The Death of Civil Discourse

First of all, thanks to Pauli for allowing me to contribute to this forum. Secondly, my apologies for taking so long to write my first post. Last week was a bear and this weekend I was out of town and away from my computer since I was attending the annual Federalist Society Student Symposium at the University of Michigan Law School -- which brings me to the topic of my first post.

This Saturday morning, as I and some other symposium attendees made our way down the sidewalk to the law school to attend the first panel discussion of the day, we spotted about 15 people picketing in front of the school with signs in their hand. They were shouting a chant about demanding equality and affirmative action for school admission. It turned out that one of the speakers on the opening panel was Ward Connerly. Connerly is the black activist who is best known for leading the charge in California and Michigan to get ballot initiatives passed that made race based admission illegal for state schools. The fact that he is black makes him a target of particular scorn for supporters of racial quotas.

The protesters were invited inside to attend the panel discussion – this turned out to be a mistake. First, it should be noted that the panel topic was “Kelo, Grutter, and Popular Responses to Unpopular Decisions” and the discussion was not supposed to be specifically about the rightness or wrongness of affirmative action. Rather the panel members were speaking more broadly on the topic of what happens when the people respond – often in the form of a ballot initiative – to Supreme Court decisions they don’t like. Kelo referred to the notorious eminent domain case in which the high Court found that a city could force property holders to sell their property in order to transfer it to developers. Grutter was the case that upheld the constitutionality of the University of Michigan’s admission policy of giving racial minorities preferential treatment. Both decisions faced widespread popular criticism and both have resulted in laws being passed in multiple states that attempt to address the widely perceived deficiencies of those cases.

As I saw the protesters being led into the room, I naively thought to myself, “This is good. They will have a chance to see the kind of open minded debate we promote at the Federalist Society.” (Contrary to what most people think, the Federalist Society is quite good about getting a diversity of opinions represented at its events. More than anything else, the Federalist Society is motivated by the desire to foster good debate.) I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within minutes of Ward Connerly’s opening remarks members of the protest group began shouting out remarks and rhetorical questions. The panel moderator was Justice Robert Young, Jr of the Michigan Supreme Court. Justice Young is also a black conservative and he began admonishing the unruly protesters telling them (and I’m paraphrasing), “You must allow Mr. Connerly a chance to speak. Then we will have a time of questions and answers in which you may participate. That’s how civilized people discuss things.” His words had enough of an effect that they behaved themselves relatively well for the remainder of the speech. But at question and answer time things got wild. The protesters all lined up behind the microphones that had been set up for audience participation and proceeded to filibuster with long attacks on Connerly that were only cut short by the moderator’s demand for a question. They all identified themselves as members of a BAMN and acronym for By Any Means Necessary. This should tell you all you really need to know about these people. A visit to their website reveals that they have made quite a career out of harassing Connerly. Members of BAMN told the rest of the crowd that we all wanted to return to the days of Jim Crow and one participant declared that BAMN “was the only ones telling the truth in this room.”

I am certainly not the first to bemoan the decline of civil debate. The emergence of Bush Derangement Syndrome and its rhetorical excesses have been widely discussed. But at a personal level this event was particularly distressing. Seeing so up close and personal that the possibility of persuasion was entirely non-existent with these people was incredibly frustrating.

It seems that discussion in contemporary society takes the form of one of two extremes: either it embraces a soft relativism in which no one is wrong, everyone’s right and we don’t want to offend anyone by declaring an opinion too boldly. And at the other end is the irrational and disrespectful shouting of the kind engaged in by BAMN where you automatically assume bad faith on the part of anyone that disagrees with you. I can’t quite flesh it out the way I’d like but I can’t help but wonder if these aren’t two sides of the same coin. Modern relativism has made it impossible for two people to vigorously disagree with each other and try to make strong cases for their position. At the same time, when disagreements do occur they do not take the form of rational arguments but rather are loud shouting matches in which you assume the worst in you opponent . It is no coincidence that the rowdy group called themselves “By Any Means Necessary” – in other words reason and persuasion are not the tools they use for bringing change. Brute force is.

Remember when Cardinal Ratzinger talked about the dictatorship of relativism? Maybe he was on to something . . .