Meetings of Opposites

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The Aim of Meetings of Opposites…

is to create the actual experience of common ground among people with irreconcileable opinions or inflamed feelings. A curriculum of shared inquiry, readings, and experiences that occurs over several sessions of two to three hours each, it is not about persuading or changing opinions, achieving compromise, or even forging consensus. It is about creating the precondition for those goods to be possible.

The common ground of Meeting is not in the middle; it is a different space altogether. In the same physical place, either we can indulge the automatic and self-perpetuating Us-Against-Them; or we can provide for and sustain a different way of being together. The common ground – We-For-Each-Other – is a matter of living together, not of agreement in opinions. The term "Meeting" is taken from the seminal work of the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber.[[1]]. It refers to a kind of dialogue with very particular features and one characteristic "movement": the turning-to-another-person with the intent of establishing a living mutual relation.

Even in Charlottesville, supposedly the happiest place on earth, we never achieved a real dialogue on the Western Bypass, for example. Now, after the Unite the Right rally, the issue of the Confederate statues among us has carried the added voltage of violence, dividing us further from ourselves. Meetings of Opposites is designed to renew the substance of our polity, our stake in each other.

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References

Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith (Routledge, 2002)