Thomas Hibbs

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more, discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking political detox, a topic that aligns with Baylor's focus on civil discourse. And we're visiting with Thomas Hibbs. Dr. Hibbs is the J. Newton Rayzor Senior Professor of Philosophy and Dean Emeritus at Baylor University's Honors College. He served as the inaugural dean of the Honors College and was founding director of Baylor in Washington. His research and teaching focuses on moral philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy and public policy. His work has been featured in numerous scholarly journals and popular outlets like the Wall Street Journal, NPR and more. Dr. Hibbs writes op-eds for the Dallas Morning News, including the June column, A Guide for Political Detox, which is going to guide some of our conversation today. But Dr. Hibbs, first, thanks for taking the time to join us and talking about this important topic today.

Thomas Hibbs:
Very glad to be with you, Derek.

Derek Smith:
Well, it's great to visit with you. And as we are approaching October of an election year, boy, there's just a lot to talk about during this time. And you have the benefit of working closely with students who are learning and watching during this time period. So I'm curious, in your classes as you visit with students, I don't know how different this is from other times in your long teaching career, but how often do topics surrounding politics or civil discourse come up?

Thomas Hibbs:
Quite a bit actually. I also run a summer program in DC for Baylor students on religion and social life. And both there and then in my moral philosophy classes, I've explicitly embedded themes around the topic of civil discourse, civic friendship, which shows up when we read a philosopher like Aristotle. He spends an awful lot of time on the topic of friendship, and he spends a good bit of time in that section talking about civic friendship. So I'm interested in engaging the students on these topics, and they're very eager to talk about these issues.

Derek Smith:
I'm curious, I realize sometimes inertia, my natural inertia might lead me to want to sit on the couch. And if I sit on the couch at the end of the long day instead of exercise, I could be less healthy. I think societally, the inertia around political discourse could probably lead us all to be a little flabby if we're not careful, if you will, to use that analogy. How important is it to be purposeful with really anyone, but especially students of this age when I don't know how well this is being modeled elsewhere?

Thomas Hibbs:
Yeah, are a lot of great questions there, Derek. I think you're right that one of the real problems is that in our political discourse, particularly because so much of it happens on social media, in virtual communities, where we're not flesh to flesh meeting with people in person, I think there are real dangers about bad habits that we can develop. It seems to me that in a lot of circles on social media, our default position is that if someone disagrees with me or my group, my position, that the assumption is that they're evil and stupid. And the real problem there is some people are making bad arguments, some people have ill intent, but the bad habit there is, it's a default position. It's where on social media, it's as if we're automatically jumping to that conclusion and it can be really unhealthy.
We also know, and interestingly, I think students I've noticed in the last four or five years. Are much more skeptical about what's happening online and what's happening to them online. They're reading things about possible connections between the rise in mental health problems and excessive time online. They also are quite aware that algorithms are at work. We're not on a neutral site. Algorithms are working on us when we're online, pushing us in certain directions. And if we exhibit a tendency toward an ideological extreme or one of one side or another, the algorithms will push us further.
And what seems to be a completely free activity, we're online, we're controlling it, we're pushing buttons, we're waving our screen for something to disappear or appear, we have the sense that we're in control. But we know more and more that we're getting limited options through the algorithms. And the kinds of intellectual communities we can find ourselves in, can be intellectual and ideological cul-de-sacs that really keep us from engaging with healthy objections to our own positions or complicated, reasonable alternatives to our own position. So I think it really is very important to be deliberate in our habits in political discourse, especially online.

Derek Smith:
Visiting Dr. Thomas Hibbs here on Baylor Connections. And here in just a moment, we're going to talk about a column you wrote in the Dallas Morning News talking about political discourse. But I'm curious, you just touched on one of the obstacles in the way of really being able to critique our own handling of political news and information. Are there any other obstacles that really leap out at you that make it harder or at least make us have to focus a little more purposefully on critically examining our own habits?

Thomas Hibbs:
Yeah, I think this is also a feature of some online interaction. The Brookings institution, which is a sort of center left think-tank in DC, did a study and they published the results, it's called the perception gap, a few years ago. And the perception gap was really interesting. They determined that the people who are most politically active, the most informed you might say about political matters, are the worst judges of people on the other side of the political spectrum. So it tended to be that it was the people who were most strongly liberal or most strongly conservative had the most distorted views of the other side. And it was the people who were sort of liberal or conservative, but not all that active who had more accurate views.
So there's something, it's what you were pointing to earlier about the way we're interacting, it seems like the system is designed in a way to move us to more ideological extremes. And also I think one of the real dangers there is that we develop habits of reducing other people to a sort of ideological litmus test. So if we start out knowing people through ideology, we're unlikely to get to know them in any deeper, richer way. Whereas we know we all have some friends whom we have political disagreements with, but who were our friends for various other and sometimes really important and deep reasons.
We understand most of the time if our friendship doesn't become unhealthy, we understand our political differences with them in a larger human context. And I think one of the dangers about our political life now is the tendency to reduce human persons to an ideological checklist. And that makes it very difficult to connect up or even to see deeper things in individual lives and in communities, where we might have an awful lot in common if we step back for the moment from the hot button ideological issue of the day.

