Public Moral Debate is Dying: Being Anti-Polite

Toward Conclusions About Public Moral Debate, Pt. 1

For the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring how public debates over moral matters have become so entrenched, and now, it is time to begin offering a sketch of a better way forward. In this installment we consider the starting point: to have a better public moral debate as Christians, we have to learn how to better fight with our friends.

(Also, stay for an opportunity at the end).

What Bono and I Share in Common Aside from Short Stature

Holy Saturday for me has never been a day of reflection. I have never taken it as a day for sober introspection or sublime meditation. On the one day of the year when we can truly say “God is dead and we have killed him”, I typically opt to do domestic work and feel the gloom settle in over the one evening each year when Jesus is not alive.

This year, as we worked in the yard, shredding leaves and digging out monkey grass, I listened to the last hours of Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono. I’ve listened to most of their catalog repeatedly, but Reader, I was nearly brought to tears several times in listening to the Irish tenor describe over and over again the intersection of faith and music.

It was the reminiscences of an older man threading together being in one of the most popular bands in the 20th century while also being a self-professed follower of Jesus. It got a little long when he talked about his various nonprofit activities, but on the whole was worth every bit of it, particularly for how he threads together, his devotion and prayer and love of Scripture with his life.

I did not see it coming.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether a 20-plus hour audiobook is your thing, but having him read the whole thing made it, quite honestly, one of the most enjoyable audio experiences of my life.

With an a musical biography, there’s always an element of stuff the fans want to know about how an album came together. But more frequently, what I enjoy about these kinds of works, are their attention to ordinary things like their friends, whose names you’ve never heard, but who have meant the world to them: the way he talks about his own enduring relationships with his wife, his bandmates, his childhood friends.

They are less instrumental points of goodness than objects of affection, and he’s keenly aware of the ways in which we our love can become idolatrous and unshakable in bad ways, particularly if we’re unable to tell the people we love what we think, or more significantly, who we are.

This Spring, I’ve travelled all across the country talking about my book From Isolation to Community, and took some of the opportunities that I did because they put me in places where I could see people that I loved. Dinner with Brandon in Jacksonville; coffee with Kester in Austin; time with Chris and Andy and Preston in Little Rock; former students and classmates in Dallas and Beaumont. It opened up the chance to spend time with new friends like Michael and Steve, to have time with kindred spirits. The joy of writing a book that people want to talk about is that it enables time and connection with people that I love and want to be with.

What this time exposed in me was the way in which I lack this so frequently. My life is far less busy than one like Bono, whose travels both as a musician and activist have taken him across the globe, but still, we live compacted lives capable of offering plenty of space for alliances but little time for friendship. There are plenty of chances to network or to create allies, but this is different than those non-instrumental relationships through which we enjoy the presence of another person and who we shuttle toward the goodness of God in our lives together. Friends offer us nothing of use and everything of enjoyment, particularly when our enjoyment pushes us both toward the good we are meant for.

As I shredded leaves this weekend, I listened to Bono talk effortlessly not about music, but about his friends. And God. And more than once, I found myself close to tears, both for gratitude of my own and the distance from them.

I did not see it coming.

What We Don’t Owe to Each Other: The Anti-Politeness of Friendship

The great gift that has come to me these last three years is a lack of fear about most things: unemployment, the loss of a career, caring about the prestige of the academy. When you’ve lost these things once, you realize they’re not all that great, and that there’s so many things more important than success. It has produced in me, I think, a greater capacity for saying what I think, and in the process, caring more about the future of students than the future of institutions.¹

But to my surprise, I find myself more interested in how this newfound backbone pertains not to speaking prophetically² to society, but in how this has made me more able to say what I think to those that I care about, to have more difficult disagreements, because what is being disagreed about matters.

This, I think, is a harder skill, in that much of the prophetic discourse assumes "speaking truth to power", when "power" is "not my people." It's harder to countenance this when this is people that you want to be with, in that telling someone you love that they're wrong takes on not only new costs, but less certainty with respect to one's own ability to say it. The friend, after all, is one who sees the same good as you, and so, saying that they're wrong is to also impugn your own vision as well.

