There will always be people in the world who have different opinions, values, and beliefs from our own. But this shouldn’t stop us from listening to those we know we disagree with, even if we think it’s unlikely that we will change our minds.

During part of the Covid-19 pandemic, I lived with my grandfather in rural Vermont, a small state in the north-east of the US. Being Australian, I had many opportunities to talk to people I would not have otherwise have had a chance to meet. Then, the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump rolled around, and it was all anyone could talk about.  

My grandfather’s carer voted for Trump in 2020. I got to know her quite well – she’s a life-long rural north-easterner with a strong belief in individual self-sufficiency. We talked a lot about the differences between where we came from. Politics always comes up in conversation around an election, so naturally it came up that we would support different presidential candidates.  

Most of the media that I consume and the majority of my social circle reinforce my liberal political views. Talking with my grandfather’s carer gave me a different perspective on why someone would vote for Trump. While her reasoning didn’t convince me to change my vote, I came to understand how my life led me to my beliefs on who should be president, and her life led to hers.

These conversations inspired me to think a little more about what we gain when we take the time to listen thoughtfully to people with different views, perspectives and opinions from ours. Here are three reasons (and a few tools) that can help us to gain the full benefit of listening to someone who has different beliefs from ours.

Be curious about reasons: both your own and others

Our values represent what we believe is good and bad in the world. But it’s uncommon for people to ‘choose’ their values. Instead, we are far more likely to adopt the values that our parents have and the dominant values of the communities we grow up in. 

Nevertheless, we hold our values near and dear to our hearts. They form the foundations of our lives and who we are as people. Someone who has different values from us can feel as though they are a world away from us. In reality, it’s likely they just had a different upbringing, with access to different information and abided by different norms. 

One tool we can use for finding the reasons behind certain views is to think like a philosopher and ask “why.” The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is well known for doing this, with what we now call the Socratic method. Essentially, every time a claim is made, we can ask “why” until we get to some root cause or foundational reason. 

The Socratic method can be used to interrogate the reasons behind both our own beliefs and the beliefs of others. Another tool was developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, who would ask “why” five times in order to get to the root cause of a problem. The same can be done when trying to get to the root of someone else’s beliefs. Asking “why” of our own beliefs and those of people around us (and people who aren’t around us) is an important part of recognising the differences in our experiences, and ultimately helps to paint a clearer picture of how our values and beliefs develop. 

Be open to a broader understanding of the world

There is no doubt that we live in an increasingly polarised and divided world. Thanks to the internet, diverse and extreme views can now be easily shared, amplifying voices around the world. Often times, this creates echo chambers that shield us (and can even villainise) dissenting voices. 

On top of this, we are creatures of habit. Our social media algorithms show us things we like, we read the same news sources each morning, and we catch up with our friends, who likely have similar values to us. The ‘other perspective’ is often pushed outside of our world view and can feel distant. It’s hard to understand why someone could have such different beliefs to us. 

When I took the time to listen with the intention of understanding, I found that I had significantly more impactful and meaningful conversations. Most of my (limited) knowledge of American politics and sociology comes from a classroom, so it’s theory-based knowledge rather than knowledge grounded in experience. It’s one thing to read statistics and understand a theory in a classroom; it’s an entirely different thing to hear a personal story. 

Listening to my grandfather’s carer talk about her experiences added a level of humanity into what I had learnt in a lecture hall. As a result, I have more empathy and understanding for people who have different life stories, and therefore different perspectives from mine. Being empathetic doesn’t mean necessarily changing our views, but rather humanising and understanding the multiple ways people form their understanding of the world.  

Knowing when not to listen

I don’t want to take away from how difficult it is to really listen to someone who has fundamentally different beliefs from us. It can be emotionally draining and it requires the right headspace. It can also be harmful for individuals of marginalised identities to listen to views that discriminate against them, and be told to give those views equal consideration to non-discriminatory views. 

The Socratic method can also be useful for determining when not to listen. If a belief is founded on a discriminatory, hateful, or untrue statement, it can help to provide grounds for not listening to a person’s point of view. Philosophers sometimes think about this through the framework of intellectual virtues, or qualities in a person that promote the pursuit of truth and intellectual flourishing. These virtues (such as empathy, integrity, intellectual responsibility and love of truth) can help us to discern good from bad foundational reasons that we might find by asking why.

