William f buckley firing line youtube

On most issues, I’m clear about where I stand and why, and I used to find it enlight­en­ing to debate informed peo­ple who felt strong­ly about oppos­ing posi­tions.

Some­times we would get each oth­er to budge a lit­tle bit, or—at the very least—sharpen the artic­u­la­tion of our views. These days, I often find myself in echo cham­bers, preach­ing to choirs, and oth­er clichés about epis­temic clo­sure.

It’s a sit­u­a­tion that alarms me, and yet I find even more alarm­ing the lev­els of cyn­i­cism, invec­tive, bad faith, threats, and mis­in­for­ma­tion that per­vade so much par­ti­san debate.

I know I’m not alone in this lament.

What we’ve lost—among oth­er human­ist virtues—is what philoso­phers and rhetori­cians call the “prin­ci­ple of char­i­ty,” gen­er­al­ly defined as mak­ing the clear­est, most intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon