APRIL 15, SATURDAY

LISTENING

An article in the Washington Post on the current celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Accord struck me. When George Mitchell, who brought the warring sides, Catholic and Protestant, together was asked what the key ingredient of the peace accord this was his answer. “There has to be patience, there has to be a willingness to listen,” Mitchell said. “Listening is a sign of respect. It says I value you and I value your views.” His response when asked about nightly cable news is that we are shouting at each other and not listening.

Of course this has implication for our current political polarization. I get fifty emails a day trying to rile me up, invitations to be furious about the political party that makes me most angry and uneasy. They are almost all from Democrats, although I occasionally get a Republican tirade which I think is a result of an early attempt to learn what Donald Trump was saying on Twitter. But I have erased every Twitter report about any subject since then. But the Democrats have my number. When I get a request for money or for some form of opposition to the MAGA world I almost always agree with the viewpoint of the sender just as I almost always agree with the perspectives of MSNBC. But since Kathe‘s death I have stopped watching MSNBC completely, freeing my evenings, and erase every attempt by the Democrats to infuriate me about Republican transgressions. I have stopped listening to shouting and attempts to rile me up. I do read the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which calmly relay events. So I know what is going on but I refuse to be infuriated.

But when George Mitchell talks about listening, I think he is referring to something else. He indicates that while not listening to shouting is probably a good thing, that all I am really doing is not listening.

Listening means not just reading or listening to the news that I already agree with, really listening is patiently and fully hearing the other person‘s perspective. It means empathy for the other person so that I understand exactly why he or she is so upset with my perspective.

The effect of this in Mitchell‘s case was that the opposing factions he was listening to felt that he respected them and he was really hearing what they were saying, even if they knew that he probably disagreed. That must have been enough to calm the discussion and to help make it possible for the people he listened to to listen to the other parties in the discussion.

So it would seem that the first step in resolving the tremendous political polarization in the United States today is simply to calmly listen to each other. Only when we listen to each other can we find a way to compromise and deal with our tensions.

One example of this is the current polarization about abortion. Each side feels they are right and the other is completely wrong. But if we step back it is pretty clear that each side is right from their own perspective. It is easy to see why anti abortion people feel so strongly that protecting life before birth is as important as protecting life after birth. But pro abortion people are right about a completely different issue, the responsibility and right of a woman to make her own decisions about having a first child or a third child, whether through contraception or preventing the life of a child through abortion. If we would listen we might calm down and see that each side is right but in a different way and seek some form of compromise.

But I‘m guessing that there is one more thing that happens when we listen to another person with views the opposite of ours, with views that we feel threaten ours. First, we come to accept that person as being a person who has come to his or her position for deeply felt reasons. If we accept him or her as being just as fully human as we think of ourselves, and not a nut case, we can even begin to respect and even like the person and begin to seek ways we can deal with his or her hurt or pain or anger through acceptance and compromise. Instead of looking for a way to eliminate the person or her tribe, we begin to look for a way to accept the person and his tribe. Only by listening first changing us, rather than him or her, are we going to be able to work things out. And that may be the only way out of our political polarization on an individual basis.

But even as I write this I can think of another reason why listening is important. Listening is how we open up to the world and see from new perspectives. Listening is one of the most important reasons for traveling. We certainly learn about cultural perspectives that are different from our own and that open us up and stimulate us and enliven us. But going one step further we learn about our own culture and how our culture is different from other cultures. Americans learn what it is to be American and not German or Indian or Moroccan. We get to really know our own culture for the first time. For instance Americans learn how much they are conditioned to demand freedom when they learn about other cultures that put solidarity or social equality ahead of individual freedom.

When we really listen, we learn, and expand and are more and more enlivened. Listening can come to feel good in itself and we can find that we feel more alive while listening, particularly to views different from our own, than listening to ourselves as we try to persuade others that we are right.

Listening to music, reading books, opening our selves to new experiences, listening to people tell us what matters to them can all make us feel more alive than closing off the world and defending ourselves against it. Listening, in itself, without a purpose, can be very enlivening and may be the best reason at all to listen to others.