Listening as dialogue

William Isaacs is a communications guru that teaches at MIT and Harvard, and helps Fortune 500 companies, governments and international organizations engage people in conversations that advance common ground and reduce the basis for conflicts.

Isaacs lays out his philosophy about communications for individuals, organizations and countries in a book titled ‘Dialogue And The Art Of Thinking Together’. In a time of extreme and dangerous polarization, locally and globally, thinking more carefully about how we converse with each other, about each other and for each other is increasingly vital to the survival of decency and civility.

One of the pillars of Isaacs’ approach to dialogue is listening. He says, “Listening is the act of generously making space without resistance for what someone has to say”. This seems simple enough, but Isaacs correctly identifies what is actually happening when we think we are listening, “Typically, when we listen, we listen to our own axes grinding and to the thoughts in our own head, not to what is being said”.

Is it possible to listen today? Consider the sheer quantum of data that is being bombarded at us, some that we must contend with involuntarily, but much of which has been curated by us ourselves.

If we happen to be a Facebook or a Twitter or an Instagram client, we are consuming words, images and videos from an array of sources that we have chosen to expose ourselves to. Now add to this our WhatsApp accounts, and streaming video through YouTube and an array of other platforms, local and global. Now add further to this the bête noire of the modern consumer of op-eds in newspapers: a daily dose of a wide array of news television talk shows.

Entrepreneurs and businesses that deal in the information trade (which is what we romantically refer to as journalism or the news industry) are generating data at astounding rates: several million terabytes of data are coursing through our timelines. All the time. Is it possible to really listen in such an environment? It seems unlikely. Perhaps even more importantly, what is it that we are pretending to listen to? If Isaacs is right, then we are probably just using the voices around us as fuel to grind our axes. In short, we are choosing data that confirms our biases, and affirms what we already hold to be dear and true. At its very foundation then, the organization of how we choose, consume and process information or data – our listening culture – is designed to perpetuate conflict and close off dialogue. It is not, by design, meant to help us “generously make space without resistance to what someone has to say”.

Modern communications is not what it seems to be. It is not neutral or objective grounds upon which we can fairly contest ideas or engage in a better understanding of the things we don’t understand. Modern communications is a battlefield. The very act of engaging is to declare a readiness for battle. Don’t believe it? Take another look.

Over the last few weeks, several extraordinary feuds erupted in the Pakistani public domain. A scholar tweeted an insinuation about a newspaper columnist. This was followed by the columnist questioning whether this scholar was qualified to teach university students. Pandemonium erupted. Two educated, erudite individuals and an array of their friends and supporters aligned into pre-determined positions. The original subject matter was lost. Respect was lost. Time and energy were lost. It is hard to think of what may have been gained. Except the mini rushes of dopamine that individuals may have inadvertently leaned into, enabled by hardware and software that is designed to train our fingers, eyes, and minds to process data in a manner that seeks out the same mini rushes.

Listen carefully to the sound of a Tweet being posted. Feel the hepatic movement of your smartphone. There is a reason why young women and men want to study computer sciences at places like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Twitter, Google, and Facebook all pay their developers very, very good salaries. But working at these companies are not just software developers, but neuro-scientists, psychologists, biochemists, and actual rocket scientists. The world’s lowest-end hackers hit websites and put up digital graffiti. The world’s highest-end hackers are figuring out how to get the next click out of you.

In an information ecosystem in which listening is nearly impossible, each click perpetuates conflict. A few days after the aforementioned fiasco, a young man, enraged as so many young (and old) men tend to be when someone criticizes the current prime minister of Pakistan, tweeted an expletive-laden attack on a well-known filmmaker and journalist. The journalist reacted by publicly identifying evidence of this verbal abuse along with identifying the young man’s employer. The young man had a demonstrable record of using extremely offensive language on social media. His employer promptly terminated his employment for cause. Perhaps one day, young men like him may be able to fire weapons remotely upon people whose views they don’t agree with. And invariably, one day, there will be some technology that shall enable pre-emptive strikes on such easily traceable anti-social young men. Anything to secure the utility of the next click.

A few days after the firing, Pakistanis saw a simmering feud between a television talk show host and a federal minister explode into the public domain when the minister publicly slapped the ostensibly offending talk show host. The next day, the minister beamed as he explained his actions as the demands of him being a Jatt. High drama for consumers high on conflict. The technologies that brought us here will take us further. Deeper into an abyss of violent disagreement. Darker.

The day after Pakistan lost a limited-overs one day international cricket match to India at the ICC World Cup, some fans began to call for changes to the team, and some went so far as to demand that these changes include the killing of the team members.

One day, mysterious hashtags targeting journalists appear. The next day, a journalist’s home gets ransacked. These events get framed as freedom of press issues. But they are foundationally much germane and innate to how we operate as human beings. They are driven by how we have been programmed to be incapable of listening.

How can we begin to listen better? It is a long and arduous journey for the simple reason that not listening has been hardwired into the human mind and body. Luckily, there is more to existence than only mind or body.

The spiritual path is defined in almost all traditions by the adoption of silence as an enabler of being able to “hear” the music of the universe. Mevlana Rumi founded the practice of “sama” or listening, as an act of zikr. It is hard to listen if we are too busy talking.

In the Ihya ul Uloom, Imam Ghazali dedicates a significant degree of attention to silence as an important instrument for the believer. He quotes a wise sage as having once said that “Silence offers two benefits to man. It protects the man’s deen, and it offers clarity about who his friends are”.

William Isaacs says, “Polarization is seductive. It draws us in. It leads us to get interested. It leads us to becoming the cartoon characters that we are not”.

The modern communication ecosystem dehumanizes us and allows us to caricature ourselves. Resistance to this tendency to become cartoons may well be an act of worship. It is certainly a critical part of creating dialogue and resolving the conflicts that engulf us. The first step in this journey may be our ability to opt for silence, when there is so much to say. This is my first column in six weeks. I pray it is accepted as a contribution to a better public discourse, and a better world.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.