Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
- - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Earlier this week PZ Meyers of Pharyngula fame wrote a post about the limits of civility declaring, "There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion". Indeed I agree that condemnation and even ridicule can be powerful tools in combating harmful ideas. And there are those who hide behind a false front of offense and congeniality using manufactured instances of rudeness to deflect genuine criticism of ideas. We shouldn't humor them, it is no breach of civility to point our mistakes and to say you believe their ideas are wrong. Yet we should also not mistake PZ's words as a universal denunciation of civility or a call for rudeness as a standard.
Contrary to Meyers I would say that civility has a great deal of virtue when dealing with those who are ignorant. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge and a person is more likely to give consideration and credence to an argument that comes free from invectives and insults. Willful ignorance on the other hand often deserves to be met with derision. Yet incivility, when not used judiciously, has a tendency to reduce an argument down to a personal emotional battle rather than one focused on ideas. Incivility often lacks virtue when dealing with honest doubters. When it is used as a cudgel, as is sadly the case with many who would use incivility, it immediately pushes the opponent to a distance making them an "other" to be feared or hated and falls back on the same absurd absolutism that is anathema to freethinking.
Yes arguments should be about the ideas but I think a measure of civility actually helps to propagate arguments by making them more palatable to the opposition. The virtue of a method lies in it's ability to convey the meaning and while well bred insolence can be powerful when used sparingly and timely; too much mockery drown out the ideas and make others unwilling to listen. So that is why I believe the best path to open discourse is civility and encourage it as often as I can. I do not encourage incivility as a method but I can understand and even approve of the occasional verbal tongue lashing which can be just as effective and often the determining when it's appropriate can be a challenge unto itself.
I was going to write about about the great deal of political hay that had been made over the appropriation of of the term pragmatist by the pundity but I've come too late to the party. This is one of the challenges of not being a four-post-a-day hardcore blogger. You get scooped. Of course with the holiday season and the inevitable flu which followed I was out of commission for longer than normal so not only was I scooped but the story has already long since been buried and forgot. This is especially true in light of the recent escalations in the Israel/Palestine conflict. So instead of repeating old talking points why not just give you a nice round-up of what some of my favorite bloggers have already said.
The initial spark for this issue came from an article at The Nation by Christopher Hayes entitled "The Pragmatist".
In a postelection essay on Obama, George Packer noted these two strains of his campaign rhetoric and dubbed them the "'progressive' Obama" and "the 'post-partisan' Obama."
In Washington "pragmatic" is a kind of code word for the latter, and it's that Obama the Beltway establishment is happily embracing.
My first thought was how ideology here was used to mean ideologue or dogma rather than foundational ideas or basic principles. A thought shared by Larry Hamelin, the Barefoot Bum.
There are two senses of "ideology": The first sense (ideology) just denotes a set of ideas consciously and intentionally expressed, related and somehow bounded. The second sense (dogmatism) denotes a set of ideas adhered to dogmatically or inflexibly. You cannot have dogmatism without ideology, something specific and bounded to be dogmatic about, so these two senses get confused.
As principle becomes vilified as dogma, so pragmatism becomes the new byword for centrism. And Ezra Klein agrees.
Chris Hayes has a nice essay on the resurgence of "pragmatism" as the highest of political virtues. It's no coincidence, Hayes implies, that this occurs exactly as liberals take power. Indeed, it's the result of a concerted effort to frame the Bush administration's failures as the fault of "ideology" in its manifestation as a character trait -- think of the mental image when you hear the word ideologue" -- rather than "ideology" as it refers to the specific beliefs and policies Bush pursued.
Ron Chusid of the Liberal Values Blog defends the renewed use of pragmatism as well as the rich definition of ideology and reaches the same conclusion I did.
The concept of pragmatism is currently being embraced because of the manner in which the Republicans failed due to ignoring reality when it conflicted with their ideology. Current praise for the concept of pragmatism does not mean a rejection of all principle. In fact, the opposite is true as both a different ideology was desired along with greater respect for pragmatism by many who voted Democratic in 2008.
And for fun you can see some philosophical analysis of pragmatism and what the terms roots mean for this resurgence of pragmatists. Both Undeserved Confidence at The Opposite of Jim Bunning and Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber look at the philosophical history of pragmatism.
