How does the conversation begin?

When you think about good conversations that you have had (or heard about) – those that accomplished a goal, convinced you (or someone else) to change a position, or just really made you re-examine your own perspective – what do you remember precipitated such conversations? Did you just feel an urge to state your position to the world regardless of who was listening? Did someone issue a challenge that touched on something about which you feel strongly? Were you offended by something that you overheard or saw? Did someone's actions so move you that you simply had to speak up, whether for or against? Perhaps you felt that your rights or civil liberties were at stake. I think one thing the world needs is more conversation-starters of all kinds, but this assumes that there are parties willing to participate in an actual conversation instead of simply exchanging volleys of words against which at least one side has inoculated itself. If you think you may have been in a deep conversation at some point, yet you have never questioned the rightness of your own position, you have not in fact participated in a deep conversation. If you are listening to someone else state their position while not honestly entertaining the possibility that the other person may in fact be right, you are actually not conversing – you are doing something else entirely, and you may as well be a politician in a scripted and televised-debate. If you have never seriously considered the arguments against your own position, you are not prepared (nor are you really entitled) to defend your own. If you are so full of opinions that there is no space for rumination, then you may as well be a wooden-headed ventriloquist dummy or an ideological lap-dog.

I know that there are other conversations to be had that are just as important and that don't start off as (or that were never intended to be) adversarial – these would be conversations with intimate partners, close friends, or one's children or parents. The conversations I'm concerned with here, however, are those that touch on things of interest to society as a whole – pick your hot-button issue du jour: abortion rights, same-sex marriage equality, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, etc. Opinions are indeed like a-holes here – everybody's got one. Does that really mean that all opinions are equal, though? Can we somehow boil this stew of opinions and find one capable of withstanding the heat?

And, if there are indeed issues that ultimately reduce to matters of taste, isn't it critical that we find some means of agreeing exactly which issues fall in this category? Now that seems like a decent starting place for a conversation on just about anything.