknowledge it as a good point. If you're asked a question to which you don't know the answer, don't make up something on the fly in order to avoid looking weak.

Acknowledge that you don't know the answer. And if you need to take a moment of awkward silence of, God forbid, dead air, to think about something. Take it. It's okay. And in practicing all of these points throughout the debate, A number of people afterwards approached me to say, this is not the earshad I'm used to.

And I must tell you, I agree with most of what you're saying. And I'm not so sure I would have had it in me to agree with you if you hadn't communicated it to me in a way that left me feeling respected. That's the point, Roger, is that we can as individuals, and as human beings change ourselves in order to elicit a more positive outcome in whatever interaction, not transaction, interaction that we're having. And here's the bottom line. You can stand your ground and seek common ground at the same time. This sounds like a contradiction, but it's actually not. Standing your ground is about what you

believe. And if that's core to your integrity, you don't need to change your mind. Stick with what you believe. Stand your ground. But seeking common ground is about how you express what you believe. And if you can express it in a way that clears room for others to be heard, you are much more likely to motivate them. to in turn hear you. Yeah, you're much more effective. Even if you want to look at it in those kind of instrumental terms, and I know you're trying to encourage us to see beyond people as simply means to our ends. But, Ershed, just to go a little bit further on this,

what would you think to some of your opponents in those debates, your conservative opponents in those debates about Islam, who are now saying to themselves, ha, you see, she's left the battlefield. We're done with her. We've beaten her. She's gone. not here fighting us. We've won. What is your reply to that argument? Because I think a lot of

activists listening to you today would say, okay, this intuitively makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm in a desperate fight here for my identity, for my community. And you're asking me to de-escalate in the face of opponents who are only escalating. And you are asking me, in effect, to step off the battlefield, and that just doesn't feel right. That feels like retreat. It feels like surrender. It feels like failure. Yeah.

And the key word there is feels. It is not surrender or defeat. It feels that way because that's your ego brain, shouting at you. It's your ego, wanting to make you. You believe that you must slam dunk the other side in order to, quote, win. But let me now invoke somebody who could never be seen as anything but tough in order to make my point that it's not defeat or surrender.

Bruce Lee, you know, the martial arts icon, who, by the way, also happened to be a philosopher. He would tell his own martial arts students be like water. Meaning, if you're rigid and brittle, you will easily break in the face of opposition. But if you are fluid and agile rather than fragile, you will be unpredictable and you will be able to adapt to whatever the circumstances are in any given moment. And that, if you want to look at it this way, that is how you win. So rather than caving to the manipulations of the ego brain, let's be smarter. Let's be savvier about what it takes to win in the fight for culture change, right? Culture change never happens overnight.

culture by definition means how things are done and that means everything not just certain things so the battle if you will to transform culture is truly a marathon and if you're going to have stamina if you're going to have the passion to continue rather than to flame out or burn out you've got to take care of yourself as well. And that means breathing deeply. Stepping back in order to listen rather than immediately label. Ask questions of your other and sincere questions, not gotcha questions. Listen to understand, not merely to win. And the ultimate point is that by engaging in this water-like fluid activity, you have a far better chance of winning over those who would have resisted you at every turn. And to my point, not long ago, Rudyard, as a professor,

I held an activity, an event called Forbidden Questions about Islam. And afterward, a huge group of young Muslim women, most of whom were in hijab, hung out and stuck around until I finished engaging with everybody else. And I thought, oh, Lord, here we go. They couldn't get enough of asking the forbidden questions about Islam. And it was only when I told them that I have a hungry dog at home to feed. And this is why I'm going to have to, you know, part company with you, ladies, instead of freaking out that I had a dog,

which in many interpretations of Islam is forbidden, it's haram. They couldn't, again, get enough of the fact that here I was breaking these irrational taboos and giving them the permission to do the same. 20 years ago, Rudyard, I could not have anticipated getting this kind of sincere and affectionate interaction from young Muslims. Today, it's commonplace.

