It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics
“However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”
—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Introduction: Where I’m Coming From
To fulfill the obligations of democratic citizenship, we have to think freely, speak responsibly, and live authentically. Those are high standards, difficult to meet in any era. But particularly in a time marked by intense political partisanship—distorted by disembodied political engagement on social media—thinking freely, speaking responsibly, and living authentically can be a struggle.
That’s partly because of our inescapable human limitations — we never know as much about the world as we would like to know, and we don’t know our own motivations as well as we tend to believe we do. The world is often a mystery, and just as often we are a mystery to ourselves. We operate with incomplete information, always facing the temptation of self-serving self-delusion.
Complicating these limits is the human tendency to conform to the views of the social groups in which we anchor our sense of self. That’s most obviously a problem for people in cults, although the line between a cult and what we take to be a normal social group can be hard to identify at times. (I’m kidding, sort of.) However cultish our particular groups, we all are social animals—we don’t think, speak, or live alone. We don’t construct the frameworks we use to navigate the world by ourselves, and we often rely on the conclusions of others who have expertise—or at least, claim expertise—in areas that baffle us. Given the rapid expansion of human knowledge in the era of modern science, being routinely baffled is part of the modern condition.
Being part of groups gives us a sense of belonging and often a sense of collective power. For most of us, going along with our crowd makes us feel good, and we are reluctant to break ranks. The threat of being cast out of a group is a powerful motivator to accept beliefs, even when we have our doubts. Some people like to think they are beyond such pressures, deriding the conformists as “sheeple” who operate intellectually like domesticated animals. If we separate ourselves from crowds that we have been part of and challenge the belief systems of our peers, it’s tempting to think of ourselves as operating outside the influence of a crowd. But even the crankiest contrarians are never really thinking on their own.
In my five decades of life in and around journalism, academia, and politics, I have never met anyone who thought alone. Throughout history there have been trailblazers, of course, people who have pushed beyond existing thinking to generate new ideas. But if contrarians believe they have special status—if they indulge the illusion of having risen above the collective thinking process—they are failing to practice the critical self-reflection that is supposed to be a core attribute of contrarians.
We are herd animals, and we often unthinkingly think as a herd. The fancy term for this is “identity-protective cognition,” the tendency of individuals to resolve disputed facts in a manner supportive of their group identities. We are motivated to adopt those beliefs to signal that we belong. Here’s another fancy term: “cultural cognition of risk,” our tendency to form beliefs about dangers to society that are consistent with our value judgments about what constitutes an ideal society. We are motivated to assess the facts about potentially dangerous behaviors in ways that support policies we already endorse. Both of these are forms of what is often called “motivated reasoning,” when our biases lead us to a particular conclusion or decision, often without any conscious awareness.
But the herd isn’t always right, and we are often not very good at assessing risk. No group of people is infallible, just as no individual is infallible, and different herds can have mutually exclusive notions of how to understand a situation, which means at least one herd in such a debate is wrong, in part or totally. None of this should surprise anyone. As three scholars of language and intelligence explain, human learning is creative, which means: [A]ny human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism. Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered.
Because we are fallible, it’s best that in our herds we encourage each other to stay sharp. In the smallest herds to which we belong—groups that usually are defined by shared values and tastes—we should reward people for speaking up to challenge the presumed wisdom of the herd. We should encourage lively internal debate. If we’re successful at cultivating that virtue in smaller circles, we can encourage it in more diverse groups, where disagreements are likely more contentious.
I am a herd animal, no different than anyone else. Because of early experience of not fitting into “normal” social groups (that’s a long story about a weird kid), I developed a contrarian streak. But I am always aware that I don’t think alone. All that said, I am eager to offer the conclusions I’ve reached about contemporary issues with confidence, even when—perhaps especially when—members of my herd disagree.
Here’s a quick summary of my evaluation of contemporary herds: I think the right-wing herd is misguided more often than it is correct, but I agree with some elements of a truly conservative worldview, especially the recognition that we humans and our systems aren’t perfectible. I think the left-wing herd is correct most of the time, but my preference for leftist conclusions does not lead me to always accept the conventional wisdom of the left, which I believe is sometimes misguided.
That’s enough background to make my intentions in this book clear: I will critique right-wing ideology, and I will point out what I believe to be failures of my left-leaning comrades, all the time trying to be as open as possible to critique from all sides, with the least amount of self-righteousness possible.
