Welcome to Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square. This blog is sequential, so if you are just joining, welcome, and please go to my website, Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square and read the earlier episodes.
How does this discussion of moral reasoning tie into what we have said about economic justice? A critical piece of that discussion involved authoritarian governing systems vs. democratic republics. We saw that mercantilism and communism can survive only in authoritarian governing systems. We also saw that freedom and liberty do not exist in authoritarian regimes.
With those discussions in mind, let’s talk about individualism vs. universal moral reasoning.
First, I do not reject individualism. I have distinguished freedom from liberty. The freedom guaranteed to all Americans in the U.S. Constitution is grounded in individualism. Nietzsche’s (1844 to 1900) most useful work, if I may be allowed a personal opinion here, was his contribution to the rights of the individual in western civilization. He rejected the controls exerted on the Prussian society of his youth by the rigid, moralistic Prussian upperclass. Individualism is a big deal. It matters.
However, let me repeat here how I began Let’s Get Civil.
“What should we do?”
“Wrong question.”
“What’s the right question?”
“What should I do?”
“But I already know what I should do. The question is, ‘What should we do?’”
“Impossible to answer. We can only answer, ‘What should I do?’”
It may seem obvious that We the People must answer the question, “What should we do?” But “What should we do?” is a moral question, and there is widespread popular and intellectual agreement that the only valid moral statement that any of us can make is one that applies only to oneself.
Let me repeat that claim: The only valid moral statement that any of us can make is one that applies only to oneself. That’s the major tenant of individualism.
We also know that We the People must make laws. We may not think about this, but we need to. All laws are moral laws because they tell us what we can and cannot do. Not just what we should do. We are not talking about just moral suggestions. We are talking about moral laws. They tell us what everyone of us can and cannot do in public life.
We make laws that require others to act or not act in ways they may not choose if it were just up to them. There is no question whether or not we as a society can pass laws. The question is: Which laws are right and proper to pass? No one of us can make that decision. In our Democratic Republic, we must make that decision together.
We must be able to answer the question, What should we do? And we know that some of those questions are easy to answer and some seem impossible to answer.
For too long, we have been answering too many of these questions through the electoral process rather than through public discourse that has built broad public understanding and agreement.
We cannot agree, heck, we cannot even talk about what we should do as a society. We need to be able to talk about these things in families and towns, in the public square. We the people must unite as the body politic. We can’t leave these questions to politicians, for if we the people can’t talk, how can we expect our elected representatives to talk? They represent us, and we can’t talk. Right now, their most accurate representation of us may be in their inability to talk with each other.
Indeed, we can no longer complete the sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”
That’s a big deal, a big problem. It’s one of the defining statements in our Declaration of Independence. It defined our core values as a new nation. And it must continue to define our core values. It must continue to form the intellectual and moral foundations of our identity as Americans, as members of our Democratic Republic.
We the People must face challenging issues, argue about them, come to agreement, and guide our government. We can’t do that if we can’t argue productively. We can’t be Americans if we can’t argue productively. Our Democratic Republic can’t survive if We the People can’t argue productively.
“I may be ignorant, but I’m not stupid.” When I first heard that said, it sounded more like “Ah may be ignrant, but ah ain’t stoopud,” and I pretty much assumed that the guy saying it was both ignorant and stupid, but that was because of my sheltered upbringing and my own ignorance. I was an enlisted man in the air force, one of the great experiences of my life. The guy who said it was from rural Texas as I recall and turned out to be both very bright and filled with tons of expressions I had never heard. Down home expressions filled with insight and wisdom.
Pope Francis recently said that abortion is like “Hiring a hit man to resolve a problem.” The pope wasn’t stupid, but damn, that was ignorant.
Let’s not get into the abortion debate here. It comes later and will come.
Here’s the problem. Way too many really smart people are too danged ignorant about some topics to conduct productive discourse in the public square. Like all those academics who believe “The only valid moral assertion that any one of us can make is one that applies only to oneself.” We have some work to do to help many of our most intelligent fellow Americans develop the capacity to argue and reach agreement about what we all should do. Along the way, we will help regular Americans do it too and they may play a larger role in healing our body politic than our intellectuals will.
