Snippets From Township and Village -- “in these uncertain times”

It will be August in only one week! Cherry harvest is underway. Nursery stock has begun to go on sale. In the wild, chicory and Queen Anne’s-lace are joined by spotted knapweed, that invader of Leelanau hills and fields that is, however, not despised by bees. No big festivals this year, nor small ones, either. Even the Thursday Evening Author series at Dog Ears Books is not taking place in this strange summer of 2020. We do, thank heaven, have farmers market in Northport on Friday mornings, something to anticipate eagerly all week long.

Northport marina parking lot on Monday morning

Farmers market. on Friday morning

My bookstore is open Tuesdays through Saturdays. “You’re risking your life to sell books,” one local customer friend remarked yesterday in mild tones. Was he chiding me? Expressing gratitude? Did he feel his life was in danger when he came in to buy a local author’s memoir? I don’t know. These days, with all of us concentrating on wearing our masks properly, sanitizing our hands, maintaining correct social distance, and conducting business transactions as expeditiously as possible, I don’t get into many deep discussions in my bookstore.

Bruce Catton: Civil War books

My customers, however, continue to be cooperative and pleasant. They appreciate being allowed again into bookstores and libraries. And we readers are reading a lot these days, more than ever. I’m finally reading one of Bruce Catton’s books on the Civil War. 

…During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices—made the debaters should more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation. - Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury

Long a fan of Catton’s memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, and his Michigan: A Bicentennial History, until now I have avoided his multivolume Civil War works, because, open almost any book on the Civil War and you are confronted with more dates and battles than you can shake a bayonet at. Officers are continually changing rank and assignment, troop movements are given in what a friend called, years ago, “penetrating and remorseless detail.” (The friend was talking about something else, but his instantly memorable phrase entered our household memory bank then and there, to be pulled out whenever an occasion calls for it.) History fascinates me, but it’s ideas and politics and journalism and people’s daily lives I want, not military strategies and campaigns. Strictly military history is not for me.

But I should have known that Bruce Catton could not write history that I would find boring! 

Old favorites, highly recommended

American society was in turmoil in 1860. Underlying much of the turmoil were big changes in world economics and technology. Cottage industries were giving way to large-scale manufacturing that threatened the self-sufficiency of small farmers and villagers, and what was for so long a quiet, local American economy was becoming a global web, its threads set vibrating by events faraway and out of sight of workers. Whole populations were on the move. The North viewed immigrants from Europe with suspicion, while the South, clinging to their culture of slavery, saw their region’s dependence on imports spelling out eventual doom. 

And in the midst of all this uneasiness, 1860, like 2020, was an election year. 

The Democrats could not agree on Stephen Douglas as a candidate for the presidency – as Catton put it, “the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South hated him because he liked it too little” – and finally the party split in two, with Northern Democrats running Douglas and Southern Democrats settling for Breckenridge. Everyone in the country, including William H. Seward, viewed Seward as a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, but somehow in the end the nod went to “gawky frontiersman” Abraham Lincoln. A fourth party brought forward yet another presidential candidate. Long before votes were cast, however, Southerners were planning state conventions to decide whether or not the expected election of Lincoln would be sufficient cause for them to secede from the Union.

The Artist likes to quote what he says is an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” My own feeling is that there cannot have been any time on earth when life was not interesting, but I understand that he takes the saying as a reference to times of crisis and catastrophe, fascinating in retrospect but frightening and sometimes life-threatening as one is living through them. The year 2020 has certainly given us “interesting times” already, and it’s doubtful the year will grow any less interesting or anxiety-provoking as November approaches. Again, in our own time -- corporations shipping jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets or replacing workers with robots to boost the bottom line -- as in 1860, immigrants and racial minorities serve as political footballs.

Times of social upheaval, with technological and/or social innovations throwing a market for employment into disarray, have always put human beings at each other’s throats. Choose the particular hill on which you are willing to die, conveniently setting aside other complicated issues, and you have chosen your enemy -- who may well be your next-door neighbor. The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial described attendees at the convention in Charleston as “screaming like panthers and gesticulating like monkeys.” 

Sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, recent rain swelled and split local cherries. Not good. Creeks and lakes rise to destructive levels in many places. The sun shines on a regular basis to bring the annual parade of wildflowers to blossom, each in turn, and as Northern Lights waver tantalizingly overhead the comet Neowise hangs in the evening sky, and the International Space Station circles the earth. Here in the northwest lower peninsula of our state, we view the sky over Lake Michigan. Elsewhere in the country Americans scan for heavenly bodies and activity over fields of wheat or mountains or deserts. 