Derek Smith:
Well, Dr. Hibbs, as we talk about these action points, if you will, I want to ask you, one of them has a specific faith component. The others, I think most of what you write about in this specific column are applicable to people of any faith or no faith at all. But I'm curious, we're here at a Christian university like Baylor University, when you view this through the lens of a Christian and treating others in a Christ-like manner, is there anything you want to add to what we're about to talk about, especially when we think about the way that Christianity sometimes becomes embedded within the broader public discourse in ways we can't all control?

Thomas Hibbs:
Yeah, this is a complicated issue. My interaction with students has, particularly over the last few years, young Christian students or students who are seeking, spiritually unsure of where they're going to wind up where they are right now, and this is both on the right and the left, they're deeply suspicious of the instrumentalization of religion for political purposes. And of course our faith ought to bear upon our politics in some way, and at times in very important and explicit ways perhaps. But the instrumentalization that often goes on in the culture of the manipulation of religion for political ends, I think in the end, this is something that is undermining our... I say our as my generation, older folks, our generation's interaction with younger people, I think it is leading to a kind of indifference to religion amongst many young people, that they see it as increasingly a political tool.
So that's a problem that I think we need to be aware of. I also think that we have deep resources in our various denominations as Christians, as do Muslims, and Jews, and members of other religious communities. And I think we have things in those histories and in our sources that we have to own up to where there've been disorders or evil things perpetrated by religious people under the guise of religion. But I think we also have deep resources that we can draw upon. Let me give you just one example on this. There's a tendency today in the political culture to want to emphasize either we've all got to be unified or we've really got to talk endlessly about our differences.
And it seems to me that the Christian tradition, just one example from Pentecost, which is a kind of reversal of the Tower of Babel where the curse that God puts us upon us there is that we speak different languages. And at Pentecost, of course, full of the spirit, the apostles come out and preach, and everybody who's there hears the gospel message in their own language. And so there's a kind of diversity within unity there. And Pentecost doesn't go back to one language. It's multiple languages, differences. And then when John has the vision of heaven in Revelation, "I see a people of every nation, race, and tongue," we have ways of talking about difference in unity that doesn't say it's all got to be unity or it's all got to be different. Complicated issues there. But I like to talk to students about this, this language that we have that we can bring to bear upon contemporary cultural disagreements and dead ends really, in the culture.

Derek Smith:
Things that unite us that go beyond the obvious.

Thomas Hibbs:
Yes.

Derek Smith:
Visiting with Dr. Thomas Hibbs here on Baylor Connections, the J. Newton Rayzor Senior Professor of Philosophy and Dean Emeritus in Baylor's Honors College. Dr. Hibbs, the column we're talking about a guide to political detox. Could you tell us a little bit of the impetus for that as we dive in?

Thomas Hibbs:
Well, I mean, I think lots of us have the experience individually or we know people or in our communities of just being exhausted by our politics, and yet feeling like there are really important issues involved. And we seem to think that every election is going to be an all or nothing kind of event for one side or another. And that of course leads to a further escalation of hostilities. And those threats which might've been fictional originally then become real, because the more fearful both sides become, the more they want to push to have absolute control. And even apart from that kind of dynamic, there is just the sense of exhaustion and of a kind of addiction, we know that the online addiction, particularly as it's connected to political issues, is real for lots of people. So I was working off of some things that have been written elsewhere recently and just put together a short piece with some suggestions about how to engage in a kind of personal or communal detox from politics.

Derek Smith:
Now, when we talk detox, are we talking detachment or is it something different than that?

Thomas Hibbs:
Well, we're talking about occasional detachment at least. We've got to exercise. Too much of anything is not healthy. So there is a kind of detachment. But it's not a giving up on politics that would be advocated here. It's not a detachment from politics. It's giving yourself some perspective and recovering a healthy way of thinking and interacting with others, that then enables you to reengage with politics in a way that doesn't destroy you as a human being, and also might help us to elevate what we're doing in the political sphere.