When We the People engage each other in public arguments, reach majority agreement, and direct our politicians; we act as our nation’s body politic. Body is a great image. One mind, one body, many parts. Majority agreement is required in our Democratic Republic, and it is also important that the minority has participated in the arguments and understands the majority’s opinion and has agreed either to support it or not to oppose it. To give it a fair shot and let it be fairly evaluated in practice. Recall our morally grounded pragmatic dialectic.,
Both individuals and the body politic must work to build one mind. It’s not easy. It is necessary.
We know that we aren’t talking and acting together as a body politic. What’s at stake? If we don’t protect our Democratic Republic, we won’t revert back to a monarchy, but we could very well descend into mercantilism with an authoritarian government run by an authoritarian leader and oligarches. They will destroy our Democratic Republic and along with it our liberty and our freedom.
How does this blog help heal our body politic? First, I explain how We the People became fractured: The forces that drove us apart and the innocent intellectuals and politicians who could have stopped it but didn’t because they got mixed up intellectually. They were smart, but ignorant. Second, I develop the intellectual solutions needed to heal our body politic. That may sound impossible. Let me indicate what we will do.
We the People can’t complete the sentence: We hold these truths to be self-evident. These truths are moral truths:
All men are created equal. That’s a moral assertion.
They are endowed by their creator. That’s both a religious and a moral assertion.
With certain unalienable rights. What is unalienable cannot be taken away or denied. That’s a philosophical and moral assertion.
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s a moral assertion.
Our country was founded on moral assertions.
However, we have stopped thinking morally as a body politic. We don’t know how to conduct public moral arguments and that’s why we can’t agree on the moral truths we need in order to bind our nation together. To unite us, unite We the People, as a body politic, with all of our differences is a complex problem. I make it simple and solve it. Again, not easy, but simple.
I need to expand upon this point. We get it that we rely on intelligent solutions that allow us to conduct moral arguments. Also, these arguments deal with public morals, what we the people should do in public life. We don’t deal with personal morals beyond the obvious claim that what we do privately cannot hurt others. Whenever we hurt others we stop acting privately.
In order to develop and use intelligent solutions, we must improve how We the People think, how we think as a group, the mind politic, and how we think as individual members of the body politic. We must think about what we think, but more important, we must learn to think about how we think. None of this is obscure. After all, I’m talking about how all of us think. We recognize all of this. Some of the terms I use might be new, but the experiences they name are not new.
For example, we all think in “Doctrines felt as facts.”
That’s a new term. I need to give credit to its source. I found it in a book I read in college: Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry. It’s one of those books I read in college that stuck with me.
Think about “doctrines felt as facts” for a second. What do I just believe? Is it a fact or a doctrine? Some of our “doctrines felt as facts” are obvious. Do we believe that “All men are created equal” applies only to men, or only to white men and women? Or only to men and women who agree with us? Or do we believe that “All men are created equal” applies to all men and women, all races, all religions, all sexual orientations, all nationalities?
Which of those doctrines we believe has a huge impact on how We the People think about ourselves and each other. Can we conduct mature, rational arguments with someone who holds fast to a doctrine felt as fact that is different from ours? If we cannot, one or both of us is holding on to a doctrine felt as fact. “Doctrines felt as fact” may be a new term, but what it talks about is not at all new to us.
Even if we haven’t thought about it before, we immediately understand it. Maybe quickly rather than immediately, but you get my point.
Some of our doctrines felt as facts are obvious as soon has we begin to think about them. Others require a lot of work, a lot of self reflection and a lot of study. We inherit our doctrines felt as facts. We learn them within our family, church, and community without noticing that we have learned them. They become a part of who we are, “habits of mind,” that direct how we view the world and other people. They also direct how we feel.
How we feel. We are told, “Our feelings are true.” That’s a doctrine felt as fact. What we feel is indeed what we feel and is therefore true. There’s a kind of truth in that. But much of what we feel results from what we think. That’s an important fact that is too often overlooked. Some feelings are physical, tied to our genetic makeup and our biology. Others are the result of how we think. How we think leads to feelings that help us solve problems or feelings that make problems worse, impossible to solve.
We become empowered as individuals when we learn to control our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions.
Being a grown up has a lot to do with taking control of our thoughts. And that involves discovering our doctrines felt as facts and subjecting them to critical reflection.
We will notice doctrines felt as facts often in this blog. Noticing them will help us understand ourselves and others and the tasks we face as we strive to understand each other and argue productively.
Let’s look at another doctrine felt as fact that frequently frustrates arguments.
