Day: August 15, 2025

The following is based on a keynote address delivered by the author to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association on March 27, 2025.

It is not a coincidence that the emptiness and aridity of so much of our era’s cultural and intellectual life comes at a moment when the arts and practices of conversation have become all but extinct. To be sure, people have not stopped talking to one another, even if they now often mistake an exchange of text messages, sent and received hunched over a tiny screen, as “talking,” and seem to prefer restaurants in which attempts at conversation end up like the discourse of platoon sergeants, shouted over the dining room’s racket. But a copious volume of words being exchanged does not translate into that thing called conversation. Particularly in an era in which openness and candor, even between friends, can prove to be dangerous in the long run.

A great deal has been said and written of late about free speech: whether it is even possible, whether it has intrinsic limits, whether it is inherently biased for or against certain groups, or whether it might be more injurious than beneficial to the well-being of a community. These questions all deserve airing. But I think most of us would agree that a greater degree of commitment to freedom of speech on our campuses and in our public life would be a salutary improvement over the walking-on-eggshells environment that we’ve had to endure for far too many years.

But what would be far better is a commitment to the kind of mutuality and breadth that the term “free conversation” implies. Particularly if Michael Oakeshott is right that conversation, as opposed to mere utterance, is such an important feature of our very humanity.

Oakeshott’s Conversation

So much of what Oakeshott valued is prefigured and modeled by that uniquely human activity, which he perhaps most famously referred to as “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” It is in conversation that “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without a “symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” And perhaps most remarkably, even audaciously, he contended that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.”

What might we learn from him today, to help us in the work of restoring and reorienting ourselves?

Well, first of all, we can learn that what he called “the conversation of mankind” in his great essay on the voice of poetry is not merely a transitional state to which we have to accommodate ourselves temporarily, until a fuller consensus about all things, presumably grounded in science, can be arrived at. No, it is the human condition, at least the condition of civilized men and women. Our participation in that conversation is an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant and provisional accommodation to an imperfect world.

There is a paradox here. Our participation in a common life is what makes it possible for us to converse, while our differences are what make our conversations worth having. And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. (Hence the term “free conversation” is a redundancy.) It is, as Oakeshott says in the “Voice” essay, and in other places as well, “not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit.”

The concept of “conversation” and its central place in the life of civilized human beings suggest to me some practical considerations that can be drawn from Oakeshott for the betterment of American life. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. A fully reciprocal conversation implies a certain propinquity and stability, and containment, rather like the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed, of medieval lore. It fits well with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the local, which would be those kinds of communities whose scale can accommodate the possibility of conversation, and whose stability with reference to “place” makes those conversations rooted and distinctive. (The very etymology of the word, conversation, goes back to the Latin conversari, “to live with, and keep company with.”) In other words, the voice of Oakeshott ought to pull us back toward a renewed emphasis upon Burkean themes of local patriotism, as opposed to national and universalistic sources of identity, and toward the preservation of smaller-scale and local forms of association.

So that is one possible gift of Oakeshott’s emphasis upon the centrality of conversation. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is, I think absolutely central to Oakeshott. And that is a release from the burden of purposefulness, from “the rage to reform,” as Oakeshott calls it, the burden that the predominance of the rationalist disposition, and of the enterprise associations through which it is expressed, including the regulatory state, imposes upon us. This release would be akin to the idea of the “usefulness of uselessness” or to the interesting parallel that has been drawn between Oakeshott’s insights and Johan Huizinga’s portrait of homo ludens, of man’s capacity for play as one of the necessary conditions for the development of human culture.

