Listening Without Bias
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”
– Annie Dillard
My husband gave me a good piece of feedback the other day. He was telling me about something important to him, and I made some kind of concessionary response, but was obviously not truly invested in what he was saying. I sensed that it bothered him, and later I offered an apology. “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening more,” I said. “It’s not that you don’t listen,” he replied. “It’s that you sometimes don’t listen well. You bring in your own bias. You’re listening to me through your own set of values and priorities. You’re not really hearing what’s important to me.”
It's true. Like Dillard’s “nightmare network of ganglia,” I’m splicing and dicing everything I hear through the lenses of my own preferences, aversions, and opinions. Some of this is unavoidable. But a lot of it is not—it’s not as autonomic as ganglia and synapses—it could be brought into my consciousness if I tried.
Sometimes I think of communication as a huge four-tiered telephone game: 1. what he thinks, 2. what he says about what he thinks, 3. what I hear from him, 4. what I think of what I hear from him. Any problem between any of the four steps, and effective communication is not happening.
My problem is that I tend to park myself in steps 3. and 4. (because those involve myself and are therefore by default the easiest places to be). Sometimes I’m even mostly in 4., only doing 3. long enough to get what I need to jump into 4. But what I really need to focus on is 1. The point of listening is to see the other person for who they are: to learn what they value and feel, to understanding how they perceive the situation. The longer I stay in 1. and 2., the more accurate my 3. and 4. will be, and the better listener I will become.
This takes two things that are difficult to come by: selflessness and time. I have to give the other person more of my full attention. I have to do the work of understanding what biases I tend to bring into the conversation. I have to put aside my own instinctive reactions or judgmental remarks. And it takes time. Good listening is rarely efficient; it may even take the patience of many encounters. Both those things require some level of conscious intention to achieve.
But if I care about a relationship, then I will do it. I will put aside my biases to listen better to something my husband cares about. I will view a bunch of scribbles with as much value as my child ascribes to it. I will listen to the struggle of a friend without automatically imagining how I would handle it.
And the same applies to my relationship with God. I’ve often thought about this line by A.W. Tozer: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” The point is, there is God: and then there is what I think about God. And they may not be the same thing. Am I listening to God without bias? Do I jump to interpretive conclusions when reading the Bible before making the effort to observe the text well? Do I talk more about myself than about God when I pray? Do I primarily see him through the lens of my own desires and preferences?
“Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.”
The longer I’m around, the more I feel like listening well is one of the best gifts someone can give me, or that I can give to someone else. As Fred Rogers said, “More and more I’ve come to understand that listening is one of the most important things we can do for one another. Whether the other be an adult or a child, our engagement in listening to who that person is can often be our greatest gift. Whether that person is speaking or playing or dancing, building or singing or painting, if we care, we can listen.”
If we care, we can listen, and listen well.
