Archive for category: Are There Limits to Free Speech and Civil Discourse?

In my opening essay for “Respectful Conversations,” I claimed that genuine disagreement isn’t a condition of human existence; it’s an achievement of human charity.  Okay, I didn’t quite say that (at least in those words).  My suggestion was premised on the idea that much of what passes for disagreement these days—at least in the public sphere—is actually people talking (or yelling) past one another or spouting catch-phrases and slogans meant to substitute for thought.  It was also premised on the idea that we human beings—especially those of us who are both citizens of a democratic society and children of God—actually have the capacity to do the hard work of learning to disagree and to disagree better (or do so more lovingly, as Tony would argue).  Figuring out another person’s arguments (not to mention one’s own arguments) and discovering points of connection and divergence takes time, energy, and practice, not to mention honesty, humility, and charity.  The philosopher Donald Davidson has argued that all disagreements are premised on an underlying set of agreements about, e.g., what words mean, how ideas work, what types of authorities have persuasive power, etc.  Though the philosophical infrastructure supporting Davidson’s argument is rather involved and not wholly compelling to everyone (you can find it here if you want some seriously deep reading), his basic point is, I think, true.  Trusting that basic point helps sustain continued engagement on the way to shaping disagreements.  Said differently, good and important disagreements only exist in contexts where the parties involved have a relationship, value that relationship, and are willing to stay in that relationship.  And civility greases those wheels. 

Hopefully, this, my third essay in this series, exemplifies the claim about disagreement being an achievement.  Two essays in and I think Tony and I are starting to figure out where our disagreements are.  And it’s not like we’ve been dancing around each other like boxers in a ring, trying to suss out each other’s weaknesses before attacking.  Instead, we’ve been trying to talk to each other and to our wider audiences in ways that clarified our positions as we were coming to understand and display them and to understand each other’s positions as we gained better senses of where the other was coming from.  So now, in this third essay, I think I’m ready to argue with Tony and I’m grateful to Tony for his own hard work in making the arguments possible.  Were our worlds not so bounded by our respective obligations to get other things done and the structure of “Respectful Conversations,” I suspect that these third essays would make excellent starting points rather than conclusions.

I.  A Story of Incivility

I started my seminary education in 1990.  When I arrived, I was moderately conservative both theologically and politically.  Not fundamentalist theologically or John Birch-y politically, mind you:  just somewhat right of center.  When I finished my Master of Divinity degree three years later, I was moderately liberal both theologically and politically.  Again:  not rabidly so; just somewhat left of center (to the degree that such spectrums make sense).  I still believe in the power of free markets to solve economic problems—though now I also recognize the need for regulations and government resources to deal with the uneven distribution of the negative effects of free market solutions.  I still believe in limited government—though I don’t think that “limited government” and “small government” are the same things and think those who spend their energies attempting to shrink government have a dangerously anarchic sensibility.  I still believe in personal responsibility—though I see how unjust social structures can inhibit the development of personal responsibility and access to power can be used to escape personal responsibility.  I still believe in a strong defense—though perhaps we might only spend as much as the next five countries combined?  And I still don’t like paying taxes—though I’m learning to see how many ways those taxes make my comfort possible and other peoples’ lives more possible.  (Parenthetically, I think that LGBTQ+ persons are every bit as human as me, that evolution and climate change are real, that news doesn’t become fake just because I disagree with it, that refugees should be treated compassionately, that women and men should be treated equally, that racism is a real and structural problem, that those who are most affected by decisions should have a voice in making them, and that the rapture is a 19^th century invention based on horrible biblical interpretation—but I also think that thoughtful conservatives should be able to agree with me on those things without surrendering their conservative convictions.) 

Upon graduation from seminary, various family members and friends found my change confusing, if not alarming, and several of them asked what led to my changes.  That question was one I asked myself.  Upon reflection, I came to realize that my answer to that question had to do with both matters of civility and of scholarly development—and the former matters were probably a more fundamental driver of the change than the latter ones. 

I went to seminary at a time when the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. (of which I am both a member and a minister) was entering a series of protracted debates and increasingly acrimonious divisions.  The issues at hand were those that most of the mainline denominations were/are dealing with:  homosexuality, scriptural interpretation, and liberation theologies, to name three major ones.  Early in my seminary life, when I argued with classmates about such things, I argued from the conservative side and when I looked for comrades who would stand with me, I looked to fellow conservatives. 

But here was the thing:  the more I talked with my fellow conservatives, the more I came to see them as . . . well, . . . as real (insert appropriate vulgar epithet here).  In private, they spoke belittlingly of many of our fellow students and condemningly of some of our more vulnerable classmates.  In public, they seemed to revel in proving others wrong.  In worship, their prayers sounded pharisaical.  And they weren’t above being sneaky or disingenuous in order to get their way on things.  And bear in mind:  the seminary I attended was, politically and theologically, fairly evenly divided among the student body.  And though the faculty probably leaned to the left collectively, the administration seemed to lean to the right.  So it wasn’t like my fellow conservatives and I were a small, embattled minority fighting to survive or a large majority thinking we could establish hegemonic control over things.  It’s just how we—or, increasingly, they—engaged the world.  Cruelty may not have been at the center of that conservative world but it rarely seemed wholly absent.  The more I was around my conservative colleagues, the less I wanted to be like them.  And the less I wanted to be like them, the more open I was to hearing other perspectives.  As I became better able to hear those perspectives, I was increasingly changed by them.

