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ELEVENLABS IS BUILDING AN ARMY OF VOICE CLONES A tiny start-up has made some of the most convincing AI voices. Are its creators ready for the chaos they’re unleashing? By Charlie Warzel
My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.
I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.
It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body…
The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel: AI voice cloning
OK, it's been on my to-do list to record myself on my Mac reading the entire U.S. Constitution from Preamble through the 27th Amendment and then post the mp3 online. I've read it aloud from start to finish several times and have studied it closely going all the way back to graduate school in the mid- 1990s. I am fairly SME with the 4th Amendment in particular. It comprised a central focus of my nearly 300 page Master's Thesis(pdf). My personal study of a range of legal and constitutional issues has continued ever since graduate school. Here’s a post from last year. So, no, I don’t have much patience for people who blab on about such topics without any substantive underlying knowledge.
Why bother? Well, again, it just goes to my ongoing irritation with our overpopulation Yes Clear of Barstool ConLaw Geniuses, most of whom have likely never read all of it, or rationally grasped its provisions (many of them elected officials, from Donald Trump on down). I would never be so arrogant as to claim ConLaw expertise. Nonetheless, I have dug into and tabulated a bit of info perhaps of interest to all those "textualists" out there.
Current English language word count, 171,476, obsolete 47,156 (some authorities think the current active tally is a significant undercount)
US Constitution
7,420 words total, * 1,065 unique words, 497 appearing only once (48%) (Preamble thru 27th Amendment, *Signators’ names excluded)
(Only 0.53% of all English words are in Constitution)
Words not found: “democracy,” “privacy” “outer” “perimeter”
Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, or determiner.
Back to my mp3 idea. I apparently can now just pay ElevenLabs $22 to digitally "clone" my voice, after which I could simply post fake recitations of all manner or prose I'd never read. Naysayers might well scoff at any genuine audio V/O.
So, for the near future, one might have to go all the way to a video talking-head recording of such material using YouTube. But, full-on “deep-fake“ video is likely not that far off.
Charlie Warzel continues:
The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.
BUT, THEN THERE'S THIS...
That made me cry. Tears of joy. Back during my musician days, I used to sing his song “I’m Gonna Love You Forever” during my solo acoustic days.He was a great CW artist. Using AI to extend his work in the wake of his severe stroke misfortune is a wonderful application of this technology.
BTW, I riffed a bit on malign AI potential back in December.
The trouble began, as it so often does, with taxes. In AD 6, the Roman Empire, ramping up its policy of territorial expansion and control, decided to impose a tariff on the Jews of the province of Judaea, in what is now Israel and the West Bank. By then, the local Jews had been living under a capricious and often cruel Roman rule for seventy years, so the tax issue was hardly their only grievance. Still, it rankled, and the question of what to do about it caused a schism in the community. The majority heeded the counsel of the high priest Joazar and reluctantly agreed to pay up in the interest of keeping the peace. But a handful, led by one Judas of Galilee, rebelled. Disgusted by what he saw as Joazar’s complicity with Roman rule, Judas vowed to establish a new sect of Jews whose members, in the words of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, “have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.”
That sounds like an honorable attitude. And a courageous one: Judas and his followers, a small and marginalized minority, took on one of history’s most formidable imperial states. As such, they seem like good candidates for hero status in the eyes of their fellow Jews, ancient and modern—and some people view them that way. But to Josephus, and to many others before and since, they were little better than villains and murderers. Judas’s sect practiced a scorched-earth policy (including against other Jews, to deprive them of food and shelter and thereby force them to join the sectarian fight), advocated the outright murder not only of Romans but also of Jewish “collaborators” (essentially, anyone with less single-minded politics than their own), and contributed to the destruction of Jerusalem and the ferocity of Roman reprisals through their own extreme violence and unwillingness to negotiate. Josephus records a characteristic raid—the sacking of the Jewish enclave of Ein-Gedi, where the able-bodied men apparently fled, and, “As for such that could not run away, being women and children, they slew of them above seven hundred.” The historian sums up the sect and its legacy this way:
All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends which used to alleviate our pains; there were also very great rob beries and murder of our principal men…. Such a change was made, as added a mighty weight toward bringing all to destruction, which these men occasioned by their thus conspiring together; for Judas and Sadduc [another leader of the rebellion], who excited a fourth philosophic sect among us, and had a great many followers therein, filled our civil government with tumults at present, and laid the foundations of our future miseries.
