 It's one o'clock on the east coast, so welcome to the future of democracy, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. I'm John Sands, Director of Learning and Impact at Knight Foundation. We've just come through a year that tested the fabric of our democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of a movement for racial justice, and a polarizing national election have further exposed deep rifts in our society that are prompting national soul searching. Can self-governance survive in a world where political alliances and economies have been remade by networked information technologies, disease? How do we begin to find new common ground? Our guest today believes it starts with a renewed focus on the need for authentic conversation in self-governing communities and our society. She recently wrote, if the American experiment is to succeed, we must improve the quality of our conversations. Emily Chamley Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, where Knight is a proud supporter of the discourse initiative. Her expertise covers a wide variety of, a wide range of territory from liberal education and economic development to post-disaster recovery and campus-free speech. From 2012 to 2016, she served as provost and dean at Washington College, and prior to that, she was a professor at Beloit College. Emily, it's so good to have you with us. Good to see you. It's great to see you, John. Thanks for having me on. Thanks. Before we dive in, I want to invite our viewers to be part of the conversation. Please feel free to send us your questions using the Q&A function Zoom, or using hashtag Night Live on Twitter, or just leave a comment if you're watching on Facebook or YouTube. Emily, so let's get the ball rolling. I think we want to have just, you know, a kind of natural, authentic conversation. So I think it'd be helpful for our audience to learn a little bit more about the work that the Institute for Humane Studies does. So why don't you just give us maybe a little bit of an overview about IHS and some of the work? Absolutely. Happy to. At the Institute for Humane Studies, we work with scholars across the country who are interested in exploring the big ideas that underlie the good society, the society that is a tolerant and pluralistic society where individuals and communities thrive. What are the ideas that underlie that kind of society? And there are scholars across the country who dedicate their careers and dedicate their scholarly lives to addressing those questions and the tensions that are presented in liberal democracies. And how do we preserve liberal democracies and strengthen them? And those are the kinds of questions that our scholars dive into. Talk a little bit more about who these scholars are. Are they resident scholars? Do they come from different institutions? Is IHS kind of a, I guess I'm trying to get a sense of who makes up the Institute? Yep. So we have a team that is based at George Mason University. We are at the Arlington campus of George Mason. But we work with scholars across the country and we don't take them out of their environments. We leave them right where they are because that's where they're doing their best work is with their colleagues doing leading edge research, but also teaching students, which is an important part of their role as well. And so we work with those scholars by supporting them through grant making, but also by convening them. That's the most important thing that we do is we gather scholars together for periods of long weekends to dive into original texts, for example, or to explore a research area that might be new to them or they may be experts in and they want to share their ideas and their research with other scholars. But those convenings, those opportunities to connect in seminar and research workshop kinds of settings is really the heartbeat of our organization because it's there that we cultivate a thriving intellectual community that is subjecting their ideas to challenge and challenging other ideas and building on each other's ideas as well. So it sounds like you pull people together for a conversation. Right, exactly. That's what we do is we pull together people for conversations, both in-person conversations and written conversations. And you mentioned the discourse initiative. That's a major initiative where our work is informed by the classical liberal tradition We also work with scholars across the ideological spectrum, though, because we recognize that if we are going to really dive deep into those ideas and fortify the ideas that underlie a society that is both free and tolerant and pluralistic and recognizes everyone that we are one another's dignified equals, that kind of society needs intellectual support and no single group can provide all of that support. We want to make sure that we're connecting with scholars who are left of center, right of center, classical liberals who are excited about those ideas and fortifying those ideas and that's a big part of what the discourse initiative is all about. What does it mean to be a classical liberal? So it comes from a tradition that it's what liberalism used to be called, which is an emphasis on I think of the work of Adam Smith as being important where his insight was the liberal plan, the liberal society was one where there was a great deal of individual liberty, equality, and justice. And so that that recipe, that that is a liberal recipe of equality, liberty, and justice. And if you have those elements, that is that also then informed