And as the summer flies past, most of us, at least in Leelanau County, continue to take precautions against COVID-19. The future’s not ours to see. It never has been. But we should probably slow down and think about it a little more dispassionately. Talk less, listen more. Be slower to anger. Register to vote.

Please Explain It To Me

Good morning. I've had some thoughts percolating since December and have decided today is the day —

Letter To My Conservative Friends: 

Or should I say “To Those of My Friends Who Call Themselves ‘Conservative’”? Because I’m having a hard time understanding what you believe and what you want. Maybe it will help if I tell you what I see as “conservatism,” and you tell me where I’m wrong. This is how I see it -- not a definition, by any means, but some important features:

True conservatism defends freedom. Conservatism worthy of the name would stand firm against tyrants around the world, not roll over for them, wiggling and peeing and showing a soft underbelly. I’m not talking about aggressive empire-building — going out and taking over other people’s lands — but standing against those who would do so to others. Are we on the same page here or not? If not, what am I missing?

I also see true conservatism as fiscally responsible. So conservatism would invest in and maintain a strong military but would not send them on pointless, expensive domestic maneuvers or half-heartedly pursue unwinnable, endless foreign wars, squandering public investment and digging an ever-deeper national deficit to prop up private (perhaps unwise) corporate investments. Or do you see protection of private corporate investment overseas and defense of freedom — our own and others’ — not only compatible but inextricably intertwined? Please explain. What policies would you have our country pursue, and how do you see them fall under the umbrella of conservatism?

True conservatism builds for the future. It respects precedent and draws lessons from the past but never forgets that the object of government policy is long-term stability and security and prosperity in the future. In short, a true conservative is not a gambler, and true conservatism would not take foolish risks with our national future for short-term gain, either financial or political. Perhaps this relates to my paragraph above, and one answer will serve to explain my confusion on both points.

True American conservatism stands by the Constitution and the rule of law. Thus conservatism would respect not only a partisan interpretation of the Second Amendment but the entire Constitution. Furthermore, a conservative president would respect (not demean) the office of president, as well as Congress and the judiciary, and would respect freedom of speech and freedom of the press, however violently he might disagree with opinions sometimes expressed. One-man rule would not be conservative, would it? Would it?

(“The law is no respecter of persons” does not mean disrespect: it means that no one person, even the president, is above the law.)

True conservatism is not anarchy. Does this need to be said? Apparently it does. The current Administration in Washington, D.C., would do away with government protections for ordinary citizens at every level and in every department by appointing to office the least-qualified individuals with the strongest short-term self-interest in destroying rather than fulfilling the trust those offices require for their continued operation. The only way I can understand this as part of a conservative agenda is if conservatism believes the missions of these departments is illegitimate exercise of government’s power. That these departments should never have been established. But then, where does conservative respect for precedent begin and end? Is there some historic line in the sand, before which precedents are respected, after which they are undeserving of respect? Or — as I fear — is the label ‘conservative’ merely shorthand for a party line? If your party does it, it’s good; if the other party does it, it’s bad? Respect and conserve the one, disrespect and destroy the other? Can you understand why it’s hard for me not to see what’s happening as essentially partisan?

True conservatism is honest and proud. It is not built on lies and name-calling, blaming, shouting, bullying, and whining. William F. Buckley represented a conservatism I could understand. He did not rely on urging mobs to shout three-word chants but engaged intellectually with opponents and articulated his own views with careful arguments and defense. 

This is why, as I see it, conservatism is moribund in our country today: dying if not dead. Can it be resuscitated? Only, it seems to me, if more than a brave handful of conservatives with spines will once again stand up for its principles. So where do you stand? And where do you think I fail to understand you?

A lot of political mileage has been made of the simplistic and short-sighted idea that government is at the root of every social problem. Is that what you think? Is that how you define conservatism? Think about life in this country without government. Would you really, for the sake of anarchical “freedom,” give up the rule of law and hand over your fortunes and your sacred honor to predatory, unregulated private corporations? Because — follow the money to the power — and you’ll find corporations in the driver’s seat. Where can you see any future security in that scenario? And where, in that picture, is any recognizable conservatism worthy of the name? 

Libertarianism is not conservatism. This, at least, is my opinion, based on considerable reading. Libertarians will tell you that private individuals and corporations will do the right thing because only in that way can they protect their investments and future profits. But the investments of any individual — and thus of any corporation — must be made in the short term for profits to benefit that individual (or those stockholders) directly. In the long run, after all, our generation — like all those before it — will be dead! So if governments around the world do not step into the breach to protect air and water and soil quality, woe betide future generations! Or do you see human nature and the natural human life span differently?

