KAREN ALLEN wrote:
My question is this: What is meant by "cilvilized" an "uncivilized"?
in my inbox today I found an interesting and relevant essay
that may help answer this question. it appears in this
month's Currents (a journal published by CASE, Council for
Advancement and Support of Education):
THE CRISIS IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Can higher education help keep complexity
and nuance alive?
by John Sexton, President of New York University
it's here: http://tinyurl.com/33d27a
but since it requires membership to read, I'll paste the
essay below. since it's also long, here's an excerpt, what I
think are the core ideas:
There is an urgent agenda to pursue: the genuine
incubation, preservation, and creation of knowledge, the
nurturing of a respect for complexity, nuance, and
genuine dialogue -- not only on campus, but beyond the
campus gates.
Dialogue within colleges and universities is
characterized by a commitment to engage and even invite,
through reasoned discourse, the most powerful challenges
to one's point of view. This requires attentiveness and
mutual respect, accepting what is well founded in the
criticisms offered by others, and defending one's own
position, where appropriate, against them; it is both the
offer of and the demand for argument and evidence. We
must have more than information to address our problems;
we must have the humility to understand that although we
may arrive at wise conclusions, we will never achieve
absolute certainty.
- - - - - - - -
THE CRISIS IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE
Can higher education help keep complexity and nuance alive?
by John Sexton
We are witnessing today an increasingly impoverished quality
of what is said by our political leaders in the public
forum. Candidates for public office now relentlessly employ
slogans, talking points, simplistic messages, and attack
ads. Most political conversation amounts to dueling talking
points. Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when
they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to
the converted. Let's face it: The purpose of most political
speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings,
celebrity, or even cash.
By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start
from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what's
right in the other side's argument seems a superfluous thing
that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos
huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem
impervious to facts.
Yet the issues we face today must be viewed from multiple
perspectives and do not have one single definition, let
alone a single resolution. How do we provide quality health
care at low cost to all citizens? What does it take to
reduce the achievement gap in education? What needs to be
done to overcome racism, sexism, homophobia? How should we
treat new immigrants?
DOGMATISM RUN AMOK
As an information surplus develops in this halcyon era of
Internet communications, the frequent absence of
accountability combines with an absence of formal checks to
make it possible for pseudo facts to spread like wildfire.
This presents even the intelligent and the rigorous with a
serious sorting problem. One unsurprising response to this
barrage of undifferentiated information is a kind of
nihilism about knowledge that leads almost inexorably to an
equation of fact and opinion and the reduction of
argumentation to assertion.
What are these trends in our public discourse that create a
wasteland of dogmatism and bode so ill for elevated and
enlightened discussion?
First, at least at the national level, political leaders
often participate in the public discourse defensively --
that is, they worry about expressing a provocative thought
at the wrong time or uttering a disastrous slip of the
tongue, especially with cameras ever present to capture the
controversial statement or the gaffe. The danger, of course,
especially given the trend toward dogmatism, is that our
national political conversations will become more and more
carefully scrubbed, driven by focus-group-tested advertising
campaigns.
Second, in such a context, policymakers and candidates often
incline even in private conversation toward stating
positions in simplistic and extreme terms to avoid conceding
ground as they wrestle with each other for public
positioning and ultimate outcomes. When polarization becomes
the rule, participants feel little trust in each other, have
less faith in the willingness of others to listen, and
constantly fear being caricatured as weak or indecisive. The
result: a lamentable decline in the willingness of our
political leaders to engage in honest, open, and probing
discourse in search of public policy solutions to the most
vexing issues of the day.
Third, when the consequence of the binary choice is pure red
or pure blue, the purest (that is, the most extreme)
elements of red or blue care most intensely about its
outcome -- and, in the case of victory, they wield
disproportionate power. This raises the stakes, especially
for those at the red or the blue extremes. And, of course,
it creates a mutually reinforcing interaction with the
dogmatism I have described, constantly entrenching and
escalating it.