Oakestott warned, “a university will have ceased to exist” when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”

I would put it even more strongly, that there is something barbarous and inhuman about a mode of existence in which one never allows oneself to repose in satisfaction and gratitude for what one has, or for the things one has been given by and in and through the conditions of one’s mere existence, but must ceaselessly seek to innovate, to grade it, evaluate it, improve it, reform it, remake it, perfect it. A philosophy that fails to resist that relentlessly instrumentalizing tendency is all too likely to succumb to it in one way or another, perhaps by emphasizing the degree to which the person is or can be self-made, thereby allowing the supposed primacy of the will to tyrannize over all other aspects of existence. Think of William Ernest Henley’s triumphant proclamation: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” The greatest of Rationalism’s illusions is precisely this illusion of mastery, an illusion whose rabid and single-minded pursuit is unable to produce either success or happiness. How much more humane is Oakeshott’s untriumphant but sweet description of poetry’s power to release us, and enchant us, with “a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” A release from the burden of purposefulness.

Speech, Expression, and Conversation

What about a renewed commitment to free speech, in our culture and in our colleges? There I would be a bit more equivocal in my judgment, seeing such freedom as necessary but not sufficient. Necessary, because free speech is one of the chief ways that we test for the truth of our assertions. The most important defenses of free speech have never been the ones that assert that the truth is relative or unknowable or personal or tribal. Instead, they are the ones, such as John Milton’s great Areopagitica, that praise the refining fire of contrary opinions as the best way to complete the incompleteness of our knowledge. If the COVID years taught us anything, they taught us that we cannot allow ourselves to become mindlessly deferential to the putatively superior wisdom of censors and anointed experts to determine the truth for us.

But the restoration of free speech, and of the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails undergraduate education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it is also something more than that. It is a community of shared knowledge and memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present, as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that accumulated body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. That is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, and forms the basis of a rich and enduring common life.

Oakeshott’s vision of the university as “a place of learning” presumes such commonality as the necessary basis for the proliferation of a multitude of conversations—and the richer the commonality, the deeper and more varied and adventurous the conversations can be. But on the other hand, he warned, “a university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research,” when teaching has become “mere instruction,” and when students come “with no understanding of the manners of conversation,” but desire only “a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.” Is that not where we are now, for the most part … and that only on a good day?

It is here that I must regretfully express a significant disagreement with the Chicago Principles, so named because they were propounded at and promulgated by the University of Chicago, under the courageous leadership of its then-president, the late Robert Zimmer. I honor Dr. Zimmer’s memory and achievement, and I think he did a great deal of good in providing a text that over a hundred institutions have been able to rally around, to reassert the university’s fundamental commitment to free inquiry.

And yet the Chicago Principles leave an important problem unaddressed, and they compound that problem precisely by their failure to address it.

You may recall that the document is called the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression” … not of “Free Speech” (or not, for that matter, of “Freedom of Inquiry” or “Freedom of Conscience”). This is not an unimportant difference, although the text of the report also employs “speech” instead of “expression” in multiple instances, as if there were absolutely no difference between them.

Let me add that the Chicago Principles are not unique in emphasizing “expression” rather than “speech.” The Woodward Report, published in December 1974 by a committee at Yale headed by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward and still one of the best such guides to the virtues of academic freedom, also uses the same language. Its official title is the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale.”

In neither of these two influential documents is attention given to any difference of meaning between “speech” and “expression.”

There are consequences to such semantic slippage, particularly if it is conscious and deliberate. The ultimate justification for free speech is inseparable from the fact that it is speech that we are allowing to be free.

By saying it this way, I mean that speech, discursive language—what the ancient Greeks called logos—has a special dignity. It is the human gift par excellence. It is the medium through which we engage in rational deliberation, the way that we work things out together, solve problems, state and apply moral principles, or principles of action. We use it to map the battle plans that we will employ in the conduct of our lives. It is the means by which we are able to be “political animals” in the way that Aristotle describes us—not just animals that live together, but animals that have the capacity to deliberate together on questions of the common good.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—staged screaming, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, flag-burning, taking a knee—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech.