And this still being June, let me remind our audience that I also could not have anticipated mainstream Muslim organizations issuing pride greetings to LGBT people, which many now Muslim organizations readily do. This is the point

that even if you don't change the mind of your so-called opponent immediately, that's okay. You've given them something more to think about. And when they find other people who take the viewpoint that you just did, it will be much more difficult for them to demonize those people because they will have the image of your fully, human engagement in their head. Let's try one other argument here that bounces around your book,

and it's certainly bouncing around popular culture and public debate right now, which is the person out there who's thinking to themselves, okay, I get it. On an individual basis, you've given me some tools here, which are actually going to allow me to be more effective in my ability to win hearts and minds to my cause to what I believe in. But what about the society that I find myself in writ large, a society that I've been told or I experienced or I've come to understand

as imbuted with racism, with what is characterized as white supremacy as the dominant culture for centuries now. How am I, even if I extend these empathies and compassion's to other people, why should I expect that it will ever come back to me through this culture of power relations where I exist by virtue of my ethnicity and identity at the bottom, not the apex, but at the bottom of those power relations. What is your message to that person who just has a, frankly, a deeply cynical, and again, I'm not being critically here, maybe there, again, that word, lived experience, view of the dominant culture and its ability to actually hear them, regardless of what they do in kind.

Yeah. You've enunciated a very important word in the public conversation about democracy, social justice, free speech, identity politics, authoritarianism, everything that you've explored in this series. And that word is power. The research suggests, though, and my own lived experience, if that's what we're going to invoke, suggest strongly that power, is not static. It's situational. Meaning that even a person of color, which I am, queer, woman,

despite all of those seeming disadvantages, in certain situations, I will actually have more power than the proverbial white straight guy. For example, in conversations about, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Most people defer to someone like me because they assume that I have more authority, more standing to speak about these things than someone who looks like Hugh does. And that may or may not be true

that, you know, I'm more qualified to speak on these issues. But the point is not whether I'm more qualified. The point is, do I have the power in situations like that, Rudyard, to approve of what you say and how you behave towards me? And the answer is, I do have that power. But because so many young people have been, well, I'm going to use the word indoctrinated to believe that by dint of their skin color or gender identity or, you know, ethnic background, they do not have power, period. They assume that they are indeed powerless. And therefore, they can't possibly use their power, since they don't have any, they can't

possibly use it badly. And yet they wind up using it very badly to, again, oppress others in the name of justice. So, yeah, I don't buy the argument. that power relations are set in stone. Are you, Roger, sometimes more powerful than me? Yes, sometimes you are. And it may even be because of your complexion. But notice again that being more powerful than me doesn't make me powerless.

Right? And this is the zero-sum mentality that we really need to bust out of. We are imbue today in either or thinking. Either you are legitimate or you are not. Either you are an oppressor or you are the oppressed. Either you are all in on Black Lives Matter or you're a racist. The fact is, though, that life is not either or.

life is replete with both and possibilities. And we're actually impoverishing ourselves by buying into the us against them paradigm. It's a fascinating answer. And we're next going to move specifically, Irshed, to some of these rules that you've developed to try to help us break out of the us versus them paradigm. And before I do that, I just want to remember our viewers, reminder viewers that if you've enjoyed these last three months with us focusing on the fate and future of democracy, please consider becoming a monk member. We have 10 years of terrific audio and video on our online archive.

That's yours free to download and explore advanced ticketing privileges at all our events. And yes, we hope to be returning to physical events this fall. And if you're a Canadian resident, a charitable tax receipt, We're giving 20% off our supporting membership right now for a limited time at Monk20. Just use that promo code on our website, monkdebates.com. Irshed, let's move on to these rules because I felt they were helpful to me to sense, okay, how do we put everything that we've talked about into some kind of specific, actionable steps that we can all take individually to hopefully contribute to a broader change in our culture? Rule number one, embrace the fact that you are more than your labels and treat others

as if they are two. And I think what's important about this rule and it's important about a lot of what you write about is the change isn't just outside, the change is inside. And it's questioning in part our own certainty, our own kind of sense of irrevocable truthiness that we like to profess that we we have and that others should adopt. Do I have that right? You sure do have that right. And it can even be more basic. You know, when I say embrace the fact that you are more than your labels and treat others as if that's true about them because it likely is. What I'm really saying is that

we all, not even human beings now, I will even include here non-human animals. We all are so much more than meets the eye. Roger, I could put you in the box, you know, straight white dude, and decide, now I know everything I need to know about you. But the fact of the matter is that there's so much about you, I don't know. I don't know the adversities you've experienced. I don't know your priorities. I don't know the values from which you operate.

