Why is civil disagreement so hard? It cannot simply be a matter of dogmatic certainty. The woman minister and I were quite convinced of the correctness of our respective positions, both at the beginning and at the end of our exchange, yet we later enjoyed a delightful conversation over a glass of wine at the post-seminar reception. No, the failure of civil disagreement cannot be a function of certainty.
I think the lack of civil disagreement in the classroom is best understood as a function of larger social and political trends. As I have noted on this site before, oppression is now a psychological category. This subverts the crucial moral difference between an actual crime, a speech crime, and (increasingly) a thought crime. It has also pressed an already pragmatic philosophy of education into an instrument of politicized therapy.
When you add this to the American tendency—right and left—to resolve difference by law court, then the kind of “live and let live” culture which a healthy liberal democratic legal system is supposed to support, ironically ends up as its exact opposite: A world where in the name of individual freedom everything is legally policed in a manner which increasingly restricts the possibility of individual diversity.
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