Overview

To Strive, To Seek, To Find explains how an avowedly ethical practice of public dialogue and deliberation can counteract the growing discontent with liberalism and the threat it poses to democratic beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The book describes the form dialogue and deliberation must take. It concludes with an appeal to our felt need to restore a sense of purpose to our life in common. Political conflict in the U.S. has been growing increasingly adversarial and intractable. Opponents agree on almost nothing, not even the most rudimentary facts. People have sorted themselves into ideological tribes whose worldviews are increasingly at odds. Support for democratic ideals and principles, such as tolerance and compromise, are weakening. Much of the public is angry and resentful. Clearly, liberal democracy is under growing stress. It is threatened not from without, but from within - by the very ideas and practices for which it has long been celebrated. Although liberalism in the modern era has improved life greatly for many people (and continues to do so), it is dogged by a nagging question: Is this all there is? Despite the benefits it has bestowed, such as material prosperity, it has left a hunger for shared public conceptions about the purpose of life. A democratic society's way of life is the public expression of an ethical ideal that offers a provisional and evolving answer to this question. Liberalism celebrates a plurality of approaches to life, but it does nothing to encourage reflection on the desirability and acceptability of those approaches. Its highly individualistic, laissez-faire approach to ethics - which almost all of us, from social democrats to libertarians, take for granted - provides little support for our efforts, as individuals and as a society, to reflect on and pursue a meaningful life. Because it treats value (goodness) as a function of personal desire and treats freedom (especially in the guise of rights) as the panacea for all conflicts, liberalism turns the political arena into a kind of market in which groups and individuals compete with each other to determine who gets what, when, and how. It offers no rational way of securing agreement concerning the ethical dilemmas underlying many of the political issues that divide us. This disables and discourages us from deliberating together. As a result, power becomes the only political currency that matters, and liberalism ends up sending the message that we may use any means necessary to achieve our self-chosen ends. Human beings require a persuasive and animating vision of human place and purpose in the great scheme of things. Constructing meaning and purpose requires an ongoing practice of public dialogue and deliberation that helps us ask and answer (even if indirectly) the fundamental question of ethics: How should we live? To Strive, To Seek, To Find explains why we must turn to ethical dialogue and deliberation to restore meaning to our lives in the face of liberalism's failure to support our efforts to explore, generate, and evaluate answers to the questions of human purpose and how we ought to live. It shows how we can do this, and how in the process we can repair our strained civic relationships by resolving, or at least mitigating, the fraught issues that divide us.

Full Product Details

9781726081733

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Michael Briand is a writer and civic communications consultant. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree in ethical and political philosophy from the University of Oxford. He obtained his bachelor's degree in government and psychology from the University of Michigan. This is his second book. Practical Politics: Five Principles for a Community that Works was published in 1999 by the University of Illinois Press.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available