I really want to hear from you. Since I’m opening the conversation, though, I’ll lay my cards on the table and reveal my conclusions here at the start:

Conservatism and progressivism need not be enemy camps. One parent in a family may be stricter and the other more obviously nurturing, but that does not mean children would be better off if both parents always took the same approach or if one’s approach did not temper the other, and it certainly doesn’t mean two parents must engage in continual tug-of-war to raise their children! I’ll go further: sometimes it’s important to listen to grandparents, too, and even the children may have perspectives their elders need to take into account. 

Democracy rests on a faith that something similar is true of government, that we will be better off making decisions together, with more guiding us than the will of a king, more protecting us than the goodwill of the wealthy and powerful. We need justice, and we need understanding and mercy. We need to stand on our own, and a helping hand is sometimes necessary to get us there. 

(If a winner-take-all, Hobbesian “law of the jungle” is your view of freedom, you are an anarchist, not a conservative, as I see it.) 

In any political party, when ideological purity is demanded, ideology gets in the way of practical solutions, but “compromise” does not have to be a dirty word. It doesn’t having no principles. After all, the best way to a given goal may well be a path neither side initially envisioned on its own.

True conservatism looks to its legacy, as does true progressivism. I’m certainly not saying that conservatism and progressivism are “the same” — far from it — but neither wants to leave the country in smoking ruins! So if that isn’t a call for mutual respect and bipartisanship, I’m afraid the danger we face is not to conservatism or progressivism alone but to the very soul and future of our nation. 

We were once the light of the world. American policies were not always right, and I think we all know that. (Don’t we?) Native Americans were massacred and held in concentration camps. Black Africans were enslaved, bought, sold, and treated as less than human. The United States has intervened in the internal events of other countries, sometimes for the good, other times with terrible consequences. Citizens have been denied the right to vote or to have their votes count, and innocent people have been deprived of life and liberty. Through all these blunders and sins, our country espoused right ideals. Have Americans been nothing but hypocrites? I’m not saying that and don’t want to argue the point.

I would say, rather, that from its inception and over its history our country has made periodic and halting efforts to realize its ideals, at times making partial progress and at other times backsliding seriously — as does any human endeavor, individual or group. Acknowledging our national shortcomings is not being unpatriotic, in my book, and certainly I cannot see holding up lies and calling them truths as conservative. Can you?

The conservative may think I am too critical of our history (do you think so?), while the radical will see my picture as too rosy-hued.  The more important question I would put to you is: How does the world see us today? How does it view our national leadership and those who support it? Is a man who shows no respect for the dignity and honor of his own high office conservative? Does “respect” mean nothing more than agreeing with and applauding one man as “the greatest,” even when he forgets he is the highest-ranking servant of the people — all the people — those who voted for him, those who voted against him, and those who didn’t vote at all; those who cheer him and those who criticize him?

My heart has been heavy for over two years now, and that heaviness weighs on me daily. This is very personal. I feel estranged from too many friends on both sides of the political divide. 

I don’t understand my polite conservative friends because I don’t understand how they can call themselves conservative and continue to see the current president (or speaker of the House, when you come right down to it) as a conservative leader. But there are also the not-so-polite ones, people I thought for years were my friends but who have now cast me into a camp they identify as “left-leaning liberal fascists.” I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t matter, because no conversation is possible against chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up! Build the wall! Build the wall!” Places that once felt welcoming and homelike no longer feel that way to me.

Both sides, I said, though, and I mean it. There are some men and women with whom I agree politically, to a large extent, some of them friends of long standing, whose company I now avoid because they operate these days on a permanent setting of high dudgeon, their rage matching that of the chanters on the other side. They follow bad news (and there’s plenty of it) minute-by-minute and eagerly pass along each latest outrageous tweet. The worst part I see in this, what breaks my heart, is the wall they, my political allies, are in the process of building against anyone on the other side of the divide. Some of these friends are politically active in productive ways, also, and that I applaud, but others seem to be doing nothing but shouting. 

Then there are those who studiously avoid any discussion of politics. You might think I would be comfortable with that, but no, that avoidance feels so false to everything I know we are all feeling that I can hardly stand it, even as I politely keep my own observations on life’s surface with strangers until and unless receiving a sign that, whatever our politics, we share present heartbreak. Otherwise, while I go about my public business with my public face, emotionally I tend to draw into my shell, my little world. So yes, I avoid, too, and I feel false when I do it, and how many of us are doing it, and how long can we keep it up? I ask not only my friends who call themselves conservative but all my friends and also anyone I’ve never met who may be reading these words. 