Who were the members of this “fourth philosophic sect,” in all their unphilosophical brutality? These were the original, capital-Z Zealots. History doesn’t record the fate of Judas, but most of the other Zealots perished in the first Jewish-Roman war, which began in AD 66 and ended four years later, with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jews. A small band of survivors retreated to a fort at Masada, near the Dead Sea, where they held off a Roman siege for three years. When the Romans finally breached the fort, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had organized a mass self-slaughter, murdering one another (suicide being forbidden in Hebrew law) rather than letting themselves be captured or killed by the RomansAs the generic use of their name suggests, the legacy of the Zealots was not ideological but methodological. Murdering in the name of faith, religious or otherwise, was hardly unheard of before they came along, but they clarified and epitomized it as a practice. In the two millennia since the last of Judas of Galilee’s Zealots perished, a thousand lowercase zealots have kept that legacy alive—meaning, they have killed in its name. These latter-day zealots have hailed from many different backgrounds and held many different beliefs. At heart, though, and paradoxically, they have all shared a single conviction: that they and they alone are in possession of the truth. (The very word “zealot” comes from a Greek root meaning to be jealous of the truth—to guard it as your own.) What zealots have in common, then, is the absolute conviction that they are right. In fact, of all the symbolic ones and zeros that extremists use to write their ideological binary codes—us/them, same/different, good/evil—the fundamental one is right/wrong. Zealotry demands a complete rejection of the possibility of error.
The conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong: this is certainty. We’ve seen a lot of this conviction already, in the form of people who are sure they can see, or sure of what they do see (mountain chains, pregnant women), or sure of what they believe or predict or recall. Most of the time, this garden-variety certainty seems far removed from zealotry—and in a sense, it is. There’s a very big difference between, say, insisting that you are right about Orion and, say, murdering the Protestants, Muslims, Jews, bigamists, blasphemers, sodomites, and witches who are defiling your country. Not everyone who is filled with passionate certitude is Torquemada…
Kathryn published those thoughts in 2010. Still reads much like yesterday (arguably moreso). Being Wrong is one of my favorite books. Do yourselves a favor. Get it. Study it closely.
I bought the book in hardcover when it first came out, then later also bought the Kindle edition, for ease of further study and citation. I've long read her work in The New Yorker. She is a fabulous writer and thinker. This post is intended to continue the riff begun in the prior post. No timely "Zealotry" flying around these days, right? Hmmm... let us not forget today's Christian Nationalist Warriors, either.
OK, gotta admit, I'm now a major-league Brian Klaas Fan Boy in the wake of reading his book.
Zuck was right. "Young people are just smarter."
Well, some of them.
So, Brian has a Substack (of course). I subscribed (and paid, notwithstanding my prevailing dubiety; it's a wimpy authoring platform, generally).
I ran across this today.
Schemas and the Political Brain Understanding how cognitive shortcuts work when processing new information is crucial to understanding modern politics—and it's a facet of cognition that Republicans manipulate extremely effectively.
Republicans have battered Democrats on messaging in recent years because they intuitively understand schemas in a way that Democrats often don’t.
What is a schema?
The word schema comes from the Greek schēmat or schēma, which means “form.” But the concept in its modern usage refers to patterns of thought that provide intellectual shortcuts for processing the information we encounter in our lives. Think of it a bit like your brain’s organizational system, which structures our knowledge, old and new. To organize vast quantities of data, we need to sort everything into categories and patterns, with simplified assumptions.
The whole world we experience is, in a sense, a giant set of data. When you go for a walk, the amount of data your brain encounters is overwhelming—the shade of color on every leaf, the patterns of cracks on the sidewalk, the faces of every person you encounter, what they’re wearing, and whether they smiled at you as you went past.
It would be impossible for your brain to process and retain all that information, particularly because most of it provides little value to you. You don’t need to recall in vivid detail whether a random woman you once walked past was wearing a hat or not. As a result, the brain does a bit of intellectual triage, where most of the information we process about the world is culled and discarded. It’s a highly efficient way of dealing with and navigating an immeasurably complex world. Our brains have evolved to process information this way because it helps us survive, able to retain what matters and forget what doesn’t...