At the end of the day, if we’re in the right headspace and feeling ready to learn, it’s a worthwhile practice for us to learn to listen and understand the reasons why people hold different views. In turn, we can reflect on our own views, and increase our empathy for those with different world views.

Older people are often undervalued and overlooked in our society – to their detriment, and ours.

A stranger knocked on our door the other day. She was promoting a service for older people who live alone. To counter the risk of an accident or sudden illness going unnoticed, a person could sign up to have a Red Cross volunteer call them every day.

It was heart-warming and heart-breaking; wonderful that an organisation was intervening to address the frightening risk of solitary suffering, terrible that the risk was so pervasive that it warranted an organisation intervening.

I was reminded of an initiative based in Africa that I’d heard about on Maya Shanka’s podcast A Slight Change of Plans, one that wasn’t designed to help older people, but to enlist their help.

The Friendship Bench was started in Zimbabwe by psychiatrist Dr Dixon Chibanda. Its goal was to alleviate pressure on the country’s health system by training ‘grandmothers’ (respected older women in the community) to meet people with common mild-to-moderate mental health disorders at a park bench, let them talk through their problems, and help them choose just one to try and solve.

Prospective volunteers, not to mention many of Chibanda’s peers, were sceptical at first, but he didn’t just train the grandmothers—he let them train him.

As a psychiatrist, Chibanda was schooled to avoid telling his own story or being vulnerable; his volunteers taught him the key to connecting with a person and building trust was a willingness to bend this rule.

They also told him that calling the park benches where the therapy took place ‘mental health benches’ as he’d planned would create such a stigma that no one would show up. Taking their advice, he renamed them ‘friendship benches’.

Randomised control trials have since shown therapy from trained community grandmothers to be remarkably effective. Better still, the volunteers benefit richly, gaining “a profound sense of purpose and a sense of belonging” from the work. “It’s a win/win,” Chibanda told Shanka. The “grandmothers” are helping people, “but it’s helping them too”.

Chibanda says one of the things he’s learned from the Friendship Bench is just how important connection is. The therapy doesn’t really start, he says, until the moment people connect.

The scheme has since been rolled out elsewhere; Chibanda says he’d like to see friendship benches all over the world. But I suspect the barriers in places like Australia would be even greater than those faced in Africa; not because of stigma surrounding mental health, but because of stigma surrounding “the elderly”.

Chibanda says his volunteers were considered custodians of local wisdom and culture. But in more individualistic, materialistic cultures, there’s a tendency to depict older people as burdensome instead.

From useless to used

Sarah Holland-Batt’s 2020 essay Magical Thinking and the Aged-care Crisis explores this tendency. She discusses inheritance impatience, elder abuse and mandated euthanasia in dystopian fiction, then declares: “the apocalypse has already arrived for Australia’s elderly”.

“We treat older people as a separate and subhuman class, frequently viewing them as a burden on their families, the community and the state,” she writes.

Immanuel Kant argued against treating people as mere resources, but according to Holland-Batt, our aged-care industry does precisely this; it mines people for profit. If Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre was right when he said the way we treat “the very young and the very old, the sick, the injured, and the otherwise disabled” is an important indicator of a community’s flourishing, ours is falling short.

I think of the way I’ve heard Indigenous people speak about their elders—with reverence and respect; of the biblical command to honour one’s parents; of the proverb that describes grey hair as a ‘crown of glory’.

When did assuming people have nothing more to offer once they’re ‘old’ become acceptable? When did we stop treasuring the kind of wisdom that builds with experience? And how dearly has it cost us?

A closer relationship, a broader perspective

What I loved most about the Friendship Bench was the image it evoked of people from different generations sitting side by side. I loved the underlying assumption that the elderly among us still have much to offer: an offering so unique they were the key to the initiative’s success. I also loved the idea the therapy took place not under fluorescent light, but shining sun.

The fact the volunteers benefited just as much as those they were there to help did not surprise me. Who doesn’t want to put the lessons learnt over the years to use? To see somebody suffering, and help? Not all, I grant, but many—maybe most.

If only Australia’s discussions about aged care were less reactive and more proactive. If only there were less talk of problems and more of potential.

