Curiosity in Feral Times. An Invitation to Generous Listening by Hakan Altinay

In a thought piece to take along during your summer break Hakan Altinay invites us to be curious again. It might help us to make “room for care, camaraderie, community and -dare I say- love”. Hakan Altinay is Professor of the Practice at Tufts University in the United States, and the director of the European School of Politics in Turkey. 

US Presidents were frequently called the leader of the free world throughout the Cold War. The current US President, on the other hand, promised in his recent State of the Union address to forge “the most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this earth.” If he gets his way, the rest of us have to be ready to be dominated as we have never been before. A Trump contemporary who demonstrates that one’s reach can easily exceed one’s grasp, Elon Musk, had opined “we will coup whoever we want! Deal with it” in response to popular queries about his involvement with a coup in Latin America. Suddenly the observation that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ no longer sounds like a quaint norm from a distant and feral age, but an abominable new normal. If you are inclined to think that this is somehow unique to the United States, you may wish to recall nobody today doubts that the leader of Saudi Arabia ordered the dismemberment of a dissident journalist into a dozen pieces in his diplomatic mission, and yet nobody shirks from shaking his hand and conducting business with him.

Being disgusted, feeling infuriated, experiencing despair -as well as seeking refuge- are all real, legitimate, and very human responses to this feral state of affairs. I, on the other hand, wonder whether insisting on curiosity should be given a chance.

When our ancestors lived in the African savannah, they had to be conscious of any movement in the bush, as a lethal danger may lurk behind that grass. Curiosity was a luxury, and anxiety was essential. 100,000 years later, the current feral times are a result of our existing normative frameworks failing, and they sharpen our sense of anxiety. Our normative frameworks feel less effective because they are less binding. In all European languages, the etymology for conscience points to knowing together (con+science). We increasingly live in separate worlds, face diverse predicaments. As such, our camaraderie -a derivative from the Latin word for space, camara– weakens along with our capacity to know together.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that what we owe to each other by virtue of sharing a planet, first and foremost, is curiosity. Without curiosity and the continuous contemporaneous knowing that curiosity enables, we are not likely to distill and sustain any normative framework worth its name, and anomie will become the norm.

We also know that curiosity is costly. It demands large cognitive bandwidth. Asking for curiosity from everyone and all the time is no small ask. The crucial question then becomes whether we have any aids or tricks in our collective know-how to negotiate this uphill task and to ease this tension, and I believe we have some:

Erasmus, on whose name we now have a large student exchange program initially piloted by the European Cultural Foundation, chose to translate the opening sentence of the Bible as “In the beginning was the conversation (sermo and not verbum) and conversation was God” This choice is seminal. Conversation has also been described as a communion, an activity which eases boundaries, erases distinctions, and leads to a higher insight. Integral to a good conversation is listening well. Benedictine monks, as well as Muslim Sufis and Taoists, have a telling description of listening well: listen with your heart’s ear. The phrase seems to suggest that listening may evolve something other than the ear, and may require a specific intentionality, namely an intention to understand your peer rather that the urge to respond swiftly and forcefully. This type of listening has been called generous listening.

We have been running a School of Politics in Istanbul for over 10 years, based on the premise and the promise of a good conversation. We prioritize curiosity and conversation over indignation and debate. The results are phenomenal. People coming from very diverse backgrounds discover that a good faith conversation, giving your peers the benefit of the doubt is deeply redeeming and highly consequential. Our lessons learned from the European School of Politics is the need for -and the potential of- providing young generations the space to discover their contemporaries. Research shows that we are under-social; we find encounters much more pleasing than we originally anticipated; and, that being and feeling heeded makes you much more prone to listen well. In other words, there is a huge untapped resource in engaging each other.

The world of arts and culture also have vital pointers for us: James Baldwin argued that the role of the arts was to lay bare the questions obscured by the answers. Rilke, similarly, advised us to live the questions rather than settling for premature answers…his conviction was that if we lived the questions long enough, and sustained our curiosity, answers will materialize in due course. Picasso chose to argue that art tells lies to tell the truth. After all, Rodin used the hardest and the coldest of all materials, marble, to depict the softness and permeability of touch and being, like no one before him. As such, Rodin told a lie to depict a fundamental truth.

Parker Palmer, himself no stranger to despair, observes that we show up and check in not because we underestimate how feral the world is, but because we also sense its hidden wholeness and the possible bliss. Maria Popova describes Palmer-type people as those “who alchemize suffering and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.” If we are to overcome the feral route, we will need to err on the side of sustained curiosity…we will do this not because it is easy but we cannot not do it. We will need to re-enrich our overly pasteurized discourse and outlook, and make room for care, camaraderie, community and -dare I say- love. We all were beneficiaries of cathedral projects started and completed before us, and time will tell whether we are a worthy peer to those who came before us. It is often said -sadly without an actual reference- that when Jean Monnet was asked whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about the European project, he responded that he was neither optimistic nor pessimistic…he was, rather, busy. The non-feral option needs us to be busy. We are both the problem and the solution, and that is good news.