This is about so much more than which party won or lost some particular election or office. It goes so much deeper. It is a plague on our historical moment, played out in public but experienced also in private, in sleepless nights and silent, lonely days. 

Every new year brings fresh opportunities to reach out, to touch, to love, to give, to be grateful for the life we have. But I am untrue to myself if I pretend I’m not feeling the deep sadness that has been the emotional background for me of the past year and that now accompanies me into the present. So if you are feeling it, too, whatever your political beliefs and allegiances, please know that you are not alone. In the end (and yes, I’m finally coming to it), that may be the most important thing I can say: If you are sad, you are not alone. Many of us are hiding sadness and depression, some with angry shouting, some with light small talk, some by withdrawing into silence and isolation.

In this new year already underway (as it’s taken me weeks to decide to make these thoughts public), I wish us all calmer, brighter times, opportunities to look at one another with love and respect, and as many occasions as possible to open our hearts and minds to one another. Because we can’t leave everything to the younger, rising generation. As long as we’re here, age 20 or age 90, we have work to do. Together. 

Let’s Think Carefully, Then Talk to Each Other

Out in the countryside

Friends and strangers stopping in the bookstore the last couple of days have been shocked to see me underlining phrases in a book. With a pen, no less! I explain that it’s an old paperback, spine cracked and pages ready to start falling out, and that some previous studious reader already went through the whole thing with yellow highlighter. One young man asked, “Are you doing a word search? My mother does that.” Seems the whole concept of underlining key ideas in a text had passed him by. But I am of another generation, of course....

The book I’ve been reading is a little anthology of historical writings on the American Revolution with an arresting title: The Ambiguity of the American Revolution. The book’s editor, Jack P. Greene, in his excellent introduction, traces the history of our history, as it were – the different interpretations given over time to the Revolution, starting with contemporary accounts -- because even in the 1770s, there was no unanimity of view. Loyalists saw the conflict one way, patriots another, and their perspectives colored the way they wrote their accounts. John Adams himself said there were as many American Revolutions as there were colonies and perhaps as many as individuals in those colonies. Everyone had a slightly different take on it at the time, and through successive periods of our country’s life new interpretations have emerged in waves, to be supplanted in their turn by others. This diversity of perspective is something we often lose sight of, now that we’ve had two hundred and forty-one years to come -- more or less, in textbooks if nowhere else -- to agreement on a national narrative.

[See continuation of discussion of this book here.]

David Ramsay, a Maryland physician who graduated from the College of New Jersey in the year of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), eventually wrote of the Patriot cause and the newly formed United States of America:

The world has not hitherto exhibited so fair an opportunity for promoting social happiness. It is hoped for the honour of human nature, that the result will prove the fallacy of those theories, which suppose that mankind are incapable of self-government. 

– from his History of the American Revolution, first published in Philadelphia in1789, an excerpt of which appears in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution

President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, addressing the crowd at Gettysburg, noted that the crowd that day “met on a great battlefield of that war,” a war “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Far short of three hundred years old, our country remains an experiment, its success into the future far from guaranteed.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press: If the “national security” entails restricting those freedoms, what “security” do Americans have? I picked up another book at home this morning, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, and, opening at random, fell by chance – true story – on a chapter entitled “Journalism and Democracy.” On the first page of that chapter, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes) says that after less than two years as White House press secretary,

It took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. ... 

 I also had to relearn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

The lighter side

Today is the 4^th of July, and Americans are gathering again, all over the country, in crowds large and small. We take time out from our ordinary pursuits to re-read the Declaration of Independence. (In Leelanau County, such readings usually take place in front of a village post office. See below for Northport event.) The mood of Independence Day is celebratory. There are parades and marching bands and flags waving in the breeze and displays of fireworks against the summer night sky.

Patriotic village gathering

While most of us do not see ourselves “met on a battlefield” this July 4, 2017, we are painfully aware that our country is deeply divided. We are divided not only on issues, but on our most basic core value, freedom. What does ‘freedom’ mean, and how is it best protected? Beneath all the posturing and tweets and insults, that is the crucial question.

Coming fast upon the heels of the first question, however, is another: How can the question about freedom be answered in a civilized manner?

If we cannot agree on an answer to the second question, the first becomes moot, because when civil discourse gives way to hate, attacks on freedoms proliferate, and repression ensues, and when hate gives way to violence, life and liberty both fall victim.

Can the current trend of incivility and increasing repression be reversed? Can our freedoms endure? It’s worth taking a few minutes to ponder these questions on this day of air shows and hot dogs and sparklers.

Eternal vigilance!

Did You Just Come Here to Argue, or What?

