3.2: Reasonable Communities

Now let’s consider what a community of reasonable people will look like. Communities of reasonable people can be characterized by freedom from domination, tolerance and respect for diverse others, good humored civility, a healthy political capacity to deal with shared problems and challenges cooperatively and effectively, and intimacy in friendship. Let’s consider each of these in more detail.

Freedom from domination:

Critical thinking provides a way of exploring, understanding, and sometimes resolving differences between people. This is the alternative to bullying, manipulation, deceit, and domination. Again, critical thinkers are responsive to good reasoning, and they cultivate intellectual defenses against rhetorical bullying and propaganda aimed at social control. Critical thinkers will resist dominating attempts to by-pass their own intellectual capacities through manipulation or deceit.

Tolerance and Respect for Diverse Others:

People who recognize their own fallibility and value intellectual humility will recognize that intolerance bars others from sharing their evidence and argument. Intolerance will introduce blind spots in inquiry and frustrate attempts to understand things and to figure things out. Likewise disrespectful treatment of others is liable to drive them from participating in inquiry with the same result of ignoring potentially important evidence and argument. Intolerance a recipe for ignorance.

Note that tolerance is a self-limiting principle. Tolerating the intolerant undermines tolerance overall. Tolerating racism, for instance, means accepting the dominating behavior of some people and the marginalization of others. This does not promote the value of tolerance overall. Valuing tolerance requires that we not tolerate intolerance. The value of tolerance defines its own limits.

Tolerance is the low bar for putting up with speech or behavior we might not be comfortable with. So long as that speech or behavior isn’t itself intolerant, the value of tolerance asks us to put up with it. But people deserve more than mere tolerance. The idea of respect on the other hand, is based on the idea that people to have a certain kind of positive inherent moral worth. Since people deserve to be treated with respect simply in virtue of being people, the idea of moral equality is built into the ethics of respect for persons. Everything we’ve said so far about basic human fallibility, intellectual humility and the value of open-mindedness applies to all of us as persons. We quite obviously value our own perspectives and opinions because we value ourselves. The idea that people deserve respect is really just a generalization of what we recognize quite clearly in our own individual cases. To whatever degree I matter as a person, mere logical consistency requires that I recognize other persons as having a similar sort of value. This positive value of respect for persons provides the basis for the value of tolerance as the low bar for acceptable speech and behavior.

Politics:

I’m sure you have noticed how divisive politics in America has become. Passionate conflict in politics sometimes reflects a struggle for power aimed at sustaining or overcoming oppressive domination. But it also often involves the struggle to sustain unjust power and domination. This conflict over power generally doesn’t work out well for the oppressed, since almost by definition, dominate groups will have the edge when things devolve into raw power struggles. Raw power-based conflict is driven and amplified by poor critical thinking. On the other hand, critical thinking and reasonableness provide an alternative to raw power struggle. The political polarization in we currently see in America is in good part the result of people refusing to try to understand each other and evaluate each other’s reasons and perspectives fairly. I’m afraid a great many Americans have become unreasonable people, disastrously poor critical thinkers. If we were better able to understand and evaluate each other’s perspectives, we would be much more capable of finding common ground in addressing our shared problems. If we were better able to identify fallacies, mistakes in reasoning, we would be much less vulnerable to manipulation that divides us, undermines mutual understanding, and thereby drives conflict.

Friendship:

There may be no more basic human need than the need to be loved. As subjects, we are doomed to a sort of isolation. No other person, no matter how well they know you and care for you can share your subjectivity. We can only hope to understand each other to limited degrees. But I’d submit that the drive to charitably understand another person is itself a form of love. Becoming a more reasonable person involves cultivating your own capacity to understand diverse others.

Perhaps this vision of living in a community of reasonable people sounds idealistic to the point of being unrealistic. That is understandable given the current state of our world. We face multiple crises from political dysfunction to climate change and this engenders a great deal of fear and anxiety. In this state, critical thinking is not just intellectually challenging, but it is likely to feel emotionally unavailable. When people are fearful and anxious it is natural to seek security in the familiar and defend that against all intrusions. The need for intellectual courage is all the more dire and it can carry with it a need for emotional courage just when both seem least available. What I want to suggest here, is that we can seek comfort and security not only in the familiar, but also in the project of building communities of reasonable critical thinkers. This obviously starts with cultivating our own critical thinking skills. And this may require loosening our grip on ideological security blankets. Intellectual humility and open-mindedness are good this. Instead of clinging dogmatically to ideology, a better strategy is to seek comfort and security in friends and loved ones. Critical thinking provides an avenue to expanding your community of friends and loved ones across differences of perspective.