Dive into this fascinating discussion on the art of discourse in the latest episode of The Impact Exchange with John Frehse and Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times.
In today's world, marked by growing polarization, understanding the role of civil discourse becomes paramount. Bret Stephens brings his wealth of experience to the table, sharing his insights on how civil society can navigate the complexities of modern argumentation. He dissects the architecture of argument, examining the foundational elements that contribute to constructive and meaningful exchanges.
Whether you're a seasoned communicator or simply someone eager to better understand the forces shaping today's conversations, this episode promises valuable insights and actionable knowledge. Tune in to The Impact Exchange for a captivating discussion that explores the intersection of culture, communication, and the art of argument.
Transcript:
John:
I’m John Frehse, and I am the host of the Impact Exchange at Ankura. And we have a very special guest today, Bret Stephens, who is famous or infamous, depending on what political activist you're speaking with. But Bret has a long and very impressive history in journalism and politics and history and teaching education. Pulitzer Prize winner, Ellis Island Medal of Honor winner and the founder of the Renewed Democracy Initiative. Plus, you worked at the Wall Street Journal for a very long time. I've read your stuff for a very long time. The New York Times, you're writing there where everybody where everybody threatened to cancel their subscriptions if they brought you in and somehow The New York Times is still making money. So thank you for joining me.
Bret:
Well, you, forgot my most impressive credential, John.
John:
Oh, excuse this. I know what this is gonna be. You're a graduate of the class of 91 at Middlesex School.
Bret:
No, I thought my most important credential was that you were a student in the class that I was in which I was the assistant teacher. You were a class of 93, if I'm not mistaken.
John:
This is true. And I don't remember you being the assistant teacher. I remember you being the teacher. And Elliot Trumold, who, by the way, has not mentioned in the things we're gonna talk about today, was sort of your assistant is how I remember it. The professor became the assistant.
Bret:
Not sure that's true, but I'll, I'll accept your version of events.
John:
So, you know, I went back when I found out you agreed to do this and thank you very much.
I went back to look at your 2023 speech on Go Forth and Argue that you did at the University of Chicago. And it was met with a lot of resistance. And there's so many things we could talk about, you know, Israel, Gaza, Trump, all this stuff. I don't want to talk about any actual event. I want to talk about the structure of discourse, of argument, of debate, which is something that you taught me when I was a sophomore at Middlesex. And it seems like you're still talking and writing about the same thing you taught me back then.
Bret:
Yeah, I'm consistent, I guess.
John:
So it's basically, if I were to sum the whole thing up, you're basically saying please don't be intellectually lazy. There's a range of ways you get at that, though.
Bret:
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I'm a graduate of the University of Chicago and I thought it was just a wonderful honor to be asked to speak at the graduation ceremonies there. And I giving graduation speeches is very difficult because you have to say something that sort of is universal and accessible and moves at a lively pace over no more than 16 or 17 minutes at most. But you don't want to end up sort of descending into cliches, which is the great risk with most graduation speeches.
And, and then of course, I was speaking to a university that I think very highly of that has this particular tradition of free expression. And I wanted to talk about why that tradition, why those skills they acquired through the not just free expression, but through the vigorous exchange of ideas and the contestation of ideas should matter in their future lives. And why it wasn't just unique to the universe or shouldn't be unique to the University of Chicago. So that was the structure of the speech.
John:
So I'm gonna hit a couple of quotes from you, and I'd love to get more detail.
Bret:
That's OK.
John:
You talk about the capacity, the desire, and above all the courage to think for yourselves. And, I think that's the first part which people I think forget about, but also to express and behave yourselves accordingly. I think people are very good at expressing themselves without doing any of the homework. So there's a lot of sort of empty arguments out there.
But when you think about the structure of an argument, like the architecture of an argument, what are we missing most?
And I'll just talk about the United States. When you're engaging others, where are you critical of them?
Bret:
Well, there's a term in Greek called prolapses, which leads to an idea in rhetoric about proleptic argumentation. What that means, in effect, is the anticipation of the argument of your opponent. And one of the things that I think is really critical in good arguments is that it recognizes the opposing point of view, not at its weakest points, but at its strongest. I've always tried to do that in my columns.