Morning sun and last ice, Lake Leelanau

When President Obama announced on March 16 his nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, he noted that the nominee, Judge Garland, is well known and widely respected for (and I’ll have to paraphrase here, not having written down the exact words) “understanding before disagreeing” and “disagreeing without being disagreeable.” If you missed what amounted to a fully prepared speech from the president on the occasion of his announcement, it’s worth taking time to catch the whole thing. 

I must admit I’ve been rationing my news listening of late. So little is “new” from one day to the next, and very little encouraging, let alone inspiring. Listening to the president on Wednesday, however, I did feel encouraged. I also felt proud to be an American and to have such a president in office, a man who has had one of the most difficult jobs in the world and has endured acrimonious hostility and partisan opposition at every turn, yet one who continues to believe, despite its shortcomings, in our country and its form of government and to be a model of civility to the nation and the world. I had been happy to read [in Rolling Stone, Oct. 2015] that he understands the “failures” of his administration are not exclusively presidential failures. He could and would have accomplished more with Congressional cooperation. The Congress wouldn’t have had to cave to his every demand, either -- just have been willing to engage constructively and compromise creatively. But “compromise” has become a dirty word to ideologues, both those in political life and all too many of those who elect them, Americans who have convinced themselves (or pretend they have) that political compromise is nothing less surrender to evil.

Really? Angels vs. Devils? Jehovah vs. Satan? Really?

In his essay on “The Future of Tragedy,” Camus wrote that tragedy differs from drama or melodrama in that, “the forces confronting each other in tragedy are equally legitimate, equally justified.” This is what makes tragedy difficult, if not impossible, to grasp in adolescence. In high school I could only see Creon as a tyrant, Antigone as a heroine. And yet, for the playwright and his Greek audience, the entire situation was ambiguous. There was reason, as well as blinding passion, on both sides. Thus,

Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong. Similarly, Prometheus is both just and unjust, and Zeus, who pitilessly oppresses him, also has right on his side.

Camus gives the formula for tragedy as follows: “All can be justified, [but] no one is just.”

Ah, we keep our little minds so busy, we humans, justifying our lives!

And this is beside my point, too, but as Camus understands tragedy, the present American political scene may well be tragic, although Congress and the American public in general lack the basic insight of the Greek playwrights and audience. In all too many minds, we do not have tragic conflict but a morality play. If you see where I’m coming from. But that was an aside....

Slowly, in roundabout fashion, I am coming to my topic for the day, which is not tragedy but rhetoric. How the two may be related (if they are) will perhaps emerge before the end of this exploratory foray.

What is Rhetoric?

Before agreeing or disagreeing with any social practice it’s important to get clear on just what the practice is, so before I ask if rhetoric is good or bad, I need to be clear on what I take the term to mean. It helps to look at the origin of the practice. Then, does the term carry nonstandard but legitimate meanings, or are there nonstandard but legitimate ways of understanding the practice? Finally, has rhetoric changed (improved or degraded) over the course of history?

So tedious! I know! But what is the point of speaking or writing at all, if not to understand and be understood?

Well, the term is Greek, and so, like tragedy, rhetoric has Western European origins. More important in the context of present-day American politics is the fact that rhetoric grew up alongside Greek democracy. In the fifth century BCE, when ordinary citizens first had the opportunity to argue legal claims against other citizens, teachers of oratory offered their services for hire. They were not lawyers but speech coaches for citizens acting as their own lawyers. These teachers then devised theories about what made for successful speech. Finally philosophers got into the act, with concerns for truth and morality that went beyond having a winning argument. Perhaps we should note that all this was taking place in the early days of the decline of “the glory that was Greece.” 

Roman rhetoric (Romans copying everything Greek for their own purposes) broke down the process of rhetoric into five components: analysis and research (the marshalling of facts); arranging of the material; putting the argument into effective language; delivering the speech (the performance); and committing its ideas to memory (for, one presumes, future use).

Having flowered in the Greek polis and law courts, it is hardly surprising that rhetoric became nearly synonymous with debate. The idea that truth emerges from adversarial verbal combat continues in our American courts and political campaigns today.

As Americans with differing perspectives, some of us may believe strongly in justice and politics as competition while others hold a modified or even entirely different view. For now, my point is simply that rhetoric and debate, like it or not, are

1)  adversarial in nature;

2)  closely allied historically, if not almost identical; and

3)  serve a function in American society much like the function they served in ancient Greece.