Like everyone, I think with others, and yet I’m responsible for defending my conclusions. Like everyone, I should work to get better at acquiring and analyzing information, as well as cultivating honest introspection. Acknowledging our intellectual interdependence in making our way through the world—even celebrating it, since I can’t imagine living a truly solitary intellectual life—doesn’t negate the equally obvious fact that I am an individual with a capacity to follow my own judgments in thinking, speaking, and acting.
I am not an island unto myself, and yet I recognize that there are times I may reject what others on the island believe to be true.
It makes no sense to declare myself to be the captain of my own intellectual ship and ignore the wisdom of the crew. But neither does it make sense to blow whichever way the social winds take me.
OK, enough with the mixed metaphors. Back to plain language.
Because I know that I sometimes will be wrong, I appreciate someone telling me, “Your argument is unsound and here’s why.” Because I know others sometimes will be wrong, I am skeptical when someone tells me, “It’s wrong for you to make that argument and I won’t listen.” I have run into that latter response more often in the past decade of my intellectual and political life than in previous decades, which is a large part of my motivation to write this book.
Authenticity
As diligently as we may study the world and reflect on our motivations, as staunchly as we may vow not to just follow the crowd, it’s not easy to think freely, speak responsibly, and live authentically.
That last term is especially hard. I mean “authenticity” not in the sense of adherence to an original, not the quest to act in accordance with a revered tradition, whether real or mythical. That kind of search for the authentic—the belief there is a “true” practice or form validated by the unquestioned superiority of tradition—is an abandonment of our responsibility to deal with a changing world. I am using “authentic” here in the sense of being true to our own professed values, that struggle to be the person we claim to be, yearn to be. That is what my late friend Abe Osheroff meant when he so often spoke of his struggle to live an authentic life, to integrate his thinking, talking, and acting.
I met Abe through our mutual involvement in the antiwar movement and progressive political organizing more generally. Already in his eighties when I met him (he died in 2008 at the age of ninety-two), Abe began his political activism during his teenage years in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. He had been a labor organizer, had traveled to Spain to fight in that country’s civil war, and was involved in radical politics the rest of his life.
Abe didn’t write much, and so I recorded an extended interview with him in 2005, which led to a documentary film about his activism. After noticing that he often invoked authenticity, I asked him what he meant by the term. Here’s his answer from that interview: Authenticity is incredibly important. To me, authenticity comes when your thoughts, your words, and your deeds have some relation to each other. It comes when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get derailed. But when you have it, when you feel that surge of recognition—that I’m saying exactly what I’m thinking, and I’m ready to do something about it.
Some people are afraid to think, because thinking can present problems. When you have thoughts, you have to decide what to do with them. We can save them and take them to a therapist, or we can go to a bar and drink them away, or we can talk about them. But immediately we have to deal with self-censorship. Talking honestly can have consequences. Take an easy example. If you’re involved in a relationship and there’s something bothering you about the relationship, and you tell the other person your thoughts, that may be the end of the relationship. You’re in a funny bind because if you talk about it you may risk the relationship, but if you don’t talk about it you know that down the road the same problem will be there. What do you do? Authenticity is about making that decision.
Then once you’ve said something, the question is, “What are you going to do about it?” A lot of people don’t do anything. Trying to be authentic is another way of saying you are struggling to let out the best part of who you are, the part that will act and take risks. We all have a choice: We can choose to be made by history, or we can choose to participate in making history.
This book is my attempt to be as authentic as possible. Because it’s arrogant to tell others how they should think, speak, and act, I’m offering no such advice. Rather than pretend I have it all figured out, I want to write about how I’ve struggled to figure it out in my own life, and why I have confidence in the things I think I have figured out.
This is not false modesty—there are some things I think I do well and some things I realize I’m not particularly good at. From an early age, growing up in North Dakota, I excelled at shoveling snow. Now in my sixties and living in northern New Mexico, I still take pride in my shoveling prowess and have expanded my skill set to include digging irrigation ditches. I also am a clear and concise writer, and I believe I became a pretty good college teacher. I have had some success in my life—I retired as a full professor from the University of Texas at Austin and have published a number of books—and I’ve tried to reflect honestly on the reasons for that success, beyond the obvious (that is, lots of dumb luck and being born white and male in the United States during economic boom times).
Mediocrity and stubbornness
Here’s what I’ve concluded: The secret of my success is that I’m mediocre, and I know it.
