As a person who loves debate perhaps a bit more than is entirely healthy for me, I find that most debates and arguments are really proxy arguments for something else. Debates can only resolve issues on an intellectual level, at best. More often they resolve no issues, but merely harden and clarify differences. They reveal the assumptions that undergird arguments, and often reveal that the real ground of a dispute is not the given subject at hand, but larger personal issues that foreclose certain options in our mind and bias us towards others. Often the real roots of our disagreements are not intellectual reasoning at all, but emotional reasoning with intellectual justification. In such an atmosphere, intellectual discussion strikes emotional roots, as the refutation of an argument is treated like a personal attack.

Why are people so rarely honest with themselves and others when it comes to public discourse? Why do people pretend to be interested in debate and intellectual discourse when they cannot treat others with respect or handle criticism of their own misguided opinions? Why do people refuse to admit the emotional ground of their beliefs and instead pretend that their positions are intellectual ones? Doing any of these correctly would greatly improve the quality of our public discourse, and doing all of them would make civil debates far more common than they are now. Why is doing this so hard for us?

I think a big part of our difficulty in civility in public discourse is a lack of knowledge about ourselves and others. All too often we mistakenly belief that our worldviews and our positions on various affairs are self-evident truths that ought to be obvious to all, instead of being choices and positions often based on perceived self-interest and personal history, both of which differ widely from one person to another. I generally have few difficulties admitting the massive importance of my own personal life history (about which I am quite candid) in influencing my own ideological commitments as well as my own particularly fierce interest in questions of justice and equity. And I am equally candid about what I judge to be in my self-interest. I understand that the self-interest of others may be different from my own, and that other people may have lived different lives that led them to trust more (and not be as suspicious as I am by nature) or that led them to think better of others or of this world, or that led them to see evil in places where I see good, and vice versa. I do not demand that others see the world as I see (nor would I want others to, if it meant that they had to go through what I have), but rather I demand them to be honest about the reasons why they see the world as they do, and not to attempt to foist their half-baked arguments on me, assuming that I have not thought through matters seriously myself.

Another big part of our problems with civility is that we tend to live in echo chambers and surround ourselves with people who think the same as we do. As a result we tend to have friends and associates with the same political worldview as we do. Because these people will generally share our background in significant ways, as well as share our worldview and probably the same sort of self-interest that we have, it is very easy for us to make the (regrettably common) mistake of assuming that no other worldviews or perspectives are reasonable, which automatically precludes respectful treatment of the positions and worldviews of other people who think differently than we do. This is not a partisan problem, either. We see the world as we are, and then want to spend most of our time (unless we are argumentative people) dealing with those who see the world in basically the same ways that we do. As a result, it is all too easy to see the way we see the world as the only reasonable way to see the world, which means that anyone who sees the world differently must be unreasonable, perverse, or deeply in error.

And sometimes this is the case. Most of the time the way we see the world is an outgrowth of our desire to see ourselves as right and as a response to what we feel like are the attacks and sins of other people against us. When we believe our own victim and villain tales, it is impossible to see other people as flesh and blood human beings who deserve our respect, and without mutual respect there are no positive relationships we can have of any kind. How to build respect for others, including a desire to understand why they believe what they do, even if it is different from ourselves, is a task that requires a great deal of emotional maturity. This maturity appears to be lacking in many aspects of our contemporary existence, and I am concerned that its results will be tragic, even more so than they already have been. There is yet time to change.