Today I was reading my near daily Washington Post fix of articles and columns when it occurred to me why I am so confident that I am onto something in my policy work.
When I was in high school, I knew very little about the bigger world. I read a lot out of my competition in debate and forensics and I absorbed ideas like a sponge from about my sophomore year of high school, in this way, through college. I read and read. Articles, books, plays, scholarly work, debate evidence, textbooks. I watched smart people on TV, read their articles, read their books, read their blogs, even (Andrew Sullivan was one of the earliest journalists/intellectuals to blog). I learned on this incredibly high curve because I knew so little about the world around me. I read in class. I read out of class. I experienced the world. And I learned a lot at a fairly clip rate because there was so much beyond my understanding and experience.
There's plenty I have to learn today. And there will forever be important stuff beyond my understanding.
But one of the things that makes me more confident that I'm onto something in my work is that there are very rarely, anymore, new arguments under the sun, on most issues, for me, anymore. I'm familiar with most of the better and worse arguments on the most and least important issues of the day. And reading, these days, is often about reading variations on the same arguments rather than familiarity with new arguments.
I crave new ideas and arguments. I yearn for them. I stay up late at night dreaming of new ideas and arguments.
Because the truth is, if you take this work or any work seriously, they are fairly rare. I assume that is why anyone in their field who has big new ideas or arguments for the field gets some level of name recognition. Because new ideas are so rare. A big reason why I need to submit my work for publication. Because just offering an idea can open up a field, even if it turns out to be a bad one.
Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm in communication studies is a thought-provoking, but, I think, ultimately less persuasive idea of communication than rational argumentation, as Robert Roland argues very well in reviews of Walter Fisher's work. But, right or not, Fisher's work opened up the field. It explored a new idea and a new direction. Right or wrong, it was thought-provoking and generated creative space to rethink older ideas of communication and reasoning. There is a lot of good in his work. His idea that people tell stories to understand the world has a lot of validity, I think. And his idea that they are tested against their own internal standards and the external validity of those around those telling stories and trying to understand the world is true, too, I think. Roland's criticism of Fisher's work, that rational argument is still the ultimate standard of communication and reasoning is right, I think, because Fisher's work seems to ignore the contributions that empirical reasoning and scientific and rational thinking have offered our ability to tell truer and better stories with more rigorous standards of thinking and storytelling. But Fisher's idea is thought provoking in a way that really does engage people who think about commuincation and reasoning so that they can explore it in new and interesting ways.
I do believe and hope that my ideas are more solid than that. And one of the things that makes me more confident that they are is that when I read those same books and articles and blogs and ideas in the world, I much less often find a lot new under the sun. Not because there's not more to uncover and develop. But because I read a lot of stuff that seems to me to make similar mistakes in reasoning and avoid similar problems in ideas and arguments over and over again, these days. Much like when I grade my kids' work, I see the same mistakes made over and over again in much of the stuff I read these days. And I very rarely read new arguments or ideas that make sense of all of that chatter.
And no matter how much the worldview of various folks I read seems confused or contradictory or inconsistent or poorly developed or stubborn or too simple or many various flavors of mistakes in reasoning, I always can come back to my ideas and find an explanation for the world that makes more sense than what I read elsewhere. That has not always been true. And nor do I want it to be largely true, since it means fewer opportunities for real learning for me.
But it is more true than not, these days, that I don't feel as confused or missing some critical explanation of things that I might have felt when I was in high school and college. That doesn't mean that I always like the explanation or that I can even always do something about what I think I might understand. It just means that I prefer a lot of my own explanations to alternative explanations I read. That's true of all of us, really. Otherwise, we adjust our reasoning to adopt the stronger reasoning of others. I do all the time. And it is those people who have ideas to offer, like this, that I respect the most. Because they influence my thinking so substantially. Joe Nye or Francis Fukuyama or Benjamin Barber or Terry Moe or John Chubb or Paul Peterson or Milton Friedman or Amartya Sen or Abraham Maslow or Richard Posner or Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill or John Locke or Thomas Hobbes or Jean Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wolstencraft or Betty Friedan or Shelby Steele or John McWhorter or Thomas Sowell or Ronald Dworkin or the list goes on forever, really.
And, these days, my own original ideas and thinking have an important place on that list that makes me more confident that I'm on the right track than when I was still learning more from the ideas of others, predominantly.
I have made some peace with the fact that, though the strongest ideas would, generally, most certainly improve the way that we relate to the world and the world we create, that most people do not take the strongest ideas seriously, no matter how much they may deserve to be taken seriously. Most people don't think that seriously about the world, at all, is the truth. And many people lack the understanding to adequately consider them, at this point in their life, anyway.
But reason and the strongest reasoning is the only way that I know to relate to life and the world because it, inevitably, when it is strong, offers us a way out of many of our unresolved problems and issues in life, if only we will take that substantial way through them.
It is perpetually sad to me that we so often opt for popular thinking or fetishes or absolutes or momentary preferences or self-centered rationalizations or other kinds of poorer reasoning to sort through the world and arrange it as we do. But it is so, whether I like it or not.
It can only be different if we choose to take more rigorous thinking more seriously, and the educational building blocks to make that kind of reasoning possible in our lives. And, until we do, we will live with the madness of poorer reasoning dominating our lives and the lives of those we decide to dominate.
One day, it might be nice if the best ideas and the best arguments and those known for making them most consistently were taken more seriously by the entire culture and not just by a small minority, and if the best ideas were to, thus, perhaps have the greatest influence over the issues of our day. That may or may not happen in my lifetime. But it behooves us, in the meantime, to not pretend that the world is thus when it it clearly is not. And to not wonder why, as a consequence, so many issues are left so poorly resolved or unresolved altogether.
I yearn for newer and better ideas. Not because the world will all of a sudden adopt them to resolve the worlds' dilemnas, necessarily. But because they offer doors of opportunity where our poorer reasoning offers deadends, no matter how often we may circle around them.
Love,
Ben
