News from Nowhere: Learning to Listen

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On a single day earlier this month, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people accused of “acts of terrorism” and of holding so-called ‘deviant beliefs’. The following day, Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea football club played a high-profile Premier League match against Newcastle United, a club that was bought last year by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The controversial ownership structures of the two clubs – and their contrasting political fortunes – did not pass unnoticed in the British news media. However, a Foreign Office minister told the House of Commons last week that the UK government still ‘welcomed’ the Saudi purchase of the club.

Although it appears that the UK’s recent cultural cooperation agreement with the Saudi regime has not encouraged them to liberalize the conduct of their criminal justice system, western governments and companies seem conspicuously eager to continue to do business with them. Indeed, western administrations have this month been trying their very best to persuade their Saudi allies to ramp up their production of oil in a bid to sustain global supplies. Nevertheless, a former Conservative minister told parliament this week that the British Prime Minister should cancel a planned visit to Saudi Arabia as that kingdom had hit ‘a new low for human rights’, while one Liberal Democrat MP observed that Boris Johnson’s proposed trip would send ‘a very clear signal that, no matter what we say, we’re not really bothered about this sort of thing’.

But what, after all, would be the actual value of a political or cultural embargo when we continue to buy their crude? And should restrictions in cultural and commercial relations be aimed at a nation’s people or at the government which we believe oppresses them? Shouldn’t we, after all, still be trying our hardest to win the civilian population’s hearts and minds?

The West’s approach to Saudi Arabia has for decades been based upon a strategy whereby our immediate desire to exploit a mutually profitable economic relationship has repeatedly overridden our urgent need to engage in serious conversations essential to addressing vast political, ideological and moral differences. This is of course typical of the thrust of western foreign policy. We will happily maintain trade with people to whom we are not, however, really willing to talk, or at least not to discuss matters of any genuine substance. This is a strategy which continues to reap disastrous results across the world. In the inevitable event of this strategy’s catastrophic collapse, an interruption to trading relations may seem the very least of its ensuing calamities.

Looking east from this little island perched at the remote tip of a continent in crisis, one is forced to wonder today what we might have done, and what we – all of us –might still do, to attempt, for a change, to get things right, or at least to get things a little less disastrously wrong. This is a remarkably difficult question. Should we be talking, and, if so, what should we be talking about?

A militant leftist friend of mine once told me he could never have a friend who was a Tory. He sat there next to me at the bar of our local public house, looking me straight in the eye over his half-empty pint of best bitter, a clear moral challenge glaring in the righteousness of his unwavering gaze. A foamy residue clung to the side of his glass. This was, after all, someone who considered my own brand of progressive consensus politics suspiciously conservative, simply because I happened to favour the redistribution of social resources within a free market over his preferred model of a state-controlled command economy. This was, in short, a man who considered advocates of laissez-faire economics to be irredeemable scum.

I was reminded of a moment in an old episode of the TV series Star Trek in which a Klingon officer protests to a human Starfleet captain that a true Klingon would never share a drink with an enemy. (In this typically American fantasy, the aggressive Klingon Empire had originally been intended as a metaphor for the Soviet Union, while Starfleet stood as a symbol of the modernizing influence of the United States and its allies). The human captain responds, with a certain smugness, that this was precisely why Starfleet had won its centuries-old Cold War with its Klingon adversaries: because it had been willing not only to talk, but also to treat its opponents with the respect accorded to social and moral equals – in other words, to drink with them. And no doubt also, one might add, to sell them their superhero movies, their junk food, their fashion, and their ubiquitous cans of carbonated water steeped in an irresistible mix of sweet syrup, caramel, caffeine, and phosphoric acid. 

A purely mathematical perspective would suggest that progressive liberal pluralism can never hope to prevail against totalitarianism and fundamentalism, because the progressives will always be willing to tolerate, empathize with, and therefore enable, the totalitarians, but the totalitarians will do everything that they can to oppress and stifle the progressives. Thus, the balance of power will inexorably shift towards the forces of oppression. By that logic, there should be no such thing as a multicultural society; and democracy simply should not exist.

However, the twentieth century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin famously pointed out that it is in the physical nature of our species always to hanker after freedom, and that any historical periods of oppression are therefore necessarily impermanent. Freedom will always prevail. The dissimulation of despots will be overcome by the inescapable truths and primal dictates of human reality: those elementary facets intrinsic to the character of our humanity. These are qualities we all share. As such, they crucially underpin our capacities to empathize.

There is real value in extending empathy to one’s enemies. This empathy recognizes that your politics are not who you are, though, like your nationality and heritage, they may inform and frame who you are. Your politics are not immutable, and neither are you. This recognition allows for reconciliation, because it affords the possibility of compromise, consensus, and change. A willingness – indeed an invitation – to hear one’s opponents speak, to provide a shared platform or arena for debate, not only opens the possibility of progress but must also allow for the chance that, though we find ourselves each sincerely committed to our own beliefs, those convictions might eventually prove to be mistaken, or at least incomplete.

Socrates and Confucius agreed that wisdom lies in one’s knowledge that one knows nothing, in one’s uncertainty as to the truth and as to the rectitude of one’s own understanding and interpretation of the world. If my narrative is not essentially superior to all others, then I must remain open to the possibility that it may have to evolve to accommodate other perspectives; and that those other perspectives must remain similarly open to that possibility for themselves.

I do not have to agree with absolutely everything that is said in the news sources to which I subscribe, nor even those to which I contribute; but I appreciate that, for the most part, those sources originate from positions of sincerity. It is the function of journalism to speak truth to power, whatever its stripe or creed; but it is also the function of journalism to accept that there is no single, hegemonic truth out there, and therefore to give ear and to give voice to the range of truths that comprise the lived experience of our reality.

This is why we ought to relish and value the company and the opinions of friends and associates whose political views land far to the left or to the right of our own. We should know that the most appropriate ways of seeing the world may not align with either of those extremes, but that they may lie somewhere in between. 

This is starting to sound a little like the political equivalent of that secret melodic chord which, in our earthly articulation of the sacred music of the spheres, was once said by a great poet to negotiate the reconciliation of polar extremes through a moment of wildly improbable epiphany, a revelation simultaneously divine and profane. Such profound commonalities at the hearts of our diverse cultures may help us overcome our differences. Thus, earlier this month, the grandson of the influential Russian-Ukrainian composer Sergei Prokofiev spoke to the BBC of the vital importance of the expression of the experience of shared ‘human pain and hope’ in the processes of mediation and reconciliation that seem so urgently needed today.

But, despite this heady idealism, we should also appreciate that our own vision of the establishment of a moderate and progressive consensus may not represent an exclusive or absolute path to peace and truth, and that there are other rousing tunes that can be played and other soulful songs that can be sung.

Our languages perpetuate our views of the world as constructed around sets of binary oppositions: female and male, black and white, east and west, left and right. These are easy but lazy ways of comprehending the realities around us. They translate complexities into dichotomies that are simple to understand and to articulate; but they remain highly misleading, because they miss out upon the nuances that in fact comprise people’s lived experiences. Those nuances – those blurred and shared areas between perceived extremes – emphasize what we have in common; yet our public discourse by contrast stresses and exacerbates those things that divide us, and recasts our politics as a form of warfare and war itself as an unavoidable, irreversible and irretrievable zero-sum game.

This inherent dividedness underpins those geopolitical controversies and conflicts which replay their relentless patterns across the continents and the millennia. You can insert your own examples here; there are more than enough from which to choose. Progress can only be made when we will admit to hearing the grievances and aspirations of all parties. It would therefore, of course, be wrong to dismiss as mere sophistry sincere claims, on the one side, of historical injustice, humiliation, and bad faith; it would be similarly wrong, on the other side, to reject as pure propaganda sets of profound beliefs as to a society’s independent cultural heritage underpinning its sense of its own nationhood.

Contemporary geopolitics remains welded into a mindset that prioritizes those sets of retributive strategies and punitive policies which seek to divide, conquer, apportion historical blame, and exact centuries of vengeance, rather than those approaches which seek to learn ways to coexist, because it seems easier to beat the living hell out of each other, and to sideline the agonizingly real human impacts of conflict as if they represented a somehow necessary toll of collateral damage, than to try to talk.

Progress towards the possibility of any form of lasting peace requires true reconciliation, and that can only be built upon mutual respect and empathy, and an acceptance that our shared humanity must therefore transcend our differences. It does not eradicate those differences, but it allows us to forge a common position from which we might start to address them. This is not the weakness of appeasement; it is the strength of those who display the moral courage needed to listen to others, even when that means that they must subject their own beliefs to the challenge of alternative forms of thought, and acknowledge that other voices are as valid as their own. It is only in this way that we might ever hope to overcome oppression and to transform into the possibilities of mediated multilateral dialogues the monolithic tyranny of history’s zealous and unpitying gaze.

Last week, an increasingly eccentric right-wing friend of mine had declared to me: ‘These people on the news, they call themselves proud nationalists, but, if I said that, they’d say I was some sort of fascist pig, even though our country’s being invaded too – by Muslims from the Middle East.’ I resisted the urge to respond that some people might already consider him a bit of a fascist, and that this kind of remark probably didn’t help his case to the contrary. As he spoke, he had stood in his kitchen, frying a pan of sausages for his tea; and, as he rolled them back and forth with his fork, they had squealed and burst in the smoking oil. The fragrance of scorched pork hung in the air like the stench of war, the most petty and Pyrrhic of victories. He licked his lips with undisguised relish, in keen anticipation of the feast of flesh to come.