of the founding of the United States, of course, the Declaration of Independence is a kind of classical liberal text. And so those are the ideas that we explore at a deeper level. And also, how do we apply those ideas in a context where you mentioned the challenges that we're facing in 2020 and into this current year? How do we flex those ideas so that we can also be a part of addressing the challenges with respect to racial injustice, with respect to the unfinished liberal project, you know, liberal democracy, I think of liberalism as our compass, the founding ideas as being sort of a compass, but it's not a finished project. And so this is a living intellectual community, precisely because there are unfinished elements of the enterprise and of the vision. Talk a little bit more about this unfinished project because I think I wanted to ask a question about before you described it that way, I wanted to ask about whether you see any, whether the past year has exposed any kind of shortcomings of the classical liberal project. But I guess framing it more as unfinished work is more generative for conversation. So let's take that tack. How is the project unfinished? Where are some areas where you think there's work to be done? One of the things that happens in any kind of intellectual tradition is there'll be some moments when certain themes get emphasized at the expense of others. So I think of, for example, as I moved into my role as a provost at Washington College, that was in 2012. It was right when free speech on campus initiatives were, those issues were really starting to bubble up and to a fever pitch in some cases. And what seemed to me was happening was that people on all sides, most of, most people, not all, but most people actually did just want to have improved conversations, they wanted to have better conversations. But they were getting themselves wrapped around the axle by making it all about First Amendment freedoms. Now, everybody at night and everybody at IHS knows the importance and respects the importance of First Amendment freedoms. But that's just the starting point for good conversations. That's just the starting point which allows us to be in a self-governing community. And so that's the kind of thing I mean when it's an unfinished project is new challenges emerge in a complex society every day. And so how do we, or old challenges surface every day? So how do we go back to basics, start to think again about how is it that we can develop not just the formal mechanisms of free speech, for example, but those informal sensibilities that lend themselves to productive conversations in which we all feel smarter after having those conversations? So you wrote a piece recently that basically lays out a few design principles for a good conversation. And maybe before we dive into some of the individual ones, because there are some that I really latched onto, maybe be helpful if you give us kind of an overview of these design principles that you can come up with. Sure, sure. I think this is certainly not an exhaustive list. It's just really I'm hoping to start a conversation so other people can weigh in as well. But some things to start up. First of all, intellectual freedom is essential that if people are afraid that they're going to be imprisoned for what they say, you can't have good conversations. So that's sort of a baseline constitutional principle of what's needed for a good conversation. But beyond that, there are less formal rules that inspire good conversations, like for example, that for us to be in a conversation that's meaningful, you and I have to respect the personhood in one another, that you have dignity and I have dignity. You may have a lot more experience and you do on a lot of topics, John, but you also respect that I have standing in the conversation. And so similarly, other principles follow from that, that we should enter into the conversation with a spirit of humility, with the assumption of good faith. We have to have respect for the importance of critical reason. But also, even as we're listening for one another's reason to argument and basis and evidence, that we are willing to listen sympathetically to, that even if I can find fissures in the evidence that you're putting forward, I'm willing to set that aside long enough so I can hear what's behind, what's driving your intellectual project, what's driving your point of view that you're coming into that conversation with, and me being willing to have some, maybe being willing to listen generously to that point of view so that I can come to understand how it is that you are looking at the same world I'm looking at and maybe even at the same evidence and we're walking away with different conclusions. How is it that two reasonable, thoughtful people can come to different conclusions after looking at the same world? That takes a certain kind of not only intellectual but also emotional posture when we enter into conversations, and that's what I mean by informal sensibilities that are required for good conversations. You've hit a chord, I think, with this idea of us entering into a conversation looking at the same world and operating from a shared fact base, I guess. It strikes me that the last year has really heightened this sense of epistemological rupture, that they're in this incredibly polarized environment that is the people's approaches to fundamental questions about our democracy, about our communities. We're not actually starting from the same place anymore, and that technology is playing