Conversation and Democracy
Professor Tom Ginsburg Addressed the Graduates at University Convocation
Thank you, Provost Baicker, President Alivisatos. Colleagues, friends, parents, and most of all graduates! Congratulations, class of 2023, on everything you’ve achieved to bring you to this joyous day.
When asked to give a convocation speech, my first instinct was to ask for help. I started, as one does in 2023, with asking ChatGPT to produce a five-paragraph speech expressing University of Chicago values. You will be happy to hear that I will not be reading that speech, which was boring and full of cliches. So I decided to spice it up by asking it to write in the style of Taylor Swift, who, many of you know she’s in town this weekend, and many of you might even be seeing her if you’re lucky. Just be yourself, there’s no one better, she apparently said. That’s pretty good, but not quite enough for the two hours I’ve been allocated for this speech. JK.
I decided to go to my second instinct, which was to think back to my own graduation and to see if there was any recollection of the words of wisdom imparted to me on that occasion. To my great surprise, I actually can remember the San Francisco real estate magnate who spoke to us, but no longer recall a word of what he said.
I do, however, remember what happened afterwards. Just a couple months after my graduation, a man named Francis Fukuyama—who incidentally had been born right here in Hyde Park where his father was a graduate student—published an important and famous article entitled “The End of History.” Drawing on ideas associated with Hegel and other philosophers I’m sure you’re all familiar with, Fukuyama argued that the world was converging toward liberal democracy as the sole ideological basis for legitimate government. He was not saying that all countries would become democracies, but rather that ideologically, there was no more competition for the basis of legitimacy. The people had won, and the dialectic of history was over.
Now, all the scholars on this stage behind me can verify that we can never be sure that anyone will read anything that we write, but it surely helps to have good timing. A couple months after Fukuyama’s publication, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy indeed seemed to be the only game in town, and he became famous as a great prognosticator. Today, he remains an important scholar at an obscure university located in Palo Alto, California.
As a young person, I was fascinated by the democratic wave, and in some sense I’m a product of that moment. I’ve spent my academic career trying to understand where constitutional democracy comes from, how it can be sustained, and how it dies.
In recent years, this last has become the more important question. Authoritarianism in various forms is on the rise; democracy is looking a little shabby in some places. The number of democracies in the world has declined in every year since 2006, and the number of people living in democracies is now less than half of the global population. Fewer agree, it seems, with Winston Churchill’s famous quip about democracy being the worst system of government, except for all the others.
Of course, this on its own doesn’t mean that Fukuyama was wrong. Today’s authoritarians cloak themselves in democratic garb. The hereditary monarchy known as North Korea in fact has the official name of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and at least one of those words is accurate. It is, indeed, Korea. Today’s authoritarians often operate in governments that, on the surface, look democratic. They hold elections; they have constitutions with long lists of rights; they have courts; and research has shown that these things help them to survive.
When democracies die these days, they do not do so in a sudden flash, it’s not a coup or a communist revolution, but rather most often, through death by a thousand cuts, a series of degradations at the hands of people who themselves have been democratically elected.
In recent years, these concerns have even come to us in the United States. Our mood is sour. Our institutions do not seem to respond to us. My colleague Cathy Cohen has shown that many young people, especially from marginalized communities, would prefer revolution to democracy. Polls, including by my colleague Sue Stokes, show that majorities of Americans are dissatisfied with the way our democracy is working. Our political discourse is hysterical, and our partisan polarization is extreme: we have friends, and we have foes, and we have nothing in between. Most Americans do not want their children to marry those of the other political party, and we now even have divorce proceedings in which political differences are cited as a basis for marital dissolution. The only thing we seem to be able to agree upon is the source of the problem: a sizable majority of Americans agree that it’s the other side’s fault.
What are we to make of this situation? How bad is it?
I want to suggest that we take a deep breath. It is important to remember that being a citizen of a democracy can be depressing, as our leaders continually come up short, and we have the collective freedom to voice our displeasure. Disappointment and hope are the twin emotions that drive democracy. Disappointment in where we are and hope that better days are possible, if we can just get another chance at the ballot. Elections are a kind of siren song that keeps us going; the winner governs, the loser goes away to lick their wounds, but survives to fight another day.
In contrast, the central emotion of dictatorship is not hope but fear. Everyone knows that strongmen survive by intimidating opponents and subjects. What is less well appreciated is that the individual with the most to fear is actually the dictator himself; such a person’s greatest fear is not a mass public uprising or revolution—that rarely happens—instead, their greatest fear is being deposed by someone in her own inner circle. Losing office in a democracy means you lose power for a time; losing office in a dictatorship means you lose power, freedom, your assets, and possibly even your head. No wonder dictators are paranoid.
Ordinary people under such governments can survive the fear by self-censoring, staying silent and laying low. But this does not mean that they give up their voice entirely. Citizens in dictatorships are remarkably courageous and creative in finding ways to engage in criticism without crossing the line. They use the three-finger salute from the Hunger Games; they hold up blank pieces of paper to indicate that they can’t say anything; they speak in parables, and jokes.
