Gotham Diary:
Different Point of View
25 March 2014

Writing to a friend last night, on the subject of current perplexities, I went to search for something that I read last week but failed to note at the time. A blue-collar worker from the hinterland was quoted as saying that “you can’t take away a guy’s right to be stupid” — something like that. I was shocked, but also exquisitely delighted, when the Google search attributed a similar statement to a far more prominent speaker, Secretary of State John Kerry. The Reuters headline: “Kerry defends liberties, says Americans have “right to be stupid.”

“The reason is, that’s freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid – if you want to be,” he said, prompting laughter. “And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.

“And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that’s a virtue. I think that’s something worth fighting for,” he added. “The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view.”

Exquisite delight? I must have been looking for a casus belli.

***

Certainly, in America, you have the right to say whatever you want to say, so long as it does not disturb the peace. But that is not only where the “right” stops, but where a moral obligation begins. What moral obligation? The moral obligation imposed on every citizen in a democracy (where citizens do the ruling) to be as attentive and intelligent — to be as smart — as possible.

(Quite often, this imperative leads to the conclusion that the best exercise of your right to free speech is to remain silent.)

I ask myself if it is necessary to argue this point, to demonstrate logically that such a moral obligation exists. I decide that it is not. Anyone genuinely in need of the argument would probably not be inclined to follow it, and I am abundantly confident that my readers need no more than a gentle reminder — unless of course they have been so demoralized by contemporary discourse that they no longer believe that any moral obligations exist. I have nothing to say to such depraved hopelessness.

Most smart people don’t need a sense of moral obligation to keep their smarts in good shape. The difficulty lies in the conduct of civil discourse. What do you do when other people aren’t so smart? Do you just nod your head and say, “You can have a different point of view?” I hope not. Nor, however, can you simply tell people that they are being stupid. What you have to do is to move as quickly as possible to identify the differences in opinion that make persuasion impossible. If, for example, you believe that women are in any significant way inferior to men, then I cannot expect to converse with you on a very broad range of topics, because not only is my belief to the contrary fundamental to most of the ideas that I entertain but it is also derived from a working assumption that women, and not men, are the measure of humanity; if anything, it is men who are inferior. If I haven’t been more disappointed by the men I have known, it is because I have expected less of most of them. Women have rarely disappointed.

(It is entirely likely that my experience has been shaped by living among the elite at a time when women worked very hard to demonstrate their abilities, and men not so much.)

The moral obligation to be as intelligent as possible, however, has a social dimension that I have just ignored, by rattling on about men and women. I meant to offer an example of the kind of difference that might make civil discourse impossible, but then I went on, rather uncivilly, to mount a preliminary defense of my point of view — arguing the inarguable. We all tend to do this, but that doesn’t make it right. We ought to take great pains to avoid being obnoxious to anyone who might be thinking, “You’re so smart, I’ll never be able to keep up. Leave me alone!” Such defeated resentment is socially toxic. It leads to the desperate assertion that stupidity is okay. Smart people have a moral obligation to avoid creating the impression that other people are stupid.

Except.

Except when those other people are embedded in the elite. When they have been to the best schools, lived in relative comfort, and achieved prominent positions. When, for example, they have become the United States Secretary of State. Then, I believe, it is not only acceptable but obligatory to call a spade a spade. To my mind, the right word for John Kerry’s remark is “foolish,” but foolishness is a kind of stupidity. If Mr Kerry is trying to send a message of Democratic Party tolerance and even approval to supporters of the Tea Party  or believers in “intelligent design,” I wish he wouldn’t. Such outreach is not only unseemly but also, I hope, ingenuine. I do wish that President Obama would swiftly demand the Secretary’s resignation.