People freely acknowledge that they want to listen better. Listening well, they admit, can be a huge challenge. They have heard the complaints of their partners and friends: You miss my real point! You seek only to fix my problem! You don’t seem to hear or acknowledge my feelings. These are real barriers. But there is another obstacle that derails or overheats many of our conversations: moral certainty.
We experience it in our private lives. And with dispiriting regularity, we hear it in the public arena: one voice with ironclad moral certainty arguing fiercely with an equally strident and equally certain opposing voice. So many important issues that seem deadlocked in hostility; so many people with opposing positions, sometimes espousing hatred and violence.
In a recent radio story, a local man related his efforts to help a few homeless people living in tents near his neighborhood. Passing the encampment on his commute to and from work, he began to meet and speak with some of the unhoused men and women about their day-to-day hardships. A common theme emerged: the lack of bathrooms. With no nearby accommodations, people resorted to squatting in the bushes, a practice that they found unsanitary, unsafe, and undignified.
The man got the idea of supplying materials for a camp toilet: an army surplus tent, toilet paper and sanitizer, cat litter, and a five-gallon bucket with a seat. The idea caught on, and over time he has delivered more than 75 of these toilet kits to encampments in the Seattle region.
What struck me about his account—a tech worker with an idea and a desire to help—was not so much his action as his frame of mind. As he pursued his project, he encountered neighbors and friends who objected to his do-good gestures. “You aren’t really helping; you’re just contributing to the problem,” they complained. They contended that he was actually doing harm by enabling the unsheltered families and individuals to continue in an unstable and unhealthy way of living.
His reply has stayed with me: “This has become my mantra: ‘If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.’” He was not insisting that he was clearly right; he was contending that the problem becomes more complex as you get in deeper. Certainty becomes difficult or impossible.
It’s a notion that I have encountered again and again in my life and work as a professional listener. “If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.” Being with people in their moral dilemmas, accompanying them as they “get in deeper,” generally means one of two things: in many cases we discover that they are uncomfortable with moral certainties (their own or others’); other times, their discomfort lies in their experience of moral uncertainty—and our conversations often reveal that this unsettled state of mind is actually more faithful to the complexity of the issue than a wished-for moral certainty might be.
Listening well is a challenge in all our lives. The health and growth of our relationships depend on it. Can we recognize and suspend our moral certainties in the interest of listening and relating? Can we go deeper into the complexity of morally difficult problems that face us as persons, families, and communities? Can we let go of certainty as the goal—striving instead for some measure of personal clarity about moral issues that is rooted in a recognition of their complexity? That appears to be one of the critical challenges of this time and place.