We in democracies can be more direct in our criticism, and we are. But our challenge then is not to let our disappointment overwhelm the hope, for that opens the door for fear to take over.
In thinking about our current moment, I have become very fond of a speech given by John Dewey, the great American philosopher who taught here at Chicago, and appeared at this very Convocation in 1902. I learned about this speech from my colleague Agnes Callard. In 1939, at what was surely democracy’s darkest hour, Dewey wrote an essay called Creative Democracy, in which he said:
“…. the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another…Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred.“
Dewey’s reminding us that democracy requires conversation. There is simply no substitute for sitting down and talking with other human beings. It is how we think. This is why Confucius and Plato come down to us in the form of dialogues. The family dinner, the friendly argument, the impassioned debate, the casual chat; not every conversation we have is political, but every form of politics requires human conversation. Which is, of course, one reason I love the University of Chicago, and its culture of argument and friendly challenge: at its best, we strive to be tough on ideas, and kind to people; whereas much of other discourse these days seems to be the opposite: tough on people but weak on ideas. (Sorry, Twitter.)
One of my favorite writers is Jeanette Winterson, and she reminds us that conversation is in no way easy. Describing having breakfast with her grandmother, put it this way: “Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port, and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. ‘You understand me, then?’
Conversation doesn’t just happen on its own; free speech only works if people are actually listening, and in our era, we have a surplus of speech and a huge deficit of listening. We need much more active work in generating environments for dialogue, conversation, and debate, and encouraging curiosity in listening about what others are saying. I think this is an essential role for universities in a democracy in our era and is something I hope that that the University of Chicago can lead on in years ahead.
In thinking back to my own research, I can recall several examples in which people can do amazing things if they are willing to listen and engage in conversation with others. In 1996, in South Africa, people came together in a divided society, with a brutal history, to craft a new constitution for what Mandela called the rebirth of a nation. The drafting process was not easy, and there were several tense moments when it looked like it might fail. In particular, the preamble, which is a kind of a mission statement for a country and for a constitution, was very contentious and they put it off until the very end. When the drafters could not agree, they decided to send into a room the Communist party representative and the pastor of the National Party, which was the governing party under apartheid. These two people had nothing in common, and yet they accomplished the task, produced a draft, and helped lay the groundwork for a democratic South Africa.
It is hard to imagine that Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress and to run for president in 1972, went to the hospital to visit the segregationist George Wallace after he was shot and paralyzed at a campaign stop. Wallace cried when he saw her, and she said, “you and I don’t agree, but you’ve been shot and I might be shot, and we are both the children of American democracy, so I wanted to come see you.” Wallace eventually renounced segregation and asked for forgiveness, appointing several African-Americans to his final cabinet as governor.
I also think about the participants in a citizens assembly in Northern Ireland, another very divided society, who came together to make recommendations on public policy. These citizens assembly involved randomly selected groups of citizens, something many scholars think could rejuvenate our own democracy. After this process, the participants said they had expected “entrenched views” from others but instead found that most people were open to discussion and change. This is something shown over and over again by social psychologists like Nicholas Epley of the Booth school, that people underestimate the benefit of conversation until they engage in it.
As I stand here and recall how much I’ve learned from talking to people, I’d like to invite you to take just a second and think about someone with whom you’ve had a deep conversation during your time here at Chicago. It is something to treasure, and actually makes me less anxious about ChatGPT. A machine can mimic conversation. It can beat us at chess, it can beat us at Go; but it cannot have the genuine sense of doubt and openness and vulnerability that leads to actual learning and creativity in conversation. AI has no self to express, no mind to change, no vote to cast.
In closing, I want to say that I remain optimistic about democracy for several reasons. One bit of good news for the United States is that a majority of Americans, of both parties, say that they have some, or a great deal of confidence in the future. We still possess the vital emotion of hope, if we could just activate it. More than 80% of people say they have friends or relatives with whom they disagree with politically, and a majority of them say they converse, at times, about their differences. The public, I believe, is much less divided than the politicians, or media, would have us believe, because those entities of course have an interest in division. It suggests a national conversation is still possible if we choose to have one.
Another point of optimism: we repeatedly see people around the world, from Armenia to Zambia, are willing to take steps for their freedom and voice. A global youth movement focused on issues like climate change is experimenting with new forms of participation. Women in Iran and Afghanistan have undertaken enormous personal risk to make their voices heard. They are taking an abstract idea of equality and turning it into reality. To go back to Shirley Chisholm, one of my favorite quotes from her is “You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”
Which brings me to my third and final reason for optimism, which is all of you! We have watched you engage in complicated, difficult conversations under truly unprecedented circumstances. For those who’ve been here for four years, you thought you were coming to the place where fun went to die, but within six months, you were back in your parents’ basement, taking classes on Zoom. What could be more fun than that? Today is the day you get to go out in the world, to implement your ideas, developed in conversation with others here. Keep talking, keep listening and stay curious.
Congratulations class of 2023!