We're listening all wrong

A Q&A with Brett Davidson about how a society that enables listening enables democracy.

I first met Brett in a political psychology course I took in grad school. He impressed me with his strong values and his commitment to narrative change as a vehicle for progress. At the time, he was working on what would become his Master’s Thesis, entitled Listening as a Political Act. His interest in listening and politics is not merely intellectual; it is rooted in experience. He grew up in South Africa and worked at a radio station during the country’s transition to democracy. Since coming to the United States over a decade ago, Brett has committed himself to narrative change work, and now serves as a consultant and facilitator to various national and international organizations focused on storytelling and radical listening. He writes a fantastic newsletter of his own called On the Wind.

In this conversation, we grapple with what it means for societies to enable listening, and what role listening plays in a democracy. Ultimately, this is a meditation about what it means to be seen by another, or seen within a system. I deeply enjoyed the conversation and hope you do too.

-Lia

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Q&A: Brett Davidson

When I think about your interests, Brett, I think about the word listening. What definition of listening do you use to guide your work?

Listening is often discussed in individual contexts, like improving interpersonal relationships, or within organizations, focusing on how management listens to employees for better leadership or culture.

I think about listening in the context of a democracy or in the context of public life, mainly for two reasons. First, we have a lot of discussion about polarization – a term whose value we could debate – suggesting that if we just could listen to each other, we might heal division in society. Second, after Trump was elected the first time, there was a lot of focus on persuading Trump voters of their “incorrectness” so that they can begin to vote “correctly.”

We debate a lot about how to get the “right” message or narrative that's going to persuade people of the things that we want them to believe. But it occurred to me that if we actually want to talk to people and persuade them, we should probably also be open to listening to them. Isn’t that what a democracy is about? Listening to one another, hearing one another, and yes, maybe trying to persuade one another, but also being open to be persuaded.

This involves listening as an individual, but it’s also about creating the systems and the possibilities for listening in society. Like many things, this too often defaults to the individual. ‘You should listen to other people,’ ‘you should develop your capacity for listening,’ etc. But society enables or discourages listening, systems enable or discourage listening.

So yes, the individual is important. But we have to look at individuals in their social and structural context. Do we enable listening? Or do we actually block it and discourage it? How far should we extend this idea of listening to other people who we disagree with? What are the boundaries of who and what we should listen to, and who and what should be out of bounds? How do we come to agreement about this, as a society?

We haven’t reckoned with many of these questions in the United States. What is the current state of listening within our systems?

Listening happens. In our society, it’s often in the form of surveillance – our phones listen to us. Certainly AI is scraping up all sorts of stuff. Then you have things like town halls, where supposedly politicians go to listen to their constituents. But they're more like theater than actual listening. Truth commissions in South Africa in many other countries since then are premised on the idea is that you have to listen to people's accounts of what happened to them in order to achieve accountability and reconciliation. But there are all sorts of power dynamics involved. Listening can become extractive. It can become exploitative if we're asking people to recount their trauma, and then nothing actually happens in terms of redress and repair. It can become a spectacle.

What do you think of the term “feedback loops”? It seems like what you're describing from listening is an action in which someone brings themselves or their perspective, and it has the potential to create an impact.

We have to think about feedback carefully, because often we expect an immediate response when we put something out into the world. We want to know if our efforts worked or not. But often, this is in the context of trying to change somebody or someone else and not trying to change ourselves, except in being more effective in changing other people.

What would it look like to allow impact in multiple directions?

I worked in radio in South Africa. You sit in a studio, record and broadcast, and then you get feedback in terms of listeners responding through letters or call-ins.

But then I went to work with community radio stations, which in South Africa are legally owned and operated by the community. So the audience is also the producer and the broadcaster. Of course, only certain individuals get involved. But there's at least the idea that it's participatory. So it starts to create a whole different idea of communication, because the communicator is also the audience. We had to think much more about how we listen to our community and involve them. We worked with community groups, asking community members what they wanted the station to talk about, and also had them talking on the station.

I was working as an anchor on a current affairs show just after the transition to democracy. We were trying to open the airwaves to all different kinds of voices. Until then, only a certain kind of accent and a certain kind of voice was allowed on radio. We wanted to change that to allow for all the different accents. Coming to the U.S. after that, I was struck by listening to American radio, where everyone sounded exactly the same. And when I turn on the radio in South Africa there are a zillion different accents and ways of speaking. This represented an important aspect of democracy to us – hearing oneself reflected in the media, and also being exposed to voices unlike your own.

You’re getting at an important point: that seeing ourselves represented in power and being able to shape decision making are important components of democracy. Yet it feels like the way we talk about democracy is distinct from this. Why is that?

