Walk-n-Talk Discussions

Walk & Talk at Burning Man

How do you get a large number of people to share their opinions in meaningful discussions? An open discussion seems to be something of an ideal among atheists, perhaps because we lean toward analysis and individualism. The first problem with open discussions of any size is that they are too easily dominated by extraverts. If someone gets angry over a sensitive topic, they also take more than their share of the spotlight. Usually, a few people do most of the talking. I’ve organized and participated in a lot of discussions over the years, and I want better results than that. Particularly if you’re concerned with empowering women’s voices, the issue is salient because on average it’s men who do most of the overtalking. Part of the problem is with extraverts, especially the loudmouths who feel compelled to talk and often talk over others. Don’t judge them too harshly. Everyone’s different, and some people are different by being more of a loudmouth. There’s another reason, however, that we don’t hear from some people. Speaking up in front of a big group is scary for a lot of people. And honestly it’s a big responsibility, taking the spotlight and asking a large group of people to listen to you instead of saying what they have to say. Plenty of people don’t even want to take their share of the air time. They have things to say, often some really insightful things, but they’re comfortable speaking in smaller groups, not big ones. How do you even things out, so that loudmouths can’t shut people out, and so shy people can contribute to a discussion without being forced to take the stage? My proposal is to run the discussion as a “walk-n-talk.” It’s an event that I’ve run several times at Burning Man, game conventions and Unitarian Sunday school. Instead of sitting, the participants stand in an open space and they all share their opinions on a question by walking to one side of the room or the other. A moderator leads a more or less regular discussion, except that each participant also gets to “voice” their opinion without taking the spotlight and in a way that can’t be talked over.

Here’s an example of the walk-n-talk format working. One year we had a quiet 7th grader in Sunday school. She paid attention in our discussions but she never spoke up. Near the end of the school year, we did a walk-n-talk, and for one question she walked way to left, as far as she could get. I asked her why she felt so strongly, and she explained her perspective to the class. It was easier for her to finally say something because she the walk-n-talk format allowed her to first voice an opinion without commanding others’ attention or even talking. We can encourage shy kids to speak up in class, but context counts more than words. 

Here’s my boilerplate description of the event for game conventions.

Walk & Talk
Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If you like pirates better than ninjas, move left. If you like ninjas better than pirates, move right.” Everybody gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. After each question, we talk briefly, and people on either side can explain their choices.  Then we move on to new questions. The questions cover whatever topics would be appropriate to the event. Participants can also pose questions to the group. Originally a Burning Man event.
   
Requires an open space where a dozen people or more can walk back and forth. Good for a high-traffic area because people can drop in at any time. Works best at 50 - 90 minutes.

Instructions for Moderators
If you have a feel for moderating the process, no instructions are really necessary, but here is the process spelled out. If you’re not moderating, these instructions still work as “the rules.”

1. You, the moderator, stand on the centerline of the room or area, dividing it into left and right. You stand at the edge of the play area. The participants gather into a mob in front of you, in the center of the play area.

2. Explain that this is a safe place for a conversation where people can disagree without criticizing someone else’s feelings or questioning their experiences.

3. The moderator poses a two-answer question to the group, such as, “Which do you like more, dogs or cats? If you like dogs more, move over that way.” Point right. “And if you like cats more, move that way.” Point left. “If you like them equally, stand on the center line.” Indicate the halfway line across the area, the imaginary line directly in front of you.
    

4. Participants move to one side or the other, often groaning at the difficulty of the decision.
    

5. You elicit a conversation on the topic. Call on people on each side. Encourage them to try to explain their viewpoints and possibly convince people in the middle. People can change position as they see fit.
    

6. Keep the conversations short. When they get too long, tell everyone to get back in the middle for the next question. You can often do new questions inspired by the discussion.
    

7. For some questions, you will want people moving not just left and right but up and back. For the cat and dog question, for example, you can add a new dimension to differentiate city people from country people. Once people are divided into right and left for dogs and cats, have them move forward (toward you) if they’re city people and back if they’re country people. Are there correlations? Do urban dog-lovers love different sorts of dogs from rural dog-lovers?
    

8. Start with safe topics, like movies or food. Gradually you can get to more personal issues, such as personal life.
 

9. My events are usually 50 to 90 minutes.
 

10. In a public venue with an open invitation, it’s nice to position the players so that you are facing the entrance, and it’s behind the players. That way new players can unobtrusively join in the back. They can also slip away if they like.

Advice for a Burning Man Walk-n-Talk 

For anyone who want to know more, here is a link to a document that I wrote to coach a friend the first time he was running the event.