If you look at my column from a few days ago, I try to make the best case for that the Trump, some members of the Trump administration make for abandoning Ukraine as being sort of not core to our strategic interests.
And when I wrote that case, I wanted to make sure that a person who believed those things would feel well represented by my summary of their views, in fact, even better represented by that summary than they might have represented themselves.
And that has always been really important in terms of making quality arguments because you will only be able to win the respect of your opponent if that opponent feels recognized by what you're what you're putting forward. Otherwise it's a matter of name calling or talking past one another.
And it really leads to like a very weak culture of argumentation and easy answers when there ought to be much more complexity and serious thinking.
I think, and I haven't thought about it this way, but I think it's interesting that if you do that job effectively, your opponent cannot come back to you and say you don't understand, right? It's that you do understand, but you disagree. And that's exactly it.
And, and you know, you all know and, most people in life know that if they've ever been in just a normal human disagreement or argument. The most frustrating thing is, is to be talking to someone who doesn't seem to get your basic point, no matter how well you try to explain it. But the more important thing is it also leads to a lot of sloppy thinking.
I think one of the biggest problems that we have is, you know, you, you put forward a case and people are too weak or meek or humble or cowed to offer powerful alternatives. And as a result, weak arguments and cliches tend to carry the day in ways that are ultimately damaging to the cultures or institutions or organizations or societies in which these arguments are being are being had.
And it's why I think we find ourselves socially prey to a set of ideas that, as my old colleague Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal used to say, vanish in the presence of thought. You want to have a culture of argument where no side ever will vanish in the presence of thought.
John:
So this is everything you're talking about goes back to, you know, I think what shows up in almost everything you write, which is the sloppy sort of overtones of some of the arguments out there that you find. I I don't want to use the term vulgar, although derivations that word show up as they did recently in your writing. There is a, a sloppiness, a lack of intellectual rigor that shows up an argument today.
And when we apply what you talk about to business, that's where I get especially interested. So you talk about it politically, but really it's, you know, psychology and sort of evolution or the opposite when we're looking at what you're writing and we're reading these things. But it applies equally to business and why businesses, you know, fail to innovate.
Everything in your speech goes back to when I'm dealing with a bankrupt company or restructuring, anything like that. They have failed to listen. They have a very strongly, you know, held idea that is not well researched and they're blowing through, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So I just like that was an interesting story.
Bret:
So I think as I remember it, and now it's been a while that I gave the speech. So it's not entirely fresh in my mind, but I basically gave a series of psychological reasons why people are prone to a certain kind of group think and then those kind of stem from human nature.
But then there's a fourth reason, which is really the decisive one, which is culture building within institutions, within businesses or organizations. I mean, I think I offered a few examples from, you know, the Vietnam War, the management of the Vietnam War under Bob McNamara, to the creation of New Coke, to, you know, the creation of the metaverse by by Facebook. Like how does it happen that big organizations, whether it's Facebook, Coke or the Pentagon, make these catastrophic mistakes?
And it winds up, as I tried to, the case I tried to make was that it winds up being about the culture that leadership creates. You'll often find institutions that will say, you know, we believe in thinking outside the box. Of course, that itself is a cliche. You know, we believe in in in a culture of openness and you know, where people feel safe and to express themselves, etcetera, etcetera. But they don't really believe that putting those cultures into practice in the real world and driving through a spirit in which people feel free to disagree, those are rare. Those are rare cultures. And the leaders who are able to create them, I think are the ones who thrive.
John:
You know, I think there's a lot of tech companies that have been very successful by doing exactly what you say. And they get to a certain level of maturity and they say, OK, now that's enough. Now we're gonna stabilize. Nobody take any risk. Let's just do some weird things.
Of course, the Vietnam piece was mentioned and I was horrified by that. But based on my age, I think I was even more horrified by the New Coke. That was really the, the childhood tragedy that I endured.
Bret:
You liked New Coke?
John:
No, it was awful. That was the horrifying, you know, terrible thing.
Bret:
I mean, IBM, by the way, is another example. I live not far from an abandoned IBM campus in northern Westchester. And I used to take my kids when they were trying to learn how to drive.