Derek Smith:
Well, let me read these five points, then we can go through them one by one, and love to hear your thoughts. So those points are practice healthy news consumption, criticize ideological teammates and commend foes, pursue silence and solitude, cultivate apolitical friendships, and focus on the way that scripture confounds politics. So take us inside number one if you would, practicing healthy news consumption, what that looks like.

Thomas Hibbs:
I think some of that involves a kind of detachment. You don't want to be on news sites, and you don't particularly don't want to just be on really short form things like TikTok or X all the time. I think you need to mix up long form where your attention span is actually challenged a little bit, you think a little bit more deeply about the issues, along with the shorter form. I try to read multiple. I mean, I'm checking things like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the Washington Post where I grew up, and the Dallas Morning News, which is a more local paper. I'm reading Politico's morning update on what's going on in DC and politics. And then I might take a look at what National Review is covering. I really force myself to try and look at... can't say that I always succeed at this, but I really try to have multiple voices coming at me each morning when I open up and start to see what people are saying about various things.
So I think mixing in long form with short commentary, and then having a breadth where you're actually seeing, huh, there's an argument here. I'm always interested, and this actually goes into the second point. I'm always interested if I find something in the New York Times where somebody who's really respected on the liberal side of things, is suddenly raising doubts about some things that are common and popular on the left. And conversely, if I find somebody on the right who's being critical of certain things that are going on on the right, my ears perk up now.
I'm exhausted by the very predictable opening line you know where this is going. And it's not even worth reading in a way. Some people are so bright that even if you know where they're going as writers, it's worth reading them. But an awful lot of it is so predictable and it's preaching to the choir on one side or another. So I'm really intrigued by people whom I see, and that's the second point, who are criticizing their teammates, and then sometimes praising opponents. And that sort of generosity, healthy self-critique and generosity toward others, I think is something that's increasingly rare, and it's to be cultivated and appreciated when and where it shows up.

Derek Smith:
So if that's the first two points, healthy news consumption, criticizing ideological teammates and commending foes. The next one, a good discipline, pursuing silence and solitude. And what's a healthy way to approach that when you're able to find it?

Thomas Hibbs:
So I think the toxic politics is also connected, I think, to what we know from surveys, not just that despising political opponents is way up from what it was 20 years ago. The number of Americans who say they hate members of the other political party, has just about tripled in the last 40 years. It's also the case that as Americans, we report even before COVID, during COVID, after COVID, we report increasingly high levels of isolation, loneliness, lack of belonging.
And so I'll take the next two again together, solitude and then friendships. It seems to me that we need to develop healthier patterns of silence, that we can be alone but not be silent, particularly if we're constantly on screens or if we're letting our minds race. So developing habits of attention, and being receptive, and being quiet, whether it's in nature or just in one's home, it can give a kind of peace to the soul, a kind of stillness, and it can make us see things and hear things in our own heart and in others that we would otherwise miss if we're frantically trying to respond to something that's just been posted five seconds ago, and we've got to beat everybody else out with our response.
And then I think it's also solitude, cultivating a kind of healthy sense of being alone and quiet. But we really need to cultivate deep friendships. And apolitical might not be the right way of putting it, but friendships that are based, as we were talking, as I was saying earlier, friendships that are based on something more and something deeper than mere politics. And real friendships are always anchored in something much deeper than politics.
So also, I think what helps there is I tell students, if you've got friends, and I actually did a survey with students not long ago, and they all said to me, they have friends who differ significantly from them politically. I think that's a really healthy sign. I always thought when I was in administration at Baylor and then at Boston College before that, I always thought that I wanted, in my leadership group, I always got worried if everybody sort of, they're all well-intentioned, working hard. But if everybody agreed on all the basic stuff and we had some crisis we had to respond to, I was always sitting there thinking, we're going to miss something because we all think the same way.
And so I always wanted just for the health of the conversation, to have somebody in there who felt like they could honestly disagree. They were coming at it, two people, three people, however many, but where you got a kind of healthy... you shared a fundamental commitment to the good of students and of the shared vision of the university. And I think this is true for friendships. I have learned a lot from friendships I have at Baylor from people with whom I disagree about X, Y or Z. And now with some of them, I think Y because they persuaded me that I was wrong about something over years of friendship. And so I think that openness to being persuaded by friends and then having those friendships anchored in something deeper than the political battle of the moment.

Derek Smith:
Is there a tie there almost with the healthy news consumption? Almost sounds like you're describing like a balanced diet of inputs could yield better outputs.

Thomas Hibbs:
I think that's right. And we know that about our friendships and we know that about leadership. If we've got leaders who just have yes men and yes women around them, that's not a healthy situation. And it's not healthy for us in our friendships to have people who simply mimic what we already think.

Derek Smith:
Next one, the final point you have is one that has a strong faith component, focusing on the way that scripture confounds politics.