some role in exacerbating this epistemological schism that I certainly can see in the work that many of our grantees do, but that we see just in the newspaper every day that we see and the differences between how one media outlet covers the same story versus another. Those kinds of issues seem to be exacerbated and more visible than they have been in the past. I'm curious about your take on that and how we reclaim, I guess, something of a shared epistemology. Yeah, there's two parts to this, and I think there are two parts that are somewhat in tension with each other. First of all, I'm an economist, so I love the marketplace of ideas metaphor, and I like to dive deep into that metaphor sometimes, perhaps too much. But if we're in a marketplace of ideas, we have to be fair dealers. The reason why we have trust when we're in the marketplace is because our presumption is that people are going to be dealing with us honestly. The same holds true for conversations. Our markets would break down if we didn't have that basic baseline of trust. Similarly, we have to enter into and presume that others are entering into the conversation with the intent of being fair dealers. That means a commitment to honesty. That means a willingness to back away from a position. If you've been shown that that position is flawed in some way, either through a fracture of logic or the evidence doesn't hold up, we have to be willing to back away from our positions. At least long enough to say, well, I'll need to think about that some more. That's one piece of it. That respect for critical reason is absolutely a part of what we need if we're going to have good conversations. With that said, we can also abuse that language of reason. We can abuse the language of, well, it's all about the facts. Oftentimes, when someone says it's all about the facts, if they import into that to say, and therefore, the facts are very, very clear about what we should do next, that may not be true. There might be scientific grounding for a truth claim. But what we do next with that is not always necessarily obvious. And there may be trade-offs, for example, that hit different people in different ways. And thinking about public health concerns around how we manage COVID is a great example of how we can have a shared commitment to truth seeking about what the science tells us. But what the trade-offs are with respect to public policy around what we do next, that's an area where we can't just simply claim, well, the scientific authority is the only authority in that. There might be some lived experience on the ground that informs how different public policies play out in different communities that we need to be listening to. And so that's the other half of it, is that the world is a complicated place. And we have to enter into any conversation that's complex with an understanding that we've got a lot to learn from one another, that you're seeing the world from a very specific perspective, and I'm seeing the world from a different perspective, and we need each other if we're going to actually be collaborators in this truth-seeking enterprise. I was thinking just as you said that this is the underlying premise of Plato's dialogues that we only learn how we actually think about something in conversation with somebody else, that it's a process of refinement of, you may come into a conversation with a set of priors that's going to guide your understanding of the facts or the particular vision you bring to the facts, but that having an interlocutor, having somebody to bounce ideas back and forth with, and to hear some of the shortcomings of your own approach to things. And that's one of the real traps with people who love to think. Those of us who love to think, we think hard about our positions and we subject them to scrutiny even before we bring them out into the public oftentimes, and that's valuable, that's a good thing, but what that also means is that sometimes we can enter into a conversation with a very, very strong point of view. Again, not a bad thing, but it means that we're emphasizing some muscles rather than other muscles. So it's like you've gone to the gym and you've worked out your quads really, really well, but you've forgotten about your upper body. So it's a similar sort of thing that if you're really good at thinking through a problem to the point where you've overcome every objection that you possibly can, sometimes that disables you as a good conversation partner because you forget how to ask a good question. You forget how to say, okay, I'm now entering the conversation with John here, and I know that he disagrees with me, and I'm going to enter in ready to volley back every single one of his objections because I thought them through. And that might be a way for us to get at truth. That might be a very, very good exercise for us to do. We should also try it out. I should also try it out so that I stop myself short of that and I say, I know that John has these objections. Let me go in by asking questions that can help me understand why he has those objections. Help me understand what's informing those objections rather than coming ready to bear with the volleying back. Instead, I just want to try to find that way of finding the question so that I'm tapping the knowledge that has been informing your challenges and your perspective. That's a very different set of muscles, right, of intellectual muscles that we need to learn how to flex appropriately even as we're sharpening our own intellectual arguments in our own