PROA's managing partner, Lucía Casanueva, brings her own perspective on the concept of listening in this article published in El Diario Montañés.
All of us reading this have friends who talk, and friends who listen. The former are interesting for an uncomfortable meal. The latter are essential for life.
We all know some people who watch, listen, question, dialogue, read, research, think, scrutinise and give their opinion, in that order, and many people who always have their trigger greased to fire value judgements on everything that comes their way. Pandemic? inflation? risk premium? climate change? feminism? NATO? Metaverse? Here we are very prone to make judgemental or not judgemental opinions.
Reality and the people who are the protagonists of social life become, out of habit, a plate in the air that is shot at with the shotgun of a tired verbiage that distances us, because in the process of maturing we have experienced that universal knowledge is impossible and to impost it is a narcissistic childishness that is increasingly prevalent in the universe of networks.
The postmodern world has been erasing the clear line that differentiates doxa from episteme in Plato's thought. Opinion and knowledge now play the same game with the same equipment, even in the University, the logical process is that opinions are the offspring of knowledge about reality and people, and not a sudden intuition, nor an a priori judgement, nor a stab in the back that comes from the stomach, avoiding the chewing of listening, reflection, pondering, dialogue and conclusions.
What is truly platonic and revolutionary is to find people who know how to listen. Who stop, look, listen, ask questions, dialogue, read, research, scrutinise, think, and gather information, experiences and arguments in order to elaborate their own opinion with a solid basis. And what is provocatively Aristotelian is to navigate in this way, against the current, on the boat of social virtue, between the waves of a liquid society that mutates towards gaseocracy at the average speed at which a tweet is composed.
To listen is a verb conjugated by people who want to get it right and avoided by those who feel the incessant obligation to distil their convictions without the slightest sense of prudence. As if speaking were a mere physiological necessity. As if naturalness were a puerile spontaneity.
Listening is a pleasure that satisfies people who doubt and a symptom of vulnerability for those who think that being right is more important than understanding each other. Listening is nourishment for people who seek to learn, improve and grow, and a dispensable wall for the discursive totalitarianism that turns social dialogue into a monologue of individualistic obsessions.
Listening is hearing people, their reasons, their stories and their whys and wherefores before prejudices flood all levels of the conversation like a magma of tar. It is to look carefully so that the words and gestures of the speaker do not escape, because non-verbal communication is also listened to, just as silences are listened to.
Listening is a mood, an attitude, an aptitude, a disposition, a climate, a way of being, of being, of appearing, of proposing, of building and of healing.
Franz Jalics, the recently deceased Hungarian Jesuit, points out in his book 'Listening to be': "True listening is that in which we welcome the other as he is and take seriously what he says". That is why listening is the first step towards empathy.
Many diseases of our time have their focus in the intolerance of listening. Post-truth and disinformation are forged in the barracks of willfully deaf people who have killed the receiver and are content to broadcast on any channel more to infect the content landscape than to converse with the world they inhabit.
In the arsenal of these defensive strategists, everything is words aimed at ideological consumerism, but that does not mean communicating or knowing how to coexist, because listening is an essential path in the search for truth. As Jalics says, "as long as you want to impose your convictions on others - conceited about what you know - no one will listen to you, even if what you have to say is the most valuable thing humanity possesses".
Our times need honest conversations. Honest dialogues without winners and losers. The ear is educated in the naturalness of family and friends. That is where we learn to avoid public conversation becoming a tatami for throat-cutting, even if parliaments seem like trenches full of racists of opposing opinions and even if from their tribunes we speak in the code of speeches written in the office before listening to the one before us.
The public conversation should not be a contest of needles, even if some media outlets spit in a one-way street without listening to their readers or audiences. And even if institutions turn a deaf ear to citizens' demands with hypocrisy disguised as transparency.
Listening to what is said is the prelude to knowing what is thought, as Donoso Cortés pointed out. Listening is to provide the intermediate field between people, groups, generations or worlds of real possibilities of running the healthy risk of being convinced with judgement.
Now that the barefoot footprints on the sand regenerate themselves every time the tide rises and falls, I think aloud: I am increasingly attracted to people who let go of their dogmas, their inflexible ideas, their non-negotiable postulates, because they have listened, grown, matured, changed and beautified themselves with wisdom by understanding others, without this shaking their principles.
To listen can be an intransitive verb - to listen to the radio - or a transitive verb - to heed advice or a warning. But it cannot be an intransitive verb if we are enthusiastic about the proposal to build a world worth living in together.
If you are spoken to about empathy by people who do not listen as a matter of course, delete their message after hearing the signal.