Yeah, heuristics & stuff. Type I & Type II thinking, etc.
Brian sums up...
How to use schemas
The lesson, then, is not that fact-based arguments are meaningless in politics, but rather that facts are most effective when they’re nestled within a ready-made intellectual framework for how to make sense of the world. Effective political movements use facts to reinforce schemas, but they understand that the schemas are what matter most. It’s a depressing truth, but getting the right taglines, slogans, and vivid ways of presenting political opponents is often far more important than being right.
So, if Democrats want to loosen Trump’s grip on the modern GOP, then the messaging needs to match the audience, while recognizing the schemas that Trump’s voters are using to process reality. Democrats can shout from the rooftops about how Trump is a racist authoritarian tax dodger who poses an existential threat to American democracy (facts that are certainly worth repeating!). But no matter how loudly those arguments are repeated, voters in the GOP base use schemas that simply don’t have a place for those facts. They’ll ignore them, dismiss them, contort themselves with brain gymnastics until they end up in a position where they remain comfortable within their existing cognitive framework.
What’s more likely to be effective to sway the MAGA base is to brand Trump as a loser, partly because that does fit with Republican schemas, and partly because it’s a direct attack on the schema that Trump has tried to cultivate for himself for his entire life — that he’s a winner who lives in a golden penthouse, a strategic genius who always ends up on top.
If you really want to destroy someone in politics, don’t attack them with a barrage of facts and decimal points, change the fundamental way that their own supporters perceive them. The path to political victory runs, to an astonishing degree, through psychology and neuroscience. That way true power lies.
OK. lots to remark upon. Goes to a lot of prior topics here. to wit,
Having to go back and re-study this beaut.
Kathryn rocks.
This delightful person (a Twitter/X fellow-traveler) started me down this latest rabbit hole.
2 Core Rules: The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.
10 Commitments: Fallibilism The ethos that any of us might be wrong thus we strive to keep our ideas open to criticism.
Objectivity Understanding that truth is not based on feeling, identity, or a person's/group’s lived experience.
Exclusivity A commitment to the idea of objective reality because what lies beyond that is chaos.
Disconfirmation A commitment that all ideas and viewpoints are subject to challenge by the community.
Accountability A commitment to offering our ideas for critique in good faith and acknowledge when we’re wrong.
Pluralism Valuing viewpoint diversity and a commitment to encourage, and seek it out.
Civility A commitment to discourage and avoid personal attacks and, instead, depersonalize rhetoric.
Professionalism A commitment to valuing the credentials and reputations of this reality-based community.
Institutionalism A commitment to valuing and relying upon established norms and codes of conduct.
No Bullshitting A commitment to sincerely regard the truth instead of obscuring it.
Well, "scientific method," anyone? Likin' the "civility" reference in particular. "Pluralism?" I'm in, notwithstanding its political contentiousness of late (e.g.,DEI).
These topics also have me recalling the excellent work of Zoe Chance.
Back to exigent concerns (in the wake of my prior transient dumbass reactive diversion).
Is hope for a real, durable, amicable, broad Middle-East peace naive?
One of my favorite conflict resolution experts:
Crisis, Contradiction, Certainty, and Contempt A Professor’s Statement on the Current Situation at Columbia University Peter T. Coleman As a member of the Columbia University community for over 30 years, Director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, current member of the University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, and a student of intractable conflict and sustainable peace, I felt it incumbent on me to share my take on the extraordinary challenges facing our community today.
For context, I have studied, written and wondered about the many conflicts related to Israel and the Palestinian territories for decades. I have visited and conducted research on peacebuilding in the region on several occasions, written about how the conflicts there have manifested at Columbia University in the past, and have traveled through the West Bank, including Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus. I have not been to Gaza to date, although one of my top students, Naira Musallam, a Palestinian-Israeli, conducted her dissertation research there in 2010. I was last in Israel in May 2023 working with Israeli, Palestinian and international students through the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University (I later posted this blog on my experiences), and hope to return there this summer to continue this crucial work.
