“Everyone has their own ways of expression. I believe we all have a lot to say, but finding ways to say it is more than half the battle.” – Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
Foreword: When Listening Becomes a Threat
Recently, I found myself in a familiar modern arena: a comment thread discussing Bertrand Russell and his famous rejection of Christianity. What began, ostensibly, as a conversation about evidence, reason, and belief quickly revealed something more revealing than any formal argument.
No one was really listening.
The discussion followed a predictable arc. Russell was invoked as the final authority on rationality. Faith was reduced to superstition. Testimony was dismissed as unreliable. Moral claims were labelled subjective. Consciousness was treated as a problem best ignored until it could be quantified. And when these assumptions were challenged, the responses did not engage the substance of the critique; they retreated into rhetorical dismissal. “Yawn.” “Fancy dress.” “Fluff.”
What struck me was not disagreement, disagreement is healthy, but the absence of dialogue. Positions were defended, not examined. Claims were asserted, not tested. The goal was not understanding, but control: to define the terms of rationality so narrowly that only one conclusion could survive.
Russell himself famously insisted that one should believe only what can be logically or empirically verified. But watching his arguments deployed in real time revealed a deeper irony. The very people appealing to his rationalism were relying on unexamined assumptions about reason, morality, consciousness, and trust. Assumptions that could not themselves be empirically verified. Dialogue had quietly been replaced by debate, and debate by dismissal.
This is not a problem unique to atheism, Christianity, or any particular ideology. It is a symptom of something far more pervasive: the death of conversation. In its place, we have performances of certainty, battles over legitimacy, and a growing inability to remain present to one another without needing to win.
This blog is not an argument against Russell, nor a defence of faith by counter-argument alone. It is an examination of what happens when conversation collapses, when listening becomes a threat, when understanding is mistaken for concession, and when truth is treated as a possession rather than an encounter.
The thinkers we will engage will be Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Buber, David Bohm, and Charles Taylor. They do not offer techniques for better debating. They offer something more demanding: a vision of dialogue as a moral and relational event, one that requires humility, presence, and the willingness to be addressed rather than merely affirmed.
The question, then, is not simply who is right, but whether we still know how to speak, and listen, in a way that allows truth to emerge at all.
Introduction: When Speech Loses Its Relational Ground
Modern discourse prides itself on clarity, precision, and rational rigor. Claims are isolated, tested, affirmed, or rejected. In theory, this should bring us closer to truth.
In practice, it often does the opposite.
Conversation increasingly functions as a competitive exercise rather than a shared pursuit of understanding. Statements are treated as self-contained objects. Disagreement is interpreted as hostility. Listening becomes strategic rather than receptive. The goal subtly shifts from understanding to defending.
This shift marks a profound change in how truth itself is conceived. Truth is no longer something that emerges between persons through encounter, but something possessed by persons and wielded against others.
Philosophical hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, and depth psychology all suggest that this model is fundamentally flawed. Understanding is not produced by detachment alone. It requires participation, vulnerability, and relation.
To see why dialogue has died, we must first understand what dialogue actually is.
Why Debate Feels Productive but Fails Understanding
Debate assumes that truth is best accessed by isolating claims from persons and testing them against fixed criteria. The stronger argument wins; the weaker yields. This model works well in mathematics, formal logic, and some areas of science.
It fails when applied to human meaning.
Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that all understanding is historically situated. We never approach a question from nowhere; we always stand within a horizon shaped by language, culture, tradition, and experience.¹ To imagine that one can step entirely outside this horizon and evaluate claims “objectively” is an illusion.
Debate depends on this illusion. It treats statements as free-floating propositions rather than as responses to lived questions. But meaning does not reside in sentences alone. It arises within contexts of concern.
As Gadamer later clarifies, understanding follows the logic of question and answer. To grasp the meaning of a claim, one must first understand the question to which it is responding.² Debate rarely attempts this. It attacks answers without inhabiting questions.
The result is not clarification, but escalation.
When the Other Becomes an Object
Martin Buber names the deeper moral cost of this shift. In I and Thou, he distinguishes between two fundamental modes of relation: I–It and I–Thou.³
In I–It relations, the other is experienced as an object; something to be analysed, used, classified, or overcome. In I–Thou relations, the other is encountered as a presence, irreducible, responsive, and whole.
Debate almost inevitably moves toward I–It. The person across from us becomes a position, a problem, or an obstacle. Even when we are polite, we are no longer meeting the other. We are managing them.
Buber insists that truth worthy of the name arises only in I–Thou encounter. Once the other is reduced to an It, something essential is lost. The conversation may continue, but it no longer has a present tense. It becomes past-oriented, procedural, and dead.
This is why debates often feel exhausting even when “won.” No one has actually been met.
The Psychological Mechanics of Defensiveness
David Bohm helps explain why this collapse happens so easily. He observes that opinions are rarely held neutrally. They are formed through past experience, cultural inheritance, and emotional investment, and then quietly fused with identity.⁴
When an opinion is challenged, the self feels attacked.
Thought, Bohm argues, is a process that produces effects while denying its own agency. It fragments reality into categories for convenience, then forgets that it performed the division in the first place.⁵ Nations, ideologies, and belief systems are treated as self-evident realities rather than products of thought.
Dialogue threatens this forgetfulness. It exposes the contingency of our assumptions. Debate protects against it.
Thus debate feels safer. It allows us to defend conclusions without examining the processes that produced them. Dialogue, by contrast, requires us to notice our own thinking while we think, a far more demanding task.
