Conversation and Democracy
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONVOCATION, June 3, 2023
Thank you Provost Baicker, President Alivisatos. Colleagues, parents, friends and most of all graduates! Congratulations, class of 2023, on everything you’ve achieved to bring you to this joyous day.
When asked to give a convocation speech, my first instinct was to ask for help. I started, as one does in 2023, with asking ChatGPT to produce a five paragraph speech expressing University of Chicago values. You will be happy to hear that I will not be reading that speech, which was boring and full of cliches. I then tried to spice it up by asking it to write in the style of Taylor Swift, who is here in Chicago this weekend, and some of you may be going to see. Just be yourself, she apparently said, there’s no one better! That’s pretty good, but not quite enough for the two hours I’ve been allocated for this speech. JK.
I then turned to my second instinct, which was to think back to my own graduation and to search for any dim recollection of the words of wisdom imparted to me on that occasion. To my great surprise, I actually can remember the San Francisco real estate magnate who spoke to us, but no longer recall a word of what he said that day.
I do, however, remember what happened afterwards. Just a couple months after my graduation, a man named Francis Fukuyama—who incidentally had been born right here in Hyde Park while his father was a graduate student--published an article entitled "The End of History". Drawing on ideas associated with Hegel and other philosophers of the type we read at the University of Chicago, Fukuyama argued that the world was converging toward liberal democracy as the sole ideological basis for legitimate government. He was not saying that all countries would become democracies, but rather that ideologically, there was no more competition for the basis of legitimacy. The dialectic of history was over, and the people had won.
Now, all the distinguished scholars on this stage behind me can verify that we can never be certain that anyone will ever read what we write, but it surely helps to have good timing. A few months after Fukuyama’s publication, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy indeed seemed to be the only game in town, and he became famous as a great prognosticator. Today, Fukuyama remains an important scholar at an obscure university located in Palo Alto, California.
As a young person, I was fascinated by the democratic wave, and in some sense am a product of that moment, as I have spent my academic career trying to understand where constitutional democracy comes from, how it can be sustained, and how it dies.
In recent years, the last has become the most important question. Authoritarianism in various forms is on the rise; democratic government is looking a little shabby. The number of democracies in the world has declined every year since 2006, and the number of people living in a democracy is now less than half of the global population. Fewer people agree, it seems, with Winston Churchill’s famous quip about democracy being the worst system of government, except for all the others.
This does not on its own mean that Fukuyama was wrong, for today's authoritarians cloak themselves in democratic garb. The official of name of the hereditary monarchy in North Korea, after all, is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and at least one of those words is accurate because it is indeed, Korea. Today’s authoritarians often operate in governments that, at least on the surface, look democratic. They hold elections; they have constitutions with long lists of rights; they have courts; and research has show that all these help them to survive.
When democracies die, they no longer do so through a sudden collapse in the form of a coup or revolution, but rather through death by a thousand cuts, a series of degradations at the hand of people who themselves were democratically elected.
In recent years, these concerns have been articulated even here in the United States. Our mood is sour. Our institutions do not seem to respond to us. My colleague Cathy Cohen has shown that many young people, especially from marginalized communities, prefer revolution to democracy. Polls, including by my colleague Sue Stokes, show that majorities of Americans are dis-satisfied with the way our democracy is working. Our political discourse borders on the hysterical, and our partisan polarization is extreme: we have friends, and we have foes, and we have nothing in between. Most Americans do not want their children to marry those of the other political party, and we now even have divorce proceedings in which political differences are cited as a basis for dissolution.[1] The only thing Americans can agree on is the source of the problem: a sizable majority of Americans agree that it’s the other side’s fault.[2]
What are we to make of this situation? How bad is it?
I want to suggest that we take a deep breath. It is important to remember that being a citizen of a democracy can be depressing, as our leaders continually come up short, and we have the collective freedom to voice our displeasure. Disappointment and hope are the twin emotions that drive democracy. Disappointment in where we are; hope that we better days are possible, if we can just get another chance at the ballot. Elections are a kind of siren song that keeps us going;[3] the winner gets to govern, while the loser goes away to lick their wounds, but survives to fight another day.
In contrast, the central emotion of dictatorship is not hope but fear. Everyone understands that strongmen survive by intimidating opponents and subjects. What is less well appreciated is that the individual with the most to fear is actually the dictator himself; the dictator’s greatest worry is not actually a mass public uprising, because those are very rare, but rather being deposed by someone in her own inner circle. losing office in a democracy means losing power for a time; in a dictatorship, it means losing power, but also one’s freedom, assets, and possibly even one’s head. No wonder dictators are paranoid.
Ordinary people in a dictatorship can survive the fear by self censoring, staying silent and laying low. But this does not mean they give up their voice entirely. Citizens in dictatorships are remarkably courageous and creative in finding ways to engage in criticism without crossing the line. They use the three-finger salute from the Hunger Games; they hold up blank pieces of paper to indicate that they can say nothing; they speak in parables, and jokes.