One course required of all first-year undergraduates back when I was a freshman at the University of Illinois was Rhetoric. In that class we learned to take and argue for controversial positions, although, as I recall, our arguments were handed in as written papers rather than delivered to the class as speeches, so there was never an opposition ready to jump up with objections. The instructor, however, assigned positions to each of us, often not the positions we would have chosen for ourselves, and so to do the job we necessarily had not only to give support for our assigned position but also to imagine, anticipate, and respond to potential serious objections. That was rhetoric as it was taught to me – not debate, as such, but the clear statement of a position and solid supporting argument for holding the position.

This, in fact, is how I continue to understand the term “argument” -- as a reasoned exchange. Shouting, name-calling, high-horse refusals to explain with a patronizing “Trust me!” – none of that is argument, as I see it. Argument demands accepting one’s opponent as a moral equal, deserving of respect.

But is “rhetoric,” my stalking horse, something else? Is it something more – or (gulp!) less?

I can’t get the question out of my head because voices on the radio keep using the term “rhetoric” in a way to suggest that the practice is less than desirable in the political arena – ironically, the very arena that gave it birth. Rhetoric, they imply, is obfuscation at best, and inflammatory bombast at its present-day worst.

Suspicions of rhetoric are as old as rhetoric itself. John Ralston Saul, in The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, presents under his heading “Sophists” the following description (his own opinions apparent in the other bold-faced terms he defines elsewhere in his book):

SOPHISTS       The original model for the twentieth-century TECHNOCRAT; more precisely for the BUSINESS SCHOOL graduate and the ACADEMIC CONSULTANT.  

       These fifth-century BC teachers wandered around Greece selling their talents to whomever would hire them. Their primary talent was rhetoric. They were not concerned by ethics or the search for truth. Long-term consequences, indeed reality in most forms, did not interest them. What mattered was their ability to create illusions of reality which would permit people to get what they wanted.

Clearly, reservations about rhetoric today are nothing new. Back at the root of reasoning’s public practice, rhetoric was used by the Sophists for gain, their own as well as that of their clients, and victory was the sole relevant measure of rhetorical quality. Serious examples of debate today (in my opinion, American political campaign matches hardly merit the term, although they certainly employ rhetoric), e.g., the “Oxford-style” debates we hear on public radio, while neither monetary award nor political office is at stake, are still concluded with winners and losers, as decided by audience vote.

Sample question: Has religion contributed, over the course of history, more good or evil to human society? Two teams argue, each taking a side of the question. In the end, the audience votes for one team or the other. Truth decided by vote: a strange Western notion.

And there’s the sorry truth of it: outside a classroom led by a instructor with high standards of argument, rhetoric as persuasive reasoning can include just as many straw men, bandwagon appeals, camels’ noses, and other informal logical fallacies as can be put over on an audience. And that’s not all. Innuendo, empty claims, and outright falsehoods, if said with sufficient conviction and repeated often enough, can be – and here we must sigh over having to use a perfectly inoffensive word in such a ghastly context – effective.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Because argument presupposes an attempt to influence, if not an outright conflict of opinion, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether or not there’s yelling involved. But can we imagine a human society that made no attempt to influence the thinking of its members? Fear and force are one way to urge social conformity. Reason, which presupposes freedom and works through argument, is another.

But suppose you are not comfortable with conflict, perhaps also fearful of “losing” – what are your options if you decline to engage in debate?

Here’s one possibility: Refuse to listen. Walk away. Get on your high horse and take what you see as the high road. Follow the example of Senate Republicans, who say to the president, “We don’t care who you nominate for the Supreme Court. We will not meet with your nominee, and we will not hold hearings.”

Am I the only one reminded by this strategy of fifth-grade girls? “Come on, let’s walk away. We’ll just ignore her!” Did we really elect people to Congress to play this game instead of doing their job? Well, perhaps we can be thankful Senate Republicans are not acting like fifth-grade boys, slugging it out (wordlessly, of course) on the playground after school!

Other options?

Sometimes people are yelling because they think no one is listening. Listening could be a course of action taken in place of debate. I say “in place of” deliberately, because although in a true debate only one person can speak at a time, we have all seen the others making notes and preparing their rebuttal during the other side’s speeches. Understanding is not the goal in debate, much less working together – only “winning.”

I’ve said that reason -- that is, argument -- demands and presupposes freedom and equality. I’m thinking now about listening and wondering what, if anything, it presupposes. There is, unfortunately, a frequent perception, shared by speaker and listener, that the speaker is in a superior, one-up position (see Tannen reference at the bottom of this post). Can a listener take a different perspective on the relationship? If so, might the speaker’s perception also shift? Not necessarily. But possibly?

I haven’t found a wide, clear path yet but am searching through the forest.