That’s what I told many of the graduate students I worked with at UT. I didn’t mean that I was unqualified for my job but rather that I tried not to overestimate my abilities. In academic life, people tend to scramble around trying to prove how smart they are. Because graduate students often mimic the behavior of faculty members, I wanted them to realize that there was a path forward that didn’t require them to overdrive their headlights.
I learned that lesson from a trusted friend, the late Jim Koplin, who told me that one could thrive in university life without pretending to be the smartest person in the room. My intellectual deficiencies are too numerous to list in full here, but among them are a tin ear for languages (I’m monolingual), a severely limited capacity for math beyond algebra (I washed out of calculus in high school and was too lazy to try again), and an embarrassingly superficial knowledge of core sciences such as physics (please don’t ask me to explain the general theory of relativity). I’ll leave an evaluation of my emotional intelligence to others.
While I was working on my PhD, Jim told me, kindly but bluntly, that I lacked the background in math and science I should have; that at my age I was unlikely to make much progress in those areas; and that these weaknesses would limit the research I was competent to do. That was one of many things he was right about.
But Jim also helped me understand what I could be good at, such as distinguishing between important and trivial research in the social sciences and humanities, and then translating the best of it into plain language for students and the general public. He encouraged me to write honestly about my experience living with unearned privilege, incorporating critical self-reflection into radical analyses.
I’m mediocre. Not only do I know it, but I’m kind of proud of it, of how I have worked hard to maximize my limited abilities. Instead of always trying to puff up myself, I found ways to do what I did best within those limitations, aware that I wasn’t creating new knowledge but helping others learn. Thanks to a lot of luck, I was able to build a successful professional career and also use those skills in political writing, public speaking, and community organizing.
That explains why I have the opportunity to write a book. Another trait of mine explains why I’m writing this book: I’m stubborn.
I hope my stubbornness is not the pathological kind, the annoying tendency we humans have to refuse to change our minds even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that we are wrong. I want to believe I am stubborn in the good sense, not abandoning a reasonable position I hold until someone presents such evidence. Like everyone, sometimes I have been stubborn in that embarrassing fashion. But as I have gotten older, I think I’m clearer about the difference between digging in for the sake of staying dug in, and holding one’s ground because intellectual standards matter. I like to think I’m stubborn the right way.
I am mediocre and stubborn, proudly.
I realize that this may not be the smartest strategy for an introduction. So, I might as well keep digging this hole by telling a story about my own failure to live up to the standards I want to defend in this book.
In 2022, Wes Jackson and I published An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, a book about dealing with today’s “multiple cascading ecological crises,” a phrase I had borrowed from Jim Koplin many years before. One of the “Four Hard Questions” that Wes and I take on in that book is overpopulation, asking a question that no one can answer definitively but is crucial to ask: What is the sustainable size of the human population, at what level of aggregate consumption? (If you don’t want to read the book, our answer is “fewer and less”, fewer people consuming a lot less, which I’ll explain in Chapter 6.)
I was talking to a friend about how so many people on the left side of the political fence refuse to acknowledge that the question is relevant. Standard left dogma is that the problem is not population but capitalism—if the world’s resources were distributed equitably, there would be enough for everyone. This dodge—it’s economics not population—is a serious deficiency of left analysis, I told my friend, because it avoids coming to terms with the biophysical limits of the larger living world of which we are but one part.
Brief uncomfortable pause.
“When I asked you about population a long time ago,” my friend said, “you told me that it wasn’t important. Your answer was that the problem was capitalism. You gave me what you are now calling left dogma.”
Another brief uncomfortable pause.
I had two possible responses. I could construct some tortured explanation of how my past comments were more nuanced and that what I had really meant was…
I spared us both that torture and agreed. Yes, I said, you’re absolutely right. For a long time, I repeated that dogma, even though I was never sure it made sense. I didn’t challenge the claim because I hadn’t read widely enough or spent enough time thinking about the question, and so I said what people of my political leanings were supposed to say. I stuck with the herd. I wanted to be seen as a good leftist, and that was lazy. Reasonable people can disagree about the issue, but accepting dogma to avoid thinking is bad intellectual practice and contributes to bad public policy. In other words, I may be wrong about my conclusion today, but I definitely was wrong simply to repeat the party line for so long.
This story demonstrates two of my deepest insights about people: We are fallible, and we don’t like being fallible.