I am not saying that my story is the case everywhere.  Nor am I saying that liberals couldn’t be (repeat above vulgar epithet) themselves.  Nor even that the story can’t go the other way:  there is an entire genre of “I used to be liberal and then conservatives opened my eyes to the way things really are” literature out there, especially among the more libertarian versions of political conservativism.  I only am telling my personal story and, as someone once noted, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

I am, instead, telling this story in order to make two quick points and introduce one longer argument.  The first quick point is that patterns of civility and incivility—how we treat each other in public settings—have consequences and sometimes those consequences register in unexpected ways.  Conservative incivility motivated my move toward liberal perspectives.  The second quick point is that academic institutions have complex and fluid ecologies in which there are many forces at work.  In spite of tendencies to see academic institutions as stolid and singular, there are always lots of things happening and movement in many directions.

The longer argument has to do with Tony’s concerns about conservatives on campuses. 

II.  Higher Education as Crucible 

As a card-carrying member of the liberal academy, I value, above almost all other things, the pursuit of truth and the passing along of wisdom.  When I teach, I do not care whether my students agree with me.  Not only do I try to reserve revealing my perspectives until asked (preferably at the end of a discussion), but I’m an ethicist:  I argue for a living and like doing so.  I do care—a great deal—that my students come to understand things in greater complexity and with an ear to a wider range of perspectives.  I ask them to question old verities.  To argue from perspectives they do not hold.  To name strengths and weaknesses in their own arguments.  To recognize the incompleteness of their own understandings and identities.  To attend to the complex movements and poolings of various forms of power and the way power both distorts and makes advancement possible.  To see doubt as a spiritual discipline.  To recognize that truth isn’t determined by vote.  My classrooms are not meant to be comfortable spaces and certainly not safe spaces.

Perhaps some conservatives in my classroom find its environment troubling.  Perhaps they see the multiplication of perspectives as an endorsement of cosmopolitanism, the valuing of doubt as an expression of moral relativism, the attention to power as a way of undermining the benefits of traditions, and the valuing of the voices of women or persons in marginalized communities as a sign that I don’t value their voices.  If so, I may not be doing a good enough job of explaining myself, they may not yet be ready for my classes, or we may simply be failing to achieve disagreement.  What is not the case, however, is that they are being singled out or persecuted. 

Likewise, some liberals may find the environment in my classroom troubling.  In my experience, however, when they find it troubling, they tend to do so without recourse to a narrative about how they are being persecuted for the positions they hold.  And since, year after year, they tend to watch either their white, male classmates or their more conservative classmates (or those who are both) get good-paying positions first—sometimes regardless of academic ability or spiritual maturity—those more liberal students almost certainly have a pretty good point when they distinguish between individual experiences of disempowerment and institutional structures that disempower.  In a world where you can find the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, neoliberal economists at the University of Chicago, and Koch brothers money shaping hiring practices at George Mason (not to mention government-accredited Bible Institutes, evangelical schools where students have to sign morality pledges, development offices across the country seeking big money from very wealthy—and often quite conservative—donors, and schools like Hillsdale College actively pushing a conservative agenda), I find it difficult to buy into the “conservatives are persecuted in the academy” argument without adding a healthy dose of “conservatives push a narrative of persecution for  their own purposes” skepticism to the mix.  There may be a correlation between having a conservative worldview and having that worldview criticized on campus but correlation and causation aren’t the same:  when they are functioning correctly, campuses are places where everyone’s worldviews get criticized.                     

None of this is to say that “loudmouth liberals and conservatives” are not a problem in the academy nor to disagree with the idea that everyone has the obligation to love the neighbors they have as well as the colleagues they like.  The rules of civility still apply.  I suspect that while Tony and I may disagree about the status of conservative thinkers on campuses, the ethos in any of the classes we might teach probably would be quite similar.

Instead, it is to say the only site I can think of where there is a greater likelihood of individual transformation, where one must negotiate more contending forces pushing against you, and where there is closer attention to the potential for growth and the reshaping of relationships than the academy is the birth canal.  Those of us who teach at institutions of higher education think this is a good thing:  it shapes personal character, it builds social resilience, and it sustains a thoughtful citizenry.  Those of us who teach in institutions of higher theological education think this is a faithful thing:  it reinforces the spiritual practices through which out students work out their own salvation with fear and trembling as God works in them (Philippians 2:12).   All the more reason to emphasize both civility and free speech.  The academy is not, though, a place where snowflakes thrive.  Each year during commencement exercises, the most disparaging thing my colleagues and I can say about a new graduate is that, “S/he went through unscathed.”

III.  Tentative Reflections on the Fourth Estate

Moving from reflecting on civility in the academy to civility in the fourth estate is a risky thing for me to do here.  Aside from a year-and-a-half spent writing weekly editorials for an Atlanta newspaper, I have no real experience in journalism—and it wasn’t that good a newspaper.  Nor do I have Tony’s training for understanding the larger processes and practices of good reporting.  So I’m not only on relatively unfamiliar turf here; I’m probably so uninformed about these matters that I don’t even understand how much I don’t know.  Still, where angels fear to tread . . .  

In his second post, Tony writes, “Journalism should flip the journalistic triad and start with genuine sympathy and empathy, move to objectivity, and then if called for, add criticism.”  I begin with a question:  why treat empathy, objectivity, and criticism sequentially (and the third, potentially, optionally)?  Bypassing the conceptual cul-de-sac of questions about the possibility of objectivity, it seems to me that the first task of journalists is to inform.  This task is so vital in democracies that the nation’s founders enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment right after the freedoms of religion and speech.  That tasks mandates accuracy.  And giving accurate accounts of events and, especially, perspectives, involves both being empathetic enough to understand those perspectives and critical enough to place them in context for readers.  Said differently, empathy and criticism ought to grow together rather than occur serially:  we assess best when we understand well and we understand well when we have delved deeply and critically.  To return to the wisdom of Tony’s first post, being accurate is how the press expresses neighbor-love.