When I first visited the West Bank, I had a revelation. Some UN colleagues and I were traveling South out of Bethlehem towards Hebron on a dusty road, when we began to pass countless miles of a dilapidated refugee camp on our left (I believe it was Dheisha). This was one of the many camps where Palestinians who had fled Israel in 1948 had settled, and who still today refuse most support from the Israeli government as an active act of protest against the normalization of their ouster and a political statement signifying their struggle.
After passing by several miles of the ramshackle camp, I noticed on the right side of the road that a new, well-constructed municipality had been built, which in comparison to the camp looked like a nice suburb outside Cleveland. When I asked my colleagues about these structures, they explained to me that they had been built and were supported by the Israeli government, with running water, electricity, and sanitation. They also explained that at some point, many families from the refugee camp, desperate from the conditions they had lived in, chose to cross the road and set up home in the new buildings. However, doing so was typically seen as an unforgivable betrayal of the struggle by members of their family and community that stayed behind, who often disparaged them or cut ties with them altogether. This was just another glimpse into the complex web of multiple intertwined conflicts and moral dilemmas which constitute what many of us call the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”…
First, we are in a crisis. The current firestorm at Columbia is real, painful and deeply concerning. It was triggered most recently by the horrific combination of the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, and by the Israeli government’s violent, punishing and unrelenting response to Palestinians and its deadly effects on humanitarian workers, journalists and many others in Gaza.
But the crisis at Columbia is also playing out in the context of dramatic spikes in antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate across the U.S., which preceded but were exacerbated by the current war, by the politicization and weaponization of these trends by members of the U.S. Congress who seek to delegitimize “elite” institutions of higher education like Columbia for political gain, and in the wake of 60 years of pernicious political polarization in the U.S. where we are seeing increasing tolerance for acts of political violence — as we head into what is likely to be the most contested elections in our nation’s history.
Further out, our crisis is also fueled daily by the atrocious violence playing out in the Middle East — by the dogged intransigence of Hamas and its supporters during “negotiations” over a ceasefire, their depraved willingness to sacrifice the lives of Gazan’s for their cause, and proud declarations by Hamas’ leaders of their ultimate goal to destroy the nation of Israel “from the river to the sea.” Of course, to some degree, these actions are both reactions to and justifications for the violent, aggressive, militant, expansionist policies of the far-Right Netanyahu government in Israel who for decades have shown scant interest in securing a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace and whose support amongst the Israeli population at home has plummeted…
Israel has been convicted of genocide by protesters at Columbia and UCLA, but its genocide case before the International Court of Justice is still pending. Israel remains officially aghast that it, and only it, is subject to judicial proceedings for the crime of genocide—and that the ICJ’s rulings so far have implied that the judges think Israel might be guilty of the crime of crimes. According to reports this weekend, the International Criminal Court—a separate body that hears cases against individuals—is preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials and possibly Hamas leaders. In the ICJ, Israel stands alone…
189 days to Election Day. Or, as Trump called yesterday, "Christian Visibility Day."
SPEAKING OF TRUMP
Of course.
UPDATE ERRATUM: MUCKING AROUND IN PHOTOSHOP
(And, yeah, I erased his flagrantly unearned flag lapel pin.) Highly recommend you read the new Time Magazine interview with Trump. "How Far Would Trump Go?"
The 26 minute article contains a link to the entire 83 minute transcript of the reporter's one-on-one interview. ~Six months, peeps, You ought know what we're all likely facing. I could scarcely be more irritated.
Well, after seeing the book approvingly reviewed by @ScienceMagazine I thought a closer look was in order, pricey Kindle tag notwithstanding.
UPDATE
I wrote a lengthy irascible post about this. Upon reflection, I subsquently deleted everything but the foregoing (saved it all in a draft, though, just for the record). Our world is going increasingly crazy on multiple fronts, and I'm wasting our time on this crap? Sorry.
What
would governance look like if our planetary condition was central
rather than ancillary to our political self-conceptions? What issues
would become paramount, and how might this change our views? How would
we act if we took seriously humanity’s profound integration into Earth’s
planetary systems, demonstrated by the COVID pandemic, from the
microbiological scale of the virus to the macrosystemic scale of the
planet’s atmosphere? What would change as a result of human beings being
revealed, not as masters of the planet, but as part of it?
