I never knew what irenic meant until yesterday. According to dictionary.com, it means “Promoting peace; conciliatory.” If I recall Walter Ong right, he’s concerned that our culture is becoming too irenic. That is, we are too concerned with being conciliatory. This also reminds me of Lance Olsen’s book Girl Imagined by Chance, in which the wife expresses concern:
What if the critics are right, Kysha wonders beside you, her tone easing into something you have never heard from her before, something suddenly taut and authentic, and the self-esteem movement is not only goofy but hazardous?
How so? you ask, watching the plane gaining speed.
What if inflated self-esteem – the kind that comes not from actual achievement but from teachers and parents drumming into kids how great they are – triggers narcissism instead of self-worth?
What if the result of the self-esteem movement isn’t a child who applauds him or herself healthfully, but one who stews with hostility and aggression against the world for lying to him or her repeatedly?
Of course, this connection is only tangential. What is the point here? I think it’s that we’ve become too concerned with irenicism (?), that we focus too much on dispelling conflict. Is there conflict within us? Dismiss it, tell our children it’s alright and that there shouldn’t be inner turmoil; instead we should be happy. Is there conflict between us? Ignore it, smooth it over, do something so that it doesn’t exist.
Does the argument sound too harsh because it has the word “argue” in it? Cry out that an argument is wrong, that instead we should be putting out ideas for others to listen to (which is, I believe, a noble attempt), but still forgetting that why should it be wrong to argue?
I guess, it boils down to the question: Is it wrong/violent/aggressive to want to persuade someone, in effect, to want to change them?
Just to check in with “anecdotal evidence”:
I used to feel that arguing was a sort of sport: you could really get into it with another person and as long as you don’t get personal, you could really dig into something through argument. But somewhere along the way, I realized that arguing in such a way with friends meant, after a very short time, that you don’t have any friends, especially if you play the devil’s advocate and really make another person hash out an idea beyond the “received wisdom” stage.
It’s as if we’ve somehow arrived, as a culture, to the point where to argue at all is only what you do when you don’t get along. If you don’t agree with one another, you’re enemies. Or, the fact that you disagree on some fundamental point is a character issue, not an intellectual issue. I’ve a friend who said, “At least I’ve never slept with a republican.” Heh.
But, really, this is just in the social world of friends and acquaintences. In the business world (say), arguing and disputing is the way to find out what to do next, to make plans. The thing is, the business world is also a social world. You can be dead right about some issue but if you argue about it, you won’t get anywhere. You have to persuade, be persistent yet nice, craft multimedia presentations, add some wavy-hand connection to generating revenue streams or cutting costs, do lots of extra work to ease people almost without their knowing it to align with your direction, etc, etc.
I don’t know. It’s all kind of strange. I’m betting that what we read about the Greeks is about the top few people who had all the money and power and disputed in senates and assemblies and came up with a ritualized way to deal with conflict: ie, politics. Much better to argue and verbally assault, cajole, persuade, etc, than to actually spend your money on mercenaries and kill people. Bad for business. Then again, like Caesar, it always helps to have a couple of legions backing up your silver tongue. I know I agree with whatever someone says if they’ve a knife at my gut.
All wrap up this ramble with: My gut tells me that no one is ever really convinced by an argument. Rather, they might come to trust the one who is making the argument because of the way they’re making it, or the choices the make as evidence, etc. So, maybe this hooks up to what you were quoting earlier about “display” rather than “contest”. But display to whom? Who finally decides if someone has won?
So maybe argument is aggressive, just not as aggressive as the alternatives, or, perhaps, as damaging.
Conflict management?
Well, thankfully I don’t have to write a paper and come to any conclusion, because this space is messy! đ
While Ong does note that in many ways we’ve moved to a more irenic, less agonistic cultureââŹâhe’s particularly referring to educationââŹâI wouldn’t say that he’s “concerned” over it. He’s noting a cultural shift. As Jesuit priest, Ong saw his role as that of describing God’s ongoing creation as we understand it at the time he was writing (with the belief that divine revelation is an ongoing process). It’s important to realize this because Ong isn’t lamenting change (whether it’s a shift from agonistic to irenic discourse or from orality to literacy) but describing and contextualizing what we know (that is, the past).
Thanks, John. Man, I haven’t thought about Ong in a while.