Straw Men and the Possibility of Community in Modernity

I appreciate Geoffrey Kurtz having taken the time to read my book and write a review of it for Front Porch Republic, along with the opportunity to respond to his critical reflections. Having the opportunity to see one’s own argument through the eyes of a critic and address their concerns is a chance to keep the conversation going. Mine having been a book about deliberation, this seems particularly fitting, and I am grateful to Kurtz for affording me this. Much of what I want to say though pertains to areas of confusion or misinterpretation regarding the central argument of Tradition and the Deliberative Turn.

To begin, Kurtz refers to my book a number of times throughout his review as putting forth a “theory of democracy,” seeing my book’s critique of the theory of Deliberative Democracy as an internal one grounded in shared premises regarding the moral priority of democracy, self-determination, the free individual, etc. However, I do not claim or imply such a shared orientation in the book. There are, in my view, advantages and disadvantages of democracy, from a moral point of view, as a set of institutions for organizing human life. Though nowhere in the book do I weigh in on such matters, so perhaps this silence was in part responsible for this misinterpretation. I believe such moral advantages and disadvantages to be the case with any form of government, none being perfect but all essentially a series of trade-offs in light of the contingencies of historical circumstances, the character of a people, etc. In any event, I do not think it appropriate as a first principle or a priori to assert democracy’s rightness and then to argue about how the latter is best realized within particular social structures or practices (e.g. localist ones) as this would seem to imply. Such premises are, indeed, characteristic of contemporary democratic theory, but these are premises I do not share. Instead, my principal concern in writing the book was with a more realistic understanding of deliberation than has been adopted by this philosophical movement, an understanding that I believe the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer can be helpful in illuminating. The book thus provides a critique of the idea of deliberation that belongs to contemporary democratic theory as a result of its abstract thinking about morality, which I argue has emerged from a number of historical developments over the last several centuries. For the origins of these developments, I encourage those interested to consult the argument put forth in the first several chapters.

I do not say so in the book, but if anything, I believe the idea of “democracy” has enjoyed an undue or exaggerated moral status within contemporary political thought, in part because of this unrealistic conception of how deliberation among citizens is believed to take place in order to satisfy its criteria of political legitimacy. Consequently, if this ideal of deliberation or “public reason” is the sine qua non of political legitimacy (as deliberative democrats say), and if it is unrealistic to conceive of it as they do (as I argue in the book), then the promise of democratic legitimacy would seem to be exaggerated by its most prominent exponents. As a result, my book’s aim of being more realistic about deliberation would actually undermine belief in the exaggerated moral claims currently made on behalf of democracy. Robert Spaemann, whom I mention in my discussion of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of democratic legitimacy, gets to the heart of this matter when he says that his discourse ethics is essentially the utopian promise, inherited from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of abolishing all authority by allowing individuals to obey no one but themselves. This is the aim of such public deliberation seeking universal agreement or shared moral underpinnings of collective decisions. Regardless, suffice it to say that my book was in no way a competing theory of democracy or an intervention in a family dispute about the best way of realizing democratic principles. In short, the book is not intended, as Kurtz interpreted it, to be a localist theory of democracy. It is concerned first and foremost with sound deliberation.

There is, to be sure, a normative priority of small-scale communities that is central to the argument of the book, but the latter is not aimed at achieving self-rule or otherwise serving democratic principles. The priority of such communities, I argue, is that wherever “genuine deliberation” happens, it must emerge from the right sort of acculturative practices. It is here that Kurtz identifies my position with somewhat of a closet idealism of which he says I, myself, am wary. Longing for deliberation that is “genuine,” my own ideal, as he characterizes it, is a “will-o’-the-wisp: something we can hope to glimpse, not expect to grasp.” In short, I pine for a thickness of community—which is both “small-scale” and, more problematically for Kurtz, exists “over time”—that has become impossible in the modern world, while critiquing deliberative democrats for the excessive largeness and thinness of their own conception. Yet throughout the book, I continually and explicitly reject such a corresponding or mirror-image idealism to those I am critiquing. It is for this reason that I introduce the idea of a continuum (acknowledged by Kurtz) in which the preconditions supporting mutual understanding are satisfied to greater or lesser degrees—precisely not the all-or-nothing idealism Kurtz attributes to my position. In the book’s Introduction, I explain the term at the heart of his criticism: “genuine deliberation, which is to say, that which entails the normative ‘pull’ or persuasiveness of those whose lives are embedded within shared, concrete ways of living, will be limited by the temporal horizons of communities of interlocutors and the way they reason and argue. As the dialogue is enlarged beyond such communities, however, the sharing of concrete meanings necessarily diminishes, and with it the common understandings and interpretations, as well as the mutual persuasiveness or resonance of such arguments” (p. 3, second italics added). Here, I am quite explicit that the normative achievement identified with small-scale communities is not an all-or-nothing, hard line in the sand, but a matter of gradual attenuation as thickness among interlocutors “diminishes.”

