When The Idea Of Dialogue Becomes Pablum

 The essay:

 https://quillette.com/2020/10/09/how-we-lost-our-way-on-human-rights/

Me:

I just wrote the following to a friend who sent me today a link to Young’s essay.

——-

I tried my best, Phil, to read this essay attentively, to discern the outline of an interesting, perhaps provocative, argument.

I’d started it once before you emailed me its link. But that time, I trailed off, sort of nodded off, resolved to come back to it again with full concentration. Your email, as noted, reminded me of my promise to myself. So I’ve just read it now, trying to be fully alive to what I could make of its argument.

The best I can do is say it’s a bland form of motherhood. Who but the intellectual miscreants Young identifies as social justice warriors would deny the importance of allowing for intellectual diversity, respect, at least presumptive respect, for views different from our own, of at least trying to lend a presumptively sympathetic ear to what the other person has to say, which is, in the cant of the day, “seeing where the other person is coming from.” But a kind of pious meaninglessness lies at the bottom his version of these obvious goods of intellectual exchange. 

Here’s an example:

“Much of the museum’s methodology hinges on the concept of dialogue. In his 1996 book, On Dialogue, David Bohm noted that the purpose of dialogue is not to argue with, critique, or undermine another’s perspective, but instead to suspend one’s own opinion and actively engage in listening as a way to understand the perspectives of others. Dialogue pursued in this manner leads not to debate but to shared meaning, which aligns well with the museum’s mandate to contribute to collective memory, and to promote respect for others. An institutional commitment to dialogue requires less in the way of advocating particular interests and rights claims, and more in the way of collecting and sharing lived experiences that are part of our common heritage related to human rights. This, in turn, may facilitate efforts to balance different rights claims.“

Take these notions to what at least I see as their absurd logical conclusions. No disagreement, no debate, let alone, vigorous, spirited, energetic debate, maybe laced with a sharp elbow or two, with a reasoned rejection of bad, illogical, silly, simply asserted ideas? This reads to me like the bromide of toleration of which I was disabused when I studied a little bit of political philosophy. Even John Stuart Mill’s “let the market place of ideas lead to what are the better arguments,” my words of course not his, is inimical to the idea of dialogue in what I’ve just quoted.

Another related point, the long standing distinction between positive and negative liberty, freedom to and freedom from, as framed by Isaiah Berlin is persistently intriguing. There is an obvious tension between them that sounds in the perennial tension between liberty, freedom from, and equality, freedom to. It’s commonly observed that one comes at some cost to the other.

Scruton, Young rightly notes, champions freedom from, negative liberty, and is wary of freedom to, the difference lying in the former as a set of natural, which is to say, pre-state rights and the latter as positive rights insofar as they are state provided. Scruton may be wrong in his inclinations and Young describes his own commitment to both ideas of freedom, from and to. He encapsulates his commitment to freedom to. Otherwise, he says,

“…we get a never-ending zero-sum competition to assert or reassert a hierarchy of rights, an approach hardly in harmony with the principle that all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Trouble is, with this we’re back both to bland motherhood and a fundamental illogicality. The bland notion of all rights as harmonious runs afoul of the fundamental tension Berlin sees inhering in every policy decision a free society wishes to make, the tension between liberty and equality, freedom from and freedom to, negative and positive liberty. What Young describes here is a piety which real hands can’t hold; it’s pious water that is ungraspable.

The illogicality is that Young’s binary opposition between rights as harmonious as against a fixed hierarchy of rights excludes the innate tension in the very idea of rights formulated as negative and positive.

Young cites Michael Ignatieff for an informing principle of his (Young’s) commitment to positive rights, freedom to:

“ I drew from Michael Ignatieff’s 2007 book, The Rights Revolution, in which the Canadian scholar wrote that “to believe in rights is to believe in defending difference”—and so defending human rights required governments to protect “the ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities, and claims, at once individually and collectively.”

I can, I think, understand what Ignatieff means, that we must respect and tolerate others in all the varied and varying ways we all manifest our ideas of ourselves whether individually or as a group, which is fine as far as it goes. 

But Young omits, and omits any accounting for, Ignatieff having been a student and a virtual acolyte of Berlin and alive and open to the very tensions Young seems completely to elide. Ignatieff has a lively sense of the need to choose between competing claims and that often these choices are between the lesser of two evils, or as one fellow put it, the evil of two lessers. Which is to say, policy involves hard choices, ox goring, nearly every time.

One would think the ideas informing an institution dedicated to exhibiting and illuminating human rights would want somewhere to take into account the inexorable need to take these hard choices. But no, instead we get the pablum of “ all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Finally, in lieu of averting to, let alone grappling a little with, the inhering tensions in the very idea of human rights, Young’s “argument” devolves to the truisms of diversity, respect and sympathy for differences, for other points of view. But even in this he stops short of any notion of disagreement and debate. No, what he seems to want is to begin and end with the motherhood of dialogue.