Introducing a Surprising Conversation About Conversation - Mark L. Jones

• Citation: Vol. 63 No. 3
• Publication year: 2012

Introducing a Surprising Conversation about Conversation

by Mark L. Jones*

It has been my distinct privilege and pleasure to serve as the Faculty Coordinator for this year's Mercer Law Review Symposium, which was held at the Law School on Friday, October 7, 2011, on the topic "Citizenship and Civility in a Divided Democracy: Political, Religious, and Legal Concerns."¹ The Symposium brought together a distinguished group of panelists-Marianne Constable, Eugene Garver, David Gushee, David Lyons, Steven Smith, and Jeremy Waldron-and the discussions were conducted under the masterful guidance of our distinguished moderator and commentator Robert Audi.² As the Symposium title and the background of the participants suggest, the event was interdisciplinary in nature. It involved, moreover, a greater collaboration across Mercer University than perhaps any previous Mercer Law Review Symposium. Thus, it included among its co-sponsors not only the Law Review but also the Mercer Center for Theology and Public Life, the Mercer Center for the Teaching of America's Western Foundations, and

* Professor of Law, Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law. Oxford University (M.A.); The University of Michigan Law School (LL.M.).

1. I would like to express special thanks to Jack Sammons, both for his steadfast friendship over many years and for contributing to the concept and execution of this Symposium in so many different and essential ways, only some of which will emerge as the reader proceeds. I would also like to thank both him and Dean Gary Simson for their very thoughtful and helpful comments upon earlier drafts of this Introduction.

2. Special thanks are due to Robert Audi for many reasons-for his invaluable advice throughout the planning of the project, for agreeing to take the helm at the Symposium itself as moderator and commentator and for characteristically doing it so well, and for being such a good friend and intellectual inspiration to so many of us at Mercer over the years. Indeed the inspiration for the Symposium is due in no small part to his own thinking about the relevant issues. See, e.g., Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and

Secular Reason (2000) [hereinafter Religious Commitment]; Robert Audi, Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (2011) [hereinafter Democratic Authority].

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the Phronesis Project for the Exploration of Character, Practical Wisdom, and Professional Formation. The Symposium was also adopted by Mercer's Lyceum Program, which was launched this year and which has taken the theme "Rebuilding Democracy" as its focus for 20112013.³

It has also been a distinct privilege and pleasure to work with those colleagues who represented the various co-sponsors on the planning committee-David Gushee, Will Jordan, Paul Lewis, Jack Sammons, Yonna Shaw, Dean Gary Simson, and Brandon Veasey. I am grateful to each of them for their vital contributions as we moved forward with planning and organizing the Symposium over the course of a year.⁴

In a very real sense, the Symposium was in gestation for more than a year and a half, originating in conversations among the three University Centers about a possible conference on democratic virtue. However, we could only move forward after we approached the Law Review, following the inspired suggestion of Dean Gary Simson, and secured its agreement to co-sponsor the event as the Law Review Symposium for academic year 2011-2012. It was only by working together and pooling our collective resources that such an interdisciplinary event of the kind we were contemplating became feasible, and this is a further demonstration of the powerful potential for productive synergies resulting from collaboration across the University.

As we moved forward with the planning process, and in particular with our efforts to define the focus of the Symposium, it became clear that the co-sponsors were united by common worries about the state of our political conversation and about how the incivility of that conversation might be related to other symptoms ofperceived disease in our body politic, such as extreme partisanship and the apparent inability or unwillingness on the part of so many of our political leaders to seek

3. See University Chapel, Lyceum and Interfaith Challenge Share Tie-Ins This Fall, News & Features, Mercer University (Aug. 22, 2011), http://www2.mercer.edu/News/ Articles/2011/110818_Chapel.htm.

4. More specifically, David Gushee (McAfee School of Theology) is director of the Mercer Center for Theology and Public Life and the Mercer Lyceum Program; Will Jordan and Paul Lewis (College of Liberal Arts) are co-directors of the Mercer Center for the Teaching of America's Western Foundations and the Phronesis Project respectively; Jack Sammons and Dean Gary Simson (Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law) represented the Law School, and Yonna Shaw and Brandon Veasey (also of the Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law) represented the Law Review, Yonna as our Law Review Administrator and Publishing Coordinator and Brandon as Lead Articles Editor. My own hats were varied and included representative of the Law School, co-director of the Phronesis Project, and a collaborating faculty member for the Western Foundations Center. I am also most grateful for the steady advice and guidance along the way of Hal Lewis, Faculty Advisor to the Law Review.

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compromise.⁵ It occurred to us that we might be able to make better sense of our current predicament, and perhaps even begin to see a way forward in trying to overcome it, if we did two things. First, we thought that it would be helpful to focus especially on the nature ofthe political conversation itself. Second, we thought that further illumination could be provided by taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach that would explore the religious and the legal conversations as well as the political one. Such an approach would bring the additional benefit of mutual illumination-illuminating not only the political conversation but the others too.

Our unspoken premise regarding all three conversations is that we inhabit language as language inhabits us, and thus it is through language that we know ourselves and our world.⁶ And the project was motivated by deeper concerns and goals than a desire to find some panacea that would enable us all to "get along" and "be nice to one another." The concept of civility is so much more capacious, robust, and profound than that. Moreover, incivility may sometimes be entirely appropriate; indeed, uncivil speech and action may be the only way for those who have been hitherto (uncivilly) excluded from the conversation to be heard. Wisdom consists, as Aristotle would say, in knowing when, and how, and to whom one should be civil or uncivil.⁷

With this understanding ofthe foundational role oflanguage, and with these deeper concerns and goals, we produced a program description that formulated our overall theme and goals as follows:

5. Clearly, we are not alone in this, as is exemplified by such initiatives as Krista Tippett's Civil Conversations Project and the National Constitution Center's March 2011 symposium on Civility and Democracy in America. See Krista Tippett, The Civil Conversations Project, On Being, http://being.publicradio.org/first-person/civil-conver sations/ (last visited Feb. 16, 2012); National Constitution Center, Can We Talk: A Conversation About Civility and Democracy in America (Mar. 26-27, 2011); see also the recently launched website http://civilpolitics.org/ directed by Jonathan Haidt, Matt Motyl, and Ravi Iger (last visited Apr. 1, 2012), whose mission is "to find and promote evidence-based methods for increasing political civility." These various initiatives offer a wealth of resources.

6. The language arts are not the only arts that concern language, broadly understood. A cursory consideration of political campaign advertisements, with their use of video and music, readily attests to the power of these other forms of symbolic communication.

7. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. The preceding observations should not in any way be understood as denigrating or minimizing needed efforts to arrest the current "race to the bottom" by articulating appropriate ground rules for civil discourse and conduct. They should be understood, rather, as acknowledging the complexity involved both in...