Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NC Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Welcome back to part two of our Christmas season conversation with Dr.
Wilfred McClay. In this episode, we continue exploring a recent speech he gave to the Michael Oakeshott Association. Last week, we talked about the near extinction of true conversation in our society today. Today, we continue our discussion with some thoughts. About the distinction between speech and expression, and we want to get some practical advice on how we can take steps toward becoming better conversationalists.
Dr. Wilfred McClay, welcome back to Family Policy Matters.
Well, it's great to be back with you, Tracy. You mentioned the distinction that I make between speech and expression. And if I could start there, because you know, all these great declarations by the University of Chicago and other places about free speech, it's always free expression. I think this is a big mistake. It should be free speech because there's a difference between speech.
an expression. I can howl in pain at something you say at the dinner table or mock you or otherwise express myself. But what I'm not doing in doing that is expressing a verbal response. To what you're saying. And if you look at what's happened on college campuses, you know, protecting free speech means protecting people going out, yelling and screaming, camping out on the campus quad, and deplatforming speakers they don't agree with.
This is viewed as an exercise of free speech. It's not. It might be expression. But people who chant a slogan are not engaged in, I mean, it's literally speech, but it's not speech in the fullest sense. Aristotle said, we are different from all the other animals and the barbarians because we possess speech.
This power of deliberating together about what is good, what is bad, what is desirable, what is undesirable, and how should we frame our lives together. in line with our knowledge of those distinctions. I think we need to go back to that idea that speech is free, and it's free because it's speech. It is because speech has these special qualities.
So, that to express his profound disagreement with you at the dinner table, that your loud dinner guest uses words. That's a beginning. Hopefully, he would also use words in a way that is designed. to convey ideas that you can respond to. Then you have the beginnings, just the beginnings of a real conversation.
So, I think, again, expression is something that doesn't lend itself to a response, to an ordered verbal response, but speech does. And so, that's the beginning. Again, it relates to being aware of your audience, be aware of who you're speaking to. Don't seek to humiliate them if you want to have a conversation with them. It's really pretty simple.
So that would be one way of getting at this. You mentioned the dinner table several times. And is that one of the things that we maybe need to start with people that we know or people we go to church with or people that we've spent some time with and know are reasonable people? Yes. And I think, you know, some of the churches I've attended over the years have done that and done it very well.
It's been a good way to get people in a large church to know one another across the usual. A lot of people usually hang out with their friends. We'll have some dinners in which people are seated with people who they don't know, but they should know because the fellowship that they have in the church is a fellowship that includes everyone.
So they should be getting to know everyone in the church. And it will enhance our Christian walk. And enhance the life of the church, which is enhancing the body of Christ, if they did that.
So I think, yeah, especially in that kind of setting, but even in just secular life, I think there's a way in which having more of those kinds of occasions for conversation can. Facilitate conversation if you make room for it. I think there has to be a recognition that there's another side. And so the other side may be wrong, may be short-sighted, may be mostly wrong, maybe a little bit right. That's the way things are, actually, I think.
I'm not saying that to strike a pose as a moderate. I think most burning issues have more than one side to it. You know, in politics, we used to talk about something called the loyal opposition, and that was people who disagreed with whatever party or platform was in power. And we're going to fight against it. We're going to object to it at every term.
But they were loyal. They were loyal to the country. They were loyal to the political system. I fear that we've lost that or we're losing it.
So the concept of loyal opposition works at the dinner table. You know, when for some reason, I'm imagining you have an ornery brother that really disagrees with you about something.
Now, if you use. A loyal opposition. He doesn't just try to take a piece of your hideout, he's trying to persuade you. to his position. And underneath it all, you're saying, you know.
He's my brother. He's not going to walk away from me over this issue.
So if there's a sense of human commitment. underlying the conversation. The conversation is not for keeps. It's that this is where the element of play comes in. It's not as if whoever wins this conversation wins in a bigger way.
No, there's no victory being sought. There is a sharpening of ideas. Iron sharpens iron. That's biblical. And there is that.
And conversation doesn't have to always be pleasant. Although it it's something you won't go back to if it isn't mostly pleasant. You're listening to Family Policy Matters, a weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. This is just one of the many ways NC Family works to educate and inform citizens about issues that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our vision is to create a state and nation where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.
