Heuristics Hurt Our Ability To Listen. Now What?

Agnes Callard fears that “The more I tell you, the less I will be understood.” The reason—she claims—is that we don’t know how to listen. Instead, we filter information through societally pre-approved heuristics. Even when we think we’re being generous and/or “siding with the victim,” what we’re doing most of the time is siding with our own projections—the notions that keep our sense of the world stable and intelligible to us.

But what, then, is listening, and how do we practice it, given our default is to do anything but?

Callard’s protest is that of the alienated individual for whom existing labels are insufficient. Yet to be a linguistic animal is to be beholden to words whose meanings are imprecise and generalizable. Listening to the singular case requires us to unlearn our attachments to words and to hear them as if for the first time, as if the present moment were our only dictionary.

When moving at a fast pace, or trying to build institutions, such an ideal seems impractical. Yet at the one-on-one level, it seems absolutely necessary.

How do we cultivate deeper listening in our personal encounters even as we admit its impossibility at the institutional level?