Some Concluding Reflections - Recovering the Political: the Problem With Our Political Conversations - Jack L. Sammons

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

Some Concluding Reflections-Recovering the Political: The Problem with Our Political Conversations

by Jack L. Sammons*

"That which challenges a person to response is the mystery of his or her own being."¹

I am going to use parts of Gene Garver's thoughtful analysis² to frame these remarks, as it did much of the conversation at the symposium, but without much concern about the troublesome distinction between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. As long as it is understood that epideictic rhetoric, like deliberative, is within the art of persuasion-it is in the particular form of getting an audience to see its object of praise or blame in a new light for, as Aristotle says, quoting Socrates, "it is not difficult to praise Athenians in Athens"³-I do not think I need to be very concerned with this distinction.

Garver tells us that we have created a world we think we control, and because we think we control it, we also think someone is subject to blame for everything bad that happens in it. (Our constant denials of responsibility are but the opposing side of this). This exercise of will that

* Griffin B. Bell Professor of Law, Mercer University, Walter F. George School of Law. Duke University (B.A., 1967); University of Georgia School of Law (J.D., 1974); Antioch College (M.A.T., 1978).

I am deeply indebted to my good friend Mark Jones for many things including his thoughtful critique of an earlier draft of these reflections.

1. Oren Ben-Dor, Thinking About Law in Silence with Heidegger 13 (2007).

2. Eugene Garver, The Way We Live Now: Rhetorical Persuasion and Democratic Conversation, 63 Mercer L. Rev. 807 (2012).

3. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse 83 (George A. Kennedy trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1991).

900 MERCER LAW REVIEW [Vol. 63

knows no bounds is not just an American phenomenon. Consider, for example, the fact that "[t]he Italian government is trying seven seismologists for manslaughter because they didn't predict an earthquake in 2009 that killed over 300 people," as reported in First Things.⁴ So we are, we think, in control, and yet it seems to me we are also incapable of the deliberation such control would require, for we have seen too clearly the fiduciary character of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge.⁵ Because it is in part the uncertainty of being human from which we are trying to escape through our control, we no longer trust a knowledge that rests upon the same uncertainty.⁶ We yearn to calculate, you might say, but can find few subjects that now lend themselves completely to calculation. They are all all-too-human. In this world in which we are doomed to constant condemnations, and here I just hope you will agree with me, there is a hubristically-inspired misunderstanding of who "we," the political "we," are-one long in the making.

The three conversations that were the subject matter of the symposium-law, religion, and politics-are in their essence about this question: who are we?⁷ Each one of the three focuses on different aspects of our identity, and each imagines the "we" of its particular conversation differently,⁸ but, in their essence, all three are about the same thing.

4. While We're At It, First Things, Nov. 2011, at 65.

5. On the fiduciary character of knowledge, see, for example, Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy 266 (1958). For a brilliant exploration of the implications of this, and much more of interest here, see Joseph Vining, The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity (2004). I want to be clear that what I say in the text is not a complaint. It is a very good thing that we cannot deliberate in the way that control over our lives would require, for, as Robert Audi reminded us in a talk to Mercer students that preceded the symposium, a world without risk would be a world without caring. This was said in the context of lecturing on Audi's exploration of the problem of evil, for which, see Robert Audi, Rationality and Religious

Commitment 205-286 (2011).

6. In the shuttle from the airport to the symposium, I heard the following from a very loud man who shared his opinions on everything with the other passengers for almost an hour and a half: "You can't believe there is a gay gene because the scientists who say they discovered it may have been gay." This is what "the fiduciary nature of knowledge" means at its worst.

7. The identity sought in the question, "Who are we?" is an identity found in a gathered time, a time in which past, present, and future are all present. The identity is something that is always on the way to us. On "gathered time" and how this works in regards to identity and the law, see my own, Jack L. Sammons, The Law's Melody, 55 Vill. L. Rev. 1143, 1154 (2010).

8. Among these three it is the law that most depends, although they all do, upon a mythical "we" of those it imagines to be its polity. To say that it does, to say that the "we" of the law is imagined, is not at all to say that it is not real. See, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre,

2012] PROBLEM WITH POLITICAL CONVERSATIONS 901

They are about us. In addition, each offers its own resources for addressing the hubris that has led us astray.

The political conversation that Garver described for us, however, has forgotten that this is the case. This forgetting is confirmed for us when the only form of deliberative rhetoric that remains possible within our political conversation, economics (which pretends the political as Arendt⁹ warned us many years ago), is the one least capable of sustaining any inquiry into our identity, premised as it is upon contested versions of reductionist views of human nature. The audience in the Florida Republican Primary Debate this year that applauded blaming the death of a person from illness on his failure to obtain adequate private health care insurance displayed for us, as well as anything could, the consequences of this forgetting. Who are we? As this audience knew, this is not what politics is about. Politics is instead just economics, and in this we have no choice about who we are. "We" are simply the prey ofan economic beast, and each one ofus is to be blamed for our weakness if killed and eaten by it.

Does such a politics, in almost all ofits manifestations, lack civility in the way discussed at the symposium? Yes, of course it does. There should be no surprise in this. The enormous social and personal tensions created as we try to measure the river, the one that is never the same twice, spill over in understandable ways when "we" talk to those "we" think "we" must blame because we have lost the ability to inquire honestly into who we are.

If we do ask the identity question at all, who we seem to be in this, the default identity I suppose you might call it, are a people trapped in the inauthenticity of trying to identify ourselves through associations with one or more of the competing cultural groups doing battle over control of the control we think we have. Anyone who identifies himself or herself, or any important aspect of his or her identity, as a liberal,

Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats, in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays 159, 161 (2006) ("So nations to be real must first be imagined."); see also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age 713 (2007) (discussing our "imagined communities"). MacIntyre, but not Taylor, is thinking in terms of a polity defined by a nation. I am not. I am thinking of a polity of law the "we" of the law as it is imagined, which is not coterminous with the nation. This "we" we call upon when we are to understand what nation (and being a nation) means, to stand in judgment of it, and to call it to its own ideals, retains the distance needed, however slight this might be, for critical judgment. Therefore, in this sense and in others, the law, like the arts, creates its own polity, and like the arts, it is always potentially an alternative to others. I have explored one polity of music and its role as an alternative to others in Jack L. Sammons, Censoring Samba: An Aesthetic Justification for the Protection of Speech, 37 Stetson L. Rev. 855 (2008). 9. See generally Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958).

902 MERCER LAW REVIEW [Vol. 63

conservative, independent, or none of the above, or as on one side of some social issue or another-taxation, abortion, gay rights, racial equality, fiscal policy, energy policy, environmental policy, economic fairness, Wall Street, Palestine, and so on-has this sense of being trapped, even when his or her side is in control. This is so because the associations, which provide this identity, can offer no personal satisfaction as an identity. They are not the "we" we seek.

Yet such identities are extremely hard to resist, providing as they do a certain security and stability, however false and incomplete these might be. Rather than the comfort of a truer identity, these identities produce only constant apprehension, defined as they are against others we do not understand and over whom we have no real possibility of control. A people so defined feel the constant, unrelenting tug of the impossible demands of needing to master the wills of difficult others. They feel the fear that ifthis tug is not acted upon, the others, who feel the same need, will master them. I believe that most people, in...