For more information about NC Family and how you can partner with us in pursuit of this vision, visit our website at ncfamily.org and be sure to sign up to receive our email updates, action alerts, and Family North Carolina magazine. You can also follow us on social media at NC Family Policy. That's at NC Family Policy. Let's go back to some of the benefits, I think, to having this uninterrupted conversation. You mentioned speech or conversation serving as a middle ground between thought and action.
That seems intriguing to me. What do you mean by that? Is where we go when we want to say, okay, we need to figure out the house is overcrowded. What are we going to do about it? We could either move into a bigger house, but that has these difficulties.
We can add on to the house. We can build a guest house. That the kids can live in. You can talk about these things without doing them. You can weigh Alternatives in speech, and in that way you can deliberate.
This is what Aristotle talks about speech being for. Deliberating about the common good. That's the middle ground. We can take an idea. and hold it out in front of ourselves.
so to speak, and say, Well, what about this? Say you're a a woman who's being pursued by two different men for her hand in marriage and and she's talking to her best friend and says, Well, Now if I marry Scott, You know, he'll be on the road all the time. He'll be famous, but you know, he won't be, may not be a good father to my children. You know, the kinds of thinking that you do, sometimes really down and dirty stuff that you don't want to, yeah, thinking about my monetary standing. We got to think about that.
And so that's part of the formula, part of the debate, the discussion. You can hold all that out in front of you. In conversation with your best buddy, and have her respond to what you're saying. No nothing has been done to anybody. It's all in that middle zone between thought in action.
And I think People who don't, you know how important it is to talk to people about. Things that are troubling you. We all know people, sometimes I'm one of those people who would rather work it all out in my head.
So keep it confined to the realm of thought because if I say this, You know, there might be consequences. Um And there are people like that, but it's much better. Almost always to express those things, to put them out there, but put them in words, not expression, but in words. And then you can deliberate about them. Right.
But you have to have some really good friends to be able to say some of the very honest things that you might be thinking. Yeah.
So I think that's part of it, too. Do you see some hope that we're going to be able to reconnect with each other through the art of conversation? I think one of the things we have to do. And there's something that Oakeshott says in the article that you cited that I really want to bring out for your audience. It's kind of shocking.
He makes this statement. that even more than Rationality and ability to invent things, and so on. The thing that really separates us. From the beasts and from barbarians is our ability to engage in conversation. And it's an outrageous, audacious statement.
I think he may be right, at least a little bit right. In this sense, that that kind of mutuality That is the mark, one of the marks of human beings. We're not just supercomputers. We also have relationships. We also have loves.
We also have groups of which we're members. Computers don't have that, and they never will. Why would anybody want to invent a computer that would enjoy membership with others?
So they're up uniquely human Traits that we are not. training our young people and we're not helping them To learn to have conversations. And maybe that's the next step. Maybe that's what schools need to do. Maybe.
You know, I went to a college, St. John's College in Annapolis, which was basically all the classes were seminars. And it worked really well because we had a reading assignment. And then we discussed it. And we would interact with one another, we would disagree with one another, we would have abortive conversations, but more often than not, we had real conversations.
And we learned. We learned how to make sense of a difficult and important text. By ourselves on our own, but you're doing it together. But we didn't do it, we didn't look to some professor to tell us what to think. That may be the future.
And I think we live in a society, we live in America. Americans don't just sit around and say, well, we have to keep doing it this way because we've always done it. That is the most un-American thing you can imagine saying. Americans are always, okay, let's try something else.
Okay, let's, so that's the source of hope. I think in education, you see this all the time in your work. We're moving forward into all kinds of really interesting experiments in education, school choice.
Some of them are going to fail. I'm a big fan of the classical education, which I think is succeeding. And oddly enough, it's more of a wellspring of creativity than these so-called progressive educational systems ever have been. But with this spirit of experimentation, and we do it for our kids. Yeah.
Well, Dr. McClay, I wish we could continue, but we are out of time and we have had a fun conversation, especially as we celebrate Christmas. Can our listeners go to read any of your work or learn more about how to become better conversationalists?
Well, sure. And you know, this is this, this is, this is not my main thing, but I did publish an article that I think you saw. It's on a website called Law and Liberty. And I think the title of the essay is A Culture of Conversation. I would recommend that as a starting place.
And, you know, people can write to me. I'm just at Hillsdale. Uh, you go to the Hillsdale website and the faculty, and I'm there, you know, my email address is there, and so feel free.
Well, thank you, and I hope you have a lovely holiday with your family and lots of good conversations. Dr. Wilfred McClay, thank you so much for joining us on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review.
To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