Animals share with us a capacity for expression of pain and pleasure, but not a capacity for speaking with analytical cogency about those things, holding them out at arm’s length, so to speak; describing them with the requisite precision, making judgments of value among them, and incorporating those judgments into the life of a human community. In fact, Aristotle is saying that it is our capacity for “partnership in these things” that makes a community possible. We might add that it is what makes conversation possible too.

Speech occupies a middle ground between thought and action, a sort of buffer zone in which we can consider, together, with abstract detachment, different courses of action, prior to acting upon one of them. The whole idea of allowing speech to be free depends upon its being securely situated in and mostly confined to this middle transitional zone. (Speech that represents a “clear and present danger” is proscribed precisely because it violates this fundamental understanding.)

We engage in this sort of provisional thinking all the time, as when we deliberate together in considering competing scenarios, whether Plan A is better than Plan B, which plan will have what consequences, and which simulation or imaginative projection is likely to provide us with a more accurate reading of future events, and thus a more effective plan of action. In a truly deliberative environment, individuals collaborate with one another in thinking through their plans, both in constructing them and then in evaluating them, implementing them, and considering together their moral implications. It is the singular virtue of speech that it makes possible such activity in the middle zone between thought and action.

This understanding of speech as a refuge for provisionality and reflection runs in remarkably close parallel to Oakeshott’s beautiful description of the university as a place offering “the gift of an interval,” as he put it in his 1949 essay on “The Universities”: a place in which one could “put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place.” University could be “an interval” in which “a man might refuse to commit himself,” in which he might “taste the mystery” of life “without the necessity of at once seeking a solution” for it. It provides us an opportunity to “practice that suspended judgment of which the ‘neutrality’ of liberalism is so pale a shadow.” And all of this, he concludes, happens not in a vacuum, but “surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization.”

Expression, the Opposite of Speech

Expression, however, is something distinct from speech. It is a more or less romantic term, an emotion-laden term, referring to forms of communication that may or may not be verbal, and may or may not be part of a deliberative process. Its romantic quality is reflected in the word’s etymology, deriving from the Latin exprimere, “to press out.”

Expressive liberty tends to be a one-way thing, a monologue, a cry of the heart, like the Sammy Davis Jr. song “I Gotta Be Me,” not a contribution to collective deliberation about truth. We sit back and listen to the monologue, like moviegoers in a darkened theater. We are spectators. The experience can be enthralling, moving, powerful, passionate. Shocking, even. If it is a great work of art we are confronted with, we might be uplifted, or feel our spirit crushed, by what we see. Perhaps our thinking about some social issue or historical personage has changed. If it is inferior art, perhaps not.

But either way, there is no room for us to answer it, to engage it, or to offer an alternative view in counterpoint. Expression qua expression is all about “my voice,” “my truth,” “my narrative”—and it must be heard! And in some sense, it must be deferred to or ignored.

One could write an interesting history of how this blurring of concepts came about in our general culture, how two things that were so clearly distinct a mere century ago have become so conjoined in our thinking as to be indistinguishable. But that is where we are now. “Words are violence!” shouted the student protesters at Middlebury College in 2017, borrowing the words of the novelist Toni Morrison to shout down their campus visitor, the sociologist Charles Murray, and threaten him and his host with violence. As if violence could also be an expressive act, a form of language. Such actions collapse all meaningful distinctions, and undermine the possibility of a college in which speech can serve its highest good, and provide its students with that gift of an interval, in which the high art of conversation can be enjoyed and cultivated.

But often the point of using an expressive gesture or image rather than a verbal declaration is precisely the imprecision that expressive symbolism permits. Words can generally be answered and contested and clarified and amended, in dialogue and conversation and debate with others using words. But the gesture has a powerful finality about it, an unanswerable quality—or it can only be answered by another unanswerable gesture: you insult me, and I insult you back; you block me, and I block you. This is the kind of gestural misanthropy in which our era increasingly specializes. It is not a good model for democratic deliberation, let alone conversation.

