I remember visiting a friend, who was showing me around his hometown including a visit to his Catholic elementary school. As we stood in the vestibule of the vintage 1940s building, I noticed the many (also vintage) trophies in one of the cases. "That one's mine," my friend observed with some pride. "It was for our winning debate team."
I was intrigued. Debate teams had not been part of my elementary school experience; in the country of my birth communism had made the open debate of ideas something forbidden. We grew up not even knowing it was a possibility. I admired his trophy and imagined how much fun it must have been to win it, butterflies in the stomach and all.
Beyond fun, as was obvious to totalitarian regimes, debating ideas is one of the best ways we clarify our own thinking; a question and answer process makes it necessary for us to articulate what we believe clearly enough so that someone else can understand it. But debating ideas is not about cementing our positions but about discovering something new, a lesson Socrates allowed his students to realize two millennia ago. As Plato retells the events of Socrates' trial, it was precisely because he encouraged his pupils to think that Socrates was put to death.
In the dialogue preceding the trial Socrates explains, "Athenians, it seems to me, may think a man to be clever without paying him much attention, so long as they do not think that he teaches his wisdom to others. But as soon as they think that he makes other people clever, they get angry…."
I've been disappointed for a long time that our nation seemed uninterested in the open debate of ideas. The freedom to openly oppose one another, that we take for granted, is non-existent in much of the world.
I must admit, though, the Presidential Debates have given me new hope. Although I was not particularly excited at the substance of the debates which sometimes turned into monologues of ideology, I was thrilled that we could pose questions of those we are trusting with leadership and measure the adequacy of their answers.
I was particularly impressed by the second debate, not so much by the candidates, who often just fell back on their safe rhetorical positions, but by the questions from the community present in the auditorium. The depth, the breadth and the sensitivity of the way the questions were framed, and the concerns these made evident was truly impressive. What I saw that night was not a country full of disengaged and apathetic "couch potatoes" but rather a community of persons concerned about thinking deeply and seriously about the community of the world.
Something else became evident during the debates: For the first time in a very long time my friends on the other side of the country, my children at home, myself in a car on the way to a parish meeting, people on the internet, all of us were confronting the same questions and the same issues, at the very same time. Although much of it would be "preaching to the choir" where people would focus only on what they wanted to hear, the process of having to face points of view radically different from our own had the potential to broaden the way we think.
The great Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan described this process best as he set out the imperatives for a fully engaged life: "Be attentive, be intelligent, be rational, be responsible, develop and, if necessary, change."
Although the two campaigns have tried their best to caricature and label their opponents, the debating of ideas has the potential of revealing to us that labels are a completely inadequate way to speak about the moral center of a person's life. I imagined the pained groans from extreme liberals at John Kerry's assertion that the question of what is euphemistically called "a woman's right to choose" was to be discerned "between a woman, God and her doctor." As many commentators noted later, the insertion of God into the equation was "unprecedented" in the "liberal" pro-abortion position. I would venture to say that this line of argument from Senator Kerry makes anything but choosing life impossible, God's presence in the discernment process would make it so. This is an unthinkable position for the stereotypical liberal.
Likewise, I imagined extreme conservatives gulping in disbelief as President Bush admitted that he "did not know" if homosexuality was a "choice." This was also an unexpected stance for a "conservative" to take since it retreats from the judgment of homosexuality as a sin. Again, if we reason through this carefully, we realize that a sin always involves a human being's free choice away from the true and the good, thus breaking their relationship with God. If homosexual persons do not choose their sexuality, then, this sexuality is part of what has been given them by God. It can no longer be called a sin, but gift. I doubt the stereotypical conservative would be happy with this conclusion.
These are just two instances of the kind of teasing out of the deeper issues that affect all of us (away from the labels) that we could be doing, we should be doing. I will be sad to see it end with our upcoming election. I imagine what we could do to heal our divides, to right our institutional sins, to cure our penchant for easy answers and really learn to live together if every week we spent 90 minutes talking about our life as a nation --- all of us, no commercials, no interruptions, but joint discernment, questioning, and challenging.
We know precious little about the life of the young Jesus, yet we know one thing --- the wise man he became did not spring up overnight; he worked hard at it. Thus, when his Mother and Father could not locate him as an adolescent, they found him debating issues in the Temple with the Jewish elders. This penchant for asking questions, for challenging what seemed obvious, and for always getting past the easy labels never left Jesus. "Peter do you love me?" is very different from "Peter, I order you to love me."
Jesus knew we find truth best by questioning ourselves and others. Let us continue debating, let us continue debunking stereotypes and labels, and let us love Jesus actively by loving wisdom. Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. |