BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE
Solving social problems democratically requires well-informed citizens who can reason together despite differences in outlook. It requires, in short, rational public discourse. Making this happen has never been easy, and today it seems to be getting harder. Architects of the new Program for Public Discourse at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill believe they know why. The problems, they say, are poor training for debate, weak commitment to a “spirit of polite dialogue,” and a lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education. They are dangerously wrong.
UNC’s Program for Public Discourse was political in origin. A Republican-dominated board of governors pressed university administrators to look at programs at Arizona State University and Princeton University and to launch a similar program at UNC. The conservative narrative driving the creation of these programs depicts the modern university as run by doctrinaire liberal faculty who expound only their own views and don’t teach students how to engage in respectful dialogue about contentious issues. Students simply aren’t being taught, the story goes, to appreciate a wide range of views (meaning conservative views), nor are they learning to be well-mannered debaters. Hence the need for remedial programming and curricula devoted to public or “civil” discourse.
As a matter of principle, it’s hard to object to the idea of trying to help students become more confident and constructive participants in public discourse. Pursuing this classic liberal arts mission might well include renewed efforts to nurture the skills of listening, analyzing, and debating. This is what many faculty members in the humanities and social sciences—the disciplines that are the usual targets of conservative ire—have been striving to do for a long time. Some faculty and administrators are readily co-opted into supporting politically initiated programs in civil discourse and civic virtue because their mission seems familiar and noble.
The problem is that these programs obscure a bigger threat to rational public discourse in the United States today: corporate power. Instead of trying to understand how concentrated wealth undermines rational discourse and discourages civic engagement, we are urged to focus on the manners and debating skills of college students. It’s no surprise that the politicians who rely upon and serve great concentrations of wealth are eager to kick the ball in this direction. We are urged to see liberal or leftist intolerance as the problem, rather than domination and duplicity by profit-driven corporations.
Tobacco is the paradigmatic example. For decades, long after industry scientists and executives knew that nicotine was addictive and smoking caused lung cancer, tobacco companies engaged in a criminal conspiracy to sow doubt about the harms of smoking. The purpose was clear: to stall regulation and keep racking up profits in the meantime. Industry efforts, orchestrated by major PR firms such as Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller, distorted public discourse about smoking and related policies. Representatives of the industry were unfailingly polite, even while their efforts, funded by the addicted masses whose health was being ruined, meant that millions more people died prematurely from tobacco-related disease. So much for civility.
The fossil fuel industry’s behavior has been equally egregious. After its own scientists documented global warming in the early 1980s, the industry poured millions of dollars into free-market think tanks whose pseudo-scholars pumped out reports and op-eds calling climate change a hoax or arguing, speciously, that the science behind climate change was either “junk” or unsettled. It was the tobacco industry’s strategy redux: manufacture doubt as a way to stall regulation that would cut into profits. The strategy worked and is still working. At a time when we desperately need rational public discourse about climate policy, denying the reality of human contributions to climate change has become nearly an article of faith among leaders and followers in one of America’s two major political parties.
No less desperate is the need, doubly underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic, for rational public discourse about health care policy. In the United States, part of the conversation, brought to the fore by the Democratic presidential primary election, revolves around proposals to create a national health-insurance system—often called “Medicare for All”—or a public insurance option.
How has the health-insurance industry contributed to this conversation? By mounting and lavishly funding a propaganda effort under the auspices of a front group called Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. This outfit has crafted a set of lab-tested talking points—Medicare for All will take away your choices! It will mean higher taxes! It will mean government control of health care!—and fed those talking points to candidates, legislators, journalists, and pundits. The strategy in this case is to stoke public fear of change that could put the private health-insurance industry out of business. But it’s all done civilly, by well-spoken people in nice suits, people who someday might want to employ university graduates.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s 2010 Merchants of Doubt and David Michaels’s 2020 The Triumph of Doubt document a host of similar examples, including denial of chlorofluorocarbon damage to the ozone layer and denial of links between sugar consumption and disease. It seems that whenever experience and independent science begin to show that profitable products and practices cause harm, the public conversation about intelligent regulatory action is derailed by institutional greed. How civil is that?
Over and again, we see large corporations using their resources to suborn science, misinform lawmakers and the public, muddle policy debate, and stall regulation, and thereby protect profits for as long as possible. This is the behavior that undermines rational public discourse and democratic policy making in the US today. Focusing on the manners and debating skills of undergraduates makes the real problem disappear and serves the interests of those who would like to ally research universities all the more tightly to “corporate partners.”
Although we should of course acquaint students with diverse views and teach them to critically examine and debate those views in a civil manner, we should not mistake these efforts for a solution to the problem of distorted public discourse in US society. That problem stems not from the liberal sensibilities of students or professors but from vast inequalities in wealth and power, and it is these inequalities that we should help students analyze, critique, and change. If we want to promote rational public discourse, and we should, we can contribute by showing how a mask of civility often conceals deception that is anything but civil.
Guest Blogger Michael Schwalbe is a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.
An excellent analysis of the corporate power that controls so much in our country.
Personally, I do not care whether good ideas come from right-wing troglodytes or left-wing lunatics. As they say, even a broken clock is correct twice each day. So, encouraging more civil discussion and discourse, even arguments, should be valuable, no matter who proposed it or why it was instituted.
Going on my own experiences in academia (40+ years, including stints as department chair), I am often amazed how pseudo-leftists (who are more often merely liberals) downplay the role of excessive culture cancelling and other censorious abuses by the “P.C.” police on campuses.
No one on any academic site has ever challenged my references to Voltaire {“defend to the death…”, Justice Brandeis “MORE speech…”), or my mother “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but MERE words will never harm me”) when it comes to these issues. Let me know what you think of my experience being forced out of my adjunct Full Professorship at CCNY:
https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_–_Revised_and_Updated
Michael,
Nice to meet you. It is always nice to meet another UNC system person. An interesting post with a number of things that like (and even admire). For example:
“As a matter of principle, it’s hard to object to the idea of trying to help students become more confident and constructive participants in public discourse. Pursuing this classic liberal arts mission might well include renewed efforts to nurture the skills of listening, analyzing, and debating. This is what many faculty members in the humanities and social sciences—the disciplines that are the usual targets of conservative ire—have been striving to do for a long time.”
That. I agree with that wholeheartedly. Well said
As a founding member of the program you are talking about, I am not clear on the link that you claim between corporatism and the “PPD.” It was a replacement for an intended “Center for American Values” premised on the idea that the free market was an intrinsic good–and an inextricable part of American identity. It was an explicit rejection of the idea that “civility” is defined by politeness in favor of the tradition that says that: 1) the content of arguments is more important than the perceived/civility of or tonal their mode of presentation; 2) that public discourse is often captured by folks who sow doubt for private gain when the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, and; 3) that the mission should not be to critique the academy’s “liberal bias” or argue for affirmative action for conservatives, but rather to say that we all agree on the idea that the university ought to be about the production of rigorously tested knowledge.
…You know, that whole “argumentum in utramque partem” tradition.
Regarding the “Merchants of Doubt”: as we see it, “debate” is not about saying there are always two sides of equal merit–it is about inviting people to work against their own confirmation bias (economic; social; institutional; and otherwise) to see the ways that the positions we hold by default are often pre-scripted for us, particularly by inviting folks to see and argue for a plurality of evidence and argument based commitments across the set of antagonisms that constitute our various social divides. Orsekes and Conway (your source) essentially endorse this vision of communication and/or debate as a crucial prerequisite for defeating the “Merchants of Doubt.”