Human
beings are essentially and ineluctably embedded within planetary-scale
phenomena: we affect and are affected by our Earthly home. Western
science, which is the bedrock of modern technology, politics, and
worldviews, however, emerged in large measure in denial of this
embeddedness. Springing from a secularized distillation of Christian
belief (“And God said, Let us make man in our image,” according to King
James’ Genesis, “and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth”),
this scientific tradition rested on the precept that humans were
inherently different from all of God’s other creatures. Unlike the
beasts, the “fowl of the air,” and “every thing that creepeth upon the
earth,” humankind was endowed with reason and a capacity, if not moral
duty, for technical mastery over the natural world—a unique inheritance
that set us humans apart from nature. Yet the scientific method that
developed over time from those precepts—a method of inquiry rooted in
the scrutiny of evidence and radical skepticism—has, by the early
twenty-first century, revealed that there is no separation between human
beings and the natural world. In a triumph of the scientific method,
the tools of science overturned science’s most basic assumptions. This
insight has been percolating for about a century, catching the attention
of the occasional forward-thinking scientist, but it is now
increasingly clear that the idea of humans distinguished from nature is
intellectually unsustainable. It is, moreover, ecologically ruinous. The
idea of “humanity apart” is, and for a long time has been, encouraging
grave harm to the ecosystems in which humans dwell and the biosphere of
which humans are a part.
These
discoveries have changed the face of science and, in turn, have
triggered a rupture in philosophy. But these insights about the state of
the world and our place in it have yet to trickle out of the scientific
labs, specialist journals, and rarified seminar rooms and into the
mainstream consciousness. They certainly have not yet affected how
societies act. With this book, we hope to change that. Given what we now
know—and are likely to still learn—about Earth and the place of humans
on it, the question that animates this book is: What should we do about
it?
Our
answer is that we must transform our modes and systems of governance,
which is to say the institutionalized social rules that tell us how we
are supposed to live in common…
Blake, Jonathan S.; Gilman, Nils (2024-04-22T23:58:59.000). Children of a Modest Star. Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Another new book. apropos of core exigent / existential concerns...
"Human beings are essentially and ineluctably embedded within planetary-scale phenomena: we affect and are affected by our Earthly home. Western science, which is the bedrock of modern technology, politics, and worldviews, however, emerged in large measure in denial of this embeddedness. Springing from a secularized distillation of Christian belief (“And God said, Let us make man in our image,” according to King James’ Genesis, “and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth”), this scientific tradition rested on the precept that humans were inherently different from all of God’s other creatures. Unlike the beasts, the “fowl of the air,” and “every thing that creepeth upon the earth,” humankind was endowed with reason and a capacity, if not moral duty, for technical mastery over the natural world—a unique inheritance that set us humans apart from nature..."
A lot to reflect upon, in light of the topics of recent posts here.
Spoiler alert: it's not a synonym for "politeness," "manners," "decorum," "agreeableness," "deference," "passivity," or "humility."
I don't recall at the moment how I ran across this book. Deep into it at the moment. Much to recommend thus far.
Impressive woman. Master’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics. Now adjunct faculty at Indiana University (in her “spare time“). A stickler for precise etymology-grounded definitions of core terms—very helpful in de-conflating widespread misunderstandings which only serve to routinely throw sand in the gears of discourse.
I'm particularly liking the author's long walk through the major historical philosophers. When I began my studies toward my Master's in Ethics & Policy Studies in the mid 90's, my first seminar, "History of Ethics," had 11 required texts. It was basically a history of (mostly western) philosophy beginning with Plato, and winding up amid 20th century philo thought leaders. I can attest to both Alex's broad & deep coverage and her assessments. Excellent.
(I had a 2nd seminar that fall: "Argument Analysis & Evaluation" (pdf). Lordy. I was still working at my Medicare QIO analyst day gig at the time.)
Worth it to recall again the foci on my interest in this stuff. We have no shortage of serious issues to attend and resolve constructively and peaceably (Klingenstein's War Against Evil Woke Communists a.k.a Democrats notwithstanding). To that end, in 2019 I asked "is there a Science of Deliberation?"
