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Tuesday
Twice over the past two days have I heard people advising sympathetic listening as response to our polarized times, is to listen. While actual agreement may seem like a distant dream, such listening at least gives us a fighting chance.
Kitty gives Levin advice along these lines in Anna Karenina, which I’m currently rereading, and it makes a difference.
In our church’s recent Sunday Forum, two members of the Beloved Community Commission, Nancy Cason and Kate Kesse, discussed how churches can play a role in advancing racial and economic equity for marginalized populations. The organization derives its name from Martin Luther King’s vision that the “aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community,” and we were advised that entering into someone else’s vision of the world is often more powerful than attempting to fix things or play Lady Bountiful. Only after such a relationship is established is further progress possible.
I heard something similar in a Carleton College zoom session yesterday on “Truth, Education, and Democracy.” Carleton Professors Sindy L. Fleming and Chico Zimmerman, along with two of their students, talked about a course they teach on “Civil Discourse in a Troubled Age.” Their aim is to move past discussion and debate to genuine dialogue, and to my question, “How do you engage people in dialogue who don’t want dialogue,” Zimmerman talked about the power of sympathetic listening. Reaffirming this approach, one of the students, who has engaged in voter registration, mentioned the power of such listening when he knocked on doors. Even when encountering strong anti-abortion positions, he said, he felt he made headway by asking questions and hearing what people had to say.
The judgmental Levin hears something similar from Kitty in the blissful moment after he learns that she loves him. Talking of one of the guests at a gathering they are attending, there’s this interchange, starting with Kitty:
“And I see you think he’s a horrid man?”
“Not horrid, but nothing in him.”
“Oh, you’re wrong! And you must give up thinking so directly!” said Kitty. “I used to have a very poor opinion of him too, but he, he’s an awfully nice and wonderfully good-hearted man. He has a heart of gold.”
“How could you find out what sort of heart he has?”
“We are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon after … you came to see us,” she said, with a guilty and at the same time confiding smile, “all Dolly’s children had scarlet fever, and he happened to come and see her. And only fancy,” she said in a whisper, “he felt so sorry for her that he stayed and began to help her look after the children. Yes, and for three weeks he stopped with them, and looked after the children like a nurse.”
To which there’s this Levin response:
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll never think ill of people again!” he said gaily, genuinely expressing what he felt at the moment.
And, in fact, he puts his new resolution into action immediately:
He did at once, and without the smallest effort, keep the promise he had made her—always to think well of all men, and to like everyone always. The conversation fell on the village commune, in which Pestsov saw a sort of special principle, called by him the “choral” principle. Levin did not agree with Pestsov, nor with his brother, who had a special attitude of his own, both admitting and not admitting the significance of the Russian commune. But he talked to them, simply trying to reconcile and soften their differences. He was not in the least interested in what he said himself, and even less so in what they said; all he wanted was that they and everyone should be happy and contented.
A short time later Kitty asks, “What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know,” to which Levin replies, “Yes; that’s true; it generally happens that one argues warmly simply because one can’t make out what one’s opponent wants to prove.”
And then there’s this insight:
Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and an enormous expenditure of logical subtleties and words, the disputants finally arrived at being aware that what they had so long been struggling to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being attacked.
When Levin, somewhat imperfectly, attempts to communicate this idea to Kitty, she
knitted her brow, trying to understand. But directly he began to illustrate his meaning, she understood at once.
“I know: one must find out what he is arguing for, what is precious to him, then one can….”
The ellipsis, I assume, indicates something along the lines of “come to a common understanding.”
While the Levin-Kitty marriage is a happy one, they of course have quarrels, including one involving a guest who flirts with her. What ensues is a mistaken assumption such as we see often in our own politics: sometimes when we see people demonizing others, it is because they are imagining things that those others are thinking and lash out in anger. Think about this dynamic as you read the following scene, where Kitty blushes in shame and embarrassment because Veslovsky is making love to her while Levin interprets the blush to mean that she is actually in love with him:
His jealousy had in these few moments, especially at the flush that had overspread her cheeks while she was talking to Veslovsky, gone far indeed. Now as he heard her words, he construed them in his own fashion. Strange as it was to him afterwards to recall it, it seemed to him at the moment clear that in asking whether he was going shooting, all she cared to know was whether he would give that pleasure to Vassenka Veslovsky, with whom, as he fancied, she was in love.
Levin turns cold, Kitty is hurt, and there are some agonizing moments. Fortunately, they are able to communicate and come to an understanding.
Communication is key for us as well. Unfortunately social media, Carleton professor Zimmerman noted, does not encourage common understanding. Indeed, flash emotional responses can foster just the opposite. Both he in his course and the Better Community project are attempting to establish something better. The very survival of our democracy hinges on such projects.