Reaping windiness

Voices cry out with fair regularity against the vapidness of contemporary public discourse.  Lots of voices.  Enough for a quorum, if not a consensus.

Less consensus is evident when those voices attempt to explain the causes of this situation.  Bad education? Video games? TV?  Talk Radio?

Steven D. Smith ( The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse ) offers a deeper explanation: Public discourse is shallow by design: Citing Rawls, he says, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the very point of ‘public reason’ is to keep the public discourse shallow – to keep it from drowning in the perilous depths of questions about ‘the nature of the universe,’ or ‘the end and object of life,’ or other tenets of our comprehensive doctrines.”  Public discourse is prescriptively secular discourse, and that excludes controverted, mysterious depths.

Yet we still have to ask the big questions, and they are constantly implied in our public discourse.  What to do?  We can attempt to translate our basic convictions into terms that the secular public sphere acknowledges, but then we feel that we’re violating our core convictions.  Alternatively, we can reject translation and “then it is awkward finding within secular discourse the words and concepts to say what we really want to say and to articulate what we really believe.”

We end up relying on “smuggling.”

By this, Smith refers to the pervasive habit of using universally acclaimed but vacuous “hurrah words” to defend our very particular agenda.  Hence, same sex marriage is defend under the rubric of “freedom” or “equality,” neither of which terms actually help us decide whether same sex marriage is a good thing or not.  Smith summarizes an article by Peter Westen, who argues that equality is an empty concept; it only makes sense to treat people equally if they are in fact equal with regard to the particular circumstances.  Treating blind and seeing equally for the purposes of issuing driver’s licenses is absurd because seeing is relevant to driving.  Seeing is not relevant to many other activities, like voting, and so in that setting we treat blind and seeing the same.  Westen concluded that “if we know what the relevant substantive criteria are [in particular circumstances], we do not need the idea of equality.”  We can only apply the criterion of “equality” to the same sex marriage issue if the differences between homosexual and heterosexual are irrelevant to the particular institution of marriage.  But that throws us immediately back on substantive debate about sex, personhood, morality, religion – deep issues.  But we aren’t allowed to talk about that.  So we talk about equality, and smuggle the bigger issues in under cover.

By using the metaphor of  ”smuggling,” Smith criticizes the fact that “secular vocabulary in public discourse is constrained to operate today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments.  We manage to debate normative matters anyway – but only by smuggling in notions that are officially inadmissible, and hence cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.”