Silencing debate to achieve political good by MT Nguyen, NYC

Political dialogue is an ideal and if well-functioning seeks to discover political good. It has been repeatedly argued that this mechanism for discovering and articulating political good is the best we have. Arguably, since there is no Form (Plato™) of the political good and at any rate no agreed upon means to approach it even if it did exist, we must ground society’s pursuits on co-deliberation and subsequent collective decision. Dialogue and the freedom of speech which grounds it is the cornerstone of the value we place on our democracy.

I am not interested in debating these particular points, but rather want to explore some conditions for genuine political dialogue. In their absence, we do not have dialogue but its simulacrum. In their absence, dialogue cannot fulfill its promise to lead to political good. It is important to be able to distinguish the two because tyranny and other modes of vice often employ the mechanisms of dialogue in order to delay, divert, confuse, and obfuscate the search for and discovery of political good. In such circumstances, dialogue establishes and solidifies political power through illegitimate means. In such cases, I want to suggest, we need to silence debate’s simulacrum, stop debating, and employ principled political power to achieve political good.

A paradigmatic case of disingenuous political dialogue is the case of the holocaust deniers. They present the silencing of their argument in terms of a free speech issue. It is true that their attempts to promote their views have been in various ways thwarted, but does a free society bear a responsibility to promote any view no matter how unreasonable? For the majority of us, debate with holocaust deniers is pointless because we acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that contradicts their central tenet. Now, although it is fruitless for us to continue it, the other side insists that the majority view is the product of a massive hoax. The belief in the value of political dialogue seems to undermine our unilateral withdrawal from the discussion, and this principle suggests that it would be wrong to thwart discussion, any discussion. The first condition of political dialogue is that it should proceed as long as one side remains unconvinced and continues to say more. However, if this is the implication of our valuing political dialogue, that we must continue debating with those who hold (from one point of view) outrageously erroneous beliefs, perhaps the value is not that important after all. It seems to embroil us in an unacceptable relativism and/or skepticism about the truth of beliefs in which we are extremely confident. Must we draw these implications? Is there another way?

I believe there is, for what can happen is the recognition that one’s interlocutor is not really debating with one at all. This recognition (to be sure, a difficult point at which to arrive) releases parties from the responsibility to dialogically engage and allows them to explore other avenues, e.g. silencing opponents. This approach needn’t deny that dialogue is the correct approach to articulating political good or that there is a discoverable political good. It embraces neither relativism nor skepticism. It implies only that, given things as they are, because there is no dialogue there can be no responsibilities to further it. Applied to holocaust deniers the idea is that we can easily recognize the vicious political agenda behind their calls for a public hearing. It is this agenda, and not dialogue leading to truth, that they want to promote. And there is no political principle that compels the promotion of any political agenda no matter what.

It is true that this is treading on thin ice, for it is difficult to show that we are not silencing a political opponent merely because we do not agree with him. This makes it important to reflect upon the conditions for genuine dialogue. I’ll merely take up two vital but often ignored ones.

One essential condition of dialogue is sincerity. Even in a context in which the substance of debate is hotly contested, in which either side is unlikely to be persuaded by the other, the presumption remains that both sides believe what they assert and are engaged in the practice of justification to the other. Discussion is undermined when an interlocutor merely asserts his views and fails or refuses to acknowledge the challenges presented by his opponent; that is, there can be no dialogue when the interlocutor engages in monologue. This is, to varying extents, always the case, because when the subject matter is of great importance, the opposing sides have already to a large degree made up their minds. Nevertheless, we can demand a good faith effort to bear an open mind and to present a coherent case that can be openly discussed.

A different but connected condition of genuine political dialogue is friendship. This might seem like a strange concept to deploy in our agonistic democracy where political contestants seem to disdain one another, but it is not. The idea of political dialogue as an essential component of political good requires friendship at least in the sense that the project of discovering political good is a shared one grounded in a mutual respect for its participants. Obviously, the concept of friendship here does not refer to mutual personal emotional attachment, but rather civic friendship. This is not compatible with mutual disdain, but is compatible with, as typical friendships are, heated argument and permanent disagreement.

We in the U.S. are now in the midst of a simulated public discourse over whether certain undisclosed (really, open-ended) interrogation techniques (read: torture) are morally permissible and legitimate or whether they are morally impermissible and/or violate international law. This so-called dialogue continues and promises to continue until some indefinite time in the future. For those of us who believe that there can be no debate regarding torture, it is frustrating (to say the least) to observe this continuing back and forth between congress and members of the Bush administration. We believe the back and forth must end, for while it occurs people are having their dignity stripped, are being degraded, tortured and killed. Dialogue, just like other activities, can have dire consequences.

As I have been arguing, however, we do not need to end discussion on the grounds that we do not believe what the other side says or that it leads to bad consequences. We can end it by suggesting that the other side is toying with us, holds us in contempt, and is insincere in its pronouncements. There is no space here to demonstrate that the Bush administration’s actions evidence a failure of each of the conditions for genuine discussion. For anyone following their moves, however, the case is not difficult to make: the legal acrobatics in a ‘torture memo’ written by a tenured law professor who, by all accounts, otherwise possesses a sound legal mind; the paranoid secrecy and duplicity which discloses information and relevant documents only upon being compelled; the ever changing, unprincipled, and obfuscating interpretations of the concept of torture; and, lastly, the contemptible and surely insincere attempt to distinguish Spanish Inquisition waterboarding from U.S. waterboarding. Each new month brings us a fresh perspective on the Bush administration’s tactics and none of them evidence any attempt to justify to others and do anything but push forward through brute force and occasional gerrymandering an egregious political agenda.

Knowing all this we need to adjust our response and make them appropriate to the conditions at hand. M.L. King recognized this more than 40 years ago when he abandoned dialogue with white supremacists who promised much but delivered nothing, and began employing civil disobedience. The call to confront an egregious agenda does not mean, obviously, that anything goes or that politics is reduced to brute exertions of power. The language and value of persuasion, dialogue, and debate are with us and our democracy, and this is verified by their use even by those who do not believe in their value. We can confront (non-dialogically) insincere and disdainful political opponents by compelling them with whatever legitimate powers we have to live by words and concepts they themselves use. We can do this not with the purpose of crushing them, but to bring them back into the fold, motivating them to engage us on terms grounded in civic friendship. If we are to articulate through political dialogue our conception of political good, sometimes principled political force used in the service of dialogue is the only way to do it.