This clarifies why liberals like me dislike Fox News (let alone Drudge, Infowars, etc.).  We don’t dislike Fox because it is conservative; we dislike it because it isn’t accurate.  We hear positions we don’t hold being treated as our own and we hear accounts of events that lack the context necessary to accurately understand them.  I imagine that this is why thoughtful conservatives don’t like MSNBC (let alone Mother Jones or the Daily Kos)—though liberals like me would also quickly argue that Fox=MSNBC (let alone Drudge=Mother Jones and Infowars=Daily Kos) are false equivalencies.  Being willing to listen to many voices isn’t the same as according all those voices the same worth.  A popular meme making the rounds these days notes that if a journalist hears one “expert” saying it’s raining and another “expert” saying it isn’t, that journalist’s job isn’t to give both experts equal time; it’s to go look out the window and report what is actually happening.  Both experts should be heard and even taken seriously:  seeking after the truth, defending their right to free speech and treating them with civility demands as much.  Their opinions, though, should be tested against reality and disseminated as such:  maintaining an informed citizenry for whom freedom of speech is meaningful and civility valued demands this—as does the commandment against bearing false witness. 

This also, incidentally, clarifies why we see red when we hear persons in power talk about “alternative facts” and “fake news” and the President of the United States refer to the mainstream media as an “enemy of the people”—and why we sometimes get reduced to babbling incoherence when some conservative commentators either repeat such language or take our anger as evidence that we’re irrational.  We really are far more concerned about the future of the Republic than about losing whatever political debate we happen to be in these days—though we’re also concerned about losing those debates if we see those losses as allowing an increase in human suffering.  

There are recent studies arguing that conservatives and liberals increasingly perceive the world differently.  Perhaps Tony’s arguments about Americans distrusting media and the need to get around that distrust by building social trust via a new empathetic paradigm for doing journalism is a response to the trends these studies reveal.  I guess I’m just not yet convinced about the cause/effect relationships here.  It seems to me that distrust of the media is the result of the way some news sites confuse information and opinion, the multiplication of perspectives with the validity of those perspectives, and “fair and balanced” reporting with accurate reporting.  As a result, they misinform rather than inform and such misinformation isn’t so much a manifestation of the growing distance between perceptions of the world as it is a primary cause of that growing distance.  And I just don’t know that Tony’s serial “empathy to objectivity to criticism” approach resolves these problems.  Maybe results will prove Tony right.  If Tony’s approach takes us forward, I’ll be glad that I’m wrong. 

IV.  Speech, Civility, and Worship       

 As I close out this third and last post for “Respectful Conversations,” I want to make one last point about the importance of civility and free speech.  In its long history, the church has sometimes responded to questions about the wider body politic by refusing to engage them.  Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is a recent manifestation of this approach, but there have been many others.  The approach gets a fair amount of support from secularists because its effect is to quiet religious voices in public places.

As a Christian standing within the Reformed tradition, it’s not so much that I distrust this approach (though I do); it’s that I don’t find such an approach theologically coherent.  If God is at work in the world, then looking out, discerning what God is doing beyond the walls of the church, and aligning one’s work and life with what one discerns God doing seems pretty fundamental to a life of Christian discipleship.  All that work takes Christians out into a world that benefits from and calls for civility and a defense of free speech.  Discerning what God is doing and aligning one’s life to God’s work is no easy set of tasks, but then Christians aren’t called to do easy things.

Toward pursuing this work and doing so in ways that express neighbor-love, those of us in the Reformed tradition have a helpful question to use as a rule of thumb for faithful public engagement:  Can we imagine what we’re doing as an act of worship?  Given that proper worship involves doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly (Micah 6:8), such an approach lends itself to the promotion of civility-as-neighbor-love and the promotion of free speech as an instrumental good that makes a publicly worshipful life possible.  (You can find a much more extensive version of this argument in my book, Believing Aloud:  Reflections on Being Religous in the Public Square) So perhaps my answer to the questions Tony raises about how liberals and conservatives should engage each other in both the academy and in journalism is this:  as long as they can imagine what they are doing as proper worship, they are on solid footing and can figure out how to disagree from there.

Hopefully, Tony and I have modeled that.  I’m grateful to Harold for giving us the opportunity to disagree freely and with civility and, more importantly, to Tony for being a thoughtful partner in this conversation.  

Among the great benefits of civility and free speech are the opportunity to hear the wisdom of others and the possibility of moving wisdom forward by engaging it.  I am, therefore, grateful for the occasion that Respectful Conversations has provided Tony and me to engage each other and for the insights Tony brought to his first essay.  In it, he says a number of things that I wish I’d said (or at least thought), all of which warrant further reflection on my part even as I continue to advance some of the arguments I made in my first post.  Among Tony’s insights, I want to pick up on three, in particular, in this essay: 

• Christians should be shaped by/act out of neighbor love.  I’m actually embarrassed that I didn’t raise this point in my own essay.  May Tony not shame me for failing to write about it.  ?
• Love and civility should be linked in the Christian mind.
• Shame plays a complex role in American public life and that role (or, possibly, those roles) have not been widely discussed or thoughtfully addressed.

 There is great wisdom in these three points.  They are, though, three points that I also want to raise some questions about.  Along the way, I want to use my questions to think more about civility and public discourse, especially during these social-media-driven and politically fraught times.  I didn’t pay too much attention to contemporary events in my first essay though promised there that I would in future posts.  The time has come due to begin to honor that promise. 

