This essay was presented during evening two of the President’s Colloquy on Civil Discourse at Whitworth University, in February of 2018. The question of the night was this: Can we disagree without being disagreeable?
In a Saturday Night Live skit last month, the chitchat of three fashionable couples at dinner skids to a halt when one diner brings up a recent, highly ambiguous Hollywood sex scandal. The skit’s pretty good joke is built around the fact that they are all uncomfortable with the implications of the scandal but unwilling to risk unpacking those implications, lest they defy the tangled and contradictory conventional wisdoms of their social set. Every person at the table begins a sentence boldly but trails off in shame at shushing signals from one or another of their gathered friends. It’s funny, and it’s painful, and it distills for comedy what it feels like to live and think in a community where speaking with absolute carefulness and propriety — speaking with the squeaky clean manners of the moment — is given greater importance than speaking in ways that challenge, illuminate, enrich, embolden, or otherwise complicate the reigning moods and mentalities.
I’m interested tonight in the inciting moment of that skit, where one friend violates a taboo by innocently broaching an uncomfortable topic at an inopportune moment in a way that makes jaws drop. In the comic world of the skit, she eventually uses sorcery to make herself disappear, a metaphor for the immense pressure this subject puts on her unprepared friends and their friendships; in our real lives, the ineloquent misspeakers and the inelegant blurters — my people, I want to say — often face less magical forms of disappearance. They’re blamed or condemned or given the cold shoulder or seen as obnoxious nuisances. Sometimes, to be sure, they are obnoxious or unhelpful. But I want to pursue the notion that we need them — absolutely must have them — to help us see behind the carefully curated facades of fashionable right thinking, and that, if we build a community where exuberant or careless ineloquence is a matter for censure, if we habitually greet awkward and inopportune speech with anger and punishment, then we are working together against that which might otherwise challenge, attune, and deepen our knowledge and wisdom.
The novelist E.L. Doctorow drew what I think is a relevant distinction between what he called the language of regime and the language of freedom. Regime language, Doctorow says, “draws its strength from what we are supposed to be” when we’re playing by the rules — when we are awed to silence or moved to careful speech by our loyalties to the attitudes, platitudes, and angers of those whose power and ways of thinking we admire, fear, or simply accept. To be sure, there is nothing necessarily wrong with speaking up and acting out from within one’s polite, well-curated, easily-recognized cultural space. Laudable results often follow from obedience, propriety, and manners. But sometimes the loyal marchers ought to be irritated out of their self-assured propriety.
Toward that end, Doctorow’s language of freedom nettles, challenges, and inspires. The language of freedom arrives on the scene askew from polite expectations, and, Doctorow says, “will always trigger fashionable angers.” He also says, though, that this language “is where we become,” meaning, I think, that this is the speech that gets us to new thoughts and exposes submerged possibilities and brings to light unexamined problems. It is speech that illuminates, enriches, emboldens, or otherwise complicates our lives. And it is not simply the language of contrarian opinion or the rhetoric of protest marches, which can turn out to be very much part of the standard world of polite speech and action. Doctorow connects the language of freedom to art, and particularly to his own work as a novelist who arranges facts and history and human activity into eccentric but telling new shapes.
Successful art, for Doctorow as for me, is often a source of challenge to conventional thinking and received habits of mind, heart, and action. An elegant act of art may turn out to be, in a given context, a piece of rude and disruptive ineloquence, a rock thrown through the windows of common complacency. Or maybe that metaphor is too aggressive; I’m not really talking about revolutionary action here. Maybe successful art turns out to be the look of gentle disapproval, or the note of skepticism, or the stunning counterexample that leads us to rethink our ways. And I want us to consider the possibility that rude, awkward, unpolished, inopportune, and unexpected speech can work like art, if we let it. Offense and irritation can lay the foundation for sincere head-scratching, hypothesis, and conjecture, creating new impetus for the rigorous, imaginative inquiries into truth and knowledge that we champion in universities.