I'd take them up there to what look like these structures that that almost look like Mayan temples in early stages of decay. And I explained to my kids, you know, IBM used to be the most innovative and one of the most successful companies in the world. And this is what happens to companies and institutions that rest on their laurels and think that they know the way the world works and they think that change isn't gonna happen unless they make it happen according to their rules.
So it's a word to the wise to, to look at a campus like that and say, you know, there's, there's a larger lesson here.
John:
I do think, 'cause I, I actually sit on the, the board of a think tank inside of what was the Wang towers up in Lowell, MA. They said for decades they sat empty. And finally now it's a very interesting campus.
But yes, I think it's history should be taught in schools that way. Bring them to the abandoned campus and tell the story and let them see.
Bret:
Well, that's exactly it. I mean, I didn't go to Business School, but I suspect that we spend too much time studying successes and not quite enough time really thinking deeply about the nature of failure.
John:
No, I think you're absolutely right. So I want to go deeper into groupthink because this is. I wrote everything all over your speeches.
Bret:
Remember the digital corporation?
John:
Yes, barely. But I do.
Yeah, one of my favorite quotes, and this goes back to the Herd of Independent Minds story, which I think is interesting about, you know, and you go back to some of the political election chaos and all this stuff.
But I go past that because I think, you know, I laughed and wrote down here like the way I approach things, Bret is I'm a logical thinker, which is like the funniest thing ever, right? A self declared logical thinker. You know, it's like this herd of independence, but somehow they all end up at the same conclusion. Even past that, I think more hitting, and that is, and it raises questions, why is it when you bring together a lot of smart people in a room, their collective intelligence tends to go down, not up? Why do they always seem to press the mute button on their critical faculties when confronted with propositions that, as an old colleague of mine like to say, ought to vanish in the presence of thought?
This is so true. How did you end up writing that? Because this is, I think, the highlight of the entire speech.
Bret:
Gosh. Well, how did I end up writing it? Well, you know, the way I always write things in a state of complete panic with a looming, looming deadline.
John:
I mean, no. I see it as total disappoint. Disappointment in society is you're and I always said this. You're a historian first and then you're so disappointed with what's happening now. And you were in high school too.
Bret:
Well, it's a combination of a bit of a historical perspective and just, you know, 30 years or 30 plus years of adult observation about the way in which people operate when they're under social pressures to conform along with the habit, which you sort of alluded to just now, the habit of calling yourself or thinking of yourself in ways that are very different from what you actually are.
I mean, I'll just give you a different example. One of the things you learn when you are an op-ed columnist for a large paper, an opinion columnist for a large paper is that everyone thinks of themselves as open minded right up until the moment they come across a point of view with which they disagree, right?
At which point their open mindedness suddenly flips into the laziest form of thinking, which is this opposing point of view is not only incredibly stupid, but it's probably evil or written in bad faith.
And, and I see that, you know, all the time, not just in reactions to, to my own columns, but in the general way in which many readers, readers deal with, with disagreement, that it takes a very unique frame of mind to be able to say, I think I disagree with this.
But let me closely examine the reasons why and ask myself whether my reasons really hold up beyond some vague distaste for whatever it is that someone is writing or saying. And, the number of people I've come across in life who are capable of that is actually a very small number.
You just don't, you don't find them that often. When you do, you think, Oh my gosh, look at this guy. You know, he's capable of changing his mind. He's able to hold opinions strongly, but or express opinion strongly, but defend them, you know, in a manner that that brooks the possibility of being wrong, right.
I think those are the kinds of people who wind up being successful and you just don't find them very often.
John:
I think those are the kinds of people that end up being attacked because the idea that they would entertain the opinion other than their group's opinion is offensive to so many people. The even exploration of something like this could be seen as offensive to groups today.
Bret:
Look, it's extremely difficult in in life. And this probably is a fact of not just human life, but animal life. Separation from the herd is a terrifying, difficult place to be.
I mean, in actual the animal Kingdom, separation from the herd is death. But in in the human Kingdom as well, people don't like to stray very far. And sometimes those who stray very far are actually crazy. And sometimes the ones who stray far are the visionaries and the Steve Jobs's and so on.
