Mode Switching

Thirty years ago, I inscribed a line from John Milton in a spiral-bound college notebook:

So fares it, when with truth falsehood contends.

I copied down those words a little smugly, mostly because I enjoyed the sound they made. I liked the drop-the-mic confidence Milton had in the power of free speech and rational argument. I also hoped to use the phrase in my next argument, say, with a roommate who transgressed civic norms of great import.

You want to know how I know you ate stuff from my care package? I found this wrapper under your bed — and these cookie crumbs on your pillow. Boom! So fares it, when with truth falsehood contends.

But what I couldn’t see coming way back in 1993 was that, just a few decades later, truth would not be faring well in its contentions with falsehoods about vaccines, about fossil fuels, about sexual assualt, about election integrity.

I’m feeling angry and inept and overwhelmed. These are my feels, but not because of the bloviators and blather-bots on cable television. No, it’s the nice people that really get to me, the sweet folks who speak in kindly tones, who do what they call their research and speak what they believe are the hard truths. What gets to me is the concerned folk who furrow their brows and craft one-thousand-word posts tilting at strawmen on every slippery slope in sight. In their company, I feel inept and angry and overwhelmed, and I feel these things even though I teach communication for a living. This business about contending with falsehood — I’m supposed to be good at that stuff. I sound like I’m good that stuff, at least judging by all the Miltonic maxims I drop for Persuasive Speaking students to inscribe on their iPads:

Disagreement is not a crisis; it is, in fact, an achievement. Your ideas should always separable from your identity. Your credibility depends on your willingness to admit the possibility of error.

These maxims about how to negotiate difference through the practices of ethical argumentation are not original with me. They are drawn from the wisdom of classical liberalism, the tradition of rational disputation and critical exchange taught in college classrooms for centuries. Even older than that, I’m appealing to the Graeco-Roman tradition of classical rhetoric that makes use of what Aristotle called the available means of persuasion.

But I’ve noticed something of late: argument quickly overwhelms me. When I disagree with some very nice person over racial inequities or gender exclusivism or abortion politics, I blow a fuse and shut down. I get really quiet. I feel paralyzed, like a speaker afraid to take the stage. What makes me go silent in a moment of disputatious human communication? I think it’s the sense that I no longer know what we’re doing when we argue these days.

The most recent episode of This American Life, “What We’ve Got Here is Failure to Communicate,” narrates the efforts of Republican state senator Ed McBroom to convince his fellow GOP voters that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen. The pod includes clips from his quiet-voiced, utterly patient appeals to the facts. The episode also plays the despairing and irrational retorts of his fellow citizens, who know what they know. Listening to this episode, on the way home from teaching a Persuasive Speaking class, I found myself asking,

So is this how it fares when with truth falsehood contends?

I’m deeply grateful for people like Mr. McBroom, but I think he’s stuck within the confines of a particular approach to persuasive communication. His mode of dialogic argument is insufficient for the hugeness of the civic tasks he’s trying to own. But I also have a notion that most of us are like the good senator from Michigan. We get stuck in our preferred mode of communication. We assume that every false opinion we encounter is a nail to pound with the biggest data hammer at hand. But the classical liberal tradition has long participated in a much larger world of human exchange than critical argument. It has long been a world of multiple modes of communication some involving song, others involving lament, still others making use of story and parody and ritual.

Overwhelmed as I feel right now, I’m just not up to playing the expert on how things go when truth and falsehood contend. Instead, let me put a question to you. What other approaches to communication have you been finding helpful lately as you speak across all the lines criss-crossing our public culture, as truth carries on its everlasting contention with falsehood?