Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can re-build a public square worth participating in. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way, and what we stand to lose by taking it too far. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. The pollution of our most urgent conversations with self-interest damages the very causes they are meant to forward. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way-incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We vilify those with whom we disagree, and make bolder claims than we could defend. So, you might wonder why I’m recommending their book in a magazine for Christian ministers. Its authors evince no religious commitments one way or another, and they work from secular premises. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke’s Grandstandingis a work of philosophy informed by psychology.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |