A Conversational Team of Rivals

After acknowledging the many and formidable obstacles – indeed, hazards – confronting a modern President considering the appointment of a “team of rivals” as did Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin closes her New York Times Opinion Page essay with a warning. “Inviting such in-house dissent may indeed pose greater challenges today than in earlier times, but it’s hard to see that we have any other choice.” Americans, she writes, “have seen the damage caused by the creation of like-minded ‘echo chambers’ in Washington.” Moreover, “history…reveals how dangerous it can be for a president to surround himself with like-minded people. Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, deliberately chose men for his cabinet who thought as he did and, with the agreement of those around him, did nothing to prevent the secession of the Confederate states. He is now considered among the worst of our presidents (“Defeat Your Opponents. Then Hire Them”. New York Times, Sunday, August 3, 2008, p. wk 11).

Lincoln, Goodwin observes, was strengthened and polished by the debates within his cabinet. I am reminded of the polishing effect that agitation has on rocks. I am reminded of the strengthening effect that resistance exercises have on muscles. I am reminded of the broadening, deepening, integrating effect that tests – well-constructed tests – can have on learning.

I know these things, and I hope – indeed pray – that both presidential candidates will think outside their own “echo chambers” when selecting their respective running mates.

That said, I confess that it is counsel I comfortably, even vigorously give but rarely receive. In the books I read, the television I watch, the podcasts I hear, and the friends with whom I hang around I have constructed something of an echo chamber of my own. The sound of Rush Limbaugh’s voice makes me nauseous. The prattle of Fox News turns me green – or yellow, or whatever their combination that looks like mucous. While some part of this revulsion is reaction to their intellectual thuggery, I have to admit that I enjoy turning off their contrary point of view. Thence is occasioned my own spongy mind, my own flaccid logic, and my own silent voice. Unsharpened, unpolished, unexercised by the marketplace of differing ideas, I have grown intellectually flabby and persuasively impotent.

And I am now the norm – not in the sense that everyone thinks like me, but that the majority of people behave like me; taking cover within the comfortable environs of their own entrenched positions; retreating into the confirming company of those who already believe the same.

While I don’t think there is enough Pepcid and Tagamet in the world to get me through a broadcast of Rush, there are certainly more palatable conversation partners around who could stretch me and, with time, polish. It isn’t so much about changing my thinking as it is improving it.

What’s the familiar lament? “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”