heads. So we've got about 10 more minutes and I want to save time for three things. One, I'd like to talk a little bit about the role that technology has taken in mediating our conversations over the past year. I'd like also to be able to spend a little bit of time talking about the changes that are happening on the ground in real communities and how that's impacting our ability to have substantive conversations. And I'd also like to find some time for some of the audience questions that are coming in. Let's start with technology. The last year for me has been particularly challenging because I feel like the bulk of the work I do moves forward through in-person interactions with people, meeting with grantees, meeting with folks who have great ideas, talking about those ideas in real time. And as a result it's been kind of a challenge for me to just personally to move the work forward. I'm curious to know what you make of the way that technology, we're now having a conversation mediated by who knows how many digital and intermediaries right now. I'm curious to know what you make of the shift in how technology has been mediating our conversations and what you think the future holds. Are we going to, is this model going to be with us for the foreseeable future? Yeah, I think that there are both dangers and opportunities with technology with respect to how we speak with each other and how we interact with each other. It was at a Knight Foundation function that I learned that there are malicious bots through AI that are designed to corrode social trust. Well, that's a terrifying prospect and people don't even know that it's a bot, right? You know, that's a terrifying prospect. But it also raises the challenges. The question can technology be aimed in the exact opposite direction too? So we can deliberately use technology to open up those spaces. There's been the emergence of online platforms like Clubhouse is I think a really cool experiment where we're using technology to use people's real humans engaging in real conversation with real voices with their names attached. And this is a kind of big social experiment to see if we can rebuild social trust with the mechanisms of technology. So I'm a half glass full kind of person. I tend to see that in moments of disruption, the human ability to sit to worry about that disruption and then say, what are the potential solutions? I don't know what all those solutions will be, but I do tend to have a lot of faith in human ingenuity to people care about this kind of problem. And that disruption is the source of new technologies and new solutions that we might not have thought of before because we didn't need to think about it before. So I'm mostly pro technology, even though I think that we need to have eyes wide open about some of the very real dangers out there. Yep. I'd also be interested in your reaction to this piece that I saw in yesterday's New York Times, which to me suggests that the physical conditions for conversation, at the same time that the technological possibilities for conversation are increasing, the physical conditions for real conversations are actually diminishing within our communities. This story said that it's not just that many voters live in neighborhoods with few members of the opposite party. It's that nearly all American voters live in communities where they're less likely to encounter people with opposing politics than we'd expect. So this piece is based on some research by Harvard scholars, Jacob Brown and Ryan. So I'm curious to know what you make of the fact that we seem to be moving while technology is creating a kind of playing field for us all to be together. In reality, the reality on the ground is actually quite a bit different. And we seem to be moving more and more into siloed communities based on partisan data. The research is fascinating that you describe and that the article covers really well. And I'm not the expert in this field. I would love to have Brown and the conversation with this first question I would ask them is, is this really new? In other words, the technology allows us, the data technology allows us to map the neighborhood level. We can see these clusters of blue and red and that we didn't see before. And my question is, is it new or is it that the technology is allowing us to see something that was probably pretty much always there anyway? And the thing that the reason why my head goes in that direction is because I think say ethno-linguistic religious community clustering that we've known about forever, class clustering we've known about forever. So is what we're seeing here really just more a proxy for class sorting that we've seen across neighborhoods that probably feel much more familiar. But in another sense, it doesn't matter. It's still interesting for us to know that this is a reality on the ground. To me, it points to the tensions between what we want in terms of a healthy pluralistic society and also freedom of association. When you have freedom of association, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to cluster with people who make us feel comfortable. I think that's probably really important for people who spend particularly members of minority groups that are in a community, a work community all day where they're dealing with what we might describe as the dominant culture all day. It might feel really nice to be able to retreat back to the neighborhood and kind of take your hair down and feel like, wow, I can kind of just sort of be myself, have the same