Happy Thanksgiving to all! I’ll be off until next Monday.
I am grateful to all of you at TSW, official contributors, guest posters, and commenters. I’m thankful for Forest Service (and BLM) folks of all geographical areas and kinds of jobs, both for how they help us at TSW , and more generally for the great work that they do. I’m calling out some of the less-appreciated folks here, special uses, including recreation; lands and minerals, and engineering. I’m thankful for FS partners and volunteers of all sizes and descriptions.
And, of course, the folks at Cloud Nine Web Design, WordPress, and all the folks keeping energy going to the various servers.
Roger Pielke, Jr. had some applicable quotes from early 20th century American pragmatist, journalist and political commentator for our work here in his Thanksgiving post this morning.
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“Lippmann recognized that intellectual hospitality is easy to call for but difficult to achieve. In The Public Philosophy (1955), Lippmann observed presciently that achieving disagreement is not so easy:
[T]he modern media of mass communication do not lend themselves easily to a confrontation of opinions. The dialectical process for finding truth works best when the same audience hears all the sides of a disputation. . . Rarely, and on very few public issues, does the mass audience have the benefit of the process by which truth is sifted from error – the dialectic of debate in which there is immediate challenge, reply, cross-examination, and rebuttal.
Today’s legacy and social media, rather than ushering in an era of healthy democratic debate, have arguably made it easier for those so motivated to avoid encountering — and to prevent others from encountering — a diversity of legitimate views necessary to sift truth from error. Echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, block lists, partisan media, censorious content moderation, cancel culture and so on are dynamics that many of us are familiar with — some of us a bit too familiar, ahem — and that get in the way of the discourses that make democracy healthy and effective.
Lippmann argued that freedom of speech and genuine debate go together — each depends on the other. Politics best serves common interests when ideas are subjected to genuine debate.
Lippmann argues that genuine debate offers a check on what some today call “misinformation” and, perhaps ironically, the lack of genuine debate motivates calls for censorship by the most strident amongst us (emphases added):
[W]hen genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates and justifies it – that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is not effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panders upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to censors to protect them. . .
For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Gresham’s law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.
(Roger’s bold)
Here at THB, the core values of intellectual hospitality and genuine debate mean that we share a commitment to learning together and also, to figuring out how to live together. These values also underly the foundation of the American project — If there is American exceptionalism, it no doubt lies in the belief that an incredibly large and diverse collection of people desire to figure out how to live together, acknowledging the realities of differing values, opinions, and beliefs.
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I’ve been reading FDA nominee Marty Makary’s book “Blind Spots”. In it he relates what researchers (in their appointed silos) work on, and relates that to his personal experience as a doc in a hospital. Both practice and research inform his thinking and questions.
I’ve always intended TSW to be a place where practitioners and academics of all stripes, from legal to natural resources, can place their views and experiences in conversation. So again, thanks to you all for your contributions.