I don't know who you would vote for, even if that was any of my business. And rather than assume anything about you, I've got to engage with you if I care enough to know those things. Why? Why should I bother engaging with you? Because I can't know how much potential you and I have for shared action. unless I know where you're coming from. It's sort of like when, you know, the label that most people know me for, Muslim, right, is put on me or I take it for myself.

Just because I have that label doesn't mean you know my position on X, Y, or Z. Some people will assume that because I'm Muslim, I'm a victim in waiting. Others will assume that because I'm Muslim, I'm a stealth jihadist. Still others will assume that I have no use for reason because I believe in a fairy tale. All of these are assumptions that conveniently commodify me in an image that they want so that they don't have to think even once, never mind twice, about who I am rather than what I am. So if you don't like it, when people package you in the biases,

the baggage that they have for the labels that you've been given, be careful not to do the same to others. When you have some commonality with them, you'll know that there is a starting point for then working together on something that matters to the both of you. And that starting point is, that common ground is, you are both plurals, multifaceted, multidimensional. There's a second rule. And that second rule is incorporate diversity of viewpoint into your, definition of diversity itself. You know, when when we think about diversity, most of us reduce it to

demographics, your skin color, my gender, someone else's religion, still someone else's sexual identity. I'm not saying that's irrelevant. It is vital to many people's conception of who they are. But just because, again, I'll use this example, I'm Muslim, doesn't mean that I think the same way as every other Muslim. And in fact, every other Muslim doesn't think the same way as every other Muslim. So if we're really interested in busting stereotypes, we should be careful not to create new stereotypes as we try to explode old ones. If you're sick and tired of people assuming that all black folks are ex, you know, violent, gang members, fatherless, blah, blah, blah, fill in the blank. If you're tired of those stereotypes, that's great,

bust them. But be sure that you're not creating new stereotypes in assuming that all white people believe that all black people conform to the old stereotype. Let's truly get rid of stereotypes and begin recognizing each other for our individuality and not just our group membership. So that's the second rule. Incorporate diversity of viewpoint into diversity itself. Yeah, well, bring that quote. There's a quote I have for you that I think gets at that.

It says before judging your own perspective. to be superior, you find out why your other holds the beliefs that you don't agree with. So it's a kind of, I guess, a call here for us to live with our tensions, not to try to paper them over or pretend that by defining somebody else in another way, you get to define yourself in equally simplistic terms. It all seems rather convenient. Very convenient. And remember, that's the name. of the one-click consumerist culture game that we're in. Convenience, right?

It reminds me to sketch a, you know, an image here of going into a grab-and-go kiosk. And we, you know, take this item and we scour this shelf, and we skip over that item, and we just take what is convenient for us, and we go. that is in some ways how we are treating one another today. I will use you, your skin color, your, you know, other markers of what you are. I will use that to further my agenda. And the moment you're no longer useful to that agenda, I move on. And by the way, I'm not even talking about now, you know, people who disagree with each other,

other's agendas, how they instrumentalize one another. In don't label me, I tell the story of two young black men who knocked on my door when I was teaching at NYU. And they were sent to me by one of my students. These young black men needed some advice, some guidance about how to handle a situation that they were in. They were part of Black Lives Matter. They had the idea of going on a, you know, on a police ride in order to see what police are feeling when, you know, they are faced with a life and death situation. And when they suggested to a Black Lives Matter organizer that they'd like to do this, she slapped them down. She said that you are now consorting with the enemy. And they said to her, well, wait a minute. How can we expect the point.

police to empathize with us as young black men if we're not willing to put ourselves in their place every once in a while. How do we build trust with them? And she had no answer for that except to label the cops, you know, the enemy to which we cannot be reconciled. So these young men had come to me to ask, what do we do with this dilemma? And one of the men said something I'll never forget. He said, it's like she was telling us, I want you for your black bodies to show up at our mass protests. But beyond that, you cannot contribute. I'm rejecting your ideas. I'm rejecting your minds. I'm accepting your bodies. And he said, this is exactly the way the masters of the plantation treated our ancestors.

So yeah, you know, before judging one another and our motives for why we believe what we believe, engage. Let's go to your third rule, which is take disagreement as an invitation to engagement. Now, a lot of people could say on the surface that sounds like common sense, but it's not easy. You know, we often, you know, I mean, some of us seek out disagreement. A lot of us don't, though. We avoid it. We see it as something that it's just not worth it.

