The art of conversation

Edmund Burke once wrote that the age of chivalry is long dead. If, at the turn of the 19th century, contemporary political thinkers and leading government figures thought the glory of chivalric deeds had been long lost, then the status of such a courtly art is not only extinct in our own age, but entirely forgotten.
 A necessary element of the age of chivalry, and the civil society, is that of public discourse. In ancient Rome, Cicero held that deliberative oratory and the art of conversation were paramount to the health and pacificity of the body politic. Conversation models not only cemented private relationships between individuals within society, but expanded out to fortify societal political connections and the maintenance of polity in governance. The themes of integrity, prudence, moderation, decorum, measure and propriety governed this art. Cicero even went so far as to advance rules for good conversation, advising, for example, to not only refrain from interruption, but to be courteous and to never lose one’s temper.
The art of conversation is dead in our own time. Debates over such issues as homosexual marriage, abortion and illegal immigration, to name but a few, more often than not result in nothing but shouting matches filled with ad hominem attacks and weak logic. Long gone are the rules of rhetoric postulated by the thinkers of antiquity. Plato and Socrates have been replaced with an adversarial model extrapolated from a vicious Germanic barbarian heritage.
David Hume expressed the opinion that conversation was an almost sacred, but also improvisatory, practice in which the duty to listen proceeds the right to speak. Too often, individuals refuse to listen to what their fellows have to say, simply casting aside their arguments as “hate speech” or the ravings of a bigot. While one should never hesitate to critically judge the arguments of another, there remains an obligation to give him the opportunity to express those beliefs in the theater of social life.
“Men are emotional beings,” wrote Joseph Addision, an 18th century British essayist, “as well as rational thinkers.” Lest we forget this, let us be sure to never cease to take into account the sincerity of another’s beliefs, no matter how outrageous they might seem. There is Truth, and we are all in search of it.
Choosing not to think, not to regard another as potentially possessing a more enlightened notion of the Truth, but simply casting aside his views as irrelevant or as an offensive abuse of “free speech,” is the ultimate immoral act.