Civil Conversation in an Age of Pluralism & Ideological Extremism | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on September 19, 2022 at Regent University. For more information, please visit thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Thomas Hibbs is currently J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, where he is also Dean Emeritus, having served for 16 years as Dean of the Honors College and as Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture. Hibbs received a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and has served as tutor at Thomas Aquinas College, Full Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, and President of the University of Dallas. Hibbs works in the areas of medieval philosophy, especially Thomas Aquinas, contemporary virtue ethics, and aesthetics. He has published more than thirty scholarly articles and seven books, as well as 100 reviews and discussion articles on film, theater, art, and higher education in a variety of venues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.0	I want to talk about civility and I want to talk about rational disagreement,
0:16.0	both of which I think are very important, but they're not exactly the same thing.
0:21.6	And there are ways in which they can part ways.
0:24.6	Hopefully they overlap.
0:26.6	But let me begin just by making a couple of observations that I think will probably
0:34.6	ring true to all of you about our current cultural and political situation.
0:41.3	We're not really good at civility or rational disagreement.
0:45.3	There may be some connection between those two deficiencies in our public discourse.
0:50.3	Civic animosity, I was talking about this today a little bit at lunch conversation we're talking about friendship.
0:59.0	And we've witnessed over the last 30 to 40 years a decline in the number of deep personal friendships that most Americans say that they have.
1:09.0	We've also witnessed a decline in civic friendship,
1:12.7	or to put it more precisely, a significant rise in civic hatred. So a few years back during
1:20.5	the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings, which now almost seem mild by comparison to what's
1:25.9	happened in our culture since then, and also seemed like they happened 10 or 20 years ago now.
1:30.8	John Haidt from NYU, who's a social psychologist, tweeted,
1:36.2	if you want to know why we're, if you want to see how we got to being at one another's throats constantly,
1:42.4	he put up details of a survey.
1:45.7	The question for the survey was, do you
1:50.2	hate members of the opposite political party?
1:53.2	And in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the early part of this century,
	...

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