Well, that says it all.

Tweets, status updates, blogs: we spend a lot of time voicing our message, communicating our opinions, talking to (at?) others about what we believe in - a right old case of meme warfare.

Not so much time is spent on listening.

For sure, we do listen, sometimes, but even then it’s only to some people; only to the people that we side with, our own choice victims. For feminists, women; for race activists, ethnic minorities; for capitalists, businesses; for Marxists, workers; for recovering addicts, current drug-takers; for labour voters, the vulnerable in need of public services; for conservatives, the employed who need lower taxes.

My friends, there is something painful in that, this myopia, that we only listen to the suffering we identify with – to everyone else, we preach, pontificate, even persecute, determined to being them ‘on side’, to our side. Sure, why wouldn’t they support our cause, worthy as it is? Except they’re supporting their own cause, as worthy also, as that actually is.

This is a very sad situation. A very stuck situation.

Camps of tribal affiliations, groups of equally noble causes fighting their own corner, fighting each other. I’ve often seen this: that something isn’t good enough, because it doesn’t include everything else. Conservatives are wrong, pulling back spending on public services in their pursuit of lower taxes for the employed, because they don’t speak enough about protecting the vulnerable. Labour is wrong, seeking to maintain spending on public services for the vulnerable, seeking to invest more capital in infrastructure to build houses, because they don’t speak enough about the need to reduce the deficit, to relieve the burden of debt on the next generation. A polarity thus develops, both sides declining to see the full picture: that we are no longer as well off as a society, that perhaps taxes have to either remain constant or even go up if we wish to maintain the current level of social services, and at the same time, in the face of these higher taxes, we must nevertheless accept a reduced quality of life. There simple isn’t as much to go around. Mother Earth hasn’t got as much left to give. 

Nowhere is this tribalism more evident than on Twitter, where camps of different tribes, affiliated to their own chosen values and causes, form exclusive cells with impermeable membranes.

For me, I’d much rather belong to no group. Whenever I feel myself getting subsumed into one camp or another I subvert the process by focusing on something else. I abhor affiliations - political, ideological, religious, whatever. I like to promote a diverse, sometimes conflicting array of narratives: feminism, equality, Buddhism, social welfare, the NHS, mental health, environmentalism, renewable energy, population controls, atheism, banning pornography, reformed/regulated capitalism, a non-regulated press, and nuclear decommissioning.  I buy the Observer and The Telegraph on Sundays. Both usually make good points. 

But that’s just me.

My point is that life is too complex, too complicated to foster simplistic affiliations. That’s far too close to religion, to dogma, for me. I’m a complex person, with strengths and weaknesses. I make good points sometimes, and terrible mistakes. I find it hard to see both sides of the story most of the time, but I want to try, and I have a right to try. On Twitter I’ve seen people being jumped for trying to consider an alternative view, and quite often I’ve been the one doing the jumping. I don’t like this part of me – I don’t think it’s useful, let alone humane. And I don’t like the process. It smacks of the schoolyard fight where everyone gathers round chanting ‘fight, fight, fight’. There’s an absence of human dignity in it. I want to be more patient, more at ease with difference. I want to feel less of a megalomaniac, living as I sometimes do from some bizarre, arrogant belief that I can change the world if only I say the right thing at the right time to the person I believe needs to hear what I want to say.

I can’t change the world.

So, if there’s anything I want to be able to say upon my death bed, then, it’s not that I changed the world (an impossible task!), but that I made a difference to some people, and that I tried to understand, and that I was as non-violence as I could be. To do that, I need to listen more. Maybe the last thing that I can do then, on my death bed, is listen, to those around me, and to myself, to just listen and try to understand.
When all is said and done, maybe that’s the only thing left to do, to listen and try to understand.