Much of the armory of present-day political protest is about various forms of nonnegotiable expression—taped-up mouths, armies of Atwood-inspired handmaids, staged screaming, audiences that wheel around and turn their backs on invited speakers or drown them out with chants, vandals who throw tomato soup at Van Gogh paintings, morons who glue themselves to valuable objects, flag-burning, taking a knee, kick-boxing Congresswomen as performance art—on and on, gestures and imagery treated as if they were speech. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have been indulgent in furthering this trend. I could multiply examples or emphasize that this is a practice of all political parties and persuasions, but the point is that we have come to accept passively the notion that these expressive acts are functionally equivalent to more conventional forms of speech.

Learning suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence.

But they are not. In fact, these examples represent the opposite of speech. Rightly understood, speech, logos, always entails the possibility of an answer, of interlocution, of dialogue, of engagement, of argument—in short, of talking back. Or, to put it more optimistically, of conversation. Instead of offering the opportunity for further exchange, such examples seek to foreclose the possibility with utter finality.

When we equate speech with expression, we deny or diminish the unique property of speech: as the medium of deliberation, of the interval, as that middle ground between thought and action, and as the instrument by which we are given an interim space, to seek and test the truth.

A Wild Flower Among the Wheat

Conversation is a term that defines the essential character of our complex and unique civilization, the civilization of the West. I believe it was Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the University of Chicago’s most influential presidents, who popularized the idea that the Western intellectual tradition was best understood as a “great conversation.” It is a way of talking about the West that may sound a bit hackneyed by now. But also may be, like Wagner’s music, better than it sounds.

For one thing, it pays attention to the fact that the thinkers of the past and their accomplishments do not die, but linger on in the present: as exemplars to be emulated, as foils to do battle against, or simply as sources of ideas and metaphors and models, but above all as thinkers who need to be responded to, and can be responded to. In that sense, Plato’s work is as alive today as it has ever been, as much a part of the activity of philosophy, and you can substitute a dozen other names for his, and the statement would be just as true.

But there is a more fundamental way in which the West can be thought of as a long conversation. Its two most important constituent elements are called by the names Athens and Jerusalem, as expressed by the Church father Tertullian, and they were and are rivals. Athens stands for the spirit of free rational inquiry undertaken in a fully intelligible world whose contours and dimensions are fully commensurable with our powers of understanding. Jerusalem stands for the spirit of piety, which concedes the weakness of human understanding and the inadequacy of unaided human nature, and insists that we are utterly reliant for guidance upon the few ways in which God has revealed Himself and His will to us, and that such reliance constitutes a wisdom superior to any ratiocination, since God’s ways are not ours. It is by our faith that we are saved and not by our knowledge; and there is “nothing better than the fear of the Lord … nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord.” 

How to reconcile the two? We haven’t. (Aquinas has perhaps come the closest.) But the conversation between them is in some sense the essential core of Western intellectual history, and the secret of the West’s vitality—a life lived “between two codes.” We would no longer be ourselves, should we become all one or all the other.

I’ve called the relationship a conversation. Some have preferred to call it an antagonism, a great debate, or a warfare between science and religion, or something even more combative or martial. But the proper study of the Western past is more fittingly described by the notion of conversation, as Oakeshott understood conversation: as something that forswears the desire for victory by one side or another, or any similar form of closure, but instead exists for its own sake, recognizing and respecting all the elements in play.

“The pursuit of learning,” he says, is not a race in which the competitors jockey for best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium … we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellent by its conclusion” because in fact “it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.” It thus suspends the ravages of time, allows us to escape for a time—an interval—from the prisonhouse of practice, and into a realm of freedom and delight, freedom from the obligation to earn its keep or otherwise justify its existence. Call it a foretaste of heaven, or a wild flower planted among the wheat. Or a rose in the cross of the present.

We can only hope that the cultural changes that lie ahead of us may not destroy what is left of this aspect of life in the university and more broadly in the republic of letters. I wish I could be more optimistic about that. But one does what one can, and leaves the odds-making to others.