Lest I violate my own convictions about sourcing, here is a quote from their interview with Nature:
“We are not saying that clear communication will inexorably lead to an informed public, which will in turn suddenly precipitate informed policies. It’s more complicated than that. Yet improving communication is a step that can make a difference. In addition, if the public is to learn that science is ‘messy’ and full of uncertainty – which can help to improve public trust in the system – they should also learn that sensible decision-making involves acting on the best information available. Peer-reviewed literature and the agreed opinions of expert bodies can and should be granted reasonable trust.”
https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/docview/518155098?pq-origsite=summon, if you are into the whole citation thing.
Of course there is a robust body of literature in my home discipline (communication studies) saying something different about the merits of debate pedagogy, both in the context of global climate change and other persistent social problems, which I invite you to peruse when you are clear of the burden of teaching and researching in the middle of the quarantine.
Given that frame,the question for me–both to you and your readers is this: does anyone have a better way that engaging in the transformation of the public towards rational/critical evaluation of claims to stop hucksters and/or merchants of doubt? (other than building capacity. in the basic elements of argument, listening, and collective deliberation)? One might even argue—work with me here–that the normalization of inequality is premised on a uncritical acceptance of set of ideological maxims that themselves deserve scrutiny—and, further, to reject civility as simply “civility as politeness” or as “corporate cover” is to reject not only the normative idea that civility ought to be about “speaking well for the good of the whole,” but perhaps even the idea that is an epistemic good to create processes whereby folks are forced to justify their arguments and the evidence that they might marshal for them. That is a dangerous gambit, IMHO–one that makes the public virtually defenseless against corporate colonization of the public sphere any time anyone claims that someone in power could monopolize the process of debate to sow doubt. I am sure you see the danger here.
But if it makes you feel better–and forgive my snark here–to virtue signal about us as corporate dupes (including, no less, one of the primary public intellectuals in the cultural theorization of left-strategy, Larry Grossberg [My colleague,so I am biased–but, see, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg and his award winning critique of the contemporary corporate capitalist conjuncture at https://www.akpress.org/under-the-cover-of-chaos.html%5D)– without attending to the specificities of this context or the model of debate we envisions, well, that seems to me that there might be factors that are not included in your analysis, to put it kindly.
If instead of seeing our efforts as an attempt to do the things you praise in the paragraph I cited earlier—a task that is so important in our context that it demands focus and institutional support—in favor of seeing the attempt to teach debate as aiding and abetting tobacco companies in “sowing doubt” or cultivating the denial of data based decision-making, knock yourself out. Who needs evidence (or really any kind of concrete empirical justification) to run a pre-made script? Perhaps your claims aren’t rooted in evidence, but,who cares–demanding evidence only helps big tobacco, after all. I , on the other hand, think we should use the process of rational/critical inquiry to engage questions like: “what are the concrete ways that inequality of various kinds has distorted the processes of public deliberation.”
Maybe you don’t because RJ Reynolds could co-opt any claim to produce evidence, causing us all to smoke at unprecedented rates So be it. In my opinion, that would seem weirdly parallel to the thing that you accuse big tobacco and big oil of, but, whatever, you do you–and honestly I don’t know enough about your context to situate the claims you are making (would that that instinct was reciprocal)
imagine, if, instead of always sowing doubt about the value of debate based on who might benefit, we really endorsed the idea that everyone should listen and have data, and (god forbid) justify their claims. Imagine we oriented our educational institutions to habituate that inclination as a defining practice of democracy. Well, then, we might have to even open ourselves (even as scholars), to limiting our public proclamations to empirically based, fact-founded, rigorously justified claims mediated by a community of other competent actors. Looking forward to dialogue here, and I hope that the possibility that it might sow doubt in your narrative (and subsequently be co-opted to cast doubt on the scientific consensus around climate change [a consensus I wholeheartedly endorse, to be clear]) is not a prohibitive barrier to public exchange. Sorry for that last sentence. Looking forward to what you have to say.
Your friend,
Chris Lundberg,
Communication Studies
UNC Chapel Hill
Member, Faculty Board, Program in Public Discourse