The Thing About Principles

Principle 1

As discussed in my introductory dispatch, I plan to group my posts into several different categories. Most will fall under Dispatches, the regular topical articles that form the backbone of this Substack.

This post begins the category of Principles, an ongoing series of articles in which I will articulate a set of principles concerning life in general and civic conversation in particular.

As I discuss in On My Agenda, I feel that modern civic discourse suffers from serious flaws. There’s no beneficial top-down source of control that can correct these flaws; such improvement can only made individually, incrementally, as participants alter and adjust their own behaviors to make discourse more productive. I hope that this and other principles will serve as topics of consideration and conversation that may aid in that evolutionary process.

In one (hilarious) interaction on the TV show “Seinfeld,” Jerry goes to a car rental agency only to find that they don’t have the car he reserved. After he berates the agent, she claims that her company knows how to keep reservations. Jerry disagrees, following with this trenchant observation:

You know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation: the holding.

The same sentiment applies to principles, whether held by me or anyone else: it’s easy to have principles; it’s much harder to uphold principles. If I am truly to have a principle, it must be much more than a notion, an idea, or an intention, but rather an active force in my life that alters my thoughts, words, and actions in some constructive way. More formally, I give you:

Principle 1: Principles impel and restrain.

To be more verbose, a true, effective principle must at times cause us to think, say, or do beneficial things that may not be natural or immediately desirable to us. And at other times it must prevent us from thinking, saying, or doing inappropriate things that we very much want to do.

In the realm of public discourse, I may want to win some argument or convince people that something is true, but to achieve that, I can’t withhold contradictory evidence—a principle of fairness and intellectual integrity requires me to be honest in including everything that’s relevant, even if it weakens my case. And similarly, if someone else on “the other side” (whatever that means) says something that’s true or makes a good point, I may want to undermine them using an ad hominem attack or verbal diversion, but the same principle would require me not to do so.

My thinking here rests on self-understanding that I assume applies equally to every other human being: I’m fallible, I’m weak, I’m tempted at times to take the easy or expedient or selfish way. If that weren’t the case, I might act well and wisely without principles, but as it is, I need those principles to impel and restrain me where necessary.

From the small amount of civic discourse and press coverage I encounter, I worry that principles aren’t generally used in this way. Far too often, it seems to me, writers and commentators use their own principles as external means of judging others’ behaviors, without necessarily abiding too carefully by those same principles themselves (which of course represents one kind of hypocrisy).

By articulating this and other principles, I hope to achieve two outcomes. Principles held in private are much easier to compromise, so by sharing these, which apply first and foremost to me, I hope to be held more accountable for upholding them, and to be forced to be honest when I fail to do so. And, as I mentioned at the outset, I hope that these principles will give you, my reader, inspiration that may influence your own participation in the marketplace of ideas. By such small changes, perhaps, the nature of discourse in America may slowly itself improve.