There’s no need to shout - The Critic, March 15, 2020

There’s no need to shout

Patrick West reviews You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy


Our era is the shoutiest humanity has ever known. Thanks to the digital revolution, especially the emergence of social media, everyone can have an opinion. Indeed, many feel compelled to voice an opinion, to be a critic on most aspects of life. Many also succumb to the lure of the censorious mob, seeking to drown out dissent or unwoke heresy. Negativity and antagonism are the prevailing moods. Yet is anyone listening to what we are saying? More to the point, are such complaints, comments and grumblings making us more miserable? Perhaps it’s time we spent less time talking and more time listening. For there is the path to enlightenment and happiness.

This is the advice from Kate Murphy in You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why It Matters. Incessant online vociferating not only makes us unhappy — when we realise that no one really cares what we are saying — but it also makes us more stupid. The more we voice our opinions, the more we become convinced of them. It is the route towards complacency and stupor. People who listen, on the other hand, open themselves to the brave new worlds of doubt and mental exploration. “It is only by listening that we engage, understand, connect, empathise, and develop as human beings.” Listening, says Murphy, not only makes us happier, it makes us more clever.

Good listeners — priests, psychotherapists, air-traffic controllers, bartenders, spies, conmen — usually come up with the best solutions. It’s because they come to understand the complexities of life, that choices aren’t binary, that questions are often more fruitful and interesting than answers. The late Steve Jobs, for instance, used to hire people at Apple to disagree with him. The founder of Ikea used to wander his shop floor anonymously asking customers their opinions of his wares.

The best CIA operatives are not the aggressive interrogators and or those who feign empathy with mandatory eye-contact, a rudimentary nod of the head or insincere “Mmm-mmm”, but those who let prisoners tell their own life stories. Bringing forth such subjective perspectives better helps agents understand perpetrators’ world-view and motives. As one CIA chief interrogator told the author, “Even if you can’t get through to the suicide bomber, it helps you maybe get through to the guy later on, who is on the fringe or who is on the fence. You can relate to him after meeting the guy who took that wrong turn.” In a similar vein, the best hostage negotiator is not the man who deploys the best argument or conjures up some subconscious Jedi mind trick, but the man who tries “to understand the guy’s point of view”.

The most common cause of strife between a child and parent, writes Murphy, is when the former believes the latter isn’t listening. A failure to listen is also the cause for much marital breakdown. We assume we understand what those close to us feel, want or need. “As wonderful as intimacy and familiarity are, they make us complacent, leading us to overestimate our ability to read those closest to us.”

Often it’s the better-educated with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners

Listening isn’t the same as passive hearing, and the author stresses the importance of it being an interactive process. Researchers at the University of Utah found that when talking to inattentive listeners, speakers remembered less information and were less articulate in the information they conveyed. On the other hand, attentive listeners elicited more information, relevant detail, and elaboration from speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions.

Good listeners are good questioners, too. This doesn’t mean repeating impersonal, mundane questions such as “how was school?” but asking curious questions such as “what did you learn today?” or “what was the best part of your day?”.

Listening has become more difficult not merely because of technology — mobile phones, podcasts, social media, louder background music in restaurants, headphones that drown out one’s inner dialogue — but because of an allied culture of individualism, self-promotion and identity politics. We are subconsciously goaded to say things like “speaking as a white man” or “speaking as a woman of colour”. Murphy quotes Pascal Bruckner’s The Temptation of Innocence, in which he writes: “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted.”

Such a focus on the self, on one’s opinions, reinforced by incessant speaking and opining, only fortifies our convictions and closes our horizons. In turn, those with the firmest convictions become even worse listeners. And often it’s the better-educated and those with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners, being so adamant that they needn’t learn anything from anyone else.

A vicious circle ensues. Our shouty society hardens convictions, which necessitates turning up the volume further. Ultimately, this is why public dialogue today has become so antagonistic and fractious (see Brexit). For instance, neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people’s political views are challenged the amygdala region of the brain (the site of the primitive fight or flight reaction) lights up as if being chased by a bear. The amygdala is also what causes road rage or makes someone tweet vitriol so out of proportion when their political opinions are questioned. And when we are in fight, flight or freeze mode it is incredibly hard to reason or listen.

