Post #50: Noble Listening

16 July 2023

Some things seem as if they should be a lot easier than they are. What is so hard about sitting with your eyes closed and watching your inner landscape, for example? Or about keeping your ears open and your mind alert while someone else is talking? Yet anyone who has tried to do both properly for more than a few minutes knows how surprisingly difficult they are in fact. Both can also be easy and engaging too, even irresistibly fascinating sometimes, as we all know; but we also know that such ease cannot be taken for granted and that for the most part these seemingly undemanding tasks require plenty of discipline.

The importance of listening, even for the purposes of coming across as a good conversationalist, can hardly be overstated. It’s one of the key principles in Dale Carnegie (not to be scoffed at: see Post #43) that to be interesting to others one needs to be interested in others above all else. Often enough one’s judicious silences will be taken for more eloquent and astute expressions of wit than anything one might say. Carnegie remembers being praised beyond measure on occasions where he had managed to get in no more than a few words sidewise, and one of the glories of the early pioneers of psychology was their unrivaled capabilities as listeners (with some pages taken from the ancient confessor’s art).

I have occasionally been accused—not very often but all the more painfully when it did happen—of being unduly fond of my own voice. It is, on one level, patently untrue: I do not in fact enjoy hearing myself talk, not in the moment and even less on tape, and my censors might be shocked if they knew how stupid and inarticulate I can sound to myself. Talking too much may be partly a personal foible (mostly owed to excessive enthusiasm or excessive diffidence with respect to awkward silences), but mostly it is a professional hazard among teachers who must keep the train moving, and more or less on track, which usually requires inordinate amounts of energy and a certain impatience with intercessions that would confuse the already tangled threads even more. (Teachers bring along their own propensity to ramble, no doubt, but this would hardly be helped by adding more of the same on the students’ side. Nor are the latter overly fond, in my experience, of hearing each other veer off-topic.)

All that said, I like still like to think of myself as a fairly lenient listener in the classroom (as plenty of students have reassured me), though I grant that one should never be too sure of it as a performer before captive audiences (as a few of them have reminded me, be it from unusual personal courage or else mere ornery frowardness and narcissism). One could always be better at this vital skill, let’s leave it at that.

Communication between the sexes has its own peculiar pitfalls. John Gray made a small fortune off the idea that Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. I have little desire to step into the minefields surrounding such questions these days; it’s enough for me to point out that Mr Gray will have no trouble finding witnesses by the millions for his contention that male and female communication patterns are often at cross-purposes. He listens for problems to which he can find possible solutions, while she wishes above all to be heard out at great length, often with no interest at all in being offered ways out of problems that she enjoys discussing. Neither style is, by itself, better than the other; but they are certainly quite different and can lead to deep frustration on both sides. (As female norms have been gaining ground, especially in an educational field increasingly dominated by women, it may seem obvious that men need to learn to be better listeners. No doubt they do—so long as it is then also admitted, on the other side of the equation, that women may have something to learn from male concision and single-mindedness.)

Serious as all these issues are, they pale to besides the challenge laid down by the Buddha in his exhortations to noble listening (Majjhima Nikaya 21.11):

When others address you, their speech may be timely or untimely; their speech may be true or untrue; their speech may be gentle or harsh; their speech may be connected with good or with harm; their speech may be spoken with a mind of loving-kindness or with inner hate. You should train yourself thus: “My mind will remain unaffected, and I shall utter no evil words; I shall have compassion for the speakers. I shall abide pervading the all-encompassing world with a mind imbued with loving-kindness, abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill will.”

     As anyone who has read #16 may recall, certain unpleasant encounters with vicious reviewers still linger in my mind even years later. That is not as it should be, needless to say, and it marks a failure on my part as much as on theirs; but it is also a fact that I must reckon with if I want to keep my precarious hold on sanity, and I don’t think I am alone in that weakness among writers. As one of them once quipped, I forget who, “I am not thin-skinned; I have no skin at all.”