It's very difficult to be the one person saying no when everyone else says yes or vice versa. And but on the other hand, we would not have, it would not be possible to have a genuinely democratic society unless we had the no Sayers, right?
I mean, I always think that the no Sayers are the engines of progress. It's Galileo saying, you know, at Puri simoave still it moves no to the Catholic Church. It's Rosa Parks saying no to the Montgomery bus drivers. When people think of community, whether it's a marriage or it's citizenship, it's an act of yes, say right, fundamental to a community. You are checking boxes to say yes. Saying no is an act of democracy. It is the most democratic act and by extension it's also the hardest one. And it's a reminder that things like democracy or organizations that genuinely value intellectual diversity, right, are hard to maintain.
Different example. Why is it that there's so much group think on campuses at universities where the existence of tenure auto facilitate independent thought? I think one of the reasons is that tenure actually does not facilitate independent thought. It facilitates the creation of like minded communities who are immune from criticism.
But it's also the fact that many faculty members, even those who have tenure, are often afraid to speak out because the social pressures against independent thought are so great that even tenure will not license everyone except the bravest thinkers to say things that they feel fall afoul the social conventions or the ideological bounds.
John:
I mean, it's interesting to me that, you know, tenure should free people to, you know, innovate, have, you know, very interesting arguments.
And what it does is it lulls people and tenure into a level of comfort that they wouldn't dare disrupt, Right. And again, the opposite effect. And I think it's, it's troubling.
Bret:
And it comes down to culture because the, the social drivers and the psychological drivers that lead us to a certain kind of intellectual conformism are so powerful that unless you have institutional leaders who are constantly pressing and rewarding independent thought, you're just not gonna get it.
John:
This is the criticism you also have of the Ivy League, which is once you make it to Ivy's, why risk your status? Like, let's just get through this, get the degree. No need to rock the boat. It's not everybody. And I don't want to be a generalist about this story.
This is why I try to find people in my practice that went to a state school are incredibly passionate and cannot help but do the work.
Bret:
It's very true prestige, I noticed that people who attend prestigious universities are often become increasingly risk averse as they move through the paces of life because the idea of moving away from a prestigious clerkship, a prestigious internship, a prestigious this or that is terrifying.
Prestige tends to work against risk taking because people feel they have something to lose.
People want to hold on to the life raft that says Harvard or says Goldman or whatever it is because these are tokens of their success and of their importance and of their place in society. But I think they do a tremendous amount of damage or can do a tremendous amount of damage to people who might otherwise be inclined to take risks.
John:
Yeah. I mean, that's why I'm like Iowa State, you know, these are people that are hungry, innovative, passionate.
All right, So when we go back to this architecture story of decision making and of arguing, I think about, I stole some of this from a friend, but you've got the head, you've got the heart and the stomach, right?
So the three components stomach be encouraged to actually go out and handle this adversity. And it's I, I liken it to construction, you know, good, cheap, fast, you get to pick two. You know, you can't, you can't build a house that's great quality, inexpensive and done quickly. You only get to pick 2 in construction. And maybe it's true that you only get to pick the head and the heart or the head and the stomach when it comes to, you know, intelligent debate in our society.
But I hope that's not true.
Bret:
Well, you know, again, it's rare. And I have seen people with all three qualities. The late president of the University of Chicago, Robert Zimmer, was a delightful human being with immense amounts of courage. And of course, he was, you know, one of the leading mathematicians of his day. So it does happen.
My friend Garry Kasparov is not exactly a slouch intellectually. He's also one of the warmest human beings and most consistently courageous people. So they are out there, but they're hard. It's true that they're very hard to find.
John:
Well, what I especially enjoy, which was not part of my research for you, but just my general applause of the University of Chicago, is how they handled all the protests. It's yes, free speech and yes, we get to argue and disagree with each other, but that doesn't give you carte blanche to go out and destroy everybody else's experience.
And the fact that the principles of University of Chicago are not a program, it's not something we're doing for the next six months, It is in the DNA of the university allowed this to be a, in my mind, a very simple decision.
It wasn't we got to get everybody together and figure out what we're going to do. You know, this violates the principles of philosophy of who we are as a learning institution. We're removing people from these areas where people cannot get through campus. I thought it was fascinating.
