I've had a lot of time to reflect, this semester, about the kinds of thinking and issues of conscience that I have wrestled with for the last 6 or 7 years, ever since I started doing this theoretical policy work and writing and becoming more genuinely independent of professors and my parents and bosses and of the dominant political culture and so many people in the world.
The more I have watched this sad, sad political period unfold, the more profoundly disappointed I have become with both the period and the people who have promoted it. This obsession with force and power, the attempt to substitute it for a more substantial philosophy of governance and life, the senseless hurt and destructiveness it has sown, the extremes that it moves in because it openly courts such extremes and has only pretense of a more genuine moderation or thoughtful approach to difficult matters of policy and conscience, and the liscence it has given the more brute and thoughtless among us to hold sway out of affiliation with sanctimony and without a sincere concern for policy or people.
The more time I've spent in the "real world," meaning after graduate school and my experience in universities, the more I have become convinced that the most serious shortage in the world outside of universities - and even in universities, often - is a genuine commitment and concern for substantial thought and discussion and debate and engagement more genuinely resolving matters of the heart and mind on their merits, rather than on instinct, or ideology, or sanctimony, or politics in its basest forms, or self-centeredness or just plain pettiness. All of these means of resolving important issues get far too much play in the "real world," especially in the world of politics and especially in power centers like Washington, D.C. Engaged, thoughtful discussions of depth and merit get ignored enough as it is in universities, nevertheless in the places where such discussions and the ideas that animate them have practical consequence. And yet so many, by far most, people fail to take such engaged, deep, thoughtful discussions and bigger ideas nearly seriously enough, largely out of the arrogance that these discussions do not concern them because they already know all they need to know.
That is my assessment of the "real world" and people who do not take such discussions seriously. That they are arrogant far more than they are humble, average joes and janes. They do not engage more serious, thoughtful discussions of important issues because they are convinced, far too often, that they've already got it all figured out. That they already know the right "balance." That they have no need to think more largely because they have no desire to think more and do not like to be bothered with the challenge, but will hide that under the guise and defense of arrogance that all that they need to know is already within their grasp.
It's the single most important quality of universities and the professors and students and people who occupy them that I miss: more genuine intellectual curiosity. It is nice to be among people in a setting where it is less fashionable to pretend that you need not know more than you already do and where it is more sensible to question and consider different ideas, points of view, alternative scenarios and arguments, reasonable disagreement, and more rigorously argued and considered thinking. The absence of that kind of intellectual curiosity and the willingness to think outside of one's own particular box is the single most important quality of most conversations I have, these days, that persistently drives me up a wall.
How in the world anyone could look at a period where the most serious issues are being resolved by force and not by reasonable argument and genuine room for disagreement boggles my mind, largely because I take liberal values more seriously than most folks, I suppose. Democracy, at its highest, is not about bullying your way through difficult issues. It is about engaging the ideas and arguments of those you disagree with as well as those you agree with and those whose ideas are curious and considering important issues from more informed and thoughtful perspectives.
Better thinkers know this. And I have spent an enormous amount of my time post-university with a lot of people who are not such better thinkers. I consider almost everyone a friend. But I've also grown more than impatient and underwhelmed by the bottoming out of standards of intellectual engagement and honesty that have characterized this period. How any liberal could look at this current period and think to themselves, "Now that is what progress looks like," is beyond me. How sad it would be, indeed, if so many enlightened thinkers and scientists and visionaries and even political leaders of the past were to look at the present period and think, "Now that is the fulfillment of everything we worked to create. That is the dawn that rises after the darkness."
How sad, indeed, if that were true.
It very clearly is not. And I am more than eager to reengage the scholarly and university world if only to have a more genuinely reasonable discussion, again, about issues that I care about.
Because this kind of "progress" is no substitute for the more honest liberal values that animate our most sustainable understanding of the world around us and the basis for our liberal democratic culture.
Love,
Ben
