In Search of Civil Discourse

Randall Smith's two-part Public Discourse essay on our superficial and yet increasingly contentious civil discourse is well worth the read. His diagnosis is rich in reasoning borrowed from Alasdair MacIntyre, but even more compelling is his suggested course of remediation. He calls for a strong appreciation for "the logic of ordinary language" and the principles of classical rheteric--but also, importantly, for intellectual humility. How I wish we saw more of this across the board: 

We should want to be questioned by others, the way Socrates and his compatriots questioned one another repeatedly—about the strength of our arguments, about the ways in which we are using our words, and about our presuppositions. There is no doubt that “such waltzing is not easy,” to borrow a line from the poet Theodore Roethke. It can only be achieved by instilling in our students a love of the truth and the intellectual humility necessary for fruitful argument.

We are all limited. We all have presuppositions, many of them unexamined. And we can rarely predict the full scope of the consequences any of our proposals will have. This is why engaging with others is not only helpful, it is essential. And yet, to engage with others fruitfully, we cannot begin by dismissing them as unworthy of our rational attention.

We would be better off recognizing that what so often happens with all our proposals, no matter which side of the ideological divide we are on, is that we see clearly the good we want to achieve. What we don’t see as clearly, given the finite character of human imagination and our inability to see all the consequences of our actions, are the trade-offs and unintended consequences we don’t intend. This is where our intellectual sparring partners could do us a great service, if we let them, and if we could approach each other in good will. They may see precisely the problems that our own elaborate intellectual constructions are hiding from us.

So instead of merely “unmasking” the “hypocrisy” of others, what we should be cultivating self-awareness about are the potential weaknesses and limitations of our own proposals. This sort of humility differs from the moral relativism that tries to insist my position is no better or more true than anyone else’s. That attitude merely exacerbates the postmodern obsession with unmasking....

I often wonder at people who set up a straw man only to knock it over and then declare victory. How much better to have faced your opponent at his strongest and to have convinced him by the wisdom of your arguments and your witness to the truth of your position. It is perhaps better still to have learned from him the places where your own argument was weak. Best of all would be for both to have guided one another a step closer to the truth of things.

And then this on compromise: 

“Compromise” need not be a dirty word. It should involve the effort to search out what are the deepest and most important goods that one’s opponent is seeking. Compromise can be the art of seeing whether the goods that my opponent is seeking and the goods I am seeking can be reconciled and preserved, if not fully, then at least partially...

He concludes: 

If we want things like “peace” and “justice,” then these words had better stop being mere slogans we use to beat our opponents over the head with. “Peace” and “justice” begin with us and how we treat our opponents. To find them, we must achieve what the poet Wilfred Owen called “the tenderness of patient minds,” and resolve to listen carefully, judge fairly, and speak charitably,especially about those with whom we disagree.

I couldn't agree more.