Listen generously is enough?

I grew up in a culture where humbleness is valued. So one of the important ideas of humbleness is to listen to others carefully and no matter you think the speaker is right or wrong, you should still listen because you can always learn something from anyone. This actually agrees with Benjamin's point in his Project on Moral Perfection. Yet even for me who is from such a culture, I find it hard to follow the principle. Sometimes I can't control myself from judging others before listening to them and thus prejudice pops out of my mind. But even in the cases I follow the principle when it is clear in my mind, I find that listen generously should be treated with care. We listen generously but take the words carefully.

After all, we live in the world full of information, from TV, radio, Internet, newspaper.... We are receiving it in a rate much much higher than the past. First of all, to be honest, the information has several kinds: some is real and authentic, the rest is fake, is fabricated or still needs proving. If we listen generously to all these kinds of information, we will loose ourselves. What is real? We don't know until we take time to judge the information. Secondly, true or false is not enough. We still need to find out what information is useful and relevant to our life or our topic. Some true information that seems to be what we need, is in fact a distraction. Recall how Picasso drew a abstract bull. Are the muscles and furs true? Yes they are. And they make most parts of the bull. But in Picasso's eye, to depict a bull, the skeleton is the core information.

Listen generously is the a good start. To make what we learn from listening truly useful to us, we have one more step: judge the information carefully.

Listen generously is enough?