Many years ago, I had a friend who had a disconcerting habit of listening. Disconcerting? you are surely asking. Well, yes: in conversation, he would sit still, look you in the eye, and not say a thing until you’d finished talking.
It was a disconcerting habit, as I say, because even then we’d long become accustomed to people not listening to a word we said, but waiting the first opportunity to jump in and give you the benefit of their own opinion. It’s only got worse since: people not only don’t listen, but they don’t even have an opinion of their own to rebut yours: all they have is seething rage that you dare even say something they don’t already take for granted.
Even though we have access to the totality of human knowledge at our fingertips, we seem to be less informed than ever before. Society is filled with people who will not read about, or listen to, a viewpoint that doesn’t align with theirs. Let alone take the time to carefully examine if their opinions are at all justified.
Instead of listening, understanding, and empathising, we’ve got into the habit of ignoring, shouting down, de-platforming, and cancelling opposing viewpoints. Not only don’t we listen, but we’ve also stopped learning.
Honest questions: how many people go further than a news article headline, a 30 second TV new piece, or a Wikipedia description to form their opinion these days?
Why is it a bad thing to take a sceptical attitude and read and research differing viewpoints?
What happened to being open to changing your opinion in the light of new evidence?
I recently wrote a piece congratulating Martyn Bradbury on his condemnation of the brutal crackdown in Wellington. I said that I probably disagree with Bradbury on everything else — but how do I know? Perhaps I ought to read his blog more. Even if I don’t (as I suspect) agree with much of it, I’ll at least learn something. I’ve certainly learned some things from occasionally reading another leftist blogger, Caitlyn Johnstone. Obviously, I should make more of an effort.
Certainly, I at least skim the Guardian, ABC, The Age and Stuff nearly every day. I’ve also made Ground News a near-daily go-to. Ground News’s mission is to seek out stuff that is being ignored by either the left or the right and present it in a “blind spot” feed.
But instead of listening to the other side with an open mind, the go-to nowadays is to dismiss opinions simply because of their source: how many times have you been told to “Stop listening to Fox News”, or “that’s just what you heard on CNN”?
As for trying to discuss events of the day with family or friends…
Unwisely taking the bait of discussing covid politics with my sister, I mentioned that death counts are unreliable, because of the official rubric of counting anyone who died within 14 (sometimes 28) days of a positive covid result as a “covid death”. “Oh, that can’t be true,” she responded. It certainly is, I said. It’s in black and white on the websites of health authorities from the UK, to the US, to Australia. “I don’t believe that,” she flatly stated.
Ditto, when my mother said that Donald Trump “endorsed the KKK”. That he is not, in his entire life, recorded as saying any such thing she firmly rejected. Trying to convince a friend’s teenage daughter of what is demonstrably true — that police in the US are not wantonly killing unarmed black men as if they were on hunting parties — resulted in the sort of red-faced fury one would expect from a tantrum-throwing toddler.
It dawned on me that these family members, who are at least as intelligent as me, were spectacularly ill-informed about the world. Not only that, but they – like so many others – have been taught to aggressively shut out any alternative point of view. The visceral anger I saw that I wasn’t part of their echo chamber and didn’t follow the mainstream point of view was both frightening and saddening.
This is not at all an isolated conversation, repeat this countless times in the last two years with friends, in business and in public. I’m sure similar conversations are occurring every day, everywhere people seek to question the designated opinion of the day. This is not healthy for our society […]
I fear we have become an incurious close-minded society who have very little real knowledge of current events beyond 30 second TV grabs and over-hyped headlines. We have become too credulous and forgotten to think for ourselves. We have become, dare I say it, stupid.
Spectator Australia
All is not lost, though. Although modern technology is largely responsible for making us into an audience with a short attention span, it also gives us the tools to overcome. Go to Ground News and check out the Blindspot Feed for whichever isn’t your “side”. Explore the vast digital eco-sphere of independent media. Search out different sources for your news and read them.
You don’t have to agree with them. You may never convince them otherwise. But at least you’ll know why they’re so ill-informed and angry.
