How to cultivate an open mind

Bret Stephens
September 25, 2017
AFR

In July, the Lowy Institute for International Policy announced that their annual media lecture would be renamed after the late ABC journalist Mark Colvin, and would be presented this year by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. On September 25, following a storm of twitter protests at the choice of speaker, the family withdrew its support for Colvin’s name to be used. Stephens’ lecture went ahead on Saturday night in Sydney under the title of ‘The Dying Art of Disagreement’. This is an edited extract.

Let me begin with thanks to the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honour of hosting me here this evening. 

I’m aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honouring Mark Colvin’s memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I’d particularly like to thank Michael Fullilove for not rescinding the invitation.

This has become the depressing trend on American university campuses, where the roster of disinvited speakers and forced cancellations includes former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University president Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will and liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, to name just a few.

So illustrious is the list that, on second thought, I’m beginning to regret that you didn’t disinvite me after all.

The basis of every community

The title of my talk tonight is The Dying Art of Disagreement. This is a subject that is dear to me – literally dear – since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society. 

To say the words “I agree” – whether it’s agreeing to join an organisation, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith – may be the basis of every community.

But to say I disagree, I refuse, you’re wrong, etiam si omnes, ego non, these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energise our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin, Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo, Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky, such are the ranks of those who disagree.

And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.

This is a puzzle. At least as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades.

Mortal threat to welfare

We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health-care laws, and, of course, the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent, street and campus protests that are increasingly violent and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering. 

This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were 20 years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare. 

The polarisation is geographic, as more people live in states and communities where their neighbours are much likelier to share their politics. 

The polarisation is personal: fully 50 per cent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Inter-party marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarisation is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts”, often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election, 40 per cent of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news.

Thanks a bunch for that one, Australia. 

State of higher education

It’s usually the case that the more we do something, the better we are at it. Instead, we’re like Casanovas in reverse: the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

It behooves us to wonder why.

Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom – at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile – published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the US. It was called The Closing of the American Mind. 

The book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and Strauss. But I got the gist, and the gist was that I’d better enrol at the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

What was it that one learnt through a great books curriculum? Certainly not “conservatism” in any contemporary US sense of the term. We were not taught to become US patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place”. We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilisation.

Exercise in interrogation

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind. This is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself. 

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries. 

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

Best instruments of spiritual liberation

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you may yet be persuaded of what he has to say. 

The Closing of the American Mind took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s, it had been the vogue in US universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that, to sustain liberal democracy, you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.

That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And, if you’ve followed the news from US campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse. 

I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that, since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilisation. 

The New York Times