OK, those aren’t deep insights. They are banal observations—banal but important reminders of why honest arguments are necessary if we are to deepen our understanding of the world. Honest arguments are most productive when we commit to thinking freely, speaking responsibly, and acting authentically; when we do our best as individuals to uphold intellectual standards; and when we recognize that upholding those standards is as much a collective as an individual effort.
We all are responsible for cultivating these intellectual, moral, and political virtues in ourselves. But we need a little help not just from our friends but also from our enemies. That can be hard these days—not just finding a way to talk to enemies but also being honest with friends.
A note on terminology
So far, I have invoked a right/left political framework rather than a conservative/liberal one, which I hope will minimize confusion throughout the book. But confusion is inevitable.
Take the word “liberal”, which is a component of the terms “classical liberalism”, “New Deal liberalism”, and “neoliberalism”—three very different political formations. The term is also used as a modifier, such as a “liberal internationalist,” someone committed to building a world order based on principle not power. These days, the antonym “illiberal” is used to describe authoritarian leaders who manipulate democratic systems to produce undemocratic ends. Without shared definitions, these terms can confuse more than to clarify.
A leading liberal political philosopher suggests that “liberal” makes most sense as an adjective that captures a spirit best described in moral rather than political or cultural terms: We [liberals] are, or we aspire to be, open-minded, generous, and tolerant. We are able to live with ambiguity; we are ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology, whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics.
This book embraces those liberal values, but I am a leftist (not a liberal) who is rooted in radical (not liberal) feminism. So, what am I?
That question can be hard to answer when there are no stable, widely agreed upon definitions. A politician such as Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, might be described by her Democratic Party supporters as a liberal, while people further to the left might consider her to be a moderate. Meanwhile, conservative opponents routinely tagged her as far left.
For purposes of this book, I will try to stick with definitions that are most commonly used in contemporary US politics. From my perspective, the contemporary right in the United States includes openly fascistic, reactionary, and moderate versions. In the center are, well, centrists. On the left we find liberals, progressives, and leftists.
The fascistic right includes those who openly call for the United States to be a white, Christian nation and hold strong patriarchal views and a weak commitment to democracy. The reactionary right includes those who believe any capitulation to democratic socialism, multiculturalism, or internationalism will destroy the country. The moderate right is the rest of the Republican Party, those who are skeptical of any restraint on the business community and are committed to US supremacy, whether it be through intervention or isolation.
Liberals offer a tempered critique of concentrated power, endorsing reforms to capitalism that include greater opportunities for women and non-white people within the existing systems. Progressives have a deeper critique of those systems but tend to be pragmatic and avoid calls for radical change. Leftists argue that we must abandon those systems and find new ways of organizing the economy and international order, typically around socialist principles.
Who does that leave in the center? People who are uncomfortable with too much change too quickly, those willing to accept most any policy proposal that promises stability and protects the status quo.
In this summary, I have not included positions on the ecological crises, which don’t always map easily onto left/right frameworks, though in general the left side of the fence takes those crises more seriously than the right. But as I’ll argue in Chapter 6, the differences in right and left on these matters may not be as important as their unacknowledged points of agreement.
At times I’ll talk about right and left in general ways, recognizing that there are important distinctions within those groupings but that for certain purposes the binary is adequate. When the distinctions are more central to any analysis, I’ll mark them.
Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of many books. His most recent is It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically About Tricky Topics (Olive Branch Press, 2024) See back cover.
Endnotes
Dan M. Kahan et al., “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, no. 3 (November 2007): 465-505, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=995634.
Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Donald Braman, “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,” Journal of Risk Research 14 (2011): 147-74, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3334657.
Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” New York Times, March 8, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html.
“Abe Osheroff: On the Joys and Risks of Living in the Empire,” interview by Robert Jensen, 2005, https://robertwjensen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Abe-Osheroff-interview-by-Robert-Jensen.pdf.
Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, directed by Nadeem Uddin (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2009), https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/abe-osheroff-one-foot-grave-other-still-da.
My reflections on Jim, along with his obituary and photos, are online at https://robertwjensen.org/category/jim-koplin/.
Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).
Robert Jensen, Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2015), 124.
Michael Walzer, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 3.
Kelefa Sanneh, “How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?” The New Yorker, March 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism; Kristin Du Mez, “A Virtual Roundtable on the Threat of Christian Nationalism,” Du Mez CONNECTIONS, February 15, 2023, https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/a-virtual-roundtable-on-the-threat.