Many of us have heard someone end an argument by saying something like, “Well, be that as it may, I just disagree.”
No matter the other side of the argument, we all get to just disagree. We are “entitled to our own opinions.” That is absolutely true in our private lives.
But, it is only true, can only be true, in our private lives. We totally frustrate the purpose and demands of public argument if we rely solely on our personal opinions; if we are unable or unwilling to subject our personal opinions to argument and open our minds to the possibility of change.
The whole purpose of public argument is to move beyond personal opinions and build shared opinions in the public square.
Fortunately, I found a renowned intellectual who cautioned us about individualism. John Henry Newman defined assent as the individual’s right to just believe in God or anything else. Assent, individualism. We get to do that and no one can take that right away from us, in our private lives. But Newman explained that assent, the right to individual opinions, does not work in public argument. His language is a bit old fashioned, so let me paraphrase him:
Assent is appropriate to the individual. But it undermines rather than promotes productive arguments. It confines itself to in its own evidence and its own standard. It cannot be anticipated or accounted for because it is the accident of this person or that. (An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 82―83.)
Any way of thinking that is based solely on the views of the individual and disregards any other evidence or standards of knowledge makes public argument impossible. We will give a lot of attention to the challenge of developing methods and standards that guide public arguments. But for now, we must agree or at least open our minds to the proposition that We the People cannot rely only on individual opinions and disregard any other opinions if we want to conduct productive public arguments.
Let me share a personal experience to help us not underestimate the challenge we face.
Richard Rorty was an esteemed American philosopher. A few years after I finished writing my first book, Intellectual Leadership in Education, I called him to discuss concerns I had regarding education leadership. He took my call, was respectful and congenial, and listened while I explained the problems I was trying to solve:
When principals hold faculty meetings to discuss with their teachers how their children learn and how best to teach, they need their teachers to come to agreement. Their students need their teachers to agree, especially that vast majority of students who need good teachers if they are going to learn. But, I explained, education research is all over the place. Education researchers don’t agree with each other nor do teacher educators, so there’ s no way that teachers can work toward agreement. No matter how hard principals may work, it is impossible to get teachers who disagree to learn to agree. As a result, principals end up with divided faculties who can’t even speak to each other. And their students, who move from classroom to classroom and grade to grade, encounter contradictory, incompatible teaching and motivation.
When I finished, Rorty replied, “But Pat, if principals end their faculty meeting and none of their teachers agree, they can be confident that they have done something right.”
Rorty was a brilliant man, no doubt about that, but he was flat ignorant about public education.
That was a few years before he died in 2007, and I am confident that at that time Rorty would have said that one of the best features of our Democratic Republic is that people don’t agree. I’m not sure he would have said that like teachers it is a good thing if they can’t reach agreement, but it seems so.
Now, as we face the fact that our body politic is fractured, it is fair to blame him and all the philosophers and other intellectuals who came before and followed him or did not challenge his views.
But I must admit, I didn’t challenge him. I realized that I had no chance of even discussing my concerns with him. I turned my attention to getting off the phone gracefully.
That story helps us appreciate the challenges we face. Esteemed intellectuals don’t share our goal of building agreement in the mind politic and the body politic so that we can build agreement in the public square. Instead, they teach views that undermine our goal.
Not only have we done a ton of useful and practical intellectual work that has helped us see a path to economic justice, we have introduced intellectual work that we will do that will help us conduct productive discourse in the public square and among politicians. We can see that we are doing and will do intellectual work that is enormously practical and important.
We are going to start that work by learning about the science of cognitive and moral development. We will learn how we develop, what stages we must go through, and that means get through, to gain higher levels of development. We will learn about the levels of development we must attain in order to be able to act like grown ups in our Democratic Republic.
What’s our goal?
To conduct discourse in the public square that allows us to agree on what is right and what is wrong in public life so that we can make laws and develop public policies that support what is right and reject what is wrong.
Right now, we can’t do that. We can’t agree on anything as We the People, to say nothing of agreeing on what is right and what is wrong in a way that guides us when making laws. Let’s get started figuring out how we must think so that we can do that.
This entire blog is based on my book Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some readers may want to order it from Amazon. Be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy, not Pat Conroy.
Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.
Email: Patconroy317@Gmail.com
Please Subscribe, Give a Thumbs Up, and Tell Your Family, Friends, and Colleagues about this Blog.
I will post episodes on Thursdays.