Listening and Hearing

In today’s polarized milieu doublethink is refined to “sayisms,” talking points, soundbites, bullet points, and bumper stickers, announcing a stance but not necessarily seeking a response beyond approval (like) or disparagement (unfriend). Conversations become stilted, guarded, or polemical. Often they simply cease. News media seek followers rather than listeners, and content in the educational sphere is increasingly displaced by the modeling of attitudes to be mimicked. Free speech is often transmogrified into silencing -- and violence that can be fatal. The rhetoric of ever expanding rights-claims, hallmarks of a progressive faith? displaces efforts toward the kind of mutual accommodation needed in any healthy community. This article is a plea for less grandstanding and more listening, even to the voices of religious traditions, which have long served, and continue to serve, as a kind of communal conscience, being repositories of the highest values and deepest concerns of the majority of mankind.