Yes, as we grow old, we grow more dependent and less capable; we cannot deny the reality of declining physical and sometimes mental functioning. But our bodies will impose enough limits without generalised assumptions based on age imposing more. I know of people in their nineties who still work as volunteers. We’re all unique; our ageing and its timing will be too. And even when age does stop us from helping, makes us start depending more, it cannot take our value, our worthiness of care, respect, and love.

The biggest game-changer I can imagine when it comes to the way our society views and treats its older members, is a rise in intergenerational connection—better still, friendship.

In some respects, our society is more connected than ever before, but not in the ways that count the most. If we want to tackle loneliness, depression and despair, this must change. We not only have to change the way we act, we must change the way we think. ‘The elderly’ need us, and we need them.

Examine what it means to age and grow older, and how this impacts all our lives. Join us for The Ethics of Being Old on Thur 24 Oct 2024 at 6:30pm. Tickets available here.

We’ve heard a lot about safe spaces recently. But there are two kinds of safe space, and one of them has been neglected for too long.

Like many universities today, new students at Western Sydney University are invited to use a range of campus facilities, such as communal kitchens, prayer rooms, parents’ rooms as well as Women’s Rooms and Queer Rooms. But there’s something that sets the latter two apart from the other facilities.  

WSU describes the Women’s Room as “a dedicated space for woman-identifying and non-binary students, staff and visitors”, saying they are provided in an effort to “provide a safe space for women on campus”. The Queer Room is described as “a safe place where all people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, or otherwise sex and/or gender diverse can relax in an accepting and inclusive environment.” The operative term in both descriptions is “safe”.  

We have heard a lot about such “safe spaces” over the past several years. Yet as the number and type of safe spaces has grown, so too has the concept of safety expanded, particularly within United States universities. Many students now expect the entire campus to effectively operate as a safe space, one where they can opt out of lectures that include subjects that could trigger past traumas, raise issues they believe are harmful or involve views they find morally objectionable. The notion of safety has also been invoked to cancel lectures on university campuses by reputable academics because some students on campus claim the talk would make them feel unsafe.  

In response, safe spaces have been criticised for shutting down open discourse about difficult or conflicted topics, particularly because such discourse has been seen as an essential part of higher education. Lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt have also argued that safe spaces coddle students by shielding them from the inevitable controversies and offences that they will face beyond university, contributing to greater levels of depression and anxiety.  

However, all of the above refers to just a single kind of safe space: one where people are safe from possible threats to their wellbeing.  

In a complex and diverse world, where people of different ethnicities, religions, political persuasions and beliefs are bound to mingle, there are good reasons to have dedicated places to where individuals can retreat, spaces where they know they will be safe from prejudice, intolerance, racism, sexism, discrimination or trauma. 

But there is another kind of safe space that is equally important: one where people are safe to express themselves authentically and engage in good faith with others around difficult, controversial and even offensive topics.  

While safe from spaces might be necessary to shield the vulnerable from harm in the short term, safe to spaces are necessary to help society engage with, and reduce, those harms in the long term.

And while much of the focus in recent years has been on creating safe from spaces, there are those who have been working hard to create more safe to spaces. 

Circle of Chairs

More than thirty years ago, philosopher and Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, Dr Simon Longstaff AO, set up a Circle of Chairs in Sydney’s Martin Place and invited passers-by to sit down and have a conversation. In doing so, he effectively created a powerful safe to space. It was so successful that this model of conversation remains at the heart of how The Ethics Centre operates to this day. 

But the success of this – similar to any other safe to space – is that his Circle of Chairs didn’t just operate according to the norms of everyday conversation, let alone the standards of online comment sections or social media feeds. In these environments, the norms of conversation make it difficult to genuinely engage with challenging or controversial ideas.  

In conversations with friends and family, we often feel great pressure to conform with the views of others, or avoid topics that are taboo or that might invite rebukes from others. In many social contexts, disagreement is seen as being impolite or the priority is to reinforce common beliefs rather than challenge them.  

In the online space, conversation is more free, but it lacks the cues that allow us to humanise those we’re speaking to, leading to greater outrage and acrimony. The threat of being attacked online causes many of us to self-censor and not share controversial views or ask challenging questions.

For a safe to space to work, it needs a different set of norms that enable people to speak, and listen, in good faith.  

