17AR22-45

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AR 22:45 - Reviving the dying art of disagreement

In this issue:

APOLOGETICS - "the disagreements we need to have - and to have vigorously - have been banished from the public square"

Apologia Report 22:45 (1,365)

December 13, 2017

APOLOGETICS

"The Dying Art of Disagreement" by Bret Stephens -- good secular advice for how to "disagree agreeably" with respect and grace. Warning: It isn't easy. In fact, it is about as easy as creating a good apologetic, and often even more significant.

Stephens joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist writing about foreign policy and domestic politics in April 2017, after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial-page editor and, for 11 years, foreign-affairs columnist. His text here is a lecture delivered at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney, Australia, on September 23. The award recognizes excellence in Australian foreign affairs journalism.

For Stephens, agreeing "may be the basis of every community." And, on the other hand, "I disagree," he adds, "are ... words that define our individuality. ...

"Americans have rarely disagreed more [than] in recent decades. ...

"Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation's welfare. ...

"Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds." Stephens refers to Allan Bloom, who in 1987 "published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called The Closing of the American Mind." [1] And it led him to college and the reading of great books. In college: "What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn't a 'teaching' with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

"To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind - this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

"It's what used to be called a liberal education.

"The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea. ...

"These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

"Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

"In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of [the] doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

"The Closing of the American Mind took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called 'Dead White European Males' of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation. ...

"For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can't simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.

"That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you've followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.

"According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today - fully 44 percent - do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called 'hate speech,' when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students - 51 percent - think it is 'acceptable' for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it's acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. ...

"In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our 'safe space.' But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind - a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

"Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn't treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

"The result is that the disagreements we need to have - and to have vigorously - are banished from the public square before they're settled. ...

"Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person - or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies. ...

"The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement - namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak - is absent. ...

"Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the 'Fairness Doctrine,' mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free, whether or not it's fair. ...

"I believe it is still possible - and all the more necessary - for journalism to perform these functions, especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen short. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who's in trouble.

"Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

"This is journalism in defense of liberalism, not liberal in the left-wing American or right-wing Australian sense, but liberal in its belief that the individual is more than just an identity, and that free men and women do not need to be protected from discomfiting ideas and unpopular arguments. More than ever, they need to be exposed to them, so that we may revive the arts of disagreement that are the best foundation of intelligent democratic life." New York Times, Sep 24 '17 <www.goo.gl/VfKJX2>

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, by Allan Bloom (Simon & Schuster, 2012, paperback, 400 pages) <www.goo.gl/p7rS8A>

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