I'm not going to change this person's mind the way they think. This is just a waste of my time. what's your reply to that? Like, how do you get people to agree to, in a sense, disagree and to see that as something more than the sum of its parts? Well, you know, the assumption that most people make is that I need to change my other's mind. And that if I don't, it's been a waste of time. I reject that premise. Not only do you not need to change your other's mind,

if you go into a conversation believing that that is your mandate, you're going to set yourself up for disappointment, and you're right in that case. It's a waste. But what if your job is to instead understand, where the other is coming from. And why would you bother? For a couple of reasons.

One is that they are more likely to hear where you're coming from if you go first in the listening department. Again, this is a core insight about human psychology is that when you lower your others' emotional defenses by leading in the listening department, they then will get rid of the noise in their heads that the ego brain is sending to them. Yeah, and give us some of the tactics there. They will feel less defensive and less threat.

You have some interesting ideas of like actual specific tactics. I mean, that you play parts of their argument they're expressing to you back to them. I think those are kind of interesting, useful pieces to, as you say, have this conversation and disagreement that actually becomes meaningful for both parties. That's right. Again, you know, it's a well-researched, a tactic that if you repeat what your other has just said, but in words of your own, and ask them, did I get that right? And if I didn't get it right, could you, again, help me understand what I'm missing? when you do that kind of thing, you're demonstrating that you're trying to listen and that you're doing it sincerely, not to reply, not to vanquish, but to understand where they're coming from.

Another crystal clear, specific tip, when you're asking questions, and remember, they've got to be authentic questions born of curiosity, not of judgment. If you start with why, why do you believe that? It can come off sounding judgmental. But if you start by saying, tell me more. Tell me more about the experience you've just shared or about the feelings that it brings up in you. Tell me more. That phrase, tell me more, indicates that you're still stepping back

and they've still got the floor. It is so much more inviting. And again, as a result, they are much more likely to then reciprocate. One of the other big stories I tell in the book is that of two young people, Genesis and Lewis. Genesis is a hip-hop artist. She's black. Lewis is a working-class white guy. For each of them, history is not abstract.

It is deeply personal. Genesis's grandfather was murdered by the KKK. Lewis takes great pride in belonging to an organization called the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He's the descendant of a soldier who fought on the side of the South in the U.S. Civil War. And their big disagreement is about the Mississippi state flag. At the time, it included a really, you know, obscene symbol of slavery. And Genesis sits down with Lewis to hash this out. And she starts with a question.

She asks him, how does that flag make you feel? And he replies, it makes me feel like I'm at home. Now notice that this wasn't a gotcha question. It didn't start with, well, why do you still like this flag? Or do you realize what that emblem stands for? Or do you even know the history behind it? No. None of this strained his brain.

It was all about his heart. And because she cared enough to ask where he was coming from, he then asked her, how about you? How does it make you feel? And she said, it makes me feel unwelcome, even though like you, I, am at home. And over the course of the next three hours, as the conversation got going in earnest, get this, Lewis didn't change his mind about the flag. He still wanted to keep it as it was.

But he changed his mind about Genesis. He realized that he cared more about her as a human being than he did about the piece of that he called his flag. And because she sought only to understand not to change his mind, over the course of the next year and a half, he wound up changing his mind. He also wound up joining the movement to change the Mississippi State flag, which has now happened. Am I suggesting, Rudyard, that every conversation will go this week?

willingly, not at all. What I am suggesting, though, is that if you walk away prematurely, you may be leaving very meaningful change on the table. So first engage, then decide if it's time to move on. And remember, it's not your job to change the other's mind. Genesis did not. seek to change Lewis's mind. And that is why she wound up changing his mind. Yeah, true allyship is, it's a process. It's a conversation. It's about, you know, people's hearts and what's in those, those hearts. Those are great. And by the way, by the way, you can't do this with everybody. Yeah. I completely appreciate that, which is why one of the other, you know, sort of guidelines here is pick only the issues that you care deeply about.

Not something that you could take or leave, but something to which in your heart and soul you are utterly committed. Then when you come across someone who passionately disagrees with you about it, you know that this is a person. I ought to be engaging as a plural, as a fellow plural, someone who is so much more than my labels for him or her would allow me to believe. That's a great insight. And a great point, Earsh, to transition to your advice to our audience about books that we can read over the summer to kind of extend this conversation and kind of extend our thinking about how we can all be, in a sense, contributors to a more and better public dialogue. So I'm going to put those books up on the screen and maybe you could tell us about each of them.