Judge Garland’s way, as President Obama characterized it, of “understanding before disagreeing” tells me that the judge must be a good listener. I can psychologize and/or demonize an opponent, based on his or her positions, but I can’t understand the reasoning that led to those positions unless (1) the other person is willing to explain his or her reasoning, and (2) I am willing to listen. Possibilities that follow listening are multiple rather than binary:

o    I may find I agree with the speaker, after all. Perhaps we were simply using different language and not realizing we were aiming in the same direction.

o    I may agree with some of the speaker’s reasons but don’t see that they entail the conclusion the speaker has drawn. Maybe we can talk this through together.

o    Our positions may be incompatible but not marked by enormous pragmatic distance. Perhaps we can each move a little closer.

o    I disagree more strongly than ever and now understand more clearly where our disagreement lies. Understanding allows me to aim my own explanation to the heart of the matter, in hopes of changing the speaker’s mind or modifying her or his position.

o    I might change my mind!

These are possibilities that immediately occur to me, not a list I see as exhaustive. Do you see other possible outcomes?

Maybe, as Bergson says of the future, the path to bring us together isn’t lying somewhere in the woods, waiting for us to stumble upon it. Maybe we have to clear that path ourselves. 

As for the Senate blocking the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court, the following idea comes from my friend Michael Roth:

"Recent history suggests there are no adverse consequences for this style of political maneuvering. So perhaps an alternate form of questioning might be to investigate what the opposition's options are.

"Suppose the president could get a federal court somewhere to find that the submitting the name is sufficient for fulfilling his constitutional duty and since the Senate has chosen not to weigh in, he can go ahead an seat his nominee.

"The senate might then chose to appeal this to the supreme court. Assuming the appeal results in a 4-4 tie, the lower court's ruling would hold and the Justice would be seated.

"Is that possible. What are the next steps for getting it done?"

That Michael! He was definitely one of the smartest of our graduate school philosophy cohort!

Suggested reading: The Argument Culture: Working from Debate to Dialogue, by Deborah Tannen; The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, by John Ralston Saul

My On-and-Off Teaching Career, Part I

Reading the book about introverts (see previous post), I was reminded of my experience teaching college classes in philosophy. It’s something I never did fulltime, and there were years when I didn’t do it at all, but still, over time, it was an experience in which I learned and grew along with my students, and I’ve been thinking about how it was that a “shy” person might lead a class and do it well.

As a graduate student, my first “teaching” experience was as an assistant responsible for helping professors grade papers written by students in their large lecture classes. Those of us grading papers worked alone and almost never had direct contact with students whose papers we graded. We worked behind the scenes, which you can see is often the perfect introvert position. One incident, however, stands out in my memory.

A student wrote to the professor to complain about her grade, certain that the reason she had received less than an A (I believe the grade assigned was B+) was that the graduate student grading her paper didn’t agree with her conclusion. The professor, a quiet man whose policy was to give all his students, graduate and undergraduate, minimum advice and maximum autonomy didn’t tell me what to say but asked me to write a response to the student’s written complaint. It was a delicate situation and the first serious challenge to what little “authority” my position held. 

My written reply assured the student that she had been graded on the quality of her argument alone, with no reference to my opinions on the subject. The problem  was that the example she had chosen for support undermined rather than supported her conclusion. The rest of her argument was excellent, as was her articulation of it. I reminded her that all her other work for the class had been A work and said there was no reason to believe it would not be excellent for the rest of the semester. I predicted an A for the course for her, based on her overall performance up to that point.

The next time the lecture class met, I had butterflies in my stomach. How had the student taken my explanation of her grade? Would she pursue her complaint? Would the professor be happy with the way I had handled the situation? The incident had a very happy ending. The professor could not have been more pleased, and the student, attentive in the front row, looked happy and confident. Her major was pre-law, so my explanation had satisfied her, and I think she learned something from that one B+.

From grading I went on to leading small discussion sections that met once a week.  In the large lecture hall, there was no time for questions, so discussion sections were set up to compensate and to give students an opportunity to converse on the week’s topics.

Finally, I had the opportunity to “teach my own classes,” as we grad students put it—and as it really was. At large universities, undergraduate classes offered in smaller than huge lecture sections are often taught by advanced graduate students. (Course listings that say “Staff” rather than having a particular professor’s name attached will usually be taught by an adjunct (temporary; term) faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow, or an advanced graduate student. Some will be disappointing, others excellent, but this is true of classes taught by senior faculty, also, isn’t it?) At this level, we were given an opportunity to choose our own textbooks and write our own syllabi. Courses I taught at this level were intro to philosophy; intro to ethics; philosophy and public policy; and introduction to logic. Logic gave me the most initial anxiety. Public policy was the class I most enjoyed.

