Nagel on Cultural Liberalism
Wisdom from 1998
Thomas Nagel’s (1998) ‘Concealment and Exposure’ is one of my favorite philosophy papers. His account of the value of reticence is a must-read for anyone who might otherwise find “radical honesty” tempting:
The first and most obvious thing to note about many of the most important forms of reticence is that they are not dishonest, because the conventions that govern them are generally known. If I don’t tell you everything I think and feel about you that is not a case of deception, since you don’t expect me to do so and would probably be appalled if I did. The same is true of many explicit expressions that are literally false… The point of polite formulae and broad abstentions from expression is to leave a great range of potentially disruptive material unacknowledged and therefore out of play.
On the value of privacy (even for public figures):
The boundary between what we reveal and what we do not, and some control over that boundary, are among the most important attributes of our humanity. Someone who for special reasons becomes a public or famous figure should not have to give it up.
And, perhaps most important of all, on the value of a robust form of cultural liberalism that abhors social pressure to give lip-service to the reigning orthodoxy:
[Political correctness] is the subject of endless fulminations by unsavory characters, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate as an object of concern. It shouldn’t be just a right-wing issue. The demand for public lip-service to certain pieties and vigilance against tell-tale signs in speech of unacceptable attitudes or beliefs is due to an insistence that deep cultural conflicts should not simply be tolerated, but must be turned into battles for control of the common social space…
The attempt to control public space is importantly an attempt to control the cultural and ideological environment in which young people are formed. Forty years ago the public pieties were patriotic and anticommunist; now they are multicultural and feminist. What concerns me is not the content but the character of this kind of control: Its effect is to make it difficult to breathe, because the atmosphere is so thick with significance and falsity. And the atmosphere of falsity is independent of the truth or falsity of the orthodoxy being imposed. It may be entirely true, but if it is presented as what one is supposed to believe and publicly affirm if one is on the right side, it becomes a form of mental suffocation.
And more:
The reason this is part of the same topic as our main theme of reticence and concealment is that it involves one of the most effective forms of invasion of privacy—the demand that everyone stand up and be counted…
The avoidance of what is offensive is one thing; the requirement to include visible signals of respect and correct opinion is another… We used to have a genuinely neutral way of talking, but the current system forces everyone to decide, one way or the other, whether to conform to the pattern that is contending for orthodoxy—so everyone is forced to express more, in one direction or another, than should be necessary for the purposes of communication, education, or whatever. One has to either go along with it, or resist, and there is no good reason to force that choice on people just in virtue of their being speakers of the language—no reason to demand external signs of inner conformity. In the abyss at the far end of the same road one finds anticommunist loyalty oaths for teachers or civil servants, and declarations of solidarity with the workers and peasants in the antifascist and anti-imperialist struggle…
Liberalism should favor the avoidance of forced choices and tests of purity, and the substitution of a certain reticence behind which potentially disruptive disagreements can persist without breaking into the open, and without requiring anyone to lie. The disagreements needn’t be a secret—they can just remain quiescent. In my version, the liberal ideal is not content with the legal protection of free speech for fascists, but also includes a social environment in which fascists can keep their counsel if they choose.I suspect that this refusal to force the issue unless it becomes necessary is what many people hate about liberalism.
For some reason, the link seems to download (rather than open) the HTML file, but you should then be able to open it from there.
"The first and most obvious thing to note about many of the most important forms of reticence is that they are not dishonest, because the conventions that govern them are generally known. If I don’t tell you everything I think and feel about you that is not a case of deception, since you don’t expect me to do so and would probably be appalled if I did."
Might something like this help explain Trump's appeal? Or, might it explain the fact that exaggerations about Trump are taken much more seriously than Trump's vastly more nutty and numerous exaggerations?
That is, I assume we all (excepting his most devoted followers) know that he makes many false and exaggerated claims, so perhaps many voters bake this in when judging whether he's a liar and either judge that he really is not or that his lies aren't as serious as ordinary lies told by ordinary liars. In other words, given Trump's political omnipresence and our reasonable expectations about what he will say, many people have implicit conventions about how to interpret his falsehoods and exaggerations, and since they judge these conventions to be widely known, they don't blame him as much as they would an ordinary politician, like Harris, who is not subject to these interpretive conventions.
I haven’t read the whole thing, but in your quoted, I find a tension between the two parts. In the first half he endorses customary reticence about certain things, which he also acknowledges includes mouthing certain standardized falsehoods rather than revealing what one literally thinks. But this seems to be quite similar to what he is condemning in the second half. Perhaps there is a different emphasis on the not saying of certain honest things, and the saying of certain things you are supposed to say (and are thus largely meaningless), but it seems similar to me.