Where will we speak candidly?
In recent years, I have asked myself what, beyond life itself and family, is the “ditch to die for”? Better conversations across difference of opinion, party, tradition, and identity.
Without such conversations, I cannot thrive, or even breathe, and without them, our traditions will peter out in social-media frick and frack, and the politics of cruelty, as the world burns.
I have tried to think about the boundary conditions that make such conversations possible.
Here is my best shot. I call them my House Rules, although they were once the norms of “civil” discourse.
- Bring your best self
- Seek to understand before seeking to be understood
- Attack positions, not those who hold them
- Hate the sin and forgive the sinner
- Apologize when you have unintentionally offended
- Forgive others as you hope to be forgiven
The rules make better conversations possible, but do not make them safe.
Even in our own homes, we invite others outside our sects, parties, and allies into conversation on issues of public importance at our own risk. Anything said, regardless of house rules may be screen-captured, recorded, or otherwise posted for public derision or worse. These threats to civility come from both left and right. Cancel culture, hashtag activism, deplatforming, and the populism that leads to death threats to judges in defense of the leader are the new norms.
So, what does this have to do with The Giving Review and its readership? Everything, I think. You/we will have to staff the ditch to die for. I read TGR with interest because it seems to care about ideas, philanthropy, and reasoned debate, often more than scoring points, and because the editors are committed to the ideals of deliberative democracy, and of civil society, at the risk of being apostates, but who knows. They still have time to recant.
Where could they, we, and I speak candidly about the risks to democracy and to moral sanity, without fear of repercussions, for the good of the whole? Nowhere. So where will we speak? Here, now, for me. Thank you to the editors for their cordial invitation.