Murphy, a journalist and contributor to the New York Times, spent much time listening to experts while putting together You’re Not Listening (the best journalists should also be the most curious listeners), and the result is generous, humane and all too necessary. At a time when the bilious nature of public discourse seems to escalate by the day, it’s time that we all stopped speaking and started listening — and this even includes listening to ourselves, to what our inner dialogue is saying. It will make us smarter, happier and more content people.

You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why it Matters By Kate Murphy Harvill Secker, £16.99

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The atheists who take heaven for granted

According to recent research by the University of San Diego, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as atheists doubled to 22 per cent between 1984 and 2014, while the proportion of the populace who believe in or regularly pray to God has reached an all-time low. No surprise there, you might say. It’s a while now since atheism in the United States was considered “un-American” or tainted by association with godless communism.

Yet the research also shows that this decrease in the belief in God has been accompanied by a rise in the belief in heaven or some kind of afterlife. This figure has risen from 73 to 80 per cent since 1972. “It was interesting that fewer people participated in religion or prayed, but more believed in an afterlife,” remarked the University of San Diego psychology professor, Jean Twenge. “It might be part of a growing entitlement mentality – thinking you can get something for nothing.”

I suspect that Twenge, author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – And More Miserable Than Ever Before (2006), is on to something. People’s day-to-day religious outlook is inevitably shaped by social, technological and cultural forces. Just as the first information technology revolution, the printing press, occurred in tandem with the emergence of Protestantism – both of which challenged authority from below – so the second big information technology is likewise fostering a society in which greater importance is placed on the 
individual. 

For instance, some sociologists noted in the last decade the resurgence of a belief in guardian angels. This was deemed a logical outcome in a society that both adheres less to organised religion and has become more atomised, consumerist and focused on the self.

This shrinking inwards towards the self has been accelerated by the age of Instagram selfies and Twitter. A generation that grew up with the internet has come to expect most commodities – from online news to television to movies – to be free and instantly available. A “paywall” is spoken of as a monstrous effrontery. 

For those today who know only instantaneous gratification – who wouldn’t understand the concept of waiting for holiday photos to be developed, or for one’s favourite television programme to be repeated – even reading a book seems daunting. Accomplishment is measured instead by more superficial methods, such as how many “likes” or “retweets” you get on social media.

“Self-esteem” and “self-belief” is what matters now. This is why, when they go to university, Generation Me become so easily upset and offended, demanding “safe spaces” and censorship. The new generation, as Professor Twenge outlines in her book, are taught “to be whatever you want to be, as long as you ‘believe in yourself’.” This is why the language of gender-fluidity appeals to them (and baffles their elders): one can “be” a man or a woman as long as one simply “identifies” oneself as such.

Yet some things don’t change in human nature: a hardwired fear and incomprehension of death. Appropriately, this can be witnessed most obviously on the internet when a much-loved celebrity dies before their time: Victoria Wood and Prince being the most recent examples. They are “out there somewhere” or “looking down on us now” or “resting in peace”. This language transcends ages and cultures. 

For centuries, belief in heaven in Christian cultures was accompanied by the notion that for some reason, usually by good behaviour and avoidance of sin, your soul warranted a place there. Thanks to my generation having cosseted them and filled their heads with all this babyish talk of “self-esteem”, Generation Me don’t believe in making an effort to get your rewards. I mean, why do good or try to change the world when a quick sympathetic hashtag will do? Let’s hope the Pearly Gates don’t have a “paywall”.



One of the most pleasing aspects about the 1998 film Shakespeare 
in Love was that it portrayed the Bard not so much as a poet or grand man of letters, but more akin to a hack. He’s always searching for new ideas, looking for sponsors to pay him money to write, scribbling into the small hours to meet urgent deadlines.

I like to think of his Spanish contemporary Miguel de Cervantes, the 400th anniversary of whose death we also commemorated recently, as likewise an inspiration for creative types. Here was a man who endured injury, kidnap, imprisonment, bankruptcy, an unhappy marriage and ill-health, and who in his prime saw his 20 to 30 plays sink into obscurity.

Only in 1605, in his 59th year, did he publish Don Quixote, which became an instant bestseller, and which today is regarded as a masterpiece of European literature. There is a lesson here for all writers and artists who toil alone.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked

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