The Value Of Speaking Your Mind
What I read: Dare to speak your mind and together we flourish by Hrishikesh Joshi in Psyche. Published June 7, 2021.
Currently our culture is awash in discourse. That was my first thought upon reading the article. Discourse is everywhere. People speak their mind all over the place. Tune into any heated online discussion or watch the multitude of talking heads on television news and one would feel justified believing that real discourse is taking place. But is it?
True to my habit, I needed to be sure I wasn’t misrepresenting discourse. So, I looked it up. Here’s how the Macmillan Dictionary defines discourse.
1: a long and serious speech or piece of writing on a particular subject
1a: serious spoken or written discussion of a particular subject
2: written or spoken language, especially when it is studied in order to understand how people use language
Hmm, is much of what I watch, hear, or witness serious? Perhaps not, at least not serious in the sense of being important, deserving of attention, or careful and detailed. Rather, much of the prevalent discussion churn is essentially emotional outbursts of biased viewpoints grounded in little more than kneejerk reactions and verbal masturbatory one-upmanship.
With no disrespect meant to those who do engage in serious and thoughtful discussions, much of what I see trying to pass itself off as discourse is tantamount to childish schoolyard verbal behavior spewed forth through an adult’s filter.
The article is a concise summation of what appears to be the writer’s prime contention in his book, Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind. In the book’s description, the author explains that we are social creatures and thus our thinking is never done optimally in an isolated vacuum. It’s important for everyone to speak their mind.
Our knowledge base is directly correlative to what our community and social circles know. By speaking one’s mind and allowing others to do the same, we bring unique perspectives into the public forum, thereby enhancing our collective ability to reach the truth on a variety of important matters.
Summoning the thinking of Aristotle, a philosopher I have recently found quite fascinating, Joshi starts his article by asking the granddaddy of philosophical quandaries.
What constitutes a flourishing human life?
Aristotle felt that for anything to flourish one must consider what type of thing it is and what is its ergon (function). Using the example of a knife, to flourish and be a good knife it must cut well. The knife’s function is to cut. Therefore, a good knife cuts well and an excellent knife cuts extremely well.
Since Aristotle surmised that something’s function is supposed to be its distinctive quality, he also questioned what it is that makes humans distinctive. Aristotle posits that the distinctively human characteristic that sets us apart from the rest of creation is our ability to reason. Thus, for humans to flourish they must exhibit and utilize their reasoning capabilities and the more elevated the exercise of those capabilities the more a life will flourish.
Assuming all that to be true, Joshi then asks the next sequentially logical question.
How might we cultivate our reason?
While one might first default to the image of a lone thinker contemplating life’s questions in solitude, true reason doesn’t work so well in isolation. Citing the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber in their book, The Enigma of Reason, Joshi suggests that our capacity to reason is inherently a social phenomenon. Reason is founded upon dialogue. We share our thoughts with others, who share theirs with us, and each party evaluates the ideas and positions in a back and forth “interactionist” manner. We interact with others to optimally reason.
Our biases and individual default perspectives interact in robust discourse to arrive at better versions of truths. A more perfect truth is the result of debate and intellectual collaboration with others. The ivory tower intellectualist gives way to the supremacy of the interactionist.
This is not a cynical view of the reasoning process. This is how reasoning best works. Joshi offers the example of lawyers each representing a side for which they by design have a biased stance. Justice is best served by the interaction of each side’s lawyers along with a jury and judge. That clash of ideas and views is what ultimately produces a better outcome, better truth, justice.
Joshi then rightly in my opinion states that based on the interactionist model we must foster more, not less, engagement and expression of our individual thoughts and ideas to toss into the stew of our collective contributions. Civil confrontation produces better outcomes.
…in order to develop our rational capacities, we must find others who can challenge our ideas and expose us to different ways of thinking about things. We can’t reason well if we surround ourselves with people who think exactly like us. Indeed, a large body of social scientific research suggests that groups of likeminded individuals, no matter how smart or educated they are, often reason very poorly, especially if they have affective ties to one another.
One can’t read that last quotation and not think about the highly contentious nature of social media and the American political landscape in which we find ourselves today.
Then, as if on cue, I checked my Facebook feed and a close friend had just posted this.
Oh right. I forgot. Online discourse is dead. I’m gonna go back to the corner of the internet with cute cat pictures.
Sadly, he’s correct, at least far too often that’s the case. One of his friends chimed in with this.
It’s kinda interesting, because I feel like the quality of the discourse improves as you add more diversity of thought, but also decreases if you let random people who aren’t really engaged or thoughtful contribute random tidbits. So there’s this weird balance you have to find.
The elephant (and donkey) in the room is fairly evident here. As Joshi points out, people are increasingly reluctant to express their opinions about social and political issues for fear of the retribution and perhaps ostracization it will bring about. The social pressure to intellectually conform is significant and this is not a healthy recipe for a functioning democracy and culture.
While our reputation and desire to be included socially are strong motivators, if we too often succumb to such pressures there are negative ramifications. Social status is certainly welcome because we can use it to attain valuable goals, but it should not be the ultimate goal to which we aspire. We must instead more often focus on the broad social implications of the interactionist approach to reason.
The interactionist view of reason also has broader social implications. As the philosopher Seana Shiffrin argues, one neglected but crucial justification for having robust free-speech protections is thinker-centred. To develop as unique and independent thinkers, to figure out the truth for ourselves, and to be recognised for the individuals that we are, we must be able to express our ideas and gain feedback from others. We can’t fully develop our own ideas without being able to externalise them and evaluate them at a distance.
If we and the society in which we live are to flourish, we must figure out how we can speak our minds and encourage others to do the same. I could invoke a firestorm of commentary by referencing the ongoing debate taking place about cancel culture, but let me simply suggest that too quickly squelching other voices is something we should all approach with caution to ensure we keep aiming for the better truths, best solutions, and most peaceful of societies.
Given recent trends then, there’s a pressing need for further enquiry into how we might promote and cultivate habits of speaking our minds, and how we might (re)structure our intellectual institutions to allow multiple perspectives to exist and engage with each other. If Aristotle is right, these might be necessary, but perhaps underappreciated, conditions for our flourishing.
And now that I have completed this post, I will log on to my social media accounts and see what hot potato topics are being discussed. I will try to speak my mind and encourage others to do the same, even though that’s sometimes easier said than done. Progress is sometimes a slow slog.