Opinions

Debating with myself: a Swarthmore education

In print | April 9, 2009

Let me pay Swarthmore a Socratic compliment: in my four years here, I have learned, more than anything else, that I know nothing.

Time and time again, as a Political Science major I have had misconceptions shattered and replaced with new conceptions, which in turn are quickly shattered. I play devil’s advocate against myself so much that I worry I’ll lose track of which opinions are mine and which belong to the devil. I express an opinion in seminar, and then, when somebody agrees with me, I take the other side.

It has become ingrained somewhere deep inside of my head: there are no simple answers. Sometimes there are right answers, but other times there aren’t. Even the most obviously right answers are rarely simple.

How do you save America from the current economic crisis? What about a community? A single family?

How do you repair the education system? What about a school? A classroom? One child’s educational experience?

I’m not saying Swarthmore doesn’t give us ways of answering questions like these. I’ve learned many. Very many. Answers that contradict one another. Good answers that are premised on other good answers being bad answers. Enough complexity and contradiction to bring me back to the conclusion that started this column:

I know nothing.

Barack Obama didn’t get in to Swarthmore. Garnet pride aside, I am extremely glad about this. Why? Because presidents can’t know nothing. Presidents must know everything.

To be sure, President Obama is a thoughtful man (certainly in comparison to his predecessor in office), and seems to genuinely appreciate and consider a multitude of perspectives before finally making decisions. But eventually, he must decide. About everything.

Not to mention that he had to get elected. In a political system where “flip-flop” is a four letter word (instead of two of them), certainty is a necessity. You don’t get elected by presenting your policies, then picking apart exactly what’s wrong with them.

I’m not saying all Swatties are condemned to a lifetime of indecision and inner conflict. I’m just saying that many of them probably will be.

And yet, let me be clear about one thing: I think this is one of Swarthmore’s greatest strengths.
The world is complex, and its problems are complex. Complex and multifaceted approaches and perspectives may be the only way to deal with the world’s problems.

Let’s say a program is implemented to address a problem — local unemployment, for instance. After a year of implementing the program, unemployment has not budged. Does this mean that the program was a failure?

It doesn’t take a Swarthmore education to know that the situation may be too complicated to call the program a total failure. But my Swat-addled mind becomes fixated on all the ways the situation could be complicated.

Maybe the program needed more time. Maybe this program alone was insufficient, but with Program B and Program C it would be an integral part of a policy solution.

Maybe the program had exactly the right terms and specifications, but it was enacted by the wrong people and never had the right support from stakeholders. Maybe it’s a brilliant policy that just happens to be wrong for this community.

It’s not that Swarthmore trains students to throw up their hands in indecision. What Swarthmore does well is that it trains detectives who sift out the pros and the cons and dig through the maybes and the could-be’s.

There is also, however, a lesson in all of these complexities that I think Swatties often overlook: values matter. This may sound obvious, but it’s something that is often completely neglected, especially here at Swarthmore.

Questions of public policy are complex — and involve complex tradeoffs. Most policies carry costs: in resources, in liberties, sometimes in lives. We Swatties may be able to work out these costs ad infinitum, but this isn’t sufficient if people view these costs very differently.

Many people, myself included, often fall into the trap of believing that if we could just educate everybody about established facts — about poverty, the environment, wars, etc.— then this would be sufficient for us reach a consensus, and our government would finally function like it should.

But this is a fallacy because of how differently people weigh these facts. I could spend an entire column talking about different ways people weigh policies (and I actually might — tune in next time!), but the bottom line is that, even knowing all of the same facts, people can and will reach vastly differing conclusions.

This is not to say objective facts don’t matter — far from it. People have values, but values are flexible. Someone who prefers smaller government, for example, might still support a new program if they can be convinced it will be have a dramatic and positive impact.

Civic education is essential to ensure that people don’t instinctively oppose or support policies on the basis of their personal values that they might feel differently about if they knew more.

Recognizing the importance of values matters because it helps us understand and sympathize with the arguments of others, even when those arguments conflict with our own notions. Understanding the values of other people can also help us recognize what arguments that people may be receptive to — and what arguments that they may be unlikely to respond to.

I’m not saying we’re going to easily fix our political culture of talking heads yelling past one another. I do believe, however, that failure to recognize different values — not to even to go so far as to tolerate, which is a different and much harder matter, but simply to recognize other values’ existence and importance — makes it much more difficult to engage in productive political debate.

And debate is something we need a lot of. These things are pretty complicated.

Jesse is a senior. You can reach him at jgotts1@swarthmore.edu.