Logic? Me? Oh, the shock when that assignment was handed down! The first time I’d signed up for logic as an undergraduate, I’d dropped it halfway through the semester—the only class I ever dropped in my entire academic career! I managed to get through it on my second try, with a different professor (it’s amazing how a subject as apparently cut-and-dried can be so different from one professor to another, depending on their particular interests in the subject), but can still recall the many nights I went to bed metaphorically banging my head against the wall to understand “only if.” “If “ was no problem; “if only” was no problem; “if and only if” was a piece of cake; but “only if” gave my brain fits. Will you believe that understanding came to me in a dream?

Well, they say that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. My best day in logic class was when one of the male students skeptically asked me if I was “sure” about an argument form I’d told the class was a fallacy. I remember how good it felt not to have a sudden sick feeling at the student’s challenge but to be able to say calmly, “Don’t take my word for it. Do the truth table.” There is no arguing with truth tables! In fact, this is one of the joys of “arguments” in formal logic: they are like mathematical demonstrations. A friend from a country that had been torn by civil war told me that following the conflict all the philosophy students wanted to work in formal logic, because arguments about “the good life” were just too frightening, and they didn’t want to end up in prison.

So you can see right away that philosophy and public policy would have been avoided like the plague by students in my friend’s native country. Here in the U.S., at the university where I taught, however, the subject held a lot of interest. How did I teach it? In order that everyone in class have a common background vocabulary and principles with which to work—and because it was, after all, an undergraduate class in philosophy--we spent the first half of the semester reading John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Many of my students were not thrilled with this work. A couple of them, dragging through what to them was archaic language, asked jokingly one day if we could read the work “in translation,” and from then on I asked that all students come to class with a written list of the numbered paragraphs assigned for that day, along with a one-sentence summary of each paragraph. The results were excellent. The students were fully capable of understanding the ideas but had to think about them, not just let their eyes skitter down the page. Sometimes there would be a paragraph that a lot of people had trouble with, but the trouble was obvious from the sentence summaries, and we could address the confusion together. Discussions were good, too. There was disagreement and argument, but it was focused, thanks to the common reading.

In the second half of the semester, we took a new and different direction. The class divided into groups (three? four? five? I no longer remember), and for the remaining weeks each group would work as a team. Each team was to imagine itself as a village or town council, and each individual was to give himself or herself a specific character. Characters and towns were to be imagined in detail: How old are you? Are you single, married, childless or a parent? What kind of work do you do? What are your personal beliefs? What is the population of your town? Describe its economic base, demographics, and history. What is important to the citizens of this place? Then a proposal was brought before each town council: Should the town have a public, tax-supported day care facility? Within each group, members were to argue for their positions in character, and at the end of the semester each group would present its conclusion and rationale for the conclusion.

The group exercise half of the class was a huge success. As an introvert myself, I’d seldom been comfortable working in groups—preferred to work on my own—but I’d realized that many students relished working together, and the class was for their benefit, not mine. There must have been introverts as well as extroverts in the class, but—and maybe it was the size of the groups or the fact that they’d already had weeks together in the same room—everyone seemed to find a comfort zone in which to work. They enjoyed having an opportunity to bring imagination into play, and they appreciated getting to know one another in the process. When it came time for final presentations, those were very impressive. Each group, as I’d hoped it would, had taken on a unique,well-rounded identity, and the conclusion each group reached was consistent with that identity.

I’ve read that citizen groups, at whatever level, can more easily come to agreement on a practical question than on a question of principle. Certainly my students, in their roles as town council members, appealed to principles in part, but they also paid attention to the real needs of their respective towns. And when there was argument over principle, they had—thanks to Locke—a common vocabulary and background against which to frame their disagreement.

Introverts had the initial comfort of working alone and subsequent opportunity to voice their thoughts in the safety of a group smaller than the entire classroom, while extroverts had a chance to energize the group process and to shine as presenters. I don’t recall anyone who was unhappy with the class.

I’m thinking back on classroom teaching because getting up in front of a roomful of people is a challenge for an introvert, and it’s interesting for me to think back on my experiences in light of insights provided by Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. One reason I think I grew confident at the front a classroom was that the authority of my position meant I didn’t have to compete with extroverts for attention. It was my class. And one of the strengths I believe I brought to the classroom was I was a good listener, not just a star performer. I could see when someone didn’t understand something or had a thought to share, even when that student might be sitting quietly, and I could help the students hear each other, too, not just try to out-shout each other.

Later teaching as an adjunct was both similar to and different from my teaching as a graduate student, but that I’ll save for Part II.