Dialogues on Repeat

A good friend of mine told me about a conversation she had considering the dialogue present on campus, how people are always speaking about an issue, stringing eloquent sentences together and producing infallible logic that is birthed, lives and dies in the span of 15 minutes in the Proctor booths. She pointed out that all of the conversations seem to have the same meta-narrative, that we’re talking to one another but the information is just reproductions of things that have already been said.

I was reminded of “The Vanek Trilogy,” a play recently produced in the Hepburn Zoo about former Czech President Vaclav Havel. The conversations Havel had with the other characters would spiral redundantly around superfluous dialogue until Havel himself breaks the repetition and engages in the simple intrigues of the characters. Even then, nothing is gained but the appeasement of those around him.

Thinking about some of the recent issues that have been prominent on campus, like the judicial hearing or affirmative action, and how the student body has been addressing them in dialogue, I noticed that same trend of repetition and redundancy. Many of our conversations offer similar opinions. Some phrasing is more politically correct, some arguments are better informed but the cliff-notes are comparable, as though we’re merely playing back the information without adding our own interpretation.

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Linus Owens, sent my sociology class an article earlier this week that underlines this same pattern. The author, Thomas Frank, points to recent publications of prominent intellectuals and claims that the meta-narrative of movements like the Tea Party trend the same grievances against the state as a result of what he terms “groupthink.”

I see the community here at Middlebury College experiencing the same groupthink cycle that leaves us at the same tautological odds with ourselves and with each other.

A successful movement, which in a sense is really a collection of people working to enact systemic or ideological change, is made successful by the efforts and the means of individuals working toward those ends.

For this campus, that means critically considering not only what we’re learning about, but how we’re approaching the ideas.

On paper, Middlebury students are an amalgamation of movers, shakers and game changers — a diverse body of individuals. One would expect to find so many varying opinions and critical concepts being shared, but that’s not always the case, and I have to wonder why.

Consider our agency in this college on the hill.  How many resources, monetary and otherwise, did it take to bring us here? The College’s mission statement expresses the need to cultivate the intellectual through independent thought. The expectation is that we take what we learn and lead with that intellect, representing the identity of the College in the global community.

But this mission is an ideal, and it’s easy to idealize our participation here as a reality when we’re not challenging each other beyond the context of what dominant narrative.

However, the intellectual exercise of cultivating independence and leadership that our mission statement acknowledges has become very self-serving. I don’t really think we’re practicing what our mission statement preaches either in this community or in the larger context of the communities from which we’ve come or to which we’re headed if in practice we’re reciting an already established set of ideals.

Identity is in constant metamorphosis, always pushing against invisible barriers and hoping for a better outcome. I invite this community to critically consider how it is defining its identity. Are we satisfying personal needs or are we using the resources with which we’ve been privileged to respond to the ideological or systemic change we’re striving toward as a collective?

Toward the end of the conversation with my friend, I asked her if there was something to gain from these patterns of tautological dialogue; she replied, “They make us aware of something … at the very least they’ve shed light on the things unsaid.”

So I’m asking that we work to consider the value of what isn’t immediately present in our discussions. At the end of the day, our strong affinities of color coordinating blue and white and the eloquent details of the descriptions found in the brochures of the admissions office equate to a stereotypical Midd Kid that can play nicely with the other stereotypical Midd Kids in the collegiate sandbox. We can be more than that by applying our own imaginations to the ideological structure of this institution to create something new rather than reproducing what already exists.

Let’s try not to default to the same undercurrent of accordance that has characterized most of the conversations on this campus, and we might be able to forge a countermelody to these groupthink dialogues on repeat.