Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [155]
By contrast, when we are aware that we could be wrong, we are far more inclined to hear other people out. We see this in the field of medicine, too, since doctors who can’t figure out a diagnosis—or who have reason to suspect that the one they settled on is wrong—can become notably patient and acute listeners, taking and retaking a medical history in search of the elusive telling detail. But my favorite illustration of this relationship between learning to listen and learning to accept fallibility comes from a man named John Francis—who, in 1973, took what became a seventeen-year vow of silence.
John Francis isn’t a monk, or even particularly monkish. He is a working-class African-American guy from Philadelphia, and his vow of silence came about accidentally, through another, more deliberate pledge. In 1971, after a massive oil spill in the San Francisco Bay, Francis, who was then living in the area, decided to give up driving. (That vow lasted even longer. I know about Francis because I used to edit an online environmental magazine called Grist, which ran an interview with him about his twenty-year vacation from the internal combustion engine.) “As I walked along the road,” Francis told Grist, “people would stop and talk about what I was doing and I would argue with them. And I realized that, you know, maybe I didn’t want to do that. So on my birthday”—he had just turned twenty-seven—“I decided I was going to give my community some silence because, man, I just argued all the time.”
Francis didn’t originally plan to stay quiet for long: “I decided for one day, let’s not speak and see what happens.” As it turned out, though, the outcome of that experiment was so interesting that he stuck with it. In accordance with Harville Hendrix’s point that we must “listen and listen and listen and listen” if we hope to change our relationships for the better, Francis found that ceasing to speak significantly altered the way he viewed other people and their ideas. “When I realized that I hadn’t been listening,” Francis reflected, “it was as if I had locked away half of my life.” Silence, he emphasized, “is not just not talking…. You hear things you’ve never heard before, and you hear things in ways you’ve never heard them before. And what I would disagree with one time, I might now agree with.” In his memoir, Francis elaborated on this theme. “Most of my adult life,” he wrote, “I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker’s ideas matched my own. If they didn’t, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker’s idea or position to be.”
Listening only in order to contradict, argue, and accuse: that reflex will be painfully familiar to many of us. Choosing not to speak might be an extreme countermeasure, but choosing to listen wouldn’t hurt. After all, the only way to engage with the possibility that we could be wrong is to stop obsessively defending ourselves for a moment. True, we can sometimes make room for wrongness in the ways we speak—all those maybes and third hands. But we can always make room for it in the way we listen. I concede that this is hackneyed advice, but some truisms refuse to die of old age and can’t be killed by corniness. In love, as in medicine, as in life more generally, listening is an act of humility. It says that other people’s ideas are interesting and important; that our own could be in error; that there is still plenty left for us to learn.
Here, then, are some ways we can try to prevent mistakes. We