Problems and Struggles

“So Socrates!” he teased, “you are still saying the same things I heard you say long ago.” Socrates replied: “It is more terrifying than that: not only am I always saying the same things, but also about the same things.”                   Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV.4.6                           (translated by Jonathan Lear) In the plenitude of discouragements that is contemporary history, the one that perhaps stings me the most is my increasing despair about the possibility of persuasion. Who changes their mind anymore? What is the difference between an open society that is intellectually petrified and a closed society? In a democratic society, which governs itself by exchanges and tabulations of opinion, surely the first requirement of meaningful citizenship is receptivity. Thoughtlessness is a betrayal of democracy. Mill said that democracy is “government by discussion.” The purpose of discussion is to test the merit of opinions with the presumption that one may convince others, or become convinced by others, of new views. One of the quintessential experiences of democratic life is to admit that one is wrong. In debates about large principles and large programs, everybody cannot be right, and sometimes not even a little right; and in a liberal order the adjudication of contradictions is accomplished not by guns but by arguments. Or so we like to tell ourselves. But the degrading spectacle of what passes for public debate in America has shaken my hoary faith in the dependability of argument. Is social media a discussion? Is a shriek an argument? Where is the reasoned deliberation that Milton and Madison and Mill regarded as the foundation of a decent polity? They intuited that the road from unreason to indecency is not long, and we are diabolically confirming their intuition. We have made “public reason” into an oxymoron. We are drowning in discursive garbage. Even the people who believe in persuasion seem to persuade only each other. They are just another American community of the elect — the mild and articulate sect of the arguers. Many observers have noticed this intellectual crack-up. They suggest a host of solutions. We must keep our minds open. We must listen more carefully. We must respect each other. We must be reasonable, and even rational. We must identify our biases and correct for them. We must bring evidence. We must lower the temperature. We must enhance our capacity for empathy. We must connect with each other, and with the Other. We must practice epistemic humility. These homilies are everywhere, and all the preaching is true. We should indeed do all these noble and necessary things. These are the traits of a democratic individual. But is it not time to notice the futility of this wisdom in present-day America? Nobody seems to be hearing that we should listen. These exhortations leave almost no trace on our public life, which gets insistently dumber and nastier. They have become a sad and lovely genre of their own, a journalistic counterpoint of urgent but soothing platitudes. They may be accomplishing nothing more than providing solace and companionship for those who utter them. I have uttered many of them myself, and I stand by them. They are the only answers. But I am beginning to feel a little foolish, and disconnected, and marginal; I do not feel sufficiently helpful.          To some extent, of course, it was ever thus. There never was a time when Madisonian graciousness ruled our politics. Philadelphia in 1787 and Illinois in 1858 were epiphanies, not norms. Indeed, the promiscuity of the nineteenth-century American press can make social media seem redundant, in its slanders and its outrages. The manipulability of public opinion has always been a primary assumption of American politics and its cunning practitioners. Was there ever a medium of communication that was inhospitable to zeal, or that turned its back on lies? Have fanatics and extremists ever been at a loss for instruments of influence? There is some consolation to be had, I suppose, from this long history of what ails us. We are not the first to have fallen short of our discursive ideals. Moreover, it is good that people stick up for what they believe. Intellectual stubbornness is in its way a mark of

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