What do you think? And what have I missed in my (somewhat overlapping) tabulation?
UPDATE
One thing leads to another. Got onto this via the video interview above.
The Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox and my Maryland Democratic Governor Wes Moore. Will have to dig in to all of this stuff.
Disagree Better: Healthy Conflict for Better Policy
Americans need to disagree better. And by that we don’t mean that we need to be nicer to each other, although that’s helpful. We need to learn to disagree in a way that allows us to find solutions and solve problems instead of endlessly bickering.
The “exhausted majority” of Americans want this, and the science is clear about interventions that reduce polarization. As doers and builders, Governors are in a unique position to model what healthy conflict looks like.
The Disagree Better initiative will look at the problems of polarization, elevate the solutions that groups around the country are already implementing, and feature Governors showing what disagreeing better looks like. Through public debates, service projects, public service announcements and a variety of other tactics, Americans will see a more positive and optimistic way of working through our problems...
There are others (some of whom I've previous;y cited) working this turf (click the logo graphics).
All quite worthy.
UPDATE, ON "CURIOSITY"
Indeed.
Nothing could be more important to true "learning." I've riffed on the topic for a long time. e.g., see one of my posts from a decade ago (some link rot at the bottom).
We have to care about getting at truths. Being curious implies that we're OK with not knowing things a priori. Our current know-it-all western culture impedes that motivation.
Civility is strategic and pragmatic and so not just a matter of niceness. We can use strong civility in the service of persuasion when we think carefully about our communicative interactions with others and the necessity of preserving social democracy. Communication practices matter when we are faced with questions about how to live well with others, and strong civility holds the promise of pointing us toward the kind of communication practices that might both build relationships and make sociopolitical change through persuasion possible. We foreclose opportunities for persuasion when we treat others with incivility, and we replace persuasion with the kinds of rhetorical forms of division that can only end in victory or defeat. We cannot build a democratic way of life with those kinds of communication practices as a foundation. We do not mean to offer civility as a cure-all or an antidote to the erosion of democratic institutions and the laws and policies that surely preserve and protect our democratic system of government. Analyses that ask questions about those institutions of governance are essential to fulfilling the promise of our democratic future but so are analyses of the communicative practices that we use within the social spaces that make up the deliberative imaginary. The promise of strong civility is that it offers us a set of specific practices and habits capable of building a democratic culture and not just a democratic system of government.
We can see the promise of strong civility more clearly if we return to our description of democracy as a wicked problem. Wicked problems are multilayered and elusive, which means that we will not ever find a perfect democracy. Instead, our description of democracy as a way of life is meant to highlight the fact that no perfect set of principles or institutions will ever give rise to an ideal form of democracy. Instead, our commitment to democracy as a way of life is supposed to return us to the rough ground of “wicked problems” that we will never solve perfectly but that we continue to work at collectively anyway—problems like how best to achieve a free and equal society when some members of that society, when granted freedom and equality, will look to oppress and demonize others. The promise of civility lies in its usefulness in traveling the rough ground of wicked problems that are always already part of our democratic culture. Strong civility remains the best available means of preserving social relationships with strangers while still seeking out provisional and uncertain solutions to intractable problems. In other words, strong civility opens up possibilities for collaboration and cooperation in such a way that the social fabric remains intact while we are working with strangers who might think differently and have different values. As communication scholars and rhetorical theorists, we prefer the rough ground of imperfect and practical solutions to intractable problems rather than ideal sketches or perfect forms of life that we can never achieve. Civility might not be the ideal weapon to wield in the fight to save democracies from dying, but it is a necessary value for temporarily holding together disparate groups of people so that we can find the best possible solutions to some impossibly difficult problems.