The Cultural Pressure Beneath the Collapse
Charles Taylor situates this dynamic within the broader conditions of the modern secular age. We live within what he calls an immanent frame, a cultural space in which meaning is expected to arise from within human systems alone.⁶
Transcendence is not denied outright, but it is rendered optional, private, or suspect. As a result, modern culture is deeply cross-pressured: haunted by a sense that there is “something more,” yet resistant to any account of reality that exceeds human control.⁷
This pressure intensifies debate culture. If meaning must be secured without reference to anything beyond human construction, then beliefs become high-stakes possessions. To lose an argument is not merely to be mistaken; it is to risk existential instability.
Dialogue, which requires openness to being addressed and changed, becomes dangerous.
What Conversation Requires to Live Again
If debate is not enough, what restores conversation?
Gadamer, Buber, and Bohm converge on a single insight: dialogue is not a technique, but a posture. It requires acknowledging that understanding is something we enter, not something we control.
Dialogue assumes:
That the other may see something I cannot That my horizon is partial That meaning exceeds my formulations
This does not mean abandoning reason. It means relocating reason within relationship.
True conversation does not eliminate disagreement. It changes how disagreement is held. The goal is no longer victory, but illumination. Not persuasion, but presence.
As Buber famously put it: “All real living is meeting.”
Word, Flesh, and Listening
At this point, the philosophical diagnosis is clear: conversation dies when truth is treated as an object to be possessed rather than a reality that addresses us. Dialogue collapses when the other is reduced to a problem, and when meaning is forced to remain within the limits of human control.
Christian theology does not merely echo this concern; it radicalises it.
At the centre of Christianity is not a proposition, but an event: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). This claim carries profound implications for how truth relates to persons. Truth, in the Christian vision, is not primarily something spoken about reality, but something that enters reality, dwells among us, and calls for response.
This sharply contrasts with modern debate culture. Debate assumes that truth is secured by correct formulation. Christianity insists that truth is disclosed through encounter. One does not master the Word; one is addressed by it. As Jesus himself says, “I am the truth” (John 14:6), not “I possess it,” nor “I argue for it,” but I am.
Here the parallels with philosophical hermeneutics become striking. Gadamer insists that understanding occurs only when one allows oneself to be questioned by what one seeks to understand. Buber insists that reality itself is disclosed only in I–Thou relation. Bohm insists that thought must become attentive to itself if fragmentation is to heal.
Christian theology goes further still: it claims that God does not merely invite dialogue but initiates it.
In Scripture, God does not reveal himself by overwhelming force or incontestable proof, but by calling. The biblical narrative opens not with a declaration but a question: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Jesus continues this pattern throughout the Gospels: “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15); “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6). Divine revelation takes the form of a question that summons the whole person, not merely the intellect.
This is why faith, in the Christian sense, is not belief without reason, but trust formed through encounter. “Faith comes from hearing” (Romans 10:17), not from coercion, nor from intellectual domination, but from receptive listening. One does not arrive at God by winning an argument; one is drawn into truth by being addressed.
The contrast with debate culture could not be sharper. Debate seeks closure. Revelation opens a horizon. Debate ends conversation. Revelation begins relationship. As the risen Christ shows on the road to Emmaus, truth unfolds not through correction but through companionship, listening, and the gradual opening of understanding (Luke 24:13–35).
Even disagreement looks different here. In debate, disagreement threatens identity. In Christian theology, disagreement becomes part of discipleship, a site where pride is exposed, listening is refined, and love is tested. The New Testament consistently places truth within relational virtues: “Speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), “Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).
The goal is not uniformity of opinion, but communion in truth.
Seen in this light, the death of conversation is not merely a social or psychological problem. It is a theological one. When truth is reduced to what can be controlled, defended, or possessed, the posture required for revelation disappears. Listening becomes impossible because surrender feels dangerous.
Christian faith names this danger clearly: “You refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:40). The refusal to listen is not neutrality, it is resistance.
Conclusion: From Control to Conversion
The crisis of conversation is not ultimately about manners, platforms, or polarization. It is about posture.
Debate culture trains us to guard ourselves. Dialogue requires that we risk being changed. Hermeneutics teaches that understanding is never complete. Philosophy reminds us that the other exceeds our categories. Theology insists that truth itself comes to us as gift, not conquest.
What dies in debate is not merely civility, but the possibility of conversion, conversion not only of belief, but of orientation. To converse is to admit that I do not stand outside the truth, but within it, and that I may need to move.
This is why modern culture, for all its talk of openness, often feels closed. It permits speech, but not encounter. It allows arguments, but not address. It multiplies opinions while starving the conditions under which meaning can appear.
Christianity does not solve this by rejecting reason. It redeems reason by placing it within love, humility, and listening. Truth is not less rational because it is personal; it is more demanding.
The recovery of conversation, then, is not a technique to be learned, but a discipline to be practiced. It requires resisting the illusion of control, relinquishing the need to win, and relearning how to listen. First to one another, and ultimately to the Word that still speaks.
In an age obsessed with having the last word, the most radical act may be this:
To remain present.
To remain receptive.
To let ourselves be addressed.
Because where dialogue lives, truth has room to appear.
And where truth appears, something in us may yet be healed.
Footnotes
1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 300.
2. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 363.
3. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 8–12.
4. David Bohm, On Dialogue (London: Routledge, 1996), 9–10.
5. Bohm, On Dialogue, 10–11.
6. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 725.
7. Taylor, A Secular Age, 726–727.
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