Why debates no longer matter in America’s spiritual and political battle

The consequences of the Trump-Harris debate will be endlessly debated (until they’re not) — but who dares bother to talk about what the heck that thing actually was?

You don’t have to believe the affair was stacked, rigged, slanted, or otherwise arranged against Trump, whether the earrings were earpieces or the “moderators” shared besties with Harris. The word-cloud candidate doesn’t have to be a literal human face stretched over a Terminator bot in order to function that way, just as Trump doesn’t have to stand literally alone in a desert plain against a tentacled hydra arrayed with heads for every bureaucratized industry for the matchup to work that way.

Those who seek to usurp the position of spiritual authority in American life historically held by the Christian churches see their chance amid the digital revolution.

But we knew all that, or something close to it, well before the so-called debate — a sort of primal dance routine augmented and intensified by layers of technology yet still no more powerful than the dominant memes of the campaign: Vance’s couch and Trump’s kittens.

The failure of this debate to amount to an actual debate is gratuitous enough on its own, but it underscores something still more dramatic: Our faith in debate as such is now clearly much too misplaced. Like it or not, the reality of our situation has put to bed the stubborn belief of so many intellectuals that