vernacular, have the same go-to cultural references, joke about the same stuff. So that's part of what it means to be able to have freedom of association is to live intentionally in this way. It only becomes problematic if I am living and working and congregating and all of my civil society interactions are always with the same cluster. I think that's particularly dangerous if you are a part of the dominant society because then you think of your experience as being everybody else's experience and in fact it's not, right? That there's a lot more nuance out there. And I think that that's also then where we get the polarization is people start talking as if their experience is everyone's experience and it hits the wrong note, it hits the wrong chord with others who say, well, that might be your reality, but it's not my reality. And the lack of trust that is seated in that kind, when that conversation goes wrong instead of actually bringing us together because we have lots of opportunities to connect and to educate one another about our lived realities, instead it ends up being more polarizing and we end up spinning society out towards the polls rather than kind of coalescing to recognize that there's some shared experiences and there's some things that we're going to be agreeing to disagree about. If we don't have any opportunity to have conversation that's where we should start to worry about the phenomenon that's described by Brown and Nino. That's a great point. So a couple of comments have come in in the chat and I'm curious about your reaction to one of them which is that someone has taken issue with I guess a characterization that we had and it notes that most citizens aren't at all interested in truth-seeking exercise. To the contrary, Americans are far more interested in emotional stimulation and thoughtless entertainment. Indeed, that's a fair description of today's electoral and social politics. What do you make of that? Do you really feel like we've moved to a point where Americans are no longer interested in the mechanisms that are required for self-governance? Truth-seeking would be the biggie for me. Yeah, I appreciate the challenge. I think the challenge is a good one. If what our barometer is is what we see on social media, I completely understand why that's the takeaway because it looks because there are mechanisms on social media that don't reward truth. They don't reward someone. If you post something and my mind is changed by it, oftentimes that doesn't seem to be the currency of what elevates your status on social media. It's more that you have more people who already agreed with you and you just found new words for them to have sharper, more powerful ammo. That is a problem and I do see that that is part of what's spinning out our conversations towards the polls and that is a problem. Let us remind ourselves, of all of the conversations that happen at the dinner table. All of the conversations that happen where we can hopefully once again happen, have unmasked conversations across the fence posts with our neighbors or on our patios over a glass of wine or a beer and talking about life in the world and not everything is about politics either. We engage in persuasive activity really more often than we do anything else. We're constantly engaged in persuasive activity. I love Dierdre Burkowski's work on this. She's an economist who writes about the liberal project but one of the things that she writes about is how so much of our commercial lives, so much of our work lives, so much of our family lives is really all about persuasion. It's all about sweet talk and sometimes we're in the mode of persuasion as an as an academic exercise but a lot of times it's nudging our colleagues or family members to see the world a little bit more from our vantage point and to see what they might discover there. If we start to look across all of the academy but also civil society and what happens in families and in neighborhoods and in workplaces so much of our work is about truth-seeking small tea truth. It's about I think that what our client base needs is this and someone else says I don't know I think it's that. That's still a truth-seeking enterprise even if it's a very casual conversation even if it's just battering across you know the back and forth that we the banter back and forth around you know what a good television show looks like with our neighbors. That's still kind of a because I think we're trying to get at the meaning of that television show and so I actually am more bullish on Americans being truth-seeking animals. We just have to make sure that we're looking for it in all the right places. Emily this has been a terrific conversation thank you so much for joining us. Thank you John. Yeah and I hope you'll come back and maybe we maybe we can do a clubhouse chat at some point. Yeah all right thanks very much everybody for joining tune in next week on hashtag night live for another deep dive into the dynamics of our cities on coast to coast. The night foundation show that explores building engaged communities in a time of rapid change as a reminder this episode will be up on the website later you can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org slash fd show you can also subscribe to the future of democracy podcast on apple google spotify or wherever you get your podcasts feel free to email us at the show fd show at kf.org if you have any questions and to send us home to miami songwriter nick county follow him on spotify thanks for joining have a good week