Don't Go Practically Naked in Public

And also avoid wearing other people's clothes.

I’m having trouble writing this.

I wanted to first acknowledge the value and importance of scholarship. Through hard study and peer acceptance of their work, some people earn the right to be called “experts.” When we ignore their research we do ourselves and others a disservice.

I don’t, however, want to be misunderstood on this point. Expertise should be questioned, but it shouldn’t be thrown aside just because it is the work of experts and we know that those kind of elitists can’t be trusted.

I’m reading a set of essays by the late emeritus Princeton professor, John Murrin (an old friend and former softball teammate from graduate school days), one of the 20th century’s most renowned students of the American Revolutionary Period, it is easy to see that he was far better informed than I am about the ideas and actions of the Founding Fathers (with respect, for example, to their ideas about religion). 

For that reason, I should give serious weight to his views on some important questions related to that period, and today.  I think it is responsible to seek out people like Murrin to assist us in our democratic responsibilities to speak cogently, vote wisely and support viable public policies. 

I’m saying something very simple, I think, but overlooked by many of us.  We should recognize that although all understandings of complex problems are approximations, some people have given them more serious, and more disinterested study. They are our allies. And obviously, they are not the same people that tweet and meme recklessly on social media.

But I don’t advise our stopping here. Locating and sharing the thoughts of others, is not the central requirement of citizenship.

The citizen in a democracy shouldn’t be passive. Citizens develop their own ideas and understandings. We can prepare ourselves using the insights of those who have earned our respect and trust, but as responsible members of a democratic society, we are called on to develop, and then share our own views with each other.

In this I think John Dewey and the pragmatist tradition was right. The writing of scholars is a fruitful field of experience for all of us. It does not, though, become part of who we are, until we “interrogate it,” i.e. think about it and talk about it.

Citizenship in a democracy requires we develop our own voice, and that it be intelligent, measured and forceful.

We don’t, that is, have to perform on stages such as social media, largely naked (uniformed), while, on the other hand, we shouldn’t appear dressed in other people’s clothes.