On Reddit, a subforum (“subreddit”) called “Change My View” gives us a glimpse of how persuasion is made possible by civility. Founded in 2013 by Kal Turnball, a Scottish teenager, “Change My View” promotes and requires respectful conversation. Strict rules essentially prohibit the use of incivility, but more important, the subreddit demonstrates how persuasion is more a matter of meeting people where they are instead of where you want them to be. Strong civility, in this case, is also a matter of listening with respect and for the purposes of understanding, but those modes of communication are also understood as key factors in the process of persuasion. This is perhaps where the greatest promise of civility lies: in the ability to teach us all how we might more productively approach the project of persuasion in ways that will hold our democratic culture together while generating the kind of change we want but do not know how to get. In other words, if we lose civility, we may lose the best means we have of changing people’s minds, and it is hard to see how we might live a democratic life without healthy and robust practices of persuasion. “Change My View” might give us a small window into how we might save our democracy, or the fact that it remains a subreddit tucked away in a distant corner of the internet might be a sign that it is too late. We cannot say whether our democracy will die or thrive in the coming years, but we do know that if it thrives, it will do so through communication practices that foreground care, cooperation, collaboration, and forms of civility that allow us to live well with others.
Keith, William; Danisch, Robert. Beyond Civility: (Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation) (pp. 170-172). Penn State University Press. Kindle Edition.
We can see the promise of strong civility more clearly if we return to our description of democracy as a wicked problem. Wicked problems are multilayered and elusive, which means that we will not ever find a perfect democracy. Instead, our description of democracy as a way of life is meant to highlight the fact that no perfect set of principles or institutions will ever give rise to an ideal form of democracy. Instead, our commitment to democracy as a way of life is supposed to return us to the rough ground of “wicked problems” that we will never solve perfectly but that we continue to work at collectively anyway—problems like how best to achieve a free and equal society when some members of that society, when granted freedom and equality, will look to oppress and demonize others…
We may think that anger gives us power. But in fact it drains us of it, because we are trying to change the behavior of others through harboring a lethal emotion. Maybe it’s the Irish in my blood, but I have a long memory and sometimes find it difficult to forgive quickly—and to let past grievances stay forgiven. For some reason, it seems safer—and makes me feel less vulnerable—to stay angry instead of letting go. Often, hurts and frustrations I’ve endured manifest in unhealthy ways. At other times, I’ve found many life-giving outlets for the frustration—journaling, kickboxing, talk therapy—that have been helpful. But I’ve found that forgiving eradicates the root cause of the hurt, and is the ultimate solution.
Too often, it seems that people use woundedness as an excuse to lash out at others. They use their wounds to fuel their righteous anger, and justify harming anyone who gets in their way. People forget that violence—verbal, emotional, or physical—hurts themselves as much as it does others. It debases them. Harming others makes them less human. Our hurts are never an excuse to hurt others, and hurting others will never make the world a better place.
I fall short of the ideals of both civility and of quick forgiveness daily, and it often has negative consequences for how I interact with others. Without creating a fresh slate each day, it’s easy to operate in the world hobbled, wounded and bumping into other wounded people without the grace and emotional wealth required for life with others. I continue to remind myself of these lessons, and have found encouragement in the words of the apostle Paul, who wrote “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”
As far as it depends on you. We are more in control of our emotions—and of our responses to our emotions—than we realize. When we fill our souls with endeavors that give us life, such as curiosity, friendship, and beauty—we are less likely to be litigious about the small things in life. We are less likely to walk through our every day running into and up against others—our self-love is less likely to bump up against the self-love of others. We are not on our own. We are not monads, and we don’t live in a vacuum. Adopting a reverence for life in all of its forms, choosing to be kind to all living things, ennobles us and the world around us.
Conversely, when we harm others, even in the name of pursuing a greater justice, we, too, are also hurt. When we are hurt by others, as William Blake noted, we hurt ourselves if we choose to drink the bitter poison of resentment—when we let our anger fester—and fail to forgive. This is how Erasmus defined civility in his handbook for young people five hundred years ago. This principle of good living together in community, alongside the many others that we have explored in this book, is remarkably timeless.
Together, as we’ve discovered throughout this book, they comprise the soul of civility. [The Soul of Civility, pp. 367-368].
Much to recommend in this book. apropos,
"WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all."—David J. Linden
ON DECK
New book coming out.
Amazon blurb:
A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences.
Deadly
viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants
cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of
these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the
authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one
level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of
planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is
leading to cascading systemic failures.
In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star,
Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of
thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political
forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative
framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition.
Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic
findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is
essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact
that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are
also flourishing.
Aware
of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely
to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that
helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original
architecture for global governance―what they call planetary subsidiarity―designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.