Of course, impolite and rude speech can also be just be impolite and rude. That makes it difficult to cope with, at times, but I want to offer four questions we can ask ourselves when we encounter ineloquences of all kinds. These questions, I hope, will help us to be more agreeable in our disagreements, and perhaps to benefit mightily from speech and actions that could otherwise lead to the explosion of personal relationships or the fracturing of community.
Question 1: Am I picking at specks?
Matthew 7 gives us Jesus’ famous lines about specks and planks, and they are central to my defense of rude and ineloquent speech. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye,” Jesus asks, “and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?” Jesus calls the speck-pickers hypocrites and warns them to get their own eyes clear of debris before poking their fingers into any else’s. That’s a metaphor about judging others, of course, and without unpacking the subtleties of Christian doctrine on judgment and forgiveness, I think I can say that we of the social media era run the daily risk of becoming a ghoulish army of speck pickers, hovering over the speech of the world, fingers at the ready. What this looks like to me, most often, is a high-tech variation on bullying — making the targeted person suffer helplessly for any exploitable move or infelicitous word, treating casual gestures and spontaneous speech with the kind of opportunistic, self-interested parsing and nitpicking that gives unscrupulous lawyers a bad name.
If your pursuit of justice has you treating the people around you as if their speech is court testimony to be relentlessly prodded and critiqued; if your idea of conflict resolution is that everyone else should have their houses forcibly put in order; if your mind is bent more on the correction of others than on mastery of yourself, then you may be falling on the wrong side of this metaphor. You should at least consider that possibility, with a bit of fear and trembling. It is obnoxious when our news media fill their 24-hour drip-feed with petty over-analysis of speech, eviscerating the spirit and intention of the speakers they target. But it is deadly to our own communities when we do that to one another. For our trouble, we end up with a gutted and suffering community of prudes, censors, and hypocrites, incapable of asking or hearing important questions about itself, or of listening to its important misspeakers and taboo breakers, who have been pummeled into miserable silence.
Question 2: Am I silencing the moderates?
Our country’s major comics publishers chose in the middle decades of the 20th century to self-censor, submitting their work to an approval process that kept their publications safe for kids. The development of visual storytelling was held back for a number of decades, as a result, but not in every way, and not in every place and time. The ’60s counterculture folks, in particular, developed an underground “comix” subculture, taking advantage of affordable printing and an emerging network of “head” shops to distribute their work. It’s an interesting story about art finding a way even when mainstream culture tries to hold it back. But the work of these artists and writers is often really, truly, very, intentionally, absolutely offensive. Even half a century later, much of it looks and is extreme, though some of those artists have gained respectable mainstream attention over time.
So notice what happened and what we lost. Hoards of right-thinking people looked at comics and said, “Well, they have to be tamed and contained,” but art and profound rudeness found a way to get out from under that forced regime, as it often does. The underground comix artists inspired many readers and followers, and they can be credited with moving forward their art form. But it is a shame, still, all that we missed out on during those decades of suppression, as we demanded that visual storytelling on paper should exist primarily for children. And what I wonder is what we might have had, from those decades, if the form had been able to develop more naturally and openly, taking on subjects and aiming for audiences less interested in costumed heroes and more interested in artful storytelling of all kinds.
Likewise, what do we lose when we silence or intimidate all but the most acceptable speakers? What damage do we do to ourselves and our own self-knowledge when we cultivate communities where only those who are intentionally, excessively, or cluelessly shocking will dare to speak? What disaster are we risking when our moderate voices won’t offer us gentle critiques for fear of being eaten by the waiting wolves? We need, I think, to learn to hear and respond to the moderate dissenters, or else we are building a world for the screaming extremists.
Question 3: Have we made space for neurodiversity?
