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Friends United Meeting |
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September 2005
Listen Respectively; Speak Truthfully
By Douglas C. Bennett
(Douglas C. Bennett is President of Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. This is a condensation of his Commencement Address at Brooklyn Friends School on June 8, 2005.)
Language is the greatest of all human inventions—greater than fire, greater than the wheel, greater than domesticated agriculture, even greater than cell phones or video games. Other animals do communicate with one another, but what sets human beings apart as a species is the extraordinary sophistication of our language abilities.
I want to talk with you about speaking and listening in the world before you. Language is what makes us special. It gives us extraordinary powers. But with those powers come important and demanding responsibilities.
The Dangers/Deformations of Speech
In your publications, you state: “Brooklyn Friends School is a place where people of all backgrounds and ages listen to and learn from one another.” I wish we could say that about the United States today: that we are a country where people of all backgrounds and ages listen to and learn from one another. But of course I can’t.
Just think about the talk we hear on television or radio. On many channels at all times of day or night, we hear very strong opinions expressed about what’s right and outraged dismissal of any other viewpoint. It is sharp and divisive speech.
Think about the United States Congress, which should set the standard for important talk in these United States. We hear a great deal of posturing, and a great deal of angry, vituperative speech.
Or think about what passes by us each day on the Internet. People say things to one another on e-mail that they would never say to one another face-to-face or over the telephone. We hear rude things, angry words, hurtful sentences.
We have no lack of speech today, but not much listening. We have a great deal of declamation, but very little dialogue.
The Marketplace of Ideas
We should value freedom of expression for reasons first strongly voiced by the poet John Milton in 1644. “Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” he said. Milton argued that the truth would not emerge and would be understood clearly if it did not find itself tested against other ideas, many of them no doubt wrong or foolish. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary,” he said. …That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
Written in the middle of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill’s book On Liberty is the great modern articulation of the virtue of freedom of expression. “ …The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of ideas is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more those that hold it. If this opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
Both Milton and Mill agree: the best cure for erroneous or harmful speech is yet more speech, not suppression of speech.
The Right to Speak
At our founding, we made freedom of expression a foundation stone for our republic, making it The First Amendment to the United States Constitution
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Notice, however, what the First Amendment does not say. It doesn’t give us protection from anyone other than the government interfering with speech—and others may try. And it doesn’t give us any assurance that anyone will listen to us. And isn’t that what we want? We don’t just want to speak; we want others to listen to us. We most feel a lack of respect when others won’t listen to us.
It is not our First Amendment rights that especially concern me today. It is our responsibility to listen.
The Responsibilities of Good Speech
Questions of speaking and listening are very much on my mind because of something that happened at Earlham this spring. On an evening late in March, an Earlham student climbed up on a stage in our main auditorium and threw a pie at William Kristol, editor of conservative opinion magazine, The Weekly Standard. The incident interrupted Mr. Kristol’s speech on “American Foreign Policy After 9-11.” He was speaking to an audience of several hundred people from Earlham and the community.
William Kristol wiped the pie off his face, said “let me just remember where I was,” and then continued his remarks. When he finished, I apologized to Mr. Kristol on behalf of the college. He entertained questions and comments for about 30 minutes, and stayed onstage after we ended the program to answer questions from audience members for another 45 minutes.
With the pie, the student had said, in effect, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, and I don’t want anyone else to hear it either.” Even though I disagree with Mr. Kristol about many things, I am grateful that he continued his speech and I am grateful the audience stayed to hear the rest of what he had to say.
Academic freedom involves responsibilities as fully as freedom and these responsibilities are shared among all members of the community. It isn’t just the government or the
administration that needs to respect others’ rights to speak. Teachers need to respect students’ rights to speak, students have a duty to respect other students’ right to speak and audiences have a responsibility to allow invited speakers (like William Kristol) to have their say. If you disagree with what someone else is saying, interfering with their speech isn’t the right response; the right response is for you to say why you disagree. I think it is best to think of this as a responsibility to listen respectfully to one another.
Under academic freedom, a second responsibility is to speak the truth. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, you can say anything you want: silly or profound, ugly or beautiful, false or true. If our goal is to find the true (or the profound or the beautiful), then we are more likely to succeed together if we all seek to speak the truth.
By no means does that mean we will all agree with one another. On all difficult and important questions, we will find we have disagreements—sometimes sharp disagreements. We will disagree about matters of science, of religion, of ethics.
Because we start in different places, we will see different things and have different perspectives. In talking respectfully with one another, we may be able to find ways to live together sharing one world and one common future.
Two responsibilities: to listen respectfully and to speak truthfully. These two responsibilities can be difficult to carry together. One asks us to care about what’s right and truthful— to speak that truth and to live it with commitment. The other expects us to be open to the possibility that others will persuade us to change our minds. Demanding as they are, these are responsibilities of being educated and responsibilities of citizenship.
Listening to God
Even before colleges and universities, Quakers championed both of these: the responsibility to listen and the responsibility to speak the truth. Quaker beliefs give both a deeper, firmer foundation.
Both responsibilities grow out of how we worship. Both grow out of how we talk to God. Both grow out of silence. In the silence we are giving ourselves the opportunity to listen to God. And in the silence, we are preparing ourselves to hear that of God in everyone else who may speak to us. Being in dialogue with God lays on us the obligation to speak as truthfully as we can at all times. Expecting to hear God lays on us the obligation to listen carefully. Expecting to hear God in others’ voices lays on us the obligation to listen carefully and respectfully to them. Put another way: refusal to listen is commitment to unconstructive conflict. Refusal to listen is the road to war. We need no more roads to war.
In the years ahead, we have a great deal of careful listening and respectful talking to do. I hope you will all do your very best with these with whomever you may find yourselves with opportunities to speak.