Your opening pair of questions and your appropriately ambivalent answer to them points to something like what anthropologist Valentina Napolitano calls “the realm of the just and the impersonal,” something I associate with the “unstructured” (i.e., adult-free) play of elementary-school-age children as Richard Sennett has described it.
Children, Sennett says, make rules more complex to give younger or less-skilled children a handicap and so prolong the game. Rules are adjusted during the game for the same reason. The children recognize these agreements as what you describe as “a temporary outcome” and not as “a moral achievement.”
Once we are in the realm of the impersonal, we can argue and carry on as much as, say, opposing lawyers before a jury that they don’t wish to needlessly offend. Afterwards, the same lawyers can laugh and carry on in camaraderie or even friendship on the elevator down from the courtroom. I wish this kind of courtroom artifice were more prevalent in other areas of what we call the public realm.
One of our greatest losses in public life may be convention, which Sennett promotes as “the single most expressive tool of public life. But in an age where intimate relations determine what shall be believable, conventions, artifices, and rules appear only to get in the way of revealing oneself to another . . .”
And with appropriate public conventions, we maintain (and perhaps even foster) relations and public life itself. As you say, “Sometimes what we don’t know is what keeps us living together.”
Your concept of hard pluralism seems like the summit of, or at least a significant milestone in, a recurring examination that you engage in so profitably: how can we can maintain pluralism and its modes—dissent, civility, and content, among others—in an age that expects either force or an insistence on manners to devalue and suppress dissent.
Several of your lines capture some of these tensions in wonderfully exacting language that challenges us to think what a love for democracy really entails:
Democracy “depends on distinguishing between dissent and disloyalty, civility and safety, and courtesy and legitimacy.”
“Pluralism fails when respect becomes tolerance, tolerance becomes rule-following, and rule-following replaces judgment.”
“Pluralism fails not when disagreement endures, but when it is made inconsequential. Democracy decays not only when dissent is crushed, but when civility drains it of force.”
Here’s to hard pluralism. May we value the impersonal enough to become, maybe for the first time, Emerson’s “nation of friends.”
Your invocation of the impersonal and of convention clarifies what hard pluralism requires: not warmth, but a shared space. I especially value your courtroom image. If anything, I’d add that convention doesn’t mute dissent—it disciplines and sharpens it. - Thanks again, Bryce, for another thoughtful response.
This post Hard pluralism is a resource for the vocabulary to notice if you are listening or if you start making faces and huffing and chittering like a monkey you know tsk tsk you have gone into childmode. Actions are what ropes us to political slavery to the hottakes. Listening's an action. And indeed we feel sure that most donot wish for insinuations shoehorned into process politesse to make our group decisions for us. Dangerously a giant tranche of us appear now 80 plus percent of americans i see appear to be a people who cannot stop talking. In prayerful hope that our tradition of standoffishness returns, maybe for us Never stop-talking just takes place as a fad.
Your opening pair of questions and your appropriately ambivalent answer to them points to something like what anthropologist Valentina Napolitano calls “the realm of the just and the impersonal,” something I associate with the “unstructured” (i.e., adult-free) play of elementary-school-age children as Richard Sennett has described it.
Children, Sennett says, make rules more complex to give younger or less-skilled children a handicap and so prolong the game. Rules are adjusted during the game for the same reason. The children recognize these agreements as what you describe as “a temporary outcome” and not as “a moral achievement.”
Once we are in the realm of the impersonal, we can argue and carry on as much as, say, opposing lawyers before a jury that they don’t wish to needlessly offend. Afterwards, the same lawyers can laugh and carry on in camaraderie or even friendship on the elevator down from the courtroom. I wish this kind of courtroom artifice were more prevalent in other areas of what we call the public realm.
One of our greatest losses in public life may be convention, which Sennett promotes as “the single most expressive tool of public life. But in an age where intimate relations determine what shall be believable, conventions, artifices, and rules appear only to get in the way of revealing oneself to another . . .”
And with appropriate public conventions, we maintain (and perhaps even foster) relations and public life itself. As you say, “Sometimes what we don’t know is what keeps us living together.”
Your concept of hard pluralism seems like the summit of, or at least a significant milestone in, a recurring examination that you engage in so profitably: how can we can maintain pluralism and its modes—dissent, civility, and content, among others—in an age that expects either force or an insistence on manners to devalue and suppress dissent.
Several of your lines capture some of these tensions in wonderfully exacting language that challenges us to think what a love for democracy really entails:
Democracy “depends on distinguishing between dissent and disloyalty, civility and safety, and courtesy and legitimacy.”
“Pluralism fails when respect becomes tolerance, tolerance becomes rule-following, and rule-following replaces judgment.”
“Pluralism fails not when disagreement endures, but when it is made inconsequential. Democracy decays not only when dissent is crushed, but when civility drains it of force.”
Here’s to hard pluralism. May we value the impersonal enough to become, maybe for the first time, Emerson’s “nation of friends.”
Your invocation of the impersonal and of convention clarifies what hard pluralism requires: not warmth, but a shared space. I especially value your courtroom image. If anything, I’d add that convention doesn’t mute dissent—it disciplines and sharpens it. - Thanks again, Bryce, for another thoughtful response.
This post Hard pluralism is a resource for the vocabulary to notice if you are listening or if you start making faces and huffing and chittering like a monkey you know tsk tsk you have gone into childmode. Actions are what ropes us to political slavery to the hottakes. Listening's an action. And indeed we feel sure that most donot wish for insinuations shoehorned into process politesse to make our group decisions for us. Dangerously a giant tranche of us appear now 80 plus percent of americans i see appear to be a people who cannot stop talking. In prayerful hope that our tradition of standoffishness returns, maybe for us Never stop-talking just takes place as a fad.
http://www.priorunity.org
http://www.nottwoispeace/excerpt-reality-humanity
http://fearnomore.vision/world-2/integrity-of-the-whole
Cooperation & Doubt
http://beezone.com/adida/cooperation-and-doubt.html
http://beezone.com/current/coopcomm.html Cooperative Community & the Integrity of Human Culture