I. Preliminary Observations

First, though, I want to offer two brief observations about the topic as it is being hosted on the Respectful Conversations website.  First, this conversation is very “meta.”  That Tony and I are attempting to have a respectful conversation on the topic of respectful conversations on a website called “Respectful Conversations” is so reflexive as to feel vaguely hall-of-mirrors like.  All writing has audiences and in a society undergoing what journalist Bill Bishop calls “The Big Sort,” those audiences tend to find, reproduce, and pass on the types of writing they enjoy to others who enjoy them.  The result, I fear, is that the types of people that will read, (hopefully) appreciate, and (helpfully) pass along the writing that Tony and I are doing are likely to be the types of people who like the po-mo sensibilities involved in such reflexivity, appreciate attempts to promote respectful conversations, and therein reveal that they share values that overlap with Tony’s and mine.  The danger in this is that far from expanding the range and significance of civil public discourse, the effect of our writings actually manifests as a symptom of the problems we want to address:  that we’re feeding the energies and funding the perspectives of our tribe(s) rather than expanding the conversation to reach new people with other perspectives.  That I’m getting ready to post my second essay and nobody has posted a comment thus far in response to either Tony’s or my first essays is at least one piece of evidence in support of this problem.

Of course, one way we might draw wider attention and response would be to produce more heat:  pick some fights, say some outrageous things, call each other names, or otherwise act like most of the talking heads we see on the opinion shows that try to pass themselves off as news in the world of cable television.  That’s not really me; I kinda doubt it’s Tony.  But this gets to my second brief observation about this topic:  the need to produce heat/stir up energy may not have much to do with the actual significance of a topic for those doing the yelling.  Maybe those who are yelling aren’t quite so convicted by their positions as they are anxious about their significance in a very big, very complex world and yelling is a way to get attention.  And maybe audiences—which really aren’t the same as conversation partners—aren’t quite so driven by the desire to have their own thoughts confirmed or, less often, challenged, as they are looking to be entertained by a good fight.  The gladiatorial qualities of public disagreements reveal the degree to which these disagreements are simulacra of actual public discourse rather than expressions of it.  And, as Christians in the first centuries of the church were quick to point out in both word and deed, gladiatorial contests were damaging not only to those forced into the arena for the pleasures of others; they were damaging to the souls of those watching and to the societies to which they were trying to bear gospel witness. 

Those, then, are my two brief observations:  I am concerned about a potential disjunction between the intentions and the effects of a civil conversation about civility and conversation (though don’t know what I can or at least am willing to do save continue in the path we’ve already been walking down).  And I think there may be more to interpret about growing incivility and contemporary debates about free speech than many of us usually recognize or admit (so attempting to resolve or at least mitigate the disturbing consequences of such incivility and debates will mean taking on interpretive responsibilities that move well beyond what this conversation can manage).  Now on to three of the insights Tony offered in his first essay that I want to explore in greater detail.

II. The Priority of Love

Tony’s first and, I think, most significant point is that the Christian obligation to “love thy neighbor as thyself” is both unconditional and foundational for any ethic that would call itself “Christian.”  Not only is a deeply theological claim (coming, as it does, on the heels of and linked to the first great commandment, to love God), it is the type of claim that manifests depth beyond facile understandings of those five simple words.  The command to love neighbors invites us to rethink our conceptions of love (Love can be commanded rather than only arising naturally?  Love can be directed at a wide range of persons rather than only the natural objects of our affection?  Love can be task, virtue, and inclination all at once?  Love is a social as well as a personal thing?).  The commandment calls us beyond tolerance, civility, and even respect for others—though, as I’ll suggest below, it also shapes how and why we value tolerance, civility, and respect.  But that depth also complicates how we love, especially as we start to apply it in varied contexts.

Return, for a moment, to the story of the Good Samaritan that Tony retells on the way to offering some provocative and helpful insights.  Having been asked “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the story of an outsider who, rather than ignoring a robbed and injured man in the ditch as various other insiders do, cares for the man, binds his wounds, takes him to a place of comfort, and covers the costs for that comfort.  The Samaritan becomes the prototypical example of how to do neighbor-love. 

Now complicate the story: 

• What if the man in the ditch says, “No, leave me here to suffer and die”?
• What if this is the third time the Samaritan has found someone lying in the ditch post-mugging?
• What if this is the third time the Samaritan has found the same man lying in the ditch post-mugging?
• What if the Samaritan comes upon the man as he is being mugged rather than after he has been mugged?
• What if the Samaritan comes across a second man lying in the ditch?
• What if the Samaritan got robbed by bandits the last time he tried to help someone in a ditch?

 The obligations of neighbor-love didn’t go away in any of those contexts but perhaps the way neighbor-love should be expressed might change in each of those contexts.  Unsurprisingly, theologians have written books on these and similar questions. 

In the instance of these essays in Respectful Conversations, the context in which neighbor-love is expressed is that of American public life—a context in which, at least in theory, rights-bearing citizens who have equal standing vis-à-vis each other are engaged in verbal intercourse over matters of common concern but shaped by varied and seemingly incommensurable perspectives.  Assuming that the topic at hand actually is a matter of common concern, then refusing to participate in the conversations isn’t an expression of neighbor-love because such refusal tacitly claims that the matter is not of common concern:  “I can’t be bothered with your concerns.”  Refusing to listen to what others have to say isn’t neighbor-love because that denies the equality of the neighbor:  “I don’t believe your concerns matter as much as mine.”  Simply acquiescing to the other isn’t neighbor-love because that denies the significance of a matter about which you, as a citizen, should care:  “I’m not an interesting partner for you in addressing these concerns.”  Coercing others—whether through force, threat of force, or rhetorical manipulation—to do what you want regardless of their arguments certainly isn’t neighbor-love:  “My concerns give me the right to harm you.”  All that’s really left, so far as I can see, is to shape the disagreement and continue the argument.  Maybe one side will persuade the other.  Maybe the two sides will have to call a truce for a time.  Maybe the argument will simply have to go on until the context so changes that its initial terms become less meaningful. 

If this is what neighbor-love looks like as it is expressed in American public life, then it seems to me that civility isn’t what comes after neighbor love (contra Tony’s suggestion that “You first need love, then you need civility”).  Civility is the way neighbor-love expresses itself in that context.  Civility is a form of neighbor-love.  This takes me to the second of the insights I want to pick up from Tony’s initial post:  that civility and love should be linked in the Christian mind (or at least in the minds of Christians who live in open, democratic, rights-based systems; things may be different in other contexts but those contexts are beyond the scope of this conversation).

III.  Civility as Neighbor-Love

So what are the implications of thinking of civility as a form of neighbor-love?  At least these:  First, to the extent that neighbor-love includes attention to intention, being civil must mean more than being polite.  Politeness can be motivated by many things; the kinds of civility that count here are those that are motivated by love.  Second, to the extent that neighbor-love sits as a high standard for behavior, it offers a means for judging calls to civility.  If those calls are used in defense of the maintenance of unjust power structures or illegitimate relationships, neighbor love judges them and finds them wanting. Third, to the extent that neighbor-love is something that we can get better at through practice, civility is something we should aspire to, not something we should think we’ve got right.  And, fourth, to the extent that neighbor-love is made possible by the prior love of God, those interested in promoting civility ought to be looking for signs of the work of God in the world. 

And what do these implications get us?  At an obvious level, they help explain why social media (or at least Twitter) can feel so uncivil.  One simply cannot give much expression to neighbor-love in 280 characters so as people take short-cuts to get to their point, they eliminate the things that are hardest to convey:  intention, integrity, depth, and naming whatever desires are motivating them.  Moreover, and perhaps at a less obvious level, social media distorts not only those we interact with (and it’s hard to love neighbors that we’ve abstracted), but it distorts us (and it’s hard to love neighbors as we love ourselves when we aren’t honest about who we are).  As Jaron Lanier has reminded us—repeatedly—we tend to reduce ourselves to the avatars we produce online, and since those avatars are not good at loving (since they are not complete and complex people), the results of our online preoccupations make us less good at loving (and, therein, being more civil) in general.  Recognizing that the objects of online incivility suffer from the incivility of trolling, attention to the way we reduce ourselves also helps us see the way that online incivility also harms trolls.  Perhaps that sounds odd, but the illustration is fairly obvious to those of us who have ever lurked over an online debate and thought, “Why can’t these people get a life???”  Though the question is rhetorical, the impulse behind it, perhaps, isn’t:  the reason “these people” can’t get a life is that they aren’t people; they’re avatars.  And avatars aren’t good at being civil because they can only express opinions, not neighbor-love.

IV.  Civility and Shame Online

So how should we engage them?  This question gets at the third insight I want to pick out from Tony’s first essay:  that shame plays a complex role in American public life.  And my arguments thus far suggest some of the reasons that such complexity might be growing.  They point toward the idea that we can’t shame trolls not because trolls lack a conscience but because they aren’t really human:  they’re simplified representations of human beings.  They point toward the idea that intent and effect both matter in assessing an action and so acts of shaming face the doubled judgment of being inappropriate or immoral because of what motivates those acts and because of the consequences of those acts.  And they hint at the idea that it is at least investigating whether shaming can be an expression of neighbor-love. 

At least in principle, I can imagine a defense of shaming as an expression of neighbor-love.  The capacity to feel shame is premised on the ability to make moral distinctions and the ability to make moral distinctions is grounded in the existence of complex psychological componentry.  There is, therefore, a peculiar back-handed compliment paid to those who, upon being shamed, feel shame:  it recognizes their humanity.  Done thoughtfully and lovingly, it may even help enhance their own sense of their humanity.  There are, after all, things we might do that we should feel ashamed of. 

Things get trickier in social media, as Jon Ronson’s entertaining if unduly flippant book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame Necessary? make clear.  Both of them see value in shame but both also recognize how easy it is to get shame wrong:  to let it be driven by spite or envy or vengeance or any other of a wide range of things-that-are-not-neighbor-love. 

By way of illustration, let me turn to a few recent events of online shaming.  Recently, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was (privately) asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia because the owner of the restaurant and that restaurant’s employees were offended by SHS’s complicity in supporting policies they deemed immoral (including on the treatment of LGBTQ+ persons), her willingness to demean the press, and her consistent duplicity as the Press Secretary to President Trump.  This act, itself, was a kind of private shaming—and the restaurant covered the costs for what SHS and her party had already eaten.  As word about the act spread on social media, though, a private act became more public and a private shaming became a series of public/online shaming, including by SHS, who tweeted about the event on her official Press Secretary twitter account and by President Trump, who never seems to miss an opportunity to make things worse.  The restaurant owner was, by all accounts, civil—and so perhaps the private shaming could have been motivated by neighbor-love.  The snowballing accounts and effects of the private act as it became public, though, grew increasingly uncivil. 

If one of the reasons it is difficult to negotiate shaming on social media is that we are not our full selves when we’re acting through our avatars, another reason is that the viral qualities of social media allow things to explode so rapidly.  It’s doubtful we ever would have heard of the Red Hen restaurant without social media (of course, it’s also doubtful that Donald Trump would be president without social media).  Social media is a tool of 21^st century communication, but as singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco reminds us in her song, “My I.Q., “Every tool’s a weapon if you hold it right.”  And social media is especially easy to weaponize.  As this example reveals, one of the ways that social media get weaponized are when they drive the collapse of public/private distinctions.  And the maintenance of civility in open and free societies is predicated on the maintenance of that distinction:  civility in public life works because we maintain private spaces to retreat to when the anxieties, frustrations, and angers that come with living with others in pluralistic contexts become onerous. The safe spaces necessary for intimate relationships and individual development disappear when it is so easy for private to become public.  There’s a reason we don’t make women wander around with scarlet “A”s on their chests, after all.      

A more complex set of illustrations have come with those whose actions reveal their racism:  the white woman who calls the police on black families barbequing in the park; the white woman who calls the police on a black child selling water without a license; the white man who calls the police because he doesn’t believe that the black family in the community’s swimming pool belongs there; the list of such events is going depressingly long.  As they were all videotaped doing something both racist and dumb and those videotapes all went viral, they were, I think, quite properly shamed.  Yet the consequences of their shaming have included the loss of employment and the sundering of relationships.  Were those appropriate consequences?  What is the limit to the penalties incurred through/with shaming?  It seems to me that one of the real dangers in shaming when it goes viral is that we are less likely to treat shame as the punishment for bad behavior than to treat it as the justification for allotting further punishment.  Recognizing that shameful behavior is shameful behavior, social media seem to feed the mob mentalities that keep us from maintaining a sense of proportion about how to respond to those who have behaved shamefully.  That was the case for Hester Prynne as she dealt with Puritans; it is even more the case when shaming can go viral and be passed along by avatars who do not love but do enjoy the thrills of punishing others.

Next post:  further reflections about the necessities and limits of civility and free speech in a poisonously partisan society. 

(Note:  During these contentious political and social times—times in which each day brings a new story about the values and costs of civility and free speech—I am tempted to build my arguments around contemporary events.  I want to resist that temptation, at least in this first essay, in order to lay some groundwork for the next two essays.)

Confusion, delusion, and bias are parts of the human condition.  They make actual disagreement an achievement.  Not agreement:  that, often, is too much to ask (and history suggests that attempts to either achieve or enforce agreement end in suffering).  Working toward clear, honest, and substantive disagreement is hard.  It is, I think, also necessary in societies that would endure over time and at least attempt to be just.  Civility and freedom of expression help make such disagreement possible.

This is one of the reasons that the syllabus of every class I teach at Columbia Theological Seminary includes a page of “Hints, Tips, and Rules for a Good Ethics Class.”  Before it wanders into details having to do with grammar, plagiarism, inclusive language, etc., that page begins like this:

Because seminary classes regularly deal with matters that are both personal and potentially divisive, we all need to keep several points in mind as we communicate with each other in this class.  Among these are:

1.  We are unified in Christ, not in opinion.  There is no special reason to think that we all must agree on an issue in order to be part of Christ’s church.  Christians have been disagreeing with each other at least since Peter and Paul, and there is no reason to think that will change this side of eternity.  In fact, as a general rule of thumb we ought to be suspicious about any issue about which we all agree.  When all heads nod in the same way, we are either exerting illegitimate control over other persons’ heads or we have stopped using our own.

2.  Disagreement can be many things:  intellectual, heated, productive, mild, etc.  Our burden is to keep it from being destructive or splintering.  Toward that end, there are three rules for disagreement within this class:

     a.  Always remember that the person with whom you disagree is, like you, a finite creature created in the image of God who is no more or less likely to sin than you and no more or less capable of being redeemed than you.  Demonizing others based on their positions is disrespectful to persons, contrary to the faith, and in poor taste.

     b.  You should be able to state your opponent’s position so clearly and fairly that your opponent would say, “Yes, that is what I mean.”  Only then can you rightly give a critique of that position.

     c.  You have the responsibility of following your thought through to its logical conclusions.  If you don’t like those conclusions, back up, figure out where you went wrong, and then either clarify or qualify your thought accordingly.

Those rules help reinforce civility in my class.  It doesn’t take long, though, for my students—who are being encouraged to ask questions about the moral and theological bases for rules, among other things—to ask about why these should be the rules.  And, as criticisms of civility grow increasingly common (based, as they are, on either concerns about efficacy during turbulent times or the way some arguments for civility reinforce unjust power dynamics and oppressive structures in society), they ask whether such rules are actually good.  

So, in almost every class I teach, I also include an early lecture on why to listen to people with whom we disagree.  Part of that lecture includes attention to John Stewart Mill’s reasons for doing so in his little classic, On Liberty, which I sometimes summarize as:  1) You could be wrong; 2) Even if you are (mostly) right, engagement with someone that thinks differently from you will help you shape your own arguments; and, 3) If you don’t listen to people who disagree with you, you won’t be able to distinguish the basis for your arguments from unexamined prejudice.  Those are good, classic, liberal arguments for engaging others and although they don’t line out practices of civility they at least hint at its importance.  I will return to them momentarily.

Since I teach at a seminary (and since I am a Christian of the Reformed variety), I also include in that lecture a more theological argument for listening to those with whom we disagree.  I call the basis for this argument “Balaam’s Law,” based on the story of Balaam in Numbers 22.  In that passage, the prophet-for-hire Balaam is called by Balak, the king of Moab, to curse the Israelites as they pass by Moab during their trip from Egypt to the promised land.  As Balaam rides his donkey toward the appropriate cursing spot, God’s anger is kindled at Balaam, and God sends an armed angel to stand in the road and prevent Balaam from continuing.  Though Balaam doesn’t see the angel, Balaam’s donkey does; understandably, the donkey turns aside and carries Balaam into a field—an action for which Balaam beats the donkey and turns it back to the road.  Twice more, the pattern repeats:  armed angel visible only to frightened donkey, Balaam waylaid and angry, donkey beaten.  “Then,” the text reads, “the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey and it said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times? . . . Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all of your life to this day?  Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?’” at which point, God open’s Balaam’s eyes to see the angel, rebukes Balaam for his behavior toward his donkey and his plan for the Israelites, and Balaam repents before blessing the Israelites rather than cursing them.

Though the story is richer than either my brief summary here or my use of it to establish Balaam’s Law reveals, it does get me to this law:  If God can speak through an ass, then surely God can speak through someone with whom you disagree.  This is my (rather cruder and titter/twitter-invoking) version of Karl Barth’s famous claim from Church Dogmatics I.1:  “God may speak through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog.”  The fundamental idea, obviously, is that Christian faith begins in a grace-filled revelation that is always disruptive and never determined by the prior holiness or the moral rectitude of either the speaker or the recipient of a revelatory word.  To the extent that living out a Christian faith is a continual project of discerning the word and work of God and responding appropriately, it is therefore hard for me to imagine any context in which Christians should refuse to listen to another person.  Of course, listening to another person is not the same thing as accepting what that other person has to say: discerning how one who is Wholly Other may be speaking also means rejecting words that are antithetical to the witness of the gospel.  And since the Christian life is a kind of pilgrimage, the practices of listening and discerning are wrapped in processes of developing particular virtues and resisting the temptations of particular vices.

There are tensions between the Millian approach to the obligations of public discourse for democratic citizenship and the “Balaamian” approach to the obligations of revelatory discernment for faithful life, and I may return to those in a future essay (especially if Tony quite properly challenges me on them).  But before addressing those tensions, it is worth noting places of overlap between the two approaches because those places point toward answers to several of the deeper questions about the possibilities and limits to civility and free speech that animate this forum.  Such points of overlap include: 

• Treating civility and freedom of speech as necessary but instrumental goods.  The goals of civility and free expression are not being civil or expressing freedom.  Instead, they are part of a collection of strategic goods to be inculcated in the pursuit of some greater good.  That good in democratic polities is the creation of a society in which all persons can participate in the governing structures that allow for a robust and resilient state.  That good in the Christian faith is the kingdom of God that has been inaugurated but not yet consummated.  In either instance, the wager implied in treating civility and freedom of speech as necessary but instrumental goods is that they are more likely to lead to these greater goods than are any alternatives.
• Maintaining epistemic and rhetorical humility.  Neither democratic discourse nor Christian vision can be sustained where ideological fervor or fundamentalist certitude trump commitments to listen to and speak with those different from oneself.  Whether humility takes the form of a commitment to the type of Emersonian experimentalism that multiplies perspectives in order to figure out which ones can advance a society or the recognition that our thoughts are not God’s thoughts and our ways are not God’s ways (Isaiah 55), such a posture favors both critical and charitable engagement with others.  Civility and freedom of speech are manifestations of this posture in that they constrain one’s own inclinations to dominate conversations and they support the rights of others to speak.    
• Committing oneself to relationship.  Democratic discourse and Christian vision are both undergirded by the convictions that we can be stronger together than we can be when separated and that unity is not the same as unanimity.  Whether this commitment manifests in a motto like e pluribus unum or a verse like “different gifts but the same Spirit” (1 Cor 12), this value not only honors the actual diversity of persons but shapes a teleological vision of reconciliation.  Maintaining civility and supporting freedom of speech become ways that persons express their hope that we need not leave others behind (let alone knock others down) in order to move closer to the beloved community of which Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke.               

There are other points of overlap; I raise these three because each of them also hints at where civility and free speech may find their limits in either regulation or prohibition. 

Treating civility and freedom of speech as necessary but instrumental goods recognizes that, historically, one of the dominant alternatives to speech in the projects of pursuing a summum bonum is violence.  The temptations toward violence are endemic to human existence and have been expressed in projects having to do with either creating a better state (e.g., the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, Mao’s cultural revolution) or bringing about the Kingdom of God.  Both moral vision and long experience, though, show that using violence to bring about such ends is neither good nor, in the long run, effective.  Where speech is used to incite, encourage, or valorize violence, it can be restricted or prohibited. 

I would hasten to note that I am aware that many people—especially those in minoritized or oppressed communities—experience some speech acts as forms of violence.  While I am sympathetic to the experiences of those against whom harsh speech has been directed and I try to be attentive to the way coarse and antagonistic speech may shape social attitudes that make violence more likely, I worry that equating speech acts with violence not only fails to distinguish between offense and harm but undermines the very notions of agency that makes it possible for us to recognize responsibility and hold people accountable for their actions.  Words do hurt but not in the same way that sticks and stones do and, for me, that difference is qualitative. 

Maintaining epistemic and rhetorical humility recognizes that language is contextual, that contexts change, that responding to such changes requires a kind of social resilience, and that pluralizing perspectives is a precondition for such resilience.  The temptation to treat one’s own opinion or one’s own place in time as the most important point in history (and, therein, to treat one’s own concerns or the current moment as carrying a level of urgency based on the premise that if we do not get things right now, all is lost) has not only led to violence but tended to produce results antithetical to the goals of desperate projects.  Again:  moral vision and long experience show that those who have treated their own perspective or any particular moment in time as singularly and overwhelmingly important have lost both their moorings in history and their imaginations for the future—and then haven’t been able to move into the moments that come next.  Where speech is used to end conversations, to silence critics, to shout down unpopular positions, to harm through deception, or to reject the diversity of voices, it can be restricted or prohibited.

