Thursday, August 25, 2005

Authenticity and Inclusion--Dialogue Part 4

Authenticity refers to speaking in ways that reflect how your truly are. In computer terminology, when a program shows on screen what you can expect to get on the page, it is called WYSWIG (What you see is what you get). Anymore, nearly everything is WYSWIG so it's not that big a deal. But I remember the days of the blue background WordPerfect. Authenticity is the WYSWIG of human communication. Authenticity is communicative component of integrity.

Inclusion is a willingness to be in dialogue with those who disagree with us or who are not like us. Authenticity and inclusion are hard to correlate. We may genuinely dislike people, genuinely not want to be in dialogue with them. Authenticity would require us to be up front about that. Inclusion would require us to change that in ourselves. Tolerance is the mid-point between the two. Which is why I think tolerance as a value is really a mid-point and not an end goal. We need tolerance in a pluralistic culture yet hopefully we will reach that point where we are authentically inclusive of people's diversity.

To be perfectly honest, I think there are limits to inclusion. I think there ought to be limits in a variety of settings. We ought to limit our inclusions of person who volunteer with children and youth. We must make every effort to ensure their safety and their moral development. We ought to be careful who we include in the group of people who speak for us. Yet, when it comes to dialogue should we, as adults, refuse to hear people out. Put another way is there any danger to listening to people no matter what their message is?

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