Intellectual Hospitality and Genuine Debate

A Thanksgiving Thank You From THB

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Of the American holidays, Thanksgiving is by far my favorite. Over my academic career, Thanksgiving provided a much-needed respite in the final weeks of the fall semester before the home stretch leading to final exams. Much more importantly, the Thanksgiving week is about spending time with loved ones, celebrating family traditions, gathering together around a big table (or three tables lined up!), and of course, playing games — driveway hoops for my family — and watching football.

Thanksgiving also provides an opportunity to express gratitude.

Here at THB I am thankful for the community that we are building together. I am thankful for the incredible expertise and diversity of views I am privileged to encounter every day. I am thankful to those in the THB community whose support has encouraged me to take a career leap away from the security of academia. Most of all, I am thankful for the collegiality of the THB community — notable for its rareness in online forums. Honest brokering is a group activity.

Today, I discuss two core values of THB — intellectual hospitality and genuine debate.

Walter Lippmann. March 30, 1931.

Both of these values come from the writings of early-20th century American pragmatist, journalist, and political commentator Walter Lippmann — who was of the tradition of American pragmatists, whose views have strongly influenced my own.

In Democracy and Education (1916) Lippmann characterizes intellectual hospitality, which refers to “an attitude of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all sides.”

We need information from all sides because none of us are omniscient, and more significantly, successful politics — acting together — requires that we understand options for action that are before us and the many reasons why different people might or might not support taking alternative forks in the road leading to our collective future.

In practice employing such political pragmatism requires an open mind, according to Lippmann:

Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that.

In situations where everyone agrees on ends and means — tornado politics, in one formulation — Lippmann suggests that perhaps we don’t need open-mindedness. But in all other situations — that is, most situations — we are well-served by intellectual hospitality and open-mindedness. Lippmann argues:

Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli. Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.

Lippmann recognized that intellectual hospitality is easy to call for but difficult to achieve. In The Public Philosophy (1955), Lippmann observed presciently that achieving disagreement is not so easy:

[T]he modern media of mass communication do not lend themselves easily to a confrontation of opinions. The dialectical process for finding truth works best when the same audience hears all the sides of a disputation. . . Rarely, and on very few public issues, does the mass audience have the benefit of the process by which truth is sifted from error – the dialectic of debate in which there is immediate challenge, reply, cross-examination, and rebuttal.

Today’s legacy and social media, rather than ushering in an era of healthy democratic debate, have arguably made it easier for those so motivated to avoid encountering — and to prevent others from encountering — a diversity of legitimate views necessary to sift truth from error. Echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, block lists, partisan media, censorious content moderation, cancel culture and so on are dynamics that many of us are familiar with — some of us a bit too familiar, ahem — and that get in the way of the discourses that make democracy healthy and effective.

Lippmann argued that freedom of speech and genuine debate go together — each depends on the other. Politics best serves common interests when ideas are subjected to genuine debate.

Lippmann argues that genuine debate offers a check on what some today call “misinformation” and, perhaps ironically, the lack of genuine debate motivates calls for censorship by the most strident amongst us (emphases added):

[W]hen genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates and justifies it – that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is not effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panders upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to censors to protect them. . .

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

Here at THB, the core values of intellectual hospitality and genuine debate mean that we share a commitment to learning together and also, to figuring out how to live together. These values also underly the foundation of the American project — If there is American exceptionalism, it no doubt lies in the belief that an incredibly large and diverse collection of people desire to figure out how to live together, acknowledging the realities of differing values, opinions, and beliefs.

From the perspective of American democracy, the point of public debate is not to “win” — but rather, as Lippmann explains, to participate in the “constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses.” Genuine debate makes it possible for us to not just live together, but to thrive collectively. In contrast, the lack of genuine debate makes it less likely for a democracy to sustain or thrive.

I often paraphrase Lippmann (Public Opinion, 1922) on the purpose of politics — The goal of politics is not to get everyone to think alike, but to get people who think differently to act alike. That’s why honest brokering is a group activity.

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Before you go, some quick updates:

• Next Monday in your in box you’ll receive Part 2 in the THB series on the politicization of the American university. Check out Part 1 here.

• Earlier this month, I documented a remarkable corruption of a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Yesterday, I watched the recording of the first public meeting of the corrupted committee, and it is even worse — and it is not the only compromised committee.

• Military and government employees — Don’t forget the standing offer to become a supporter of THB at 50% off forever. Thanks for your service!

• Paid subscribers have access to the THB Pro page with book downloads, THB Insider posts, and much more.

• Finally, I’ve created a new THB Thanksgiving special offer — $1 per week forever. Thank you!