Listening and public life

I recently had the privilege of facilitating a series of workshops on listening for students, faculty, and staff at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. The aim of the workshops was to give participants an opportunity to explore the theory behind, and practice of, listening with intent – with a focus on intentional listening’s importance in public and academic life.

In the workshops, my aim was to weave together theory (definitions of listening and ideas about the role of listening in academia and democracy), practice (short exercises where participants got to practice and experience both listening and being listened to), and storytelling (focused on my own education on listening during different phases of my life).

I talked about working as a radio journalist and producer during South Africa’s transition to democracy, and how I saw that process play out. Not only in the decisions we made and the stories we told in our reporting, but in the events we were covering – the difficult and conflicted process of negotiation and political compromise during those years. That experience helped inform my caution around approaches that promote listening as a means of healing social and political divides. I know listening can fill this important role, but I don’t believe listening is a panacea. The relationship between listening and political and social conflict and division is complicated and layered.

In a democracy, you do not listen only to remove conflict and division. In a sense, a democracy represents a commitment to listening and speaking together in a way that recognizes others’ inherent worth, even in the presence of ongoing conflict and division. As Susan Bickford writes, “Listening is a crucial political activity that enables us to give democratic shape to our being together in the world.”

Listening is essential – but the act of listening is no guarantee of harmony. In fact, we might listen only to find we disagree far more fundamentally than we first thought. And listening is a prerequisite, but not a substitute, for action – for doing the hard work we need to do to address the real issues and inequities that underlie much conflict that exists.

In the workshops, we talked about how speaking tends to be far more valued than listening in both politics and academics. There are plenty of incentives to speak — but few to listen. We get instruction on how to share our views through speaking and writing, but relatively little on how to pay attention — to listen — to the views of others. Speaking is seen as active, listening as passive.

A huge AHA! moment came for me when one participant speculated that if speaking and listening are intimately intertwined, then not only should we value listening as much as we do speaking, but our valuing of listening should change the way we choose to speak. I’m still thinking through the implications of this insight, but it does seem to me that one big reason public speech seems ever more extreme and strident is because of the (well founded?) assumption that it’s harder and harder to get anyone to listen – and that if they are listening, it’s with hostility. How would our speech in the public sphere change if we felt we were speaking to a different kind of listening? I return to Susan Bickford. “Listening…give[s]... shape to our being together in the world.”

A different participant talked about being anxious and tense when anticipating a very difficult conversation with a friend – and then recalled the visceral sense of relief and release when she realized her friend was really listening to what she had to say. This is a great example of how speaking might change in the presence of listening – the disarming and receptivity that happened between those two friends led to a very different kind of conversation than what the participant had initially anticipated.

We reflected on listening as risk-taking. For example, Professor George Yancy talks about  listening’s potential to shake us up and show us aspects of ourselves that might cause pain — such as our own roles in perpetuating inequity and injustice. This may demand fundamental change from us.

In addition to holding risks, listening also has limits. There are ideas and people we may legitimately decide we are not prepared to listen to — that are just out of bounds for a range of reasons. However, these boundaries may change over time and from situation to situation. The workshops ended with a personal exercise, where participants reflected silently on where their own boundaries are, and the extent of their own willingness to extend some of those boundaries — and take the risk of listening.