Dialogue, Contamination, and Educated Restraint

Is dialogue "openness to the other"? Or intelligent border management?

I was struck by a word used in a review of my last book: contamination. My book argues that education is most fundamentally about expanding dialogue, and the reviewer responded with a reference to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, where contamination is often presented positively as the way encounters with the strange and unfamiliar change us. In Tsing’s account, contamination is not corruption but creativity. New forms of life emerge through entanglement. Her emblem is the matsutake mushroom, which grows in devastated landscapes through complex collaborations between fungi, bacteria, trees, soil, and people—and which is also delicious. Contamination, here, is how life goes on.

But it was the negative resonance of the word contamination that made me pause. At a recent education conference in Hawaiʻi, I heard a story that challenged my earlier emphases. I learned about local history from an Indigenous Hawaiian keynote speaker. When James Cook first arrived in 1778, he encountered a people who, by many accounts, appeared extraordinarily curious, playful, open, and generous. There was hospitality and exchange, laughter and intimacy.

Within decades, the consequences were catastrophic. At first, the catastrophe came not through violence but through disease. Contamination arrived through touch, breath, intimacy, and trust. A succession of epidemics tore through the islands, with devastating effects on population and social life. And within a century, biological collapse was followed by political takeover. In 1893, there was a coup against Queen Liliʻuokalani backed by U.S. Marines. What followed was not only the loss of sovereignty, but the remaking of culture with compulsory schooling conducted in English, and periods in which the Hawaiian language and cultural practices were marginalized or punished. It seems that in this case a stance of “openness to the other” did not work out so well.

This story has forced me to rethink my enthusiasm for openness as the defining characteristic of dialogue. I had been shaped by an educational concern with closed minds to think of learning as expanding horizons and unsettling certainties. That concern remains valid. But I now see more clearly that dialogue has two distinct failure modes: excessive closure (rigidity, defensiveness, refusal to engage with difference) and excessive openness (collapse of boundaries, loss of form, destructive contamination).

The story of Hawaiʻi raises another troubling issue: the impact of differences in power. The ideal of constructive dialogue tends to presuppose reciprocity, which requires at least enough symmetry that each party can risk being changed without being erased. History is full of encounters that lacked such symmetry with differences not only of power but of immunity, weapons, wealth, legal authority, and the ability to define what counts as “reasonable” or “civilized.” In situations of imbalanced power, “openness” can easily become exposure to exploitation and abuse.

Yet contamination is not only negative. Even deeply unequal encounters can give rise to new hybrid cultural forms such as those visible today in the flourishing of contemporary Hawaiian–American art, music, dance, and environmental sensibilities, and in their wider influence on American culture. This does not negate the injustice, but it shows why the question is not whether to risk contamination, but how to manage it. The challenge is maintaining enough symmetry that encounter can be creative rather than catastrophic such that parties can risk transformation without facing erasure.

None of this means that dialogue cannot work in educational contexts. Classrooms and online learning environments can be made safe enough for learners to take risks and be transformed. But it does suggest that we need to be careful about what we mean by dialogue, and about the conditions it requires.

This issue matters urgently today. When social media first arrived, I was enthusiastic about its potential to support dialogue across distance. Unfortunately, not everything has gone well. Many of those now calling for bans on social media in schools aren’t against the technology itself. They are saying: this technology is not working properly yet; take it away and fix it; and only then will we welcome it back into our lives.

With the advent of AI, there is a new temptation. An alien intelligence has essentially arrived on our shores. It seems friendly, so we want to welcome it wholesale into our cultures, classrooms, and childhoods. But perhaps the experience of Hawaii should make us pause and ask: would that be wise?

Dialogue, properly understood, is not the opposite of closure. It is the careful management of boundaries. It is the tension between maintaining identity and risking transformation. It is about structure, timing, and judgment. You have to be open enough to learn, but not so open that you dissolve the conditions that make learning possible in the first place.

Dialogic intelligence is not radical openness. It is educated restraint

This post was prompted by a review of my last book
The book is now out in paperback if you want to read more.