By JOE HOMER
Although memories of our first arguments escape me, my father and I have long and heatedly debated politics, economics, religion and life. It happened on long car rides. In the home. And just about anywhere. Thinking back, I see what little capacity I had for patience, intentional listening and the understanding that comes from it. Informed argument and persuasion were not my aims; being right was.
I grew up in a small town with what I saw as small, misguided ideas. Since a young age, I’d always been critical, and I strove to live out these ideas. No wonder I became a vegan with obscure interests in philosophy. On Sunday mornings, I would take long walks to think through the inconsistencies and contradictions of arguments and actions, working myself into a frenzy. I never stopped questioning, and as I did, I became bolder about expressing my own views.
Every conversation I had on terrorism or the environmental impacts of eating meat became an opportunity for me to establish the veracity of my beliefs, the rigor of my reasoning and my moral superiority. My argumentativeness came with me to class, to school clubs, and to friendships. As the conversation temperature inevitably rose, I began to feel the social drawbacks of being outspoken, and the futility of aggressively propounding my own views.
Late in junior college, I noticed that this wasn’t the best – or even a good way – to constructively discuss our shared world. Instead of telling, I began to practice the art of listening and of silence. In disagreements with my father, I focused on paying attention to what he said in order to grasp his individual story, the choices and ideas that composed it, and the background from which he came. Doing so also gave me perspective on my own beliefs, how they were shaped by my personal history and transformed through my experiences and the decisions I’d made.
Recognizing this, I saw my vocabulary change; statements like “you’re wrong” and “but you missed this” disappeared. My conversations welled with question marks and interrogatives and drained of anxious exclamations and argumentative anger.
Looking at the world outside my immediate surroundings through newspapers and people I knew, it became clear that the practice of stubborn argumentation was incompatible with a larger moral imperative. Hegel, in deploying the term ‘dialectic,’ hints at – perhaps unconsciously – the primacy of collective deliberation over the narrowness of individual perspectives. Each of us knows a piece of the world better than the others, and ignoring this voice is akin to suppressing a unique vantage point and voice. My life bears out the same truth. Only through attentive listening did I discover the significance of understanding individual nuances in vocabulary and perspective, crucial to both our individual and collective well-being.
My aim is no longer to convince; now, I strive to inform, giving others the opportunity to reach decisions on their own. Debate, on this view, becomes a shared space where I can learn from others, and where they can learn from me.
This essay was a winner of the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize 2011-12 sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley.
Bearer of Pity 