Why ‘Listen’ Is the Word of the Year
We risk getting dumber and meaner when we don’t listen
My word of the year is listen.
It’s one of those words whose meaning is in its music. Listen is a quiet word, that half swallowed L and diffident I and softly hissing S. It defies the clamorous words it absorbs, the words that have defined this year, the shouts and roars, the bray and bluster. Listening is hard when the sounds around us grow mean and ugly.
And listening takes particular courage in divisive times. Voters in the midterm elections were united around almost nothing other than how divided we are; 76 percent say we are coming apart, versus 9 percent who see us coming together. As we separate, we shout to be heard across the divide, which grows tiresome, and so we just stop talking to each other altogether.
Listening becomes a form of subversion, a rebellion against the tribe. And so we refuse. We’ve seen this on campus, when college students shout down speakers whose views they reject. We saw it when New Yorker editor David Remnick could no longer justify interviewing Steve Bannon onstage at the magazine’s festival as other speakers threatened to pull out and sink the whole event.
Even in more intimate settings, hostility to the very act of listening grows. Fifteen years ago…