Bret:
Yeah, I can't tell you. Although Middlesex are a common bond, the sporting school of Massachusetts was a huge intellectual influence. I can't tell you how grateful I was to have an experience like the University of Chicago, because people talk about free expression and I think that doesn't quite capture what's necessary. Free expression is a is necessary, but not quite sufficient.
What is important is the free contestation or the open contestation of ideas. It's intellectual challenge.
It's very possible to have free expression and have people on one side who are doing a lot of talking and a lot of people on other side who are just not even bothering to listen. There are a lot of institutions, university institutions that are, that are like that. People banging on a drum and saying free, free Palestine over in that corner of the quad and everyone else ignoring them. The real magic happens when you create a culture in which ideas get challenged, in which your ideas get challenged, in which there's. I wrote about this in another column last year. It was titled The Spirit of Protest in the Spirit of Inquiry. And my point was that the spirit of protest doesn't go nearly far enough. The spirit of inquiry is about the proper frictional environment in which different ideas meet up against one another, and also the habits of mind that are required to make that friction productive.
And that means not only an ability to speak and defend your corner, it's also an ability to listen, to digest, to maintain just enough of an open mind that you are capable of being persuaded, but at the same time maintain enough confidence that you can put your arguments forward and defend them as vigorously as possible.
I think what makes for interesting people, generally speaking, are people who whose inner life in effect has this tension. It's a tension between a great deal of self skepticism and a great deal of confidence. People who are purely confident are generally insufferable, right?
And people who for whom self skepticism is the dominant emotion sort of collapse into rubble or paralyzed, become followers. They become paralyzed.
How do you maintain these two things inside of yourself at the same time so that you can have enough confidence to move forward? And always a sense that you're also continually examining your ideas.
You know, another metaphor that I think of sometimes is if you've ever had the experience of walking up a sand dune or just a gravely hill, you take a step up and then your foot has to fall a good deal in order to find a more solid footing. And that's on the one hand exhausting, but on the other hand, it's the way in which you more sure footedly get yourself up the hill. Our thinking should be like that.
We should proceed by large step and half step down and large step and half step down. That's actually the way in which genuinely thoughtful people reach valid conclusions.
John:
Yeah, it's interesting. In the business world, I like to think that I do a lot of really smart things.
The most valuable thing we do for our customers is not applied mathematics and not all the huge data work we do on business. We have diagnostics where we listen to the workforce, the hourly employees. And what we find is that senior leaders think they know what's wrong.
We've had clients say we've got to put $100 million into this facility because it's just a miserable place to be. And we engage the employees in an anonymous survey where we find out 84% of them think the working conditions are good, but they hate the leadership team. They don't care about them. They don't know how to communicate.
Again, we're so busy telling you how smart we are that we never listen. And that listening and learning piece can only come when you don't think you have all the answers.
Bret:
Right, and it is unfortunately the defect of the virtue of high intelligence is not realizing that there are other smart people in the room, even if they are slightly less articulate than you are.
You know, in fact, I mean, one of where I've fallen down and have tried to do a little bit of growing up is the realization that just because you can make a really great argument doesn't mean it's the right argument, right?
You can argue very persuasively and logically for conclusions which simply fail because the world doesn't work that way, or your idea isn't quite as brilliant as you imagine it to be, or there are obstacles in life that you haven't necessarily considered.
And it's typically we're very smart people tend to go wrong, not least because it's difficult to find intellectual peers who can challenge you in a way that you take into serious consideration,
John:
Like valuable argument, not just saying no, but actually having a different point of view that's been researched. So you're talking about Robert McNamara again, a little bit here.
And your piece here was second point. There is a problem of rationalization of smart people convincing themselves and others of some truly dumb things, which you've mentioned earlier.
And just because you're great at arguing doesn't mean you're right, which I think is an awesome point. And I know I've taken up too much of your time. So I want to talk about one other thing.
When we think about leadership? I'm not trying to put you on the spot, like what's your definition of a great leader?
But are there traits in leaders that you think about when it comes to arguments?
Bret:
Well, I had the benefit for many years of working for Paul Gigo, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.
