What if nobody is listening?
Listening, God help me, is harder for me than is talking. At age seven, I could blatherskite with the best and if anyone ever talked themselves to death that person would have been little me. My Mom could not have listened to all I had to say about stuff if she tried. Mom did the best she could. After a bit, it occurred to me that all the boiling ideas in my mind that seemed so important to me might not have been so important in fact.
My Dad, master of the spoken word, said something to me as he got older: “I have less to say.” I understand that better now as I have less to say. See enough, read enough, experience enough pain, and there is a limit to what you are willing to say.
Talking was easy as a child. Finding a listener was hard, as it should have been since (as a child!) I only had childish things to say. A good listener married me, thank God, but the biggest change over the last few years has been Hope saying more that she always had been thinking and my saying less: much less. She has taught me to listen and (hopefully) I have encouraged her to use her “outside the head voice.”
Hope was an example of person who talked a great deal, but only in her mind. She had strong opinions, but too often kept them to herself. I was not listening, but she was not talking. There can be no listening without talking.
So far so easy to see, if hard to do. We should talk less and listen more. We could put that on an inspirational poster and hang it in a classroom. There is a deeper problem, but we wiggle away from the fact that we do not have to listen if we placate, pacify, pander to anyone we think may disagree with us. We say polite nothings to those we suspect could expose our half-truths, our equivocations, or our fictional history. Often, as I grew older, I would talk to Mom and Dad and discover that my self-serving memories of my life were entirely wrong. I had constructed a convenient fiction and when we hashed out the truth, when I listened to them, risked a real conversation, I grew.
This can be very hard. I had learned to listen, but now I had to learn to talk to the right people, in sincerity, at the proper time. This was much harder: the Socratic dialectic is a hard teacher. There is no compromise: one must seek out the best interlocutors and examine everything. Talking is as hard as listening in that context!
A falsehood of our time is this: “We can examine our ideas without talking them out, listening, understanding.” Talking is often a necessary prelude to listening. Listening is necessary if we wish to talk. We cannot love our enemies, or even our friends, if we will not sincerely talk to them and then, having given our best lines, our most persuasive arguments, listening to what they have to say. This is an era where nobody is listening, because nobody is talking to anybody who might shatter their fragile views.
A conversation is necessary for education, so says Socrates and Jesus, but a conversation needs listening. Listening, however, requires sincere talking. Plato’s greatest work, Republic, almost died when Socrates, the man who loved discussion, became afraid, weary, and unwilling to talk. He was done. Nobody was listening and if nobody is listening to wisdom then nobody can be persuaded. The dialogue is saved when two bold young men say some things, some foolish things, some wise things, some wicked things, but ideas sincerely held. Socrates could work with that, listen to that.
So we should all be: listen, talk, listen. Live to discuss sincerely with all our being.
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