A guest at a recent gathering responded to a presentation about Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project with this: “You know, talk is cheap. What about taking it to the next level, getting things done?”

His question was dead-on: Talk is cheap.

But not talking is remarkably expensive, and any meaningful action requires that we communicate well with one another.

Still, his question sticks with me, and I hope it always does.

What is useful about the particular kind of talking we in the world of arts and culture want people to do? What is not just nice but necessary? What is good about sharing experiences of dance, literature, paintings, or film?

Here’s some of what’s necessary and good: when we look at something together and talk about what it means, we are open to the object, to one another, and to ourselves. We are for a brief period acknowledging that our actions in the world are complex and that the implications of these actions are even more complex. We are also acknowledging that we ourselves are awake to many different possibilities, and that we are more hopeful about some directions than others. And we are acknowledging that it is important to be heard, which is a short step from admitting that it is important to listen.

To put it more plainly, effective action in the world requires reflection on goals and how to reach them. And effective reflection depends on our capacity to see our own assumptions and convictions in fresh ways. How do we do this best? We go out of ourselves, out of our fixed beliefs. We put ourselves in other places and consider what being in those places might mean. We look at and talk together about the meaning of things and ideas before us.

Later at this recent gathering, I talked with two other guests, one who works in corrections and one who works in medicine. Each separately described failed efforts by their institutions to achieve certain objectives. And each attributed these failed efforts to entrenched attitudes, too little listening, and deficient imagination. The decision-makers in their institutions were not, as I heard it, being sufficiently human with one another.

How is it that we can be more human together? Here’s a quick and easy way: we can talk with one another. It may be counter-cultural and it may, as the first gentleman said, be cheap, but I hope we can see the difference between talk’s cost and its value.

– Adam Davis, Executive Director, Oregon Humanities

Photo: Idea Lab Youth Summer Symposium, by Kim Nguyen