We in democracies can be more direct in our criticism. Our challenge is not to our disappointment overwhelm our hope; that opens the door for fear to take over.
In thinking about our moment, I have become quite fond of a speech given by John Dewey, the great American philosopher who taught here, and appeared at this very Convocation in 1902. I learned about this from my colleague Agnes Callard. In 1939, at what was surely democracy’s darkest hour in the last hundred years, Dewey wrote an essay called Creative Democracy, in which he said:
“…. the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another…Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion.“
Dewey reminds us that democracy requires conversation. There is no simply substitute for sitting down and talking with other people. It is how we think, and it is for this reason that Plato and Confucius come down to us in the form of dialogues. The family dinner, the friendly argument, the impassioned debate, the casual chat; not every conversation is political, but every form of politics requires human conversation. This is one reason I love the University of Chicago, and its culture of argument and friendly challenge: at its best, we strive to be tough on ideas, and kind to people; much other discourse these days is the opposite: tough on people but weak on ideas. (Sorry, twitter.)
One of my favorite writers, Jeanette Winterson, reminds us that conversation is in no way easy. Describing having breakfast with her grandmother, put it this way: “Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port, and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. ‘You understand me then?’”[4]
Conversation doesn’t just happen on its own; free speech only works if people are actually listening, and that may be our biggest deficit today. We need much more active work on generating environments for dialogue, conversation and debate, and how to encourage curiosity about what others are saying. This is an essential role for universities in a democracy and I hope that this is something that the University of Chicago can lead on over the years ahead.
As I think back over my own research I can recall several examples in which people can do amazing things if willing to listen and engage in conversation. In 1996, in South Africa, people came together in a very divided society, with a brutal history, to craft a new constitution for the rebirth of a nation. The drafting process was not easy, and there were several tense moments when it almost failed. The preamble, which is a kind of a mission statement for a country and a constitution, was politically contentious and so was put off until the very end of the process. When they couldn’t agree, the drafters decided to send the Communist party representative into a room with the pastor of the National Party, which had governed under apartheid, to draft the text. These two people, who had nothing in common, accomplished the task, and their product laid the way for a truly democratic South Africa.
It is hard to imagine that Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress and to run for president, went to the hospital to visit the segregationist George Wallace, after he was shot and paralyzed at a campaign stop. Wallace cried when he saw her, and she said “you and I don’t agree, but you’ve been shot and I might be shot, and we are both the children of American democracy, so I wanted to come see you.”[5] Wallace eventually renounced segregation and asked for forgiveness, appointing several African-Americans to his final cabinet as governor.
I also think about the participants in a citizens assembly, convened in the very divided society of Northern Ireland in 2018, to make recommendations on public policy. This involved randomly selected groups of citizens, something many scholars think could revitalize our own democracy. After the meeting, participants said they “expected entrenched views from many participants,” but instead found that “most were open to discussion and change.” This is something shown over and over again by social psychologists like Nicholas Epley of our Business school. People underestimate the benefit of conversation until they engage in it.
As I stand here and recall how much I’ve learned from talking to people, I’d like to invite you to take a second and think about someone with whom you’ve had a deep conversation during your time here. It is something to treasure, and makes me less anxious about Chat GPT. A machine can mimic conversation and can play chess or go better than humans; but it cannot have the genuine sense of doubt and open-ness and vulnerability that leads to actual learning and creativity. AI has no self to express, no mind to change, no vote to cast.
In closing, I want to say that I remain optimistic about democracy for several reasons. One bit of good news is that a majority of Americans, of both parties, say that they have some, or a great deal of confidence in the future. We still possess the vital emotion of hope. Furthermore, more than 80% of people say they have friends or relatives with whom they disagree politically, and a majority converse about their differences. The public is much less divided than the politicians, or the media, which suggests a national conversation is still possible.
Second, we see repeatedly that people around the world, from Armenia to Zambia, are willing to take steps for their freedom and voice. A global youth movement focused on issues like climate change is demanding more voice, and experimenting with new forms of participation. Women in Iran and Afghanistan have undertaken enormous personal risk to make their voices heard. They are taking an abstract idea of equality and turning it into reality. To go back to Shirley Chisholm, one of my favorite quotes from her is “You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
This brings me to my third reason for optimism. You. We’ve watched you engage in complicated, difficult conversations under truly unprecedented circumstances. Many of you thought you were coming to the place where fun went to die, but within six months, you were back in your parents’ basement, taking classes on Zoom. What could be more fun than that? Today you get to go out in the world, to implement your ideas, developed in conversation with others here. Keep talking, keep listening and stay curious.
Congratulations class of 2023!
[1] https://www.goldbergjones-or.com/divorce/political-differences-causing-divorce/
[2] Scholars call this affective polarization—which is not about policy but identity. It is the topic of a rich empirical literature.
[3] Adam Przeworski, Crises of Democracy (2019).
[4] Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries 163 (1997)
[5] Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight 97 (1973).