Our improving public conversation about individuals on the autism spectrum has included sympathetic and helpful talk about how to help those individuals live well, and has led to the telling of surprising and inspiring stories about people with autism whose unusual minds have been indispensable assets to their lives and their work. One side effect of increased awareness has been a bit of speculation about autism-spectrum symptoms in famously difficult or eccentric geniuses of the past, such as Einstein, Mozart, and Newton. That kind of speculation is always inconclusive. Sir Isaac Newton’s taciturnity, bad temper, and obsessive work practices may or may not indicate that he was living somewhere on the autism spectrum. But such speculations—alongside real contemporary stories—continually suggest that the very qualities that have made some of our most brilliant minds so remarkable have also caused their remarkable interpersonal difficulties. They have often spoken rudely, at inopportune moments, in unwelcome ways.
In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman says that neurodiversity refers to “the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” should be understood not simply as cognitive deficits or dysfunctions but as “naturally occurring cognitive variations,” each one “with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture.” The neurodiverse see and say things differently than most people do. That can be a great hardship; it can also be a source of amazing insight or accomplishment. However, the neurodiverse are clearly at a serious disadvantage in any environment where speaking out of turn, failing to use the right words at the right time, or just being eccentric and a bit ill-mannered are reasons for severe censure. I want us to think not only of the individual with autism but also about, for example, the first-generation college student with ADD and no clear idea about how to follow social rules her peers were acculturated into from childhood. Such individuals are very likely to tell us something new about ourselves or recast old questions in new and unexpected ways; they are strangers who can shed new light on our daily lives and practices. But we will never learn from them if we reject them outright for speaking out of turn or breaking the rules of prudence as they try to put what they have in mind into words and actions.
We ought to give them a break, I think, and we ought to give a similar break to all eccentrics, and we ought to realize that there are eccentricities in everyone. If we can make space for the neurodiverse and the eccentrics, we will hear and learn things that would otherwise be lost to us.
Question 4: Are we offering well-backed claims and allowing our claims to be scrutinized?
In university culture at its best, we make informed claims backed by reasons, we submit our claims and their reasons to scrutiny, and then we scrutinize the scrutiny, all in order to make better claims backed by better reasons, which we will then submit to scrutiny, and so on. Each academic discipline has its own strategies for gathering evidence and forming claims and questioning claims, so that a well-rounded student ought to leave school with a number of different ideas about how either to form or encounter an unusual claim and then test it. Those disciplinary strategies can guide our responses to eccentric and unusual speech, helping us sometimes to assent to and sometimes to push back on that speech; they can provide us with ways to include all kinds of voices in our debates, even awkward-seeming ones. These tools can help us form communities in which awkward or unexpected speech is met with lively scrutiny and response rather than horror, disavowal, and punishment.
It does take some spine to embrace the rude voices — to allow all voices to speak and become part of that process of making claims and subjecting claims and reasons to scrutiny. It sometimes takes an effort of will to accept impolite voices that speak out of turn. Every era has its committed puritans, who try to shackle art, suppress misspeakers, punish the ineloquent, and pressure others to do the same. History and experience show us that art is not always free, that it can be tethered to regime, and that demands for art to obey, to speak the party line and reinforce authorized lessons, will always be with us. But so, too, will the persistent, if sometimes cowed or beat down, language of freedom. We can learn to welcome, forgive, and even benefit from rude, inopportune, or upsetting eruptions from the language of freedom, which has its risks but also has a way of leading us toward epiphanies. We can even forgive the way the language of freedom sometimes speaks rotten foolishness, knowing that we have many adequate means for testing and countering claims, for dividing wisdom from folly, and for welcoming imperfect utterances.
Whitworth University
2/2018
From: “Response: Against Eloquence.” President’s Colloquy on Civil Discourse: Whitworth University 2017-18. Ed. Beck A. Taylor and Nathan L. King. Whitworth University, 2018. 59-65. Print. One of three responses to Nathan King’s keynote, “Building Better Discourse.”