Every so often I will hear someone say something that substantially changes my perspective. The other day, our improv instructor explained that the chief requirement in improv is to listen. People, he would say, always try to appear interesting - but you cannot make yourself interesting. However, you can make yourself interested. And if you are interested then you are interesting. To be interested, though, you must listen.
Later, he said this: listening is a willingness to be changed.
I think herein lies something crucial. We are fond of our identities. We are not willing to allow just any odd person to change us in just any odd way. An article in the Harvard Business Review lists among reasons people resist change: fear of losing control, a resentment of the person suggesting the change, a simple bias in favour of habit. Unsurprisingly, we learn more from people we like. We are generally defensive about our beliefs when offering a new perspective often carries the implication that the old one (the one we are currently holding) is in some way deficient. Perhaps we may also fear a domino effect: that changing our minds in one regard will force us to change our minds in another. Then, before we know it, we might become someone else.
However, conversations can and often do change us. If we listen properly, we may learn, perhaps in quite a striking way, something about another person's perspective. We may experience what it would be like to 'climb into [their] skin and walk around in it' (as Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird). We may, in consequence, become more sympathetic to their values and less suspicious of their beliefs. Their motives may come to seem less alien, less, selfish, less perplexing. In short, by listening, we may become - if only in a small way - a little more like them.
That is terrifying. Why would anyone want to become - even in a small way - more like someone unpleasant, weird or beneath contempt? Humans everywhere, liberals as well as conservatives, have a certain instinct for purity. This may have evolved as the urgent reflex to recoil from contaminants, but a similar drive may be observed in our moral behaviour. If listening to someone detestable can make you more sympathetic to them, perhaps this is because you have already allowed their values and their worldview to "infect" you. A later endorsement would merely come as the natural symptom of such a contamination. The process need not always be negative: when we like someone, we may just the same hope that, by talking to them and spending time with them, we too can become a little better. In a way, this is one of the principle fantasies of love: that by getting close to this person, we may be lifted and refined into a better version of ourselves.
Listening really is a willingness to be changed.
This year has been a highly polarising time in politics. Many people lament the breakdown of communication, the isolating effects of social echo chambers. We all, it would seem, wish everyone listened more to everyone else. However, listening is a willingness to be changed. Perhaps then, the problem has more to do with an exaggerated attachment to our own identities, to our values as they currently stand. Listening is easier to preach than to practice:
In the end, however, societies are only possible among people who have agreed to have certain things in common. That is: to be, in some fundamental ways, a little bit like each other.