The first is the iconic animal form by George Orwell. Famous book, many of us maybe have not broken the spine on it since what was that grade 10 English in our school curriculums. But why is that a book that you're returning to at this moment? You know, many have described Animal Farm as a critique, a searing critique of left-wing totalitarianism, because Orwell wrote it, you know, to highlight the human rights abuses of Stalin-era Soviet Union. But actually, I think it's far bigger this book than a critique of any part of the political spectrum. It's a novel about the animals, the non-human animals who take over the farm after

being on the receiving end of so much injustice and abuse from the farmers. And what the book shows is that the oppressed can easily become oppressors in their own right. Because now you have the animals treating one another unfairly. You have, you know, boxer, the horse who fundamentally believes in the righteousness of the animal revolution and works his heart out only to be discarded by the leaders of this revolution. The final kind of rule of animalism is all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. And the point here is before we become too sanctimonious about our own causes, let's remember that any of us who smell power can become corrupted by it.

That it's very easy for us to do to others what we not just critique, but excoriate that they have done to us. So hold up the mirror, folks. And the second book that I advocate is a more academic one. It's called Teaching Critical Thinking. And it's written by an iconic social justice activist and educator by the name of Bell Hooks. You know, for all of my own critique about intersectionality. I would say that Bell Hooks, who indulges in a lot of social justice rhetoric,

nonetheless does something that all educators could stand to be reminded of. She points out that children, young people, are natural thinkers. They are full of curiosity and wonder. But that that curiosity and wonder gets snuffed out at the hands of the education system, which has been structured for conformity, not curiosity. And she, in no uncertain terms, tells her fellow educators, it is so easy for any of us as educators to get attached to our own point of view. But if you are really going to be teaching justice and not merely just us,

we've got to allow for multiple points of view. And I dare say that if diversity, equity, and inclusion were today taught with diversity of viewpoint at its heart, that the so-called other side in these culture wars, the people who heavily criticize wokeism and so forth would be much more abenable to having their children educated about race, gender, socioeconomic class, and so forth, because those children would be treated as individuals and not as avatars or mascots of this or that community. So you see, taking both of these books together gives us a great insight into how free speech and social justice can be reconciled.

And they can be reconciled by treating viewpoint diversity as part and parcel of diversity itself so that no one entity monopolizes power. Yershad, thank you. You know, there's that saying, we saved the best for last, and we've done that in this series. We purposely wanted you to be our sixth and final speaker.

So precisely we could have this. kind of summing up that we could all go away from what have been at times some some kind of gloomy conversations about the future of democracy with a sense of our own kind of agency, our ability in small ways that could lead to much bigger results to be net positive participants in the dialogue of democracy. So thank you so much for coming on the Monk Dialogues, for sharing your wisdom and insights with us. I've just been enriched by this hour that we've been able to spend together. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure and I hope that we'll be able to collaborate again. Let's do it. Well, that was Irshad Manji and that is the last of our spring 2021 monk dialogues.

I hope you've enjoyed this series. I've certainly enjoyed being your host, all your emails, comments and feedback. Let's keep the dialogue going over the summer. We've got podcasts out every week. and hopefully this autumn will be returning to Roy Thompson Hall and physical events for your benefit and for ours. So to thank our partners in this journey, first and foremost, the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. They make so much of what we do possible. Thank you to the late and great Peter Monk. Presenting sponsors, Gluscan Chef and Onyx. Thank you guys. You've been terrific supporters over this pandemic period. and, of course, our supporting sponsors, Bond Brand loyalty and Tories. Our social media partner, Facebook, who's helping us bring these dialogues to online audiences,

thank you, and just fabulous production services by Amber Mac Media. Hey, Chris, a pleasure working with you again. And Creative Harbor, thank you, the team there. So, ladies and gentlemen, that wraps up this season of the month dialogues. We'll be in touch with you in the weeks and months to come on the future. future of this series and the Monk Debates Charity more generally. Again, we appreciate your attention. We appreciate your civility and your substance within which you engage with us and each other. So have a terrific summer. Read these books. We'll all be better for it. Bye bye. We'll catch you soon.