By | Alfred Stallion
Civil discourse is an essential talking tool used throughout history and across societies for a bevy of reasons, from conflict resolution to finding common solutions, so on and so forth. It’s important for societies to resort to such measures if they want to reclaim the civil aspect of their social fabric. There are ultimatums to civil discourse, and very often we have seen them trump the previous and applied to solve conflicts. Means like extremist debate, violent protests, riots, and even war, are all alternatives to the simple solution of civil discourse. Yet, no matter how simple discourse may be, the alternatives are often times pursued instead. However, throughout history, the examples are evident, that even though most societies or governments have opted to pursue those alternatives in pursuit of solving a conflict, the end result has always been a return to civil discourse to reach a final solution. Just look at any war throughout history, after all the carnage, catastrophe, chaos, and destruction, the battling governments usually gather around a round table to discuss a resolution.
And that is the irony in all this, that civil discourse is never NOT pursued, rather, its pursuit is always postponed. Even though its importance and effectiveness can’t be neglected, yet populations and governments barely opt for it as the primary means of conflict resolution. Even if we look around now at the most democratic and diplomatic countries and societies, a lack of civil discourse is strongly present, no matter how much it may see otherwise. A reason why it may not seem that way at first glance is that discourse has been as the ruse, or the veil, to cover up the true intentions and methods of modern-day societal communications and relations. For instance, the ever-so-popular movement and practice of being politically correct is a great example of this. While at face value, being politically correct has some strong attributes, its actual practice and implementation leaves much to be desired and opens up endless aveneus for abuse and corruption. With that being said, being politically correct often hinders the possibility of civil discourse, because, in order to reach a proper resolution, one must be able to truly say what’s on their mind, albeit in a polite and respectful manner.
However, some practices of political correctness have seen the total disregard of honest opinion and replaced them with respectful opinions. The reason why this is controversial is because in order to think one must risk being controversial. This is apparent throughout history, with several examples of free thinkers. Just look back at the many greek philosophers, scholars, scientists, astronomers, and many others that defied the norms of societies to prove their points and findings. If they had succumbed to the shackles of being politically correct then we might not have ever realized that the Earth is in fact truly round, that the Earth orbits the sun and not vice versa, and the many other important and crucial discoveries.
