The first of an exploration on why public moral discourse is Just So Hard. Due to upcoming travels and commitments, I’ll be taking a two week hiatus until later this month, but maybe with some treats and surprises before then?
The Ugly Death of Deliberation
It’s commonplace to say that our discussions of moral questions is polarized, and nearly paralyzing kinds of ways: feelings and ideological talking points make nearly impossible any true public debate or public enactment of shared moral principles. I’m uninterested in teasing out the roots for this particular phenomenon right now, except to say that—however it has happened materially—public ethics is mostly dying.
Here’s what I mean:
Moral reasoning is the process of offering evidence, coming to conclusions, revising these in light of arguments, and offering counter-arguments.
But this is not what happens in most public situations. Describing moral argumentation like this doesn’t depend on it being some version of procedural liberalism, where everyone acts polite about inhuman things and takes seriously obscene arguments. But moral argument, in nearly every iteration, takes some version of this seriously: we are in pursuit of truthfulness and enacting that truthfulness in the world, and offering reasons for why we think and act so.
This is part of how Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail works, how Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Bentham’s Utilitarianism move around. It’s in the moral suasion of Desmond Tutu, the historical descriptions of W.E.B. DuBois, the smoldering umbrage of the Communist Manifesto. It’s the Socratic dialogues, Jesus with the Pharisees, Paul pleading with the Corinthians. It’s so soaked into the bones of moral discourse that it’s impossible to evade: to make a moral argument is to make it on the basis of evidence, reasoning from presuppositions, to try to persuade your audience, and to be willing to walk back a wrong argument if convinced.
This last portion—being willing to walk back a wrong argument—requires more than a little commitment to the good being more important than winning. But, as I’ll tease out in a moment, this is essential to public ethics having a future, for any people in a shared space being able to talk about hard things.
Of course, this can go sideways in all kinds of ways: one group can have more social power and destroy the ability of another group to speak, or the rhetoric of one group can be so overwhelming to an audience incapable of sorting out good arguments from bad ones that arguments lose their moorings. All of these examples above assumed that their audience not only had the desire to sort out truthfulness from falsehood, but were capable of sniffing out a crappy argument from a good one, of knowing when a conclusion didn’t follow from a premise.
So, at some level, being able to have public moral arguments assumes that we are first people capable of having good arguments, and this may not be the case any more.1 And so, now public ethics now no longer takes the form of arguments, and more the form of assertion, a contest of pure will rather than a tussle designed to win the opponents, and with them, a shared world.
What I mean is this: when moral argument dies, our public moral speech takes the form of assertive conclusions, such that defending these takes the form of ideological speech, that the conclusions are in need of more refined implementation, but not that the conclusions themselves are wrong. And so, the demands never come just a certain outcome, but as a direct plan for implementation, and so the whole program of speech comes as a take-it-or-leave-it package, a bundled load of slogans and answers which cannot be disentangled. At best, it comes with bullet points, but at worst, just bullets.
Protest and the Rebirth of Public Moral Discourse
Is the whole thing dead? Should we just bury public discussions of moral goods altogether as unworkable?
With what I’ve said above, it seems counter-intuitive to say, then, that protest might be the way forward still, that maybe protests are just demands, but arguments. But bear with me:
Protests are never comprised by pure ideological blocks, but by people with shared ends. As I’ve described this with respect to church communities, protests are best understood as crowds—groups with a common goal or binding purpose that it out in front of them. Protest members might disagree on innumerable things, and frequently do! Within the SNCC, the backbone of the early Civil Rights Movement, they disagreed on lots of policies and finally, on the role of nonviolence, but for a long while, their shared commitments to nonviolence and equal rights held them together.
But in order to have shared ends, they have to hash out—or at least be willing to abide—differences on means and lots of subsidiary goals. Their futures might be different, but right now, they coalesce, and hopefully will continue coalescing for some time to come. And so, behind the scenes of what appears to be a hegemonic front, something much more subtle is happening: forebearance and forgiveness.
Behind the unified front of a public demand, there is a lot of negotiating, disagreement, and continued commitment. This is not absolute and does not always persist, but the point is this: do not be fooled by the unified front of any movement which seems unreasonable to you, because buried within it, making it tick, is an unwieldy network of communication born out of bearing with people who disagree with one another.
What frequently does not happen in the clash of ideals—the possibility of walking back an argument—does happen within shared coalitions. Sometimes, it’s done for purely pragmatic and nefarious reasons, but in order for these to hang together, there is more than a little willingness internally to disagree. And the trick is then this: to extend this presumption to strangers and enemies.
It is to this that we will turn next.
Personal Note: It’s been bonkers since January. I’ve traveled to speak in Little Rock, Beaumont, Austin, and as of next week, Gainesville, FL, on top of all the normal stuff. And baseball season is starting for the kids.
Reading: the first in the series of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Been listening to the last of the published Louise Penny Inspector Gamache books while driving. Class prep materials for an intensive class on Christian community, including Ivan Illich, Christine Pohl, some articles and books by friends, and other treats.
At least not now? Maybe in the future? “Any longer” sounds so determined, and I just don’t think history is determined like that.