Thought Leaders Blog

Commencement season is by its nature a contemplative time of year. It's as much a celebration as it is a taking stock, a reflection on where we have been and where we are headed.

These last two years have been challenging for us as a nation. We have seen banks fail, the price of gas sky-rocket and fall, and record levels of unemployment. We have also learned more than we ever wanted to learn about torture, the Great Depression, and abuses of executive power and wealth.

But we have been blessed with a new administration -- our first African American president. Whatever your politics, here is a man who is literate, smart, witty, and deeply committed to that phrase that has now become a cliché: 'yes we can.' He is a can-do man, who is also committed to the life of the mind, a president committed to the ideals of a 'deliberative democracy.'

Many have called our new president pragmatic, and perhaps pragmatism, if it is heavily dosed with dialogue, is what the world needs right now. In a New Yorker article following the election of President Obama, George Packer reflected on the idea that 'deliberative democracy,' rather than ideology may be the defining governing philosophy of the Obama administration.

Deliberative democracy appears in Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. It is the idea that through conversation, through dialectical exchange, through talking and listening to each other, we might claw our ways to a truth. We might find a path that no one individually, without benefit of exchange of ideas, might attain. Deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can arise only through public deliberation by the people.

Obama finds inspiration for the notion of deliberative democracy in Lincoln's words. At his first inauguration, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war, Lincoln urged his fellow countrymen, "Think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberatively, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it."

So what does it take to engage in deliberative democracy -- a concept as old as the Greeks who 2,500 years ago gathered in the agora, to debate the issues of their time? In fact, many forms of rhetoric involve us in thinking calmly and well upon whole subjects. Listening to others' points of view and hearing our way into a new truth is a more complicated and better understanding of a truth that we can only approximate.

Pascal says as the circle of knowledge grows, so does the circumference of ignorance. So our learning and knowledge paradoxically makes us more and more ignorant, or at least more aware that all knowledge is incomplete, and in need of deliberation, debate and discussion.

It is that understanding that will compel us, propel us, require us to be diligent in the pursuit of the latest information available in the fields in which we work. This might be the latest intervention or strategy to heal another or the best knowledge that will help another learn and develop.

While our knowledge seeking will benefit from our deliberative thinking and communal problem solving, so will our democracy. NYU Steinhardt's own Jon Zimmerman, professor of the history of education, has said that only 1 percent of his students will become historians, but he knows they ALL will become citizens. And so he "tries to teach the skills that democratic citizenship demands: curiosity, critical thinking and open mindedness."

As we graduate a new class of baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral students, I wonder how they would answer these questions:

As you look back over your years of schooling, can you say that today you are more curious and less certain than when you started?

Are you more likely to engage in deliberative discussion about your ideas?

More likely to critique and interrogate your opinions than simply defend them?

Are you more open to ideas that are different from your own beliefs?

At gatherings, do you seek to sit next to the person most different from you so that you might learn something new?

Do you greet each new person with eager anticipation that this encounter will lead to new knowledge, new ways of thinking?

Are you able to think calmly and well upon the whole subject you have examined?

And are you willing to, as Maria Ranier Rilke enjoins us, to ‘live the question,’ especially those questions for which you have no answer? This is a world that needs all of us to think calmly and well for the good of our democracy and our global society.