Abstract
Given the recent rise and increased intensity of political polarization in the United States, how are we to engage in public discourse? If, as political theorists have argued, the norms that once governed political discourse are no longer respected and utilized, if “facts” differ according to one’s political lens, if polarization renders agreement a seeming impossibility, is it even reasonable to expect those who differ to be able to talk with one another? This book opens with a close reading of the first scene in Plato’s Republic in order to show the efficacy of dialogue for the public square and to help set the stage for distinguishing dialogue from persuasion-oriented discourse. Dialogue’s strength lies in its ability to help connect facts to meaning—which John Dewey insisted was crucial for successful civic discourse. I then address Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on the way that Socratic dialogue affirms the finitude and plurality of human existence. I conclude by arguing that the encounter in the opening scene of the Republic teaches us that the ideal city is to be founded on neither violence nor persuasion, but rather dialogue.
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Notes
- 1.
“Political polarization is on the rise in and has increased dramatically in the USA over the past few decades and is likely to continue to increase” (Van Bavel and Pereira 2018, 221).
- 2.
“The incivility distinctive to today’s politics comes from the erosion of norms that historically constrained political discourse and action” (Persily 2015, 8).
- 3.
See Persily (2015), Pew Research Center (2019), Dunning (2016), Laden (2007), and Brandsma (2017). From the Pew Research Center: “Over the past two years, Americans have become more likely to say it is ‘stressful and frustrating’ to have political conversations with those they disagree with” (2018).
- 4.
“A bigot and I can say the same … thing: that the only real question is one of power, the question of which community is going to inherit the earth, mine or my opponent’s … Both sides may agree that there seems no prospect of reaching agreement on the particular issue at hand. So, both sides say as they reach for their guns, it looks as if we’ll have to fight it out” (Rorty 2000, 13). These questions, as Chap. 5 will elucidate, are made even more troubling by the plethora of recent research that reveals the limitations of reason to change minds. See, for example, Brownstein and Saul (2016a, b); Haidt (2012); Kahneman (2011); Mercier and Sperber (2018); and Sloman and Fernbach (2017).
- 5.
Rorty (2000), 13.
- 6.
- 7.
I am not criticizing the appeal to or concept of social identities or identity politics. See my previous book (2016) that clarifies the role, meaning, and centrality of social identities.
- 8.
Here I do not follow Sinnott-Armstrong, who names “distance” as one feature of polarization and cites Pew Research Center data to describe how Democrats and Republicans are further apart now than in the past on key issues (13). The emphasis in my definition of polarization is on how we use difference to fuel demonization of the other.
- 9.
The literature on deliberation by political theorists is too vast and subtle to provide a sufficiently nuanced definition here. Nonetheless, the main difference worth noting between deliberation and dialogue is that deliberation generally remains primarily focused on the rational evaluation of specific policies (e.g., Guttman and Thompson 2004; Neblo 2015; and Mansbridge et al. 2010). Practitioners tend to maintain that “deliberation emphasizes the importance of examining options and trade-offs to make better decisions. Decisions about important public issues like health care and immigration are too often made through the use of power or coercion rather than a sound decision-making process that involves all parties and explores all options” (National Coaltion for Dialogue and Deliberation http://ncdd.org/rc/whatare-dd/).
- 10.
- 11.
While a classic definition of deliberation emphasized reason-giving aimed at consensus (Mansbridge et al. 2010), numerous theorists have critiqued and expanded upon this initial account (e.g., Cohen, Escobar, Laden, and Young).
- 12.
See the National Issues Forum website for issue guides that use a form of deliberation that encourages citizens to weigh options on a variety of public issues (https://www.nifi.org/en/home).
- 13.
While more will be said in Chap. 4 about the structured process in which stories are shared, let me clarify here that in a dialogue stories are not offered as a form of argument or persuasion. In this way, the use of narrative in dialogue is different from its use in deliberations as advocated by Young (2010, 70ff) or by feminist legal scholar Kathryn Abrams (1991).
- 14.
Political theorist Georgia Warnke has also suggested a non-deliberative form of discourse, one aimed not at consensus but at meaning: “Whereas deliberation allows us only either to confirm or to give up on the public character of our reasons and considerations, interpretive discussion allow us to explore larger ranges of meaning ” (Warnke 2013, 766).
- 15.
- 16.
I discuss these claims in more detail in Chap. 5.
- 17.
All quotations in this section are taken from Plato 1991, 3–4 (327a–328b).
- 18.
See CNN coverage of the July 2019 second round of Democratic debates (https://www.cnn.com/opinions/live-news/commentary-night-2-of-democratic-debate-june-27/index.html); also see https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/12/politics/who-won-the-debate/index.html Additionally, the New York Times constantly focused their reporting on “who won” the debates: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/democratic-debate-winners-losers.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/politics/debate-winners.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/democratic-debate-houston.html
- 19.
If Hannah Arendt is correct in her assessment of Plato’s disappointment with persuasion after Socrates’ failure before the jury (Arendt 1990, 73), we might read Polemarchus’ question as motivating the whole Republic-as-“dialogue” that ensues: namely, how is the philosopher to respond when persuasion proves impotent?
- 20.
David Bohm describes the violence experienced when one is not heard: “in general, if somebody doesn’t listen to your basic assumptions you feel it as an act of violence, and then you are inclined to be violent yourself…” (Bohm 1996, 53).
- 21.
As Chap. 2’s analysis of Martin Buber makes clear, “universal” and “commonality” are existential rather than epistemic terms in so far as they describe our fundamental connection to the other.
- 22.
Let me clarify that my analysis does not require me to defend Arendt’s public-private distinction. In fact, it is my hope that my reflections offer a way to complicate her problematic distinction, which Seyla Benhabib has termed her “phenomenological essentialism” (Benhabib 1992, 94).
- 23.
As Arendt construes it, political persuasion is a form of violence (although oddly and incorrectly she pits persuasion against compulsion [74]). She writes: “To persuade the multitude means to force upon its multiple opinions one’s own opinion; persuasion is not the opposite of rule by violence, it is only another form of it” (79). Perhaps she has in mind Gorgias’ statement that if Helen of Troy had been rationally persuaded to leave her home, as opposed to physically abducted, it still would have counted as an act of force. Additionally, John Sallis uses persuasion as one form that nous’ generation of the world takes (Sallis 1999, 91). In any event, “persuasion” had a variety of different meanings in Greek, and therefore I do not find it problematic that she considers dialogue as a form of persuasion.
- 24.
Arendt writes: “Plato was the first to use the ideas for political purposes, that is, to introduce absolute standards into the realm of human affairs, where, without such transcending standards, everything remains relative” (1990 75, emphasis added). Yet she admits, and I agree, that Plato never intended the ideas as purely political much less as standards, if by standards we mean knowable criteria by which to measure and judge. The realm of the forms, rather, functioned as an image to indicate a type of regulatory ideal, an impossible-to-achieve telos of human existence, a liminal image—not a blueprint or set of measurable criteria. Plato’s defense against the relativism of the Eleatics was not to summon a knowable creed but to show us that without an imagined telos, human life is meaningless. Without a highest truth, rationality is impossible. Yet as Socrates’ words imply again and again, we can never know with certainty, clarity, or distinction what these forms are. The good is beyond being, beyond conceptualization. See Barthold (2010), Chap. 5 for a protracted argument about the role of the good in Plato.
- 25.
See Nicomachean Ethics 1155 a 20–3. See also Allen (2004), which defends a form of political friendship as central to a thriving democracy.
- 26.
My criticism of Arendt here might seem to help explain a failure in her theory of judgment that Benhabib notes: “Where I depart from Arendt though is in her attempt to restrict this quality of mind [judgment] to the political realm alone, thereby ignoring judgment as a moral faculty. The consequences of her position are on the one hand a reduction of principled moral reasoning to the standpoint of conscience, which is identified with the perspective of the unitary self, and on the other hand, a radical disjunction between morality and politics which ignores precisely the normative principles that seem to be embodied in the fundamental concepts of her own political theory like public space, power and political community” (1992, 141).
- 27.
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Barthold, L.S. (2020). Introduction. In: Overcoming Polarization in the Public Square. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45586-6_1
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