by Margaret A. Miller
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. ... Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices.
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
You never know who’s going to be important to you. I wasn’t aware of this as a student, so it was a surprise to me how often after college and graduate school my thoughts kept coming back to John Stuart Mill, of all people. It wasn’t just his elegant brain or those long, beautifully constructed sentences—it was his brand of liberalism that appealed to me. And nothing has resonated more than his description, in On Liberty, of the “morality of public discussion.”
I thought of Mill when I read the articles in this issue on the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues program. At the University of California, Irvine, and Emory University (among other institutions), they are trying to help students learn how to negotiate really difficult issues—racial tensions, conflicts between gay and conservative as well as Muslim and Jewish students, the war on terror, the aftermath of 9/11—all the disputes that divide and perplex us as a nation. These campuses are setting up boot camps for future citizens, who will have to negotiate these matters as we move into our dotage, on behalf of all of us.
So here’s what Mill has to say about difficult dialogues: that the primary rule is to listen carefully and respectfully to your opponent, so that you don’t engage in the slothful and self-righteous but ultimately fruitless activity of constructing a straw man. You need to respond in ways that respect the rules of logic and evidence and that show you know something about what you’re discussing (as the students at Emory learn about the history of race relations there) but not necessarily the rules of decorum (Manuel Gomez makes this point eloquently in his essay on the UC Irvine program). Debate that comes out of genuine conviction, Mill argues, will necessarily involve strong emotions (an interesting position for a man who is generally seen as bloodless). If anything, the onus is on those who hold the generally accepted position to keep their cool.
Mill argued that any position, even if right, is a “dead dogma” until you have to defend it against someone who believes the opposite just as fervently. This sounds very much like one of the aims of liberal education. Sometimes we try to replicate true debate in class by representing positions that are not our own, but Mill argues that there’s no substitute for conviction when it comes to an argument’s being “plausible and persuasive.”
That’s why he prizes eccentricity so much. It’s a kind of intellectual biodiversity—the more strains of thought you have out there jostling for habitat, the more likely it is that one will be right for the unexpected circumstances that increasingly confront us. Sometimes I’m annoyed by the aging enfants terribles we faculty can become, but maybe that’s the price we pay for providing some of the more promising endangered intellectual strains safe haven in the petrie dish that is the academy.
What we can do for students is teach them the rules of logic and evidence and make sure that their standards of truth are rigorous so that they don’t spout foolish notions and also so, as an Oxford don once reportedly told a graduating class, “they will know when a man is talking rot to them.” What we can’t do, except indirectly, is to make them care about ideas. So when they do care about something passionately, that’s our teachable moment. It may be inconvenient, it may be annoying, but that’s our chance to turn them into the citizens of the future messy, chaotic world they will inherit from us.
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