Lessons In Listening From A Political Exile
Lessons In Listening From A Political Exile
Editor’s note: this is a guest post by Raphael Chayim Rosen, of Lady Liberty’s Pedestal. If you would like to submit a guest post, please send an idea or a finished draft to jadorenewal17@gmail.com.
About the Author:
Raphael Chayim Rosen is the author of the substack, Lady Liberty’s Pedestal, exploring the political culture, customs, and norms, today and throughout history that make American democracy stable. Trained at Harvard and Cambridge, Rosen has published academic work in history, philosophy, and physics, and is a patent-holding entrepreneur and inventor, named by Bloomberg as a Top 25 Social Entrepreneur in America. His forthcoming book is: “Pedestal: What Makes American Democracy Stable and Why Your Everyday Thoughts, Words & Actions Determine Its Success.”
“There is at this very moment a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere on an unparalleled scale. People living in different nations with different economic and political systems are hardly able to talk to each other without fighting. And within any single nation, different social classes and economic and political groups are caught in a similar pattern of inability to understand each other.”
So writes David Bohm in On Dialogue, American theoretical physicist turned philosopher. But Bohm did not write this last week. Or last year. He wrote it in 1970.
Polarization, or faction, is the greatest danger for American democracy today. It has been the greatest danger to most democracies throughout history. Twenty-four centuries ago, Aristotle identified faction as the pre-eminent cause of failed states. Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, highlighted that people made “the party caprice of the moment their only standard,” prioritizing their faction over everything. And George Washington in 1796 implored Americans to be “indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest.”
In the last thirty years, however, Americans have increasingly sorted ourselves into political factions and we dislike and fear our political rivals more. A 2018 study found that the “starkest dividing line” in contemporary America is not “race, religion, or economic status.” It is party affiliation. This increasing affection for political party has also intensified antipathy for ideological opponents. In 1994, 21% of Republicans had a very unfavorable view of Democrats; by 2022 this had swelled to 62%. In the same time period, the fraction of Democrats with a very unfavorable view of Republicans tripled from 17% to 54%. Millions of Americans, inflamed into rival factions, say they are willing to break the country apart: in 2021, half of west coast Democrats and two-thirds of southern Republicans wanted their regions to secede from the Union. The problem of faction, the fear of each other, is the major risk to American democracy’s stability today***. And one of the greatest factors underlying the problem is American’s inability to listen to each other. As The Economist observed in 2022, “America has no problem with speech. It has a problem with listening.” Listening to each other is key to overcoming faction, healing the West, and making American democracy thrive.
Back in 1970, a similar inability to listen to fellow citizens alarmed David Bohm. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Bohm studied physics at Penn State, Cal Tech and then UC Berkeley, where he obtained his PhD studying under physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Bohm also participated in the Young Communist League and other Communist groups in the 1940s. As a result, he was barred from the Manhattan Project and in 1950 Princeton University fired him. No one would hire him. He was advised to flee America. He did.
Bohm was intimately, personally, familiar with the consequences of a nation that refuses to listen to its fellow citizens. The Cold War featured an ideological gulf between countries and within countries. The Vietnam War perhaps most clearly articulated this gulf for Americans: many believed America’s fighting was a noble effort to thwart an atrocity-committing, Communist-led government. Other Americans saw that war as a struggle for Vietnamese independence from foreign interference, that happened to be led by Communists. With hindsight, it is easy to see the large degrees of truth in both views, and the tragic consequences of Americans’ inability to listen to and appreciate each other’s views.
There were Cuban missile crises sending families scurrying for bomb shelters. There were Berlin Walls dividing families. Soviet invasions and occupations subjugated hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans. Chinese communist policies led to mass starvations. Latin American and African nations struggled between leftists and rightists with superpowers intervening. In other words, current events constantly roiled intense factions and emotions within America.
In response, working in Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom, David Bohm developed a methodology to master the art of the listening. His approach to communication began by acknowledging a scientific truth: we experience intense emotions when confronted with ideas anathema to our own. When “somebody doesn’t listen to your basic assumptions, you feel it as an act of violence and then you are inclined to be violent yourself,” noted Bohm in On Dialogue. We react with violence to an idea, he suggests, because our beliefs “are assumptions with which we are identified… it is as if we are defending ourselves.” We deem an attack on our ideas to be an attack on ourselves. We perceive others’ opinions as actual physical “violence” against us, because our brain’s fight or flight response is triggered in response to perceived danger, not objective reality.
For example, when we see a movie in which a tiger approaches, our mind reacts as if there were actually a tiger approaching us through the jungle. Similarly, when we encounter ideas we disagree with, our brains perceive these ideas as an actual physical threat against us, leading to automatic opposition and anger.
Our “thoughts are a system of reflexes,” Bohm pronounced. “A reflex means that when a certain thing happens, something else happens automatically.” Most of us don’t conceive of our thoughts as instant, automatic “reflexes.” But biology teaches they often are. So when our mind perceives a threat, whether a tiger or an idea, it responds with automatic anger. In order to listen effectively, therefore, a person needs to master suppressing their automatic reflex of rejecting new ideas. Even if an idea is detestable, we must train ourselves not to reject it. Nor, however, do we accept the idea. This is Bohm’s key insight: instead, we take a third approach.
We train our minds to hold the new idea in front of us: “we are not trying to change anything but just being aware of it.” If new ideas make you feel anger, Bohm says, “What is called for is not suppressing the awareness of anger… but rather, suspending [the ideas] in the middle at sort of an unstable point–-as on a knife-edge—so that you can look at the whole.” It is as if the idea is floating in front of you, for you to look at, to consider. You don’t try to assimilate it into your own thoughts. You keep it far enough away from you that you don’t have to feel it as if it were a tiger coming to maul you. It is “suspended in front of you so you can look at it.” By this method, you gift yourself the ability to overcome the automatic reflexes of fear and anger that make listening so arduous.
Bohm concludes that by suspending displeasing ideas in front of us, “I can see things that I wouldn’t have seen if I had simply carried out that anger, or I had suppressed it and said, ‘I’m not angry’ or ‘I shouldn’t be angry.’” Holding displeasing ideas in front of us allows for rational, dispassionate consideration, transforming the idea into an object for examination. Not a threat. Simply an object. If an insult comes to your mind about the idea, you “suspend that, too.” You consider the idea, genuinely.
So, as a community of practice, in the week ahead, here's our action item: when we hear one opinion we dislike, at least one time we should try to suspend that idea in front of us . We shouldn't reject it. Nor should we accept it. We should just hold it in front of us, like it’s hanging there. Then consider the idea genuinely. Through this exercise, we open our mind and we also help inoculate American democracy from the peril of faction.
***President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking to a nation fearful after two bitter years of economic heartbreak famously remarked in his inaugural address about fear itself: “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” However, if fear does not abate, and instead intensifies, the danger of American rupture through factional conflict waxes stronger.
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