Fourth, in this high-stakes world, intense partisanship
thrives, as the relatively minor shifts in the electorate
create potentially seismic shifts in policy by virtue of the
small margins between victory and defeat. Such an
environment elevates the importance of party loyalty in the
service of maintaining power, because in a bipolar nation
the thought of reds taking over from the blues, or vice
versa, is seen as apocalyptically significant. The
consequent insistence on fidelity fertilizes dogmatism. And
the emphasis on party loyalty breeds the suppression and
punishment of internal dissent within the party and the
proliferation of litmus test positions as a party creed--a
dead weight on the richness, variety, and capacity of the
public discourse.
HIGHER EDUCATION'S NECESSARY ROLE
Our great colleges and universities can and must be in the
forefront of reversing the trends I have described. But this
is not a simple tale with an ending in which universities
play the hero. Make no mistake about it: Precisely at this
moment when research universities are needed as an antidote
to public dogmatism and to what I call a "coliseum culture,"
in which audiences are fed spectacle over substance, they
themselves are increasingly threatened. As complex arguments
and reasoned nuance are devalued in favor of the simplistic
and the dogmatic, the very basis of research universities is
devalued and subverted.
By their nature, research universities deal in complexity;
their essence is the testing of existing knowledge and the
emergence of new knowledge through a constant, often
vigorous but respectful clash of a range of viewpoints,
sometimes differentiated from each other only by degrees. In
nurturing this process, research universities require an
embrace of pluralism, true civility in discourse, a honed
cultivation of listening skills, and a genuine willingness
to change one's mind.
In this way, research universities can offer a powerful
reproach to the culture of simplistic dogmatism and
caricatured thought in a model of nuanced conversation. Our
colleges and universities must extend their characteristic
internal feature, the meaningful testing of ideas, so that
it becomes an "output" that can reach into and reshape a
wider civic dialogue. And these institutions must invite the
public into the process of understanding, examining, and
advancing the most complex and nuanced of issues with an
evident commitment to take seriously the iterative and
evolutionary encounter of a stated proposition with
commentary and criticism about it.
Of course, in this process, so familiar on our campuses,
views are held strongly and defended vigorously. The embrace
of the contest of ideas and tolerance of criticism does not
mean a surrender of conviction. Informed belief is
fundamentally different from dogmatism, just as the search
for truth is very different from the quest for certitude.
Dogmatism is deeply rooted in its dualistic view of the
world as saved/damned, right/wrong, or red/blue -- and it
claims certainty in defining the borders of these dualistic
frames. But within the university, conviction is tempered:
The discovery and development of knowledge require boldness
and humility -- boldness in thinking the new thought and
humility in subjecting it to review by others.
We must however, take care to resist any tendency toward
dogmatism within the walls of our institutions. So we must
insist on a pervasive, genuine, rigorous, civil dialogue.
Silencing of viewpoints cannot be tolerated, and
disciplinary dogmatism must be challenged.
Dogmatism on campus must be fought if universities are to be
a model for society. Silencing any view -- in class, on
campus, or in civil discourse -- must be shamed when it
occurs, and those who seek to silence others should be
forced to defend their views in forums convened, if
necessary, especially for that purpose. Above all, we must
not let our institutions be transformed into instruments of
an imposed ideology. There is instead an urgent agenda to
pursue: the genuine incubation, preservation, and creation
of knowledge, the nurturing of a respect for complexity,
nuance, and genuine dialogue -- not only on campus, but
beyond the campus gates.
Dialogue within colleges and universities is characterized
by a commitment to engage and even invite, through reasoned
discourse, the most powerful challenges to one's point of
view. This requires attentiveness and mutual respect,
accepting what is well founded in the criticisms offered by
others, and defending one's own position, where appropriate,
against them; it is both the offer of and the demand for
argument and evidence. We must have more than information to
address our problems; we must have the humility to
understand that although we may arrive at wise conclusions,
we will never achieve absolute certainty.
Higher education has a dual role in the civic dialogue, as a
rebuke to simple-mindedness and as a model of how things can
be done differently. In preventing the collapse of civil
discourse, the university simultaneously will safeguard
itself from the concomitant effects of a society that
disregards the reflected thought, reduces the interchange of
ideas to the exchange of sound bytes or insults, and often
shrinks the arena for discussion to a constricted,
two-dimensional space.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
[aka laserbeam®]
[aka ray]
SERIAL LIAR. CALL FOR RATES.
"It is very clear on this listserve who
these people are. Ray has admitted being
connected to this forger." -- Tony West
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