2.4 (October 2002): 398-402
© 2002 National Communication Association

Confronted with Difference and Diversity, How Should We Act?

W. Barnett Pearce

Ronald C. Arnett and Pat Arneson. Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships. SUNY Series in Communication Studies. Ed. Dudley D. Cahn. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. 331 pages. $63.50 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).

The loss of that which makes coherence and social order possible comprises the major theme of postmodernist rhetoric. With varying degrees of optimism and despair, postmodernists advise that we must find ways of living lives without recourse to traditional rationality, morality, or a Master Narrative. And with the advent of globalization in the 1990s, the situation just got worse. Citing the effects of the three “democratizations” (technology, finance, and information, or “how we communicate, how we invest, and how we learn about the world”) Thomas L. Friedman described the emergence of a market-economy that is demonstrably better than any other system at increasing the economic standard of living of those who participate in it.[1] However, one of the consequences of joining what Friedman calls “the Electronic Herd” is the subordination of all values to that of the marketplace.

How do we live in peace and with dignity and honor in such a world? Confronted with difference and diversity, how should we act?

These are the questions that Arnett and Arneson address. By focusing on “process” rather than the “content” of metanarrative agreements, they “frame” these questions in a unique manner that aligns them with a particular tradition of communication scholarship. Their answer is a passionate call for “dialogic civility” as a background narrative for communication in the public arena and the replacement of public intimacy with public civility as the dominant form of communication.

Arnett and Arneson begin their story not with what has been lost in this postmodern world but with what has replaced it: a background narrative of “routine cynicism” and the practice of “therapeutic discourse” in the public arena. They propose “dialogic civility” as a new background narrative as a way of accomplishing what they describe as “the communication project of the twenty-first century—revisiting the public domain as the communicative arena where diversity and difference can meet” (xvii).

The concept of a background narrative is essential to understanding the argument. In my terms, the distinction is between “content” and “process.” A “Master Narrative,” as Lyotard would describe it while claiming that the postmodern era must do without one, consists of a particular story to which all people in a culture refer, whether they affirm or deny it and whether they embrace or distance themselves from it. For example, not everyone was a Christian during the era in which a substantial portion of Europe called itself “Christendom,” but even those who were not clearly understood that Christianity constituted the “Master Narrative.” In contrast, a background narrative does not depend on the content of any story but instead structures the patterns of interactions among people. The concept draws on Arnett’s previously developed idea of a “humble narrative,” which “does not dictate the way to approach a situation, but offers a background set of assumptions agreed upon by enough people to permit it to influence everyday perception and actions” (52).[2] It is in the “background” because it guides the way people communicate rather than constitute the substance of what they communicate about.

Arnett and Arneson argue that a background narrative of “routine cynicism” has developed in “a postmodern culture that lacks metanarrative agreement” (303). “Our era of fragmented and defrocked narratives in which many people feel existentially displaced and unable to agree on what constitutes guiding public virtues turns the soil and makes ready for planting routine cynicism” (19). A person acting in accordance with this narrative is predisposed to be cynical, not as an appropriate analysis of a situation, but as an automatic response; as a result, the person “rejects, disbelieves, or is unable to distinguish the important, the vital, and in some cases the sacred from the profane and the trivial” (13).

A public discourse that substitutes intimacy (“therapeutic discourse”) for respect (“civil discourse”) is the result. Arnett and Arneson state as a “basic assumption” the claim that “interpersonal communication from a privatized, therapeutic, feeling perspective has exhausted itself.” Citing Philip Reiff’s claim that the “therapeutic” worldview “triumphed” over the religious metanarrative, they argue that that the “overextension of private therapeutic discourse into the public realm” has produced “emotive exhaustion and self-centered conviction” that is dysfunctional as the basis for public discourse (281-2).[3]

That’s the problem. The solution is a new background narrative of dialogic civility.

“Our goal for public interpersonal communication is not intimacy, but civility. We seek a narrative of dialogic civility that offers a commitment to keeping the conversation going in an age of diversity, change, and difference.” Arnett and Arneson call for the construction of something that does not now exist, “an agreed-upon communicative convention about respect for the other and our relational responsibility in an interpersonal relationship” (284).

Its emphasis on situated communicative action sets Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age apart from other prescriptions of ways to deal with realities of life in a postmodern age. Citing their indebtedness to Hans Gadamer as well as “early communication process scholarship” (David Berlo; Dean Barnlund), Arnett and Arneson ground themselves in a view that “communication is a process guided by persons, text, and the historical moment.” They remind themselves and their reader “not to reify communication in the abstract” (31). This grounding legitimates the shift from “narrative” as content to “background narrative” as rules for interaction, and leads to an analysis of types of communication practices rather than causes or results. In making this move, the authors align themselves with one of the newer traditions in communication scholarship represented in works by Shawn Spano, Robyn Penman, Stuart J. Sigman, and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz.[4]

I found the book difficult to read until I understood that it is written in a spiraling style. Looking at the table of contents, and because the text has a “problem-solution” narrative structure, I expected to find a discussion of the problem in Part 1, a survey of other writers in Part 2, and a proposed solution in Part 3. Instead, the whole argument is presented quickly and often, in a spiraling model in which the same ideas are encountered again and again, with increasing layers of meaning and in altered contexts. Six numbered statements comprising “Our story about dialogic civility” appear on the concluding (303-4) pages of the book. However, the design of the work does not build suspense until this point. Instead, the theme is articulated early and embellished by successive visitation throughout Parts 1 and 3.

The chapter-length essays on Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Martin Buber, Carol Gilligan, Paulo Freire, Sissela Bok, Victor Frankl, Nel Noddings, and Robert Bellah that comprise Part 2 are worth the price of the book. These are seminal figures and a thoughtful reconsideration of their contributions is a wonderful contribution to the literature.

The inclusion of specific examples, most from the authors’ own lives, is one of the strengths of this book. And yet Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships shares with others in this genre a certain asymmetry between problem and solution. After reading the book, I have a much more vivid notion about what routine cynicism looks like (and how to “do” it) than I have about dialogic civility. I understand better the factors that lead people to adopt cynicism than those that would lead toward a commitment to civility. Granted that, from the authors’ perspective, civility in public life is preferable to intimacy, and dialogic civility as a background narrative is preferable to routine cynicism, through what process might the preferred replace the existing? To the extent that we collectively address what Arnett and Arneson call the “communication project of the twenty-first century” (xvii), we need not only to conceptualize dialogic civility but also to find ways of realizing it.