Learning to listen for real (from someone who's learned the hard way)

Gerard Alexander, associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, has an excellent, if one-sided, criticism of everything that is wrong with politics in America and the world, in today's Washington Post.

Why are liberals so condescending?

"Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a 'Bolshevik plot' -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. 'We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,' the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not 'express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.' During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.'

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere."

Be on the lookout for Harvard Professor Paul Peterson's forthcoming column, "Why do conservatives act like such morally self-righteous jackasses?"

It's a strange tendency in the human race. Fueled by insecurity, and the everpresent joys of self-righteous indignation, I think.

Christ says love thy neighbor. So Christians interpret that for centuries as, "Kill thy neighbor you suspect doesn't love thy neighbor."

Jews bring us the wisdom thou shalt not kill. And then modify it in the early 20th century to mean, "unless you're Arab and we don't want you around."

And Muslims. Don't even get me started.

It is a strange tendency. This tendency to confuse self-righteousness with being right. Passion with reason. And the damned foolish and without exception literally impossible notion that any person or any group can have all the answers in the world and thus know without having to listen and thoughtfully consider alternatives. And willfully ignore how the strong-arming undermines the more honest discussion.

Why has it caused so much death and destruction and insanity in the world?

Fear. And power. And the ways that we make excuses for our unending use of the latter to unfailingly fail to conquer the former.

Outside of disease, we are our worst predator and source of insecurity. And, thankfully, today, our wisest fellowtravelers have developed ideas and clarified our thinking to assure that our worst problem is that we just don't get along very well.

But it's all the same ball of wax, in the end.

It humanity's most foolish fault, by far. And it is isolated to no group or individual.

And the tendency to turn to power to resolve it and all of our problems once and for all, and to pretend that this tendency is our strength rather than our deadliest weakness, is the long and failed history of humanity. Until more genuinely liberal pathes were paved. Liberal meaning liberty. Especially our liberty of conscience.

And our choice to use that conscience to either listen, genuinely, honestly, to one another. And to humble ourselves in a world where what we know is far surpassed, without exception, by what we do not.

Or to keeping pretending that this more aggressive, less reasoned and reasoning path has taken us forward rather than backward.

It should be obvious to anyone who is still not defending this strange journey that we have taken in the last 10 years that it is a path to nowhere. And that it is hardly the path of our highest values at play. And that it is anything, really, other than one long manipulation in the name of the arrogant notion that anyone, anywhere can use power unerringly to resolve our woes.

If there is any one insight that would more genuinely move humanity forward, I think, it is recognizing this folly. From there, many other problems find resolution. And many more people live and thrive. And many more people learn to seek out answers with less false assurances that they or anyone has more right answers than they really do. And thus more real answers can be found.

We talk plenty. We need to listen more. A lot more. For real. Not faking it. And stop pretending that our aggression, and not our minds and hearts, are the source of our progress. It's in that listening where everything else gets tackled more honestly.

Everything else is the story of my life. Plenty of failure. Plenty more stupidity.

On a personal note. Thanks, Brandi. You were right. And I was wrong. About a lot of things. Namely about how unerringly full of it I am. About everything. Especially about what really matters in this life.