Thomas Hibbs:
It seems to me that the good is fractured in our lives. It's fractured in our personal lives. It's certainly fractured in our political lives. And I can look at both political parties and say, huh, there's something over here that I think really fits with how I see things as a Christian. And there's something on this other side now we got to prioritize. But I think just as it's important to criticize teammates and commend foes, I think it's important to do a deep dive into scripture and/or the sources in our denomination, and see the way those resources actually could help us reorient our politics. I mentioned already the example of how we think about difference and unity. How do we think about the poor? How do we think about the way in which we treat people at the margins of society? How do we think about effectively meeting their needs?
It seems to me that scripture speaks in a way that doesn't, at least from my perspective, map neatly onto either or a summing of the best things in both political parties. There's much deeper resources there for us to draw upon. And one of the problems is I think that with why we're so depressed is that our political discourse is pretty toxic, and we're politicizing everything. And if we don't have perspectives outside of politics that at least for the moment, free us up from the burden of the immediacy of the political battle, then our politics becomes increasingly shallow because we lose the resources to bring into the political order that might enliven it and elevate it.
And so developing a rich, deep meditation on scripture for its own sake and for the love of God and God's people, and then going from there into politics, and not attempting to make instant political capital out of theology, or religion, or scripture, seems to me that that's a really important thing for us to do. Again, it's for the sake of a kind of... partly, at least for the sake of a kind of political re-engagement. But we've got to spend a lot of time just being formed by those sources, particularly by scripture.

Derek Smith:
Dr. Hibbs, I talked to one of your colleagues a while back in the Honors College, Jason Witt, who said he talked to students about ordering their loves. Is there a little bit of that, what we're talking about here as we think about politics, it's important, but it's got a proper place?

Thomas Hibbs:
Yeah, Jason's brilliant on this stuff. He does great work with our undergraduate students in the Honors residential college, real witness in his own life to the students. I think that's right. And I think we need to do as adults, we've really done lots of a disservice to this generation by over-monitoring them from preschool on up, by getting them to think that every test is the test that's going to either make or break them in their success.
And I also think we haven't modeled civil... even in the university, how often do students see faculty publicly disagreeing with one another? We increasingly have panels at Baylor where we're attempting to do this model, civil, rational, serious, and sometimes heated disagreement about really difficult matters. But if we don't model that for our students, they aren't going to know what we're talking about. And what Jason says about the order of our loves, what comes first, what comes second, and about the possibility that our deepest loves might give us the grounds for some sort of unity and conversation across ideological, denominational, partisan divides. I think that's the hope. Is that ultimately there could be justice and accountability, but also reconciliation and unity.

Derek Smith:
Well, Dr. Hibbs, thank you for sharing these. And as we head into the final couple of minutes, I'm going to ask you a question. And I'm assuming maybe the answer is me, but also you and also our listeners. We talk about this political environment and how imperfect it can be. Who is ultimately responsible that, or who's ultimately responsible for fixing that? Is the answer each of us?

Thomas Hibbs:
Yeah. Here's the sobering part of this, I think though, I think it is. And I think partly we need to do this to keep ourselves from being driven crazy by the politics. We need the detox for that, and then we need it for our families and our communities. I don't think we could implement all of these as individuals and in our churches. All these things by themselves are not going to solve all of our political problems. Some of them are structural. Some of them are the fact that we seem to think that everything that's important about politics now happens in Washington DC and increasingly only in the Supreme Court. I mean, that's not healthy for us.
Congress is not functioning. It's not doing the work that it is called to do by our constitution and by our history. The influence of money and the way in which the media seems increasingly along ideological extremes. These are deep, structural problems in our politics. They are not going to be solved overnight by us implementing all of these strategies that we've just discussed. But maybe they can help us see some of those problems more clearly, because some of those are long-term structural problems that have arisen over decades, and there's no quick fix. And it also might give us a chance to bring resources into the political order that will, to some extent, make our interactions more healthy and less as they are increasingly prone to the resort to violence.

Derek Smith:
Well, Dr. Hibbs, appreciate your time. We'll look forward to hearing more from you and your colleagues about this important topic. And just look forward to the ways that Baylor, as you mentioned, creating these opportunities for students to hear people disagree on important issues civilly. We'll look forward to seeing those in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us, and we look forward to what you have in store for us in the future.

Thomas Hibbs:
Thank you, Derek. Really nice to be with you.

Derek Smith:
Thank you. Dr. Thomas Hibbs, the J. Newton Rayzor Senior Professor of Philosophy and Dean Emeritus of the Honors College at Baylor, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. Reminder, you can hear this in other programs online at baylor.edu/connections. You can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.