Seriously, via my John Locke Institute Summer School colleague Lord Dan Hannan:
Over the summer I participated in teaching in a school, appropriately called the John Locke Institute. Rather like what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham was describing in his home city, it tries to teach young people the idea of what the administrators of the course call “generous listening”. It is a lovely phrase. Generous listening means not waiting, patiently or impatiently, for the other person to stop speaking so that you can jump in. It means properly trying to engage with where they are coming from. If they use a loose word, do not pounce on it. Do not engage with their weakest argument; engage with their best argument.
The Oxford Union organised something they called “ideological Turing test debates”, where young people would be given a topical debate—should statues come down, should private schools be abolished—and you had to guess whether they really meant it. In other words, they had to master the other point of view well enough that they would have passed the Turing test and people would not have been able to tell whether they believed what they were saying. Is that not the sort of thing that all our schools and universities should be doing, in order to equip people to function in modern society? I fear that, when they do the opposite and say, “The most important thing about you is that you are female, white” or whatever it is, instead of teaching those countercyclical truths, they are teaching procyclical tribalism.
Background on the Ideological Turing Test here, here, and here. I wonder if this means Wikipedia will reinstate the excellent-yet-deleted article on the ITT?
Dan Hannan is possibly the best public speaker I’ve ever seen in person. Full video of his speech:
HT: Martin Cox
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 16 2021 at 6:37am
It is the failure to engage with the best arguments for regulations and taxes that I see as the main problem of many writers in this blogspace.
I think that asking that a speaker be able to articulate the opposing arguments so well that no one would know his real opinions is unnecessary (and slightly creepy). Perhaps it is a useful sill for say a teacher presenting controversial material to students, but I would NOT like to know that my MP/MC might just as well believe the opposite of the argument he is making.
Dennis Senger
Dec 17 2021 at 9:27am
But wouldn’t you like to know that your MP/MC truly understood the arguments on the other side?
Jon Murphy
Dec 17 2021 at 4:56pm
Given they are engaging with the arguments in the public/academic sphere (newspapers, commentary, journal articles), your statement would imply that the best arguments simply aren’t being made.
Matthias
Dec 27 2021 at 9:25am
I’m not quite sure this is a valid point.
Think of the symmetrical argument:
Just because there are good public arguments for orthodox economics, doesn’t mean that the Guardian newspaper automatically engages with them properly.
Henri Hein
Dec 16 2021 at 2:14pm
One of my favorite quotes ever is John Milton:
nobody.really
Dec 16 2021 at 4:31pm
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Comments are closed.