I would hasten to note that I recognize that appeals to humility can be weaponized against those who face structural injustice:  when those on the top tell those on the bottom to be humble, they regularly mean for them to stay in their places at the bottom.  Contemporary disquiet and disgust with the virtue of civility by many of those on the political left are driven by such an awareness.  Any appeal to civility that is inattentive to the reality of the structures and flows of power in social systems should be called to account for such inattentiveness and made aware of the history of deleterious consequences that follow from such naivete.  It seems to me, though, that rejecting civility in such contexts not only misunderstands the strategic/instrumental value of civility but cedes moral high ground (high ground being in short supply for those on the bottom).  Regardless of who does it, weaponizing speech by using it to deceive, silence, or end conversations gives ammunition to the prejudices of the opposition and, when it is done by the oppressed, manifests as a project of tearing down the master’s house with the master’s tools—which, as Audre Lorde reminded us, is a doomed project.                     

Committing oneself to relationship recognizes that the kinds of othering that lead to people being treated as less than or other than human begin by separating “us” from “them” and building barriers between “us” and “them.”  The temptations to divide, to cordon off, and to otherwise dream up categorical differences between people have funded chattel slavery and genocide, not to mention racism, sexism, classism, and the other -isms that plague societies.  Where they have flourished, so have many of the deepest injustices and most horrific events of human history.  Where speech is used to categorize and then divide people, to generalize and then demean people, to reject and then dehumanize people, it can be restricted and prohibited.

I would hasten to note that this is, perhaps, the most complicated set of restrictions or prohibitions to negotiate, if only because such restrictions and prohibitions struggle to address matters of tone, nuance, intent, and context.  What is the difference between a tasteless joke and verbal cruelty (one thinks of the difference between mocking the powerful and mocking those who cannot defend themselves)?  Between the same word used in either a derogatory or empowering way (one thinks of the way the term “queer” with reference to LGBTQ+ persons has changed)?  Between the way a word is seemingly innocuous when used by one group and never innocuous when used by another?  By way of starting to answer such questions, I will note only that I am resistant to granting magical powers to language:  words, themselves, do not do things.  Addressing such questions means taking up the complex projects of making judgements about human intentions, actions, and consequences.  Making judgments about words, themselves, is tantamount to an attempt to escape those projects.   

In the six paragraphs immediately preceding this one, I have tried to at least begin to do two things:  1) to offer a defense of the way the proper limits to free speech are built into the very purposes of speech in democratic discourse and Christian vision; and, 2) to attend to the complexities of those limits.  I suspect that Tony’s responses to these paragraphs will mandate that I circle back around to them.

For the moment, though, I want to recognize that the vision of civility and free speech I am offering here comes from the perspective of someone whose social location and status (white, male, upper-middle class, educated, able, cisgender, heterosexual, Christian) is as likely to inoculate me from the most deleterious consequences of that vision as many of the things that I might actually say, write, or think.  While nobody can negotiate the thickets of language and exit unscathed—especially in open and democratic systems—I am simply more likely to emerge with scratches than scars than are many people.  Recognizing this, I want to make two final claims, one that is weakly valorous and another that is harder.

The weakly valorous claim is this:  that the same virtues and practices that sustain the visions of democratic engagement and Christian living I am espousing here mandate that those like me whose positions provide access to power and resources have an obligation to give special and specific attention to the way language (and especially our own speech) harms others and then to oppose such use of language and mitigate its consequences as we are able through our own use of words.  If being civil means being polite, then we may be called to be uncivil.  If, however, being civil means participating in the creation and expansion of a society that is honest, caring, open, and respectful for all persons (that is, if being civil means working to construct a just civitas), then the pursuit of civility is among the most important of things that we do.

The harder claim is this:  In the Augustinian vision I am promoting here—one in which the “city of God” and the “city of man” are inextricably blurred—many of the concerns I have tried to name above are not problems to be resolved so much as they are conditions to be borne.  Perhaps bearing them can mean working to manage, minimize, or ameliorate them; it will not mean attempting to end them because such attempts will make things worse.  In this, concerns about civility and free speech are like much of the rest of life:  matters to be endured more than problems to be solved.  So far as I can see, the virtues that inhere in civility and freedom of expression are the very virtues that can help us endure those concerns because they help us bear each other.

My classroom is not wholly like wider society.  All the students are graduate students, all share at least some overlap in faith and worldview, and, as professor, I wield power both in soft forms (I can remind students about language use during class discussions) and harder ones (I grade their work).  Neither my pedagogical methods, my “hints, tips, and rules,” nor my lectures may be applicable in many other social settings.  They are, though, I hope, means for helping students develop virtues associated with critical and charitable engagement—including those associated with civility and the promotion of free speech.  If they can help produce better citizens and Christians, then perhaps they (or their analogues) are worth promoting more broadly?

Next up:  Responses to Tony and explorations about the implications of these foundations for matters having to do with weaponized free speech, the contemporary political scene, and the advent of social media.  

Due to a death in the family of one of our conversation partners, the November conversation will not be able to continue beyond the November 1 postings.

Please return to our ten-month series on December 1 when Jim Skillen and Harry Boyte will present contrasting views on the “goals” of politics; the ideal characteristics of a well-functioning political system; and the extent to which our current political system in America is, or is not, measuring up to these ideals.

Harold Heie