These norms require us to withhold our judgement on the person speaking while allowing us to judge and criticise the content of what they’re saying. They encourage us to receive criticism of our beliefs while not regarding them as an attack on ourselves. They prompt us to engage in good faith and refrain from employing the usual rhetorical tricks that we often use to “win” arguments. These norms also demand that we be meta-rational by acknowledging the limits of our own knowledge and rationality, and require us to be open to new perspectives. 

Complementary spaces

It takes work to create safe to spaces but the rewards can be tremendous. These spaces offer blessed relief for people who all-too-often hold their tongue and refrain from expressing their authentic beliefs for fear of offence or the social repercussions of saying the “wrong thing”. They also serve to reveal the true diversity of views that exist among our peers, diversity that is often suppressed by the norms of social discourse. But, perhaps most importantly, they help us to confront difficult and important issues together. 

Crucially, safe to spaces don’t conflict with safe from spaces; they complement them. If we only had safe from spaces, then many difficult topics would go unexamined, many sources of harm and conflict would go unchallenged, new ideas would be suppressed and intellectual, social and ethical progress would suffer.  

Conversely, if we only had safe to spaces, then we wouldn’t have the refuges that many people need from the perils of the modern world; we shouldn’t expect people to have to confront difficulty, controversy or trauma in every moment of their lives.  

It is only when safe from and safe to are combined that we can both protect the vulnerable from harm without sacrificing our ability to understand and tackle the causes of harm. 

More than thirty years ago, philosopher and Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, Dr Simon Longstaff AO placed a dozen chairs in a circle in Martin Place in the centre of Sydney’s busy CBD. Next to them he put up a sign that said: “If you would like to discuss ideas with a philosopher join the circle”. 

At first, the circle attracted little more than sidelong glances from curious passers-by. But it wasn’t long before people paused to read the sign, a few of them taking up the offer to occupy one of the chairs and start a conversation. Soon the circle was full and the discussion buzzing. 

Simon discovered that many people had an unsated appetite for a different kind of conversation than the one that usually unfolded with friends, family and colleagues or, heaven forbid, online.  

This was a kind of conversation where they could open up and express their deepest beliefs and attitudes, where they could ask questions without people presuming the worst about them, where they could have their ideas challenged without feeling judged or threatened, and where they could explore a topic before making up their mind.  

Simon returned regularly to Martin Place with his circle of chairs, and each time more and more people stopped by to discuss ideas with him and the others seated around the circle. People started to come from far and wide to join in the conversation, having heard about it from friends or family. Rarely were chairs left empty.  

With his Circle of Chairs, Simon had effectively created a space where people were safe to talk about difficult and challenging subjects. What made it work was that it wasn’t just free and unregulated discourse. Simon was able to bring his skills as a philosopher to facilitate the conversation and set appropriate norms that enabled people to speak and listen in good faith in ways that are difficult to achieve in everyday conversations. 

This exercise all those years ago served as a crucial spark that led to the creation of The Ethics Centre, which still works to create safe spaces to discuss difficult and important subjects to this day. 

Welcome to the conversation

Presented by The Ethics Centre, Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) is Australia’s original disruptive festival. By holding uncomfortable ideas up to the light and challenging thinking on some of the most persevering and difficult issues of our time, FODI aims to question our deepest held beliefs and desires. 

Which is why Dr Simon Longstaff’s original vision of a Circle of Chairs is returning to this year’s FODI, in partnership with JobLink Plus. With six sessions held over the two days, we’re inviting festival goers to take up a chair and sit shoulder to shoulder with leading philosophers Dr Simon Longstaff, Dr Tim Dean and Dr Kelly Hamilton, who will be joined by special guest conversationalists to unpick some of modern life’s most dangerous ethical dilemmas. 

Will you agree with your fellow FODI attendee’s views? Pull up a chair and join or simply watch the guided conversations unfold as together we examine how we’re really feeling, thinking and doing.  

We hope to see more safe spaces opening up outside of FODI to help us all have the opportunity to share our authentic views and tackle the most challenging, and important, questions that we face today.
 

Circle of Chairs returns to Festival of Dangerous Ideas live 24-25 August 2024 at Carriageworks, Sydney. Book your free ticket to one of the sessions here. Supported by Joblink Plus.