civil conversation

I was impressed by the colloquy between David Brooks and E.J Dionne yesterday on NPR. Usually their job is to squabble, albeit in a slightly tonier way than is typical of most other paired media pundits. Brooks in particular strove this time to hit a higher mark of reflection, in the moment of opportunity for a New Civility in our public discourse he thinks the Tucson aftermath affords:

…the most important thing [is] acknowledging your own weakness. I need E.J. because I don’t have 100 percent of the truth. I may have 60 percent, he may have 40, but, you know… we need each other to balance each other out and we need the conversation. Without that conversation, we really have nothing. And so that’s why we need civility because individually each of us are weak.

Dionne then cited the theologian/philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, from (improbably enough) Wright City, Missouri, just down the road from my own boyhood home. “We must see the error in our own truth and the truth in our opponent’s error.”

Brooks had earlier quoted Niebuhr in his Times column:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. … Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

It’s a fine sentiment, if overstated. (Surely there are many worthwhile things each of us can hope to achieve in our brief time on Earth.) It reminds me of John Dewey’s statement about the continuous human community.

[Interesting, btw, to see Brooks invoking a theologian/philosopher. In the current New Yorker (“Social Animal,” Jan. 17) he writes: “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” But maybe his point is that the present generation is lacking in wise theologian/philosophers?]

The very next line from Niebuhr, not quoted by the pundits, deserves equal time. It’s from The Irony of American History, which one of my Intellectual History profs had us Mizzou undergrads read back in the ’70s.

The irony of America’s quest for happiness lies in the fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life “comfortable,” only finally to run into larger incongruities of human destiny by the same achievements by which it escaped the smaller ones.

We have a higher destiny on Earth. Niebuhr and Dewey disagreed about whether we have one higher still, but never mind. The point to ponder here is that we’ve got to be kinder and more receptive to one another. We’ve got to have a civil conversation about how to do it.

Appiahn Way

(Not to be confused with the old Roman Road, though both– for better or worse– facilitate human connection…)

One of my favorite reads last summer was K. Anthony Appiah’s Cosmpolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. (He’s on my mind this morning because he has a gray box blurb in our next Intro chapter on sex, race, and multiculturalism.)

Appiah is another non-caucasian philosopher (like his former Princeton colleague Cornel West) everyone should read, especially in the Age of Obama. He too is a multi-cultural hybrid– I really wish Obama had not called himself a “mutt”– with an African Dad.  Like West, he’s also conversant with and congenial to the classic American philosophical tradition of James and Dewey. The spotlight in Cosmpolitanism is on the perennial pragmatic theme of pluralism. Lately, Appiah has been pushing the incipient “experimental philosophy” (or X-phi) movement.

Cosmopolitanism (which Appiah traces to the Cynics, though Socrates may have beat them to it)  means being a citizen of the world, not just of your neighborhood, community, tribe, nation, or gender, ethnicity, race, religion et al. It’s about transcending those particular personal markers without denying their importance in creating your identity. (Maybe that’s what John Rawls was really after, with his “original position” and “veil of ignorance.”)

Appiah’s “Way” is conversation:

Your conception of cosmopolitanism — being “citizens of the world” — emphasizes conversation. How do we learn to have such conversations and how do they happen?

I think that, for educated people, the beginnings of conversations across boundaries of identity — whether it be national,religious or something else — come with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. So I’m using the word “conversation” not only for literal talk, but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here — and the role of the sorts of encounters that are central to the humanities — because it’s crucial, I think, that these encounters be undertaken not just because they make it more likely that we can live together in peace, but because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves.

And that’s another element of the metaphor of conversation: Conversation allows us to understand others, teaches us things, but it’s also a pleasure. If you try to persuade people to engage in conversation across societies as a kind of necessary drudgery, they won’t take it up in the right spirit — they probably won’t take it up at all. So cosmopolitanism, in short, has to be defended as a delight, not as a duty.

In this excellent talk, listen for the references to Adam Smith and the invidious comparison between a pained finger and the large-scale loss of human life– that’s where his pal David Hume got it– and to Balzac’s”Box” prequel. Also, interesting thoughts on utilitarianism and Peter Singer.