     Untruth alone, or what sounds like it to me, is already more than enough to do for me. I pointed out, in #28, Alfred Adler’s dictum that being right is often the worst thing in the world (see also #44), because of how it makes for digging in one’s heels and alienating others with one’s intransigence. This one too I owe to Dale Carnegie:

Here lies the body of William Jay

Who died maintaining his right of way

He was right, dead right, as he sped along

But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.

     Very well, I can accept that much, though not without a struggle. But shouldn’t the truth count for something in the world? What could be harder (for me as much as anyone) than to listen without squirming to what one considers patently untrue or even nonsensical? When one is strongly committed to a contrary view, how easy it is for others to sound like idiots, with only half a step left to go before their “ignorance” begins to sound pernicious or even immoral on account of its obvious mistakenness! The Millian free-speech ethos demands much of the listener in this way (see once again #28); the Dhamma even more, because truth is only the beginning…

     So let us enrich the witches’ brew with the toads of poor timing and undue harshness—aggravated tactlessness, that is to say—and let us round it all off by throwing in the spider’s legs of ill will and bad intentions! Lord have mercy. I already had to bow out a few punches earlier, I’m afraid, as just not being up to this kind of punishment. But that’s not to say that I don’t see the formidable force behind what the Buddha was saying (and Jesus too, with his call to turning the other cheek, see #28). Defending oneself can easily aggravate a situation and spur an assailant on, while it is a marvel to behold how effectively one can sometimes clear the atmosphere by saying nothing and letting someone blow off steam without reacting to it.

     I will always remember the center manager at the incommodious meditation center in #10 with whom I managed the rare feat of keeping my big mouth shut as I was getting chewed out with all the grace of a culture steeped in sixty years of military dictatorship. It marked, despite the inauspicious circumstances, one of the greatest (and most unexpected) triumphs of my meditating life (not that there have been so many). On other occasions, when I was the graceless party myself, I have many times experienced from the loser’s perspective the great power, moral and practical, of those who could hear me out without flinching, all the while remaining steadfastly polite, considerate, and pleasant. It is not possible, I think, to stay angry for long when one is up against such an unconquerable force, and if I can give myself any small credit in these unfortunate episodes, it is that I could at least see clearly what was going on and how much my opposites proved themselves my superiors by their composure. I even remember telling them so. Sometimes seeing one’s failings is the best one can do.

     I recall with chagrin how difficult it used to be for me to listen to criticisms of my academic articles (mentioned in my previous post), which sounded so unwarranted and perverse to me on one occasion that for over a decade I was unable to produce anything further for academic publication—a turn that very nearly destroyed me professionally before I was at last able to snap out of it again. There can be a remarkable amount of ideological rancor and personal animus in these academic debates (ill-will, in other words); tact is not to be counted on (although there are honorable exceptions); and whether the whole business tends in any way towards truth or goodness (to say nothing of beauty) is very much to be doubted. All this from declared devotees of reason endowed with very unusual levels of intelligence and learning—it takes a strong stomach.

     I was still wrong to react as I did, and harming myself most of all. In an ancient Indian tale that also made its way into the Pali Canon (Udana 6:4), a king has his birth-blind subjects gathered together and asks them to describe an elephant, which they all do based on the various parts of the creature’s anatomy that come within the reach of their hands. The point of the tale is not that we could hope to be exceptions, but that we are all blind in this way. Even if one were the lone clear-sighted person in the room, it would be wrong to get offended since others are not willfully blind, even if it may often feel to us as if they were. Thus Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius make much of the reminder that olive trees must be expected to bear olives, and that anyone who turns to them for apples or mangoes is not just foolish but unjust.

     Whatever fruits one may wish for, the laborers in the academic orchard are doing the best job they can, given how they see things; no matter how painful the results may be in any particular instance, they deserve some general credit for their services to the profession, and this all the more since they do not get compensated for their troubles in any other currency than respect. To cut my long story short, I am happy to report that although I still seem to attract severe and even censorious reviews aplenty, I have learned to live with them—not exactly taking them in my stride, but now being able to reply to editors with a genuine smile after a brief time-out for licking my wounds. It really does make life so much easier for everyone, and the results can be truly astonishing for a late arriver at conclusions that may look obvious to others.