Lessons in Humility & Cooperation
I have often had a hard time being understood in French. Expressing myself in complex terms can be really hard, and that difficulty is only magnified in exchanges where there's disagreement.
There are certain moments where I'm understood, and it feels like a miracle. Some of that credit goes to me, but it also often goes to the person I'm speaking with—they've just performed some serious mental gymnastics to imagine what I could possibly be trying to say.
Regardless of why I speak the way I do, I often find myself in a funny situation—one that might very well exist when I speak to people in English but is put into sharp relief when I speak French: I need the sincere cooperation and openness of whoever I'm speaking with. This becomes interesting in cases of disagreement. No matter how heated an argument gets, I still basically need the person I'm arguing with to try and take my case at its best. A case that I've framed poorly, if not for lack of clear thinking at least certainly for lack of clear word choice.
I can't effectively communicate my disagreement on complicated topics (or sometimes even simple ones) most of the time because I basically need the other person to always imagine what I'm saying in the best possible version. Essentially: I need to be listened to generously. I need my arguments to be heard in the best, strongest interpretation, rather than their weakest.
Although this fact is not obvious to our European friends, debate is of course treated as a real subject in secondary and higher education—one you can study, practice, and compete in. Particularly in college, I had a professor of debate who really insisted on taking my opponent's argument at their very best—finding ways to see exactly what they're saying, even helping them find ways to say it, and then you can all move forward together to see if you have a substantive disagreement.
This is all well and good, but... in my experience, it made visceral something that I think we all understand in our best moments: listening generously is essential because the other person does not deserve to be left feeling like they can't be right in an argument just because you can talk around them. If we can down to brass tacks, what would even be the reason for entertaining such a discussion? And yet we so often do among people who share our native language but not our views.
In a world which seems to be on a sharp trajectory toward insanity, what would it look like if we brought a real generosity of interpretation to our listening more generally?
