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Last winter, I found myself seated around a massive table with about forty others on the ground floor of the historic Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in Chicago. A group of curators had invited me to participate in Parts of Speech, an exhibit consisting of six lectures by six artists held at venues across the city. Instead of a typical talk, where Id speak from a stage or behind a lectern, Id proposed hosting a debtors assemblya forum where people could share stories of their financial hardship.

Id never hosted such an assembly before. As the participants (not audience members) trickled into the room, I reminded myself that the event was supposed to be about listening, not talking. Even so, I couldnt resist making some opening remarks. I told the group that my work as an organizer and documentary filmmaker had led me to understand listening as a deeply political act, and an underappreciated one. I suggested that our lack of attention to listening connected to the larger crisis of American democracy, in which the wealthy and powerful shape the discourse while many others go unheard. After Id finished, Laura Hanna, the co-director of the Debt Collective, an economic-justice group Id helped found, reeled off statistics demonstrating that we live with Gilded Age levels of inequality. Then she invited people to share their stories. In that ornate, wood-panelled room, an ominous silence descended. Looking from one quiet face to another, I panicked. What if no one talked?

The first person to speak confessed to owing a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in student loans; many people in his life were unsympathetic to his plight, he said, because he had studied art and not law or something. A young woman began to cry. Im a first-generation student, I come from a family of poverty, she said. Sorry if I get emotional, but Im here with my little one, and Im thinking about her future. Im a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in student-loan debt, and thats a huge number. When she finished, the room burst into applause.

The dam broke. A young man spoke of a mental-health crisis that had caused his debt to balloon; it included ambulance and hospital bills that took three years to pay off. A middle-aged woman described herself as teetering at that edge of poverty after she quit her job because of racist comments made by a colleague; her high debt load meant she couldnt help her college-age son. Another woman explained that her hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in student loans were overwhelming not just her but her mother, who had taken many of them out on her behalf; she described the pain of feeling judged a failure when you are trying the best you can. An older man told how, after arriving as a refugee from Liberia, hed thought education would be a lifeline. Hed gotten a degree in chemistry and then attended nursing school, but now the money he owed was a trap from which he couldnt escape.

As the forum progressed, the mood in the room changed. Some people listened silently. Others, taking it all in, felt emboldened to reveal hardships theyd been reluctant to divulge elsewhere. A few got fired up: after hearing others stories, the crying woman asked, How can this be legal? A mountain of debt and shame was becoming visiblean overwhelming burden that was also a common bond. Id suggested a debtors assembly because I wanted to create a space in which both sides of the communicative coinspeaking and listeningcould be valued equally. Even so, I found myself surprised by listenings power. Though I work on issues of inequality, I was stunned by how much suffering the circle held.

We have two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we speak, the stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, two thousand years ago. Thats long been one of my favorite quotes. The truth, though, was that it had been a long time since Id had an opportunity to listen, silently and at length, to what many other people had to say. Afterward, walking in the cold, I couldnt help but think of listening as something were all entitled toa right were often denied, and that the assembly had just reclaimed. Today, we are constantly reminded of the importance of free speech and the First Amendment; we exalt freedom in the expressive realm. Is there some corresponding principle of listening worth defending?

We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

The idea that the right to listen to one another should be defended in a democracy seems strange. Thats probably because we lack a shared vocabulary or framework for understanding listening as a political act. We pay lip service to the idea of listening: stage-managed town-hall meetings, at which politicians and candidates respond to curated questions from a screened audience, are a familiar part of the political landscape. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a highly publicized national listening tour, which yielded photographs of him riding a tractor with a farmer, going to church in a small town, helping out on an automobile assembly line, and so on. No one really imagined that Zuckerberg would listen to anything the people he visited had to say. We expect powerful people to be talkers, not listeners.

Philosophers, too, have thought mostly about speechbiased, perhaps understandably, toward dazzling utterances. When Aristotle declared man a political animal, he argued that what distinguished us from other creatures was our capacity for rational discourse. Modern philosophers have developed a framework of deliberative democracy in which oration and argument, declamation and debate, play out in an idealized public sphere. Careers have been made studying speech-act theory, which examines how certain verbal expressions do things in the world (a judge declaring a defendant guilty, for instance, or a couple married). A corresponding listening-act theory doesnt yet exist.

But to listen is to act; of that, theres no doubt. It takes effort and doesnt happen by default. As anyone who has been in a heated argumentor whos simply tried to coexist with family members, colleagues, friends, and neighborswell knows, its often easier not to listen. We can tune out and let others words wash over us, hearing only what we want to hear, or we can pantomime the act of listening, nodding along while waiting for our turn to speak. Even when we want to be rapt, our attentions wane. Deciding to listen to someone is a meaningful gesture. It accords them a special kind of recognition and respect.

In 2015, I began making a documentary called What Is Democracy?a feature exploring the fate of self-government in the Trump era. Immediately, I remembered that one of the hardest things about beginning to shoot a new documentary is remembering how to listen. I had to make a concerted effort to bite my tongue, so as not to babble over my subjects, ruining the footage (the way I had, to my eternal embarrassment, during my first film shoot, more than fifteen years ago). I found that listening well, so that I could respond genuinely and substantively, was exhausting work.

One of the things I heard, when I listened, was that many of the people I spoke withimmigrant factory workers, asylum seekers, former prisoners, schoolchildrensimply assumed that no one was interested in listening to them. At a community center in Miami, I asked a group of teen-agers if they ever discussed democracy at school. Yes, but its about branches of government, a boy said. They dont ask us, How do you feel about the school? As far as the kids could tell, their opinions didnt matter to their teachers or the administrators in charge, and they didnt feel there was much they could do about it. My voice isnt going to change anything, a girl told me, with a shrug. I asked them whether they thought the adults in their lives had more of a say than they did. I dont think people of higher power really want to hear a black mom thats poor in a ghetto, the girl responded, matter-of-factly. Similarly, a boy warned, an adult standing up for himself at work would only get into trouble; it was better not to speak out and just get it over with. Their certainty about going unheard was painful to hear.

The rest is here:
The Right to Listen - The New Yorker