The definition of democracy that dominates especially in the U.S. and the West is very procedural. We think if we have rule-based processes like freedom of speech and free elections, then that’s enough. Coming from South Africa I know that, actually, that is not enough. If someone doesn't have a roof over their head, access to education, or food, how are they going to be able to participate? But also what is the point of participation if it does not help you get a roof over your head, education, or food to eat? People around the world are passing on democracy because they have critical, pressing needs that voting in an election every four or five years has not solved. So they begin to think: “What use is democracy to me?” It's not necessarily that people don't like democracy, but that they've looked at it and say, “It's not working for me. I don’t believe that what I say matters.” People have been saying for a long time that they want changes to the system, but the system hasn’t changed.

We also treat democracy like it’s something to be consumed. We’ve been told that we are consumers and have swallowed this idea that, if we’re not producing value or consuming, we’re not successful or valuable. And then voting becomes another kind of consumer activity. We’re presented with candidates and evaluate them like they’re orange juice options in the grocery store, then we tune out for the next four years. And the only thing that political parties communicate is either ‘choose my candidate’, or ‘send me some money so I can win’.

Our identity is reduced to being consumers, but we should really be participants. People who have mutual responsibility for each other, and it doesn’t stop at voting. That’s not the be all and end all of democracy.

How can the political stories that we tell become avenues for greater participation?

Often in advocacy, the intention is to use a story in order to achieve some kind of impact. It’s instrumental. We see it as a unidirectional thing: “If I tell the story, then people are going to see the importance of the problem, and change the policy, or whatever it is.” And this is important for getting policies passed or getting people elected.

But there's a lot of research also showing that some of the most impactful stories are the ones that are much more complex. People might hear a story and draw different conclusions from it, see different things in it. Many people may find it valuable, even if for very different reasons.

These are different from instrumental narratives. These stories make things grayer. They remove the idea of simplicity, making it more complicated. They help people to think in complex and nuanced ways, because life is not easy. There are no simple solutions.

The idea here is not actually to achieve a specific goal, but to achieve this idea of democracy. We should have many voices, many perspectives. We should get away from a single narrative that's going to reign. Of course, this is much less predictable. But isn’t that part of the messiness of democracy?

Part of the problem that we're in is that one narrative is dominating. And certainly we're seeing now in the U.S., if you disagree with the dominant narrative, you're hauled away by men in masks. But the alternative is not necessarily to have to replace it with a different dominant narrative. What we need is a society where many narratives can flourish.

If we give complexity, then we receive complexity. And there's a gift in giving people a complex story and trusting that they can hold it, and that we can hold whatever their interpretation of it is. This strikes me as a critical component of listening: being able to hold someone’s words and our reaction to them simultaneously. What are the enabling conditions for this kind of listening?

The best listening happens in person, where we can be face to face with each other. Where people actually sit in a room, create a space, create a time that listening can take place.

People need to feel that they will be welcomed and included, regardless of what they say or do. When that happens, they’re more likely to listen to other people as well, instead of getting defensive.

Our openness to listening also depends upon our experiences over time. If people are told that others want to listen to them but then nothing happens repeatedly as result of that listening - nothing changes in their lives or in society - they will not believe that after a while. Listening creates a responsibility - having listened, what does that require of me in response - in my doing or being in the world?

Counter-intuitively, listening can be hardest with the people we're closest to. Sometimes, we’re trying to listen, but we are incapable because we come from a different world - which is hard to recognize if it’s someone you are close to. We are trying to listen, we think we are listening, but we actually have no idea what the other person is trying to say. Sometimes we eventually get there. Sometimes we don't.

I don’t know if we can ever escape the fact that we have our limitations. Sometimes you have to move beyond words and language and just have a feeling of connection with someone and be open to other ways of sensing that and experiencing that. For example, my dog can smell things that I could never hope to smell. We all sense differently. There are loads of things that we're not equipped to pick up, that others can.

I've had this crazy experience with my nephews in Austria who do not speak English. I'm making my way with German, but I have serious limitations. Yet in some way beyond my comprehension, my oldest nephew and I are deeply connected. We’ll sit on the couch next to each other, making eye contact, not saying a word. I know that we are understanding each other, but it is not mediated through language. Maybe the listening we need will come through bonds like these.

Well, talking about that: There was one of the weekend workshops I helped organize on listening. One of the facilitators, Carol Gilligan, had this exercise where we had to spend 10 or 20 minutes with someone in silence. It’s an interesting experience, both for how uncomfortable it is and for what you’re able to pick up.

There's a person who was at the workshop, and I was partnering with her for that exercise. I didn't feel particularly moved by it, but she came back the next year, and she said that the exercise had changed her life. It enabled her to make some kind of a psychological breakthrough regarding her mother. It was quite astonishing.

It all comes down to the space we create to be in and be with someone else. And we can’t fathom the kind of impact it can have.

The Prompt: What should the bounds of our listening be?

Brett posed big questions about what it means to live in a participatory democracy that sees diversity and difference as strengths, instead of liabilities. In this world, what should the bounds of listening be? Should some be out of bounds?