Guidelines

Verbatim Notes from Gamefest

Here are the notes I prepared for the last walk-n-talk I did at Gamefest in Denver. The topic was gamer identity, an easy catch-all topic. As you will see, the notes are highly sketchy, really just reminders for me to refer to quickly when I need a new topic.

Verbatim Notes

Availability
If you want me to run a walk-n-talk at your event, email me: jt at jonathantweet dot com.

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

The Baggage Check dome in 2009. My friend and I
slept in the rental truck on the far right.

Penn Gillette is an outspoken atheist, but in his book God, No he speaks highly of the time that the guests at his party all sang “Kumbaya” together. God might not exist, but “Kumbaya” is real. My atheist “Kumbaya” moment happened at Burning Man this year. At Camp Baggage Check, we performed a welcome ceremony that I had invented for us. It was a little dorky, but it went over well.

Here’s how I introduced the ceremony to the camp, as we were gathered in a circle in our central dome. “Camp Baggage Check is a place that we set apart. Here we come together intentionally, and we behave differently toward each other from how we would in the everyday world. One way that we designate this space as a special is by sharing a welcome ceremony together. For this ceremony, we use three things that humans have used in community-building ceremonies for a hundred thousand years: shared vocalization, shared music, and shared gesture.”

During the ceremony, each camp mate in turn says, “Hi, my name is BLANK,” and then the other forty people in the circle chant in unison, “Welcome home, BLANK!” The chant has a simple melody, just enough to count as music. We included arm gestures, first throwing the arms wide open and then pantomiming a hug. For laughs, I call that the “astral hug." This simple ritual is a far cry from singing and dancing all night around a fire like our ancestors did, but it has vocals, music, and motion. Some researchers say that we evolved particular mental adaptations that help us use these shared activities for group bonding, and I think they’re right.

This year was the first time we did the ceremony with the melody and the astral hug, and I was worried that my campmates would find it too dorky. Frankly, it sounds pretty dorky. But it went over well. People respond warmly to everyone else in the camp chanting a welcome for them. Now we're talking about adding a brief ceremony to do each evening before our shared dinner. It will be an original Burning Man version of saying grace before a meal.

Link

Singing Changes Your Brain, by Stacy Horn, 2013

The Burning Man Temple

The Burning Man Temple is different each year.
This is 2011's Temple.

New Atheist Sam Harris says that if we all magically forgot our religious traditions, we would find no use for our churches, mosques, and other places of worship. In his mind, we would go about our lives without whatever it is that happens in churches and never miss it. It's easy to find fault with organized religion, but I suspect that there is something of value going on in a church or other sacred space. The story of the Temple at Burning Man is an interesting case in point, in which a sacred space insinuated itself into a raucous festival.

In 2000, artist David Best lost a close friend just two weeks before he was scheduled to erect a wooden “Temple of the Mind” at Burning Man. Instead of cancelling their plans in grief, Best and his friends turned their temple into a memorial to their friend. In true burner fashion, they encouraged other people to use the temple to memorialize their own dearly departed, and since then the Temple has been a fixture at Burning Man, rivaling the Man itself in its power. Best is a professional artist with work in museums, but his “Temple” built of waste wood touched people in a way that none of his previous works ever had. To this day, burners gather at the Temple to write messages of loss on the surfaces of the wooden Temple. The Temple and the memorials left in it go up in smoke one day after the Man itself burns. The Temple is a beautiful place where a full-on atheist like me can leave a memorial alongside someone who expects to be reunited with their lost loved ones on the astral plane. It seems as though a spiritual place like the Temple is serving such an important role that it appeared spontaneously in the middle of a wild festival and immediately became part of the culture.

Most people are surprised to hear about Burning Man’s spiritual side, but there are many sides to Burning Man.

Here’s a story about a memorial by law enforcement officers at 2013’s Temple (click).

And here is an online paper that describes the Burning Man Temple (click).

A previous post about my own experience with grief (click).

2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html

2011

Monkey Chant at Burning Man

Burning Man is a yearly festival of radical self-expression, interactive art, and intentional community. That’s fertile ground for an atheist Sunday school teacher. Last year at Burning Man, for instance, I attended my first monkey chant. When I say that religion is largely about community, my experience with the monkey chant is not far from my mind. As science writer Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, rituals of shared song and dance are society’s traditional community builders, all the way back to our hunter-gathered days, and all the way up to the boot camp drills and chants in the modern military. We seem to have evolved to form heartfelt communities through shared song and dance.

The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.

The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.

Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.

So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.