In listening to Bono describe his own relationships, the friendships which have given him staying power for six decades, I was struck by how this loss of fear is precisely what makes friendships possible. His story, for the last five decades, has been not only one of music but of political activism, a venture built not on shared goals, but on trust in those you’re sharing those goals with. In many ways, his own communication style belongs to a less polarized age: he speaks of creating friendships over political divides and building consensus among political camps incapable of agreeing. But in learning to say what he thinks, and to reveal to others who he is in those commitments, Bono became more able to help hold together large coalitions.

It is one thing to talk about building consensus with one’s enemies, which Bono talks about amply. But what Bono describes here—the work of consensus—requires more candor among friends that can become more fraught. For disagreement among one’s enemies can reinforce distance, but disagreement among friends, among those who are supposed to already share your priors about the world.

In thinking about this more open form of communication, I am reminded of what is given by the resurrection of Christ, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, is an ethics of speech which is what can call anti-polite. It is a form of speech which ultimately seeks friendship, while committed first to that which makes our speech possible.

In naming this kind of speech, as anti-polite, I’m trying to carve out a space between politeness and rudeness. To be polite is to operate indifference to the norms, and to inhabit the hospitality of another person, and to be rude is to be presumptuous about one’s position within that hospitality. But to be anti-polite is to recognize that you are being mutually hospitable in the intent of building up each other. It is being willing to endure friction for the sake of some thing better, and to have that friction as a productive part of a relationship.³

In his book, Desire of Nations, an exploration of church within civic society, he writes that

the church created by the act of God at Pentecost was characterised by freedom of address — to God in its prayer, and from God in its prophecy.

For us to have an account of what it means to speak in public on moral questions means that we first have to begin with what makes speech possible at all as Christians: the God who opens our mouths that we might offer praise, prayer, and prophecy.

To do all three of those tasks will mean that there will be times that our speech with our friends will run alongside each other (praise), will run toward each other in affirmation (prayer), and will also run against one another (prophecy). The Christian discourse unable to do all three of these, unable to offer all three of these to the world will only antagonize the world without being able to invite it into its own healing. But the Christian discourse unable to do all three of these with its friends will produce false unity when there is disagreement. The ability to only pray and praise with one another, but never to prophecy, will mean that we can have friendship, or concern for moral matters, but not both.

The Anti-Polite Discourse: Ordered Toward Love

To engage in anti-polite discourse is not to be looking for a fight, but to keep in view why we argue about moral matters to begin with: that the love that moves the stars desires that we might be capable of knowing that love as well. The moral life is not about constructing the perfected world, but about being changed that we might live into a life together with God.

The moral life then, as the parable goes, is not only coming into the wedding feast prepared for us since the beginning of the world, but come in with proper wedding clothes on. We cannot come in on our own terms, but in those terms which have been set down before us. If we are to have speech with one another which offers not only praise and prayer, but prophecy as well, then it must be in service to this aim: that we would all be seated at the table fully dressed.

Such speech will not be concerned with politeness, but neither will it be abrupt and caustic as a kind of performative prophetic mode, unhooked from any other end than simply being “prophetic”. Our speech, if it is anti-polite, has in view the good of the person we disagree with, that our minds, our affections, and our behaviors might be fully clothed.

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1. Yes, yes: point granted. These are arbitrary counterpoints, in that education takes place in and through institutions which make them possible. I’m also aware, far more than most administrators, that the actual infrastructure making good education possible is very inexpensive. In the humanities, all we need is a white board, a dry-erase marker and some books. So, while the institutions help facilitate education, frequently, the institutions have an overinflated sense of necessity.

2. This is a term which gets tossed around all the time, and I’m still not at all sure what is meant by it. To “speak prophetically” most of the time means something like this: standing up for a righteous cause that everyone already agrees with in the setting of our speaking. But to be a prophet among your own house, which will gain you no friends and possibly cause the loss of some friends, is the much harder thing.

3. I am riffing here on Nicolas Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility, from his book Antifragile. In that work, he positions, anti-fragility, as a kind of resilience, between fragility and durability: the former is endlessly breakable, and the latter resist any breakage at all, while anti-fragility recognizes that stress, and the risk of break ability are part of what make for a healthier life.