Here's a final thought for the evening. I've been saying this in various ways recently, but I aim for better compression: the temptation to confuse our political priorities with our communicative priorities is powerful and must be resisted with every ounce of strength we have.
To put it in different terms: it is all too easy to confuse the ways in which we organise and express our own thoughts about politics with the ways in which we should organise cooperation with those with the same priorities, even if they are expressed in different terms.
I believe quite strongly in the dialectical virtue of communicative charity. This means something like: 'first, do not talk past one another'. This is difficult. Charity is not simply won by hard work, it must be maintained by it. The temptation to miserliness is everpresent.
The most common objection I receive to the demand for charity is that it often asks more of the interpreter than it does of their interlocutor, and there are too many misers with poor opinions justified by motivated reasoning who do not deserve such generosity.
This is a reasonable excuse, in isolation. We all have limited time, energy, attention, and other resources required to think for ourselves let alone think for and/or with others. But this is true of charity as such. It has its limits, but it's about asymmetry, i.e., gifting.
Not everyone has resources to gift, and they must make decisions about who to give these gifts to, but we should resist the temptation to see such choices as transactional. I may give to the homeless strategically, but not because there is any possible return on my investment.
Arguments to the effect that 'I can't universalise this charity, therefore I cannot be expected to uphold it in any given case' use abstract impossibility to defer concrete responsibility. You can't eradicate homelessness, but there's *this* person here and now you can help.
The same goes for discursive charity. You can't convince every alt-right troll their priorities are skewed, or every tabloid reading worker that their interests are being betrayed, but you can often do some concrete good, right here and now, if you have the time and energy.
But this means not being so attached to your own vocabulary that you cannot speak your concerns in the language of others. It will be difficult, experimental, and uncomfortable in various ways, but it's worth trying and failing, again and again. Universal logic, diverse rhetoric.
Once more, I don't think this sort of expectation can be made of everyone: 'first, do no harm' isn't an oath we expect of anyone but doctors. Yet in this age of personal mass communication, so many people present themselves as mass communicators, consciousness raisers, etc.
If you want to take on this sort of communicative authority, even if it is only in some small local region of the social graph, some niche community, or the vague intersection of a few, then you have to take on the associated responsibility. You have to mediate.
If you want to be the media you want to see in the world, then mediation is non-negotiable, even if it's just mediating the various overlapping subcultures in your personal Venn diagram. Not everyone can do this, certainly not in the same way, but we've got to pull together here.
Solidarity, charity, mediation. The principles are not hard, even if the practice is like pulling teeth. But if you want a guide to the pragmatics of this practice, you could do much worse than reading Brandom's account of de re/de dicto vocabulary and historical reason.
No one ever sees the Brandom coming. Perhaps he waits for us at the end of every thread, laughing.🖖
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