And maybe because he was in the practice of making arguments his nearly his entire life, he had an ability to organize information in a way that put forward, he was able to, I guess is I should say, he's still very much, you know, in in the work. He knew how to distinguish the proverbial signal from the noise. He knows more about more subjects than anyone else I've ever met. And while he has kind of an organizing set of principles and a political philosophy, he also sort of looks around and doesn't allow a kind of idealized version of the world to get in the way of, I hate the cliche but lived experience, if you will. And that made him, I think a uniquely thoughtful person makes him a uniquely thoughtful person and a very good mentor.
You know, for me in the way in which I try to think of things. But I've also seen people in the business world and in politics, military affairs. Someone I think about quite a bit is David Petraeus, who might have, you know, a friendly relationship with cause Petraeus was always able to ask the ultimate questions.
You know, famously when it came to the war in Iraq, he said, you know, tell me how this ends. And that was a question that unfortunately, very few people or nobody was really able to, to answer.
I think that's what made for superior generalship on his part.
John:
So I'm gonna ask you a couple of quick questions to end this thing very quickly.
How do you argue with your family at the at the dinner table?
Bret:
They argue with me, principally my 15 year old. I will say something Pontifical or pompous and my 15 year old will, she is not afraid to challenge dad.
And I think actually one of the great strengths of our family is that there's never any sense of hierarchy or decorum when it comes to having a debate or a discussion at that point, we're all equals. And dad is frequently wrong.
John:
So you're telling me you actually walk the walk on this? This is real.
Bret:
If you'll ask, ask my daughter, she will tell you. Many a time I've had to grudgingly concede that she is right and I am wrong. She has a very she has a very forensic way of thinking.
John:
But I don't think you were ever wrong in high school. So I think this is a great evolution for you.
Bret:
No, that's not true. I just pretended that I was never wrong, but it was it was for show.
John:
All right, So let me end with this. And this is the thing that I think the broader audience in the country is actually very worried about is what's gonna bring us as a society back to the table to have thoughtful, intelligent arguments so that we can start to innovate again, both socially and business and everywhere else.
How do we get people back to the table?
Bret:
Look, I don't think things are anywhere near as bad as we make them out to be. For the most part, life goes on, right? I mean, here we are. And many people, sometimes including me, have very grave reservations about policy making, the manner of policy making. And yet somehow I went about my Business Today and I got my Starbucks and walked my dog and had great relationships with colleagues or, you know, interactions with colleagues who disagree with me on all kinds of things.
We're better than we, we tell ourselves that, you know let me offer this thought. Maybe it's a closer. You know, an important difference between an authoritarian system like China's and an open society like ours is that authoritarians show their strengths and they hide their weaknesses. They even hide their weaknesses from themselves. Democratic societies are the opposite. We're constantly talking about our weaknesses to the point that we mask our own strengths from ourselves.
So, you know, we're in a period of American pessimism. We have been for a while. Another period of American pessimism was the 1970s. Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation.
And yet that was the period in which Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Larry Ellison and a bunch of guys nobody had ever heard of were innovating the 21st century economy 25 years ahead of the 21st century itself.
You look at China today and you can see formidable military power and fearsome discipline at their party congresses. And what you never hear about is the incredibly high rates of youth unemployment.
You never see the empty cities of apartment buildings or complexes that were built at huge expense and now are dormant. You never see the discontent that people feel in their everyday life because they would never admit it to a foreigner or even to a neighbor.
So democracies, because we are focused on our weaknesses, we forget that we are more resilient than we forget how resilient we are. And also by virtue of focusing on our weaknesses, we're trying to address them. I mean, it's a good thing we're talking about. Like, how can we have more civil dialogue? How can we bring more viewpoint diversity to campuses? What do we need to do to adjust so that the parties are more In Sync with with people?
Those are gonna be the virtues that are going to keep America strong, I think, in the long run from through the rest of the century. Whereas other systems that seem so much more fearsome are also very brittle and brittle systems crack and crumble.
So I am not, I mean, I'm always worried, and but I think there's a paradox to pessimism. The pessimist by looking at where he plants his every foot is less likely to stumble than the optimist with his head in the air.
John:
So some guidance and some optimism, which is shocking to me, from Bret Stephens. And thank you so much for spending time with us at The Impact Exchanges has been fantastic.
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