I don’t make many posts that are primarily about other people’s writing, but I read three things recently I thought worth pointing out. All are related to one of my pet projects: improving civil discourse.
The first is from one of my favorite philosophical jurisprudence scholars. Jethro Lieberman has a great book, Liberalism Undressed, defending a view of the liberal state as dedicated to the harm principle. (I admire it, but disagree with a lot of it.) He has been working on the offense principle for quite a while and has a blog dedicated to it. In a recent post, he takes issue with the overly-PC concern with the use of the word “stand.” See that post here, at Taking Offense. One might wonder if civil discourse is possible if people can’t agree that it’s ok to say “Those who stand for nothing fall for everything” (attributed to Alexander Hamilton). The use of such words may be unfortunate in some ways, but they are nonetheless likely to be too useful to give up using altogether. In any case, my view is that we should be willing to engage with each other even about such topics—that is, if you think some topic or a particular word can’t be used in civil discourse, we need to be able to engage in civil discourse about that!
The second piece is from Lauren Hall, over at The Radical Moderate’s Guide to Life. She discusses a controversy in her small town that made national news. It’s about a Drag Queen Story Hour, where some trans folks read to kids. Lauren is fine with that, as am I. And she and I both oppose the way this particular story hour was stopped. She wonders, nonetheless, about the wisdom of having a “drag king … [who] goes by a stage name that is both a play on words about mental illness and genitalia at the same time” reading to the kids. Perhaps it is OK, but if you are going to promote such an event, it seems unreasonable to expect no opposition. Still, one would hope that both sides—and anyone interested—could engage in civil discourse about the topic. Better that then shutting it down.
A final piece is this recent Washington Post article, in which Amanda Ripley explains how one temporary Congressional Committee was able to be productive. The key? Genuinely connecting with each other. Part of the reason Washington has gotten as polarized as it is, is that members of the Duopoly parties don’t have as many opportunities to really engage each other as they had in the past. Before the so-called “Gingrich Revolution,” members of the House and Senate from both parties would meet together at social events that were often paid for or subsidized by tax dollars. That was an easy thing to attack—”why are we taxpayers footing the bill for these lavish parties?” But those parties gave our legislators the chance to get to know each other and people that know each other rarely think evil of each other—that is, polarization is less likely when opponents meet face to face and talk. Stop that face to face interaction between parties, and the members of each party push themselves to extremes. And here we are.
In a nutshell: we need to engage in civil discourse about the words people find controversial, the activities they find controversial, and the governmental practices and policies they find controversial (perhaps even those no one finds controversial!).