Although Kurtz acknowledges my conceptual use of the continuum, he seems to identify as my priority the “genuine deliberation” associated exclusively with the furthest point on that continuum, insisting that I have idealized only this fullest or most complete form. Having imputed this understanding to me, he then attributes to my argument a traditionalist idealism, i.e. a longing for a form of community which no longer exists in the modern world. The irony here is that this is precisely the type of argument against which the last part of the book, “Modernity as Historical Narrative” is devoted to refuting. Some deliberative democrats have similarly claimed that community (in this idealized sense of a bygone era) has been shown to be impossible in the modern world and, therefore, its prioritization represents a traditionalism that is ultimately utopian, romantic, etc. However, as I argue in this last chapter, the latter is a straw man argument. To refute it, I advert to the continuum regarding the thickness of such communities to show that such modernist arguments illegitimately attribute an extreme or idealistic position to their opponents to claim their impossibility for the world in which we live. I argue that this argument loses its power once one recognizes that the competition between these values (free individual versus thick community) is not an all-or-nothing state of affairs.

With full recognition of the fractured or fragmented circumstances of modern life, I say that we always have the option of “mov[ing] the needle” (p. 171) in the direction of community—not, to be perfectly clear, to achieve some utopian ideal from the past, but for the sake of improving (at least to some degree) the mutual understanding or quality of our deliberation. There will always be “tradeoffs” (pp. 4, 173), I argue, between the freedom of the individual and the thickness of community. But good or sound deliberation being dependent on the latter, we must recognize what will be sacrificed or compromised as communal ties are loosened and we choose to prioritize individual freedom or autonomy. To write off all community—or, in Kurtz’s case, intergenerational community—as the relic of a bygone era, however, is in an unacknowledged way to decide between these values, which ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Seeing such ties as no longer a possibility in the modern world, the “realist” of modernity insists that this value be abandoned, further contributing to this state of affairs and, in turn, justifying such abandonment in the future in the name of an even stronger claim to “realism.”

In the same paragraph of Kurtz’s review that acknowledges my use of a continuum—the very conceptual device designed to avoid such all-or-nothing thinking with regard to the thickness of community—he thus attributes to me precisely the sort of idealism this was intended to reject. He characterizes my argument as saying, “If we don’t experience full, unqualified, ‘concrete, historical community,’ then we won’t experience full, unqualified ‘genuine deliberation.’” While this statement, in isolation, is consistent with the relationship I identify between community and deliberation, the normative priority of this absolute is nowhere part of my argument. In fact, I am most explicit throughout the book that although genuine deliberation (understood as the resonance, pull, or persuasive quality of discussion) is indeed a good for human beings in society, it is always realized in degrees proportionate to the thickness of community, and that such degrees of its realization must be weighed against other elements of human flourishing in light of historical circumstances. At one point, I even go so far as to acknowledge the value of autonomy as sometimes worth prioritizing over the deliberative fruits of small-scale communities over time:

Sound deliberation is not the only political value. Indeed, there may be historical moments, as surely there have been in the history of Western civilization, when the latter has been deemed worth sacrificing or compromising in favor of the liberty of the individual citizen. Rawls may be correct, historically speaking, that the fallout of the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented one such moment in the West. However, it must likewise be recognized that, as the coherence, integrity, or thickness of community becomes attenuated, for whatever reason, it is precisely the resonance of our mutual appeals that will suffer. And, therefore, there will be occasions, such as the present historical moment, when this normative priority will be worth emphasizing over other political values against which it must inevitably be weighed (p. 184).

Such passages hardly seem indicative of an idealist of a communitarian or traditionalist stripe.

To take some responsibility for this misinterpretation, I suppose I might have spoken throughout the book not in terms of “genuine deliberation” but always with the qualifier “more genuine deliberation” or “truer deliberation,” thus reminding the reader of the latter’s correspondence to the degree of temporal thickness mentioned at the outset. Still, passages such as the one above regarding the trade-offs in degree between individual freedom and the bonds of community were intended to clearly express a distance from such all-or-nothing idealism. Indeed, the ongoing dialogue in our society discussed in the Conclusion of the book regarding this trade-off begins to appear bizarre, disingenuous, or at least very high stakes, if only “full, unqualified ‘genuine deliberation’” would satisfy the author.

Finally, consider the appeal at the end of the last chapter in which I take explicit steps to separate myself from those who would, in fact, advocate a return to a bygone age. In the concluding paragraph, I am at pains to avoid any such confusion about my own position and that my argument might be accused of any such reactionary or romantic idealist attempts to turn back the clock. In no uncertain terms, I explicitly say:

The upshot of the present analysis is not—to be perfectly clear—that only a return to something like the medieval ‘fishing village’ will satisfy the political or associational needs of human beings, in light of the emphasis on the Gadamerian conception of deliberation and practical reason, which shows the dependence of the latter upon tradition, or concrete communities that exist over time. … As this section has attempted to make clear, [the] fruits of concrete, historical community must be conceived as existing along a continuum, not as an all-or-nothing state of affairs. (173)

This, apparently, was insufficient to avoid an interpretation that I belong in the same intellectual camp as such traditionalist idealists. However, the problem with such interpretations is that they insist on finding a straw man idealist despite, as I have attempted to show, even the most explicit rejections of this position. I believe this is problematic, not merely for fidelity to an author’s words, but for its implications for those of us who believe that intergenerational community has at least some value for our lives. Like the deliberative democrats whose own straw man arguments abandon all possibility of community in the modern world, I believe this abdicates a responsibility to ethical choice and the very dialogue that would inform those choices. For the mirror image of the idealist, who is blind to the realities of present circumstance, is the person who would forgo the possibility of free choice in the name of what is, or the overpowering weight of history (in our case, the role often played by the concept of “modernity”). Between these extremes, however, is free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the fractured and deracinated world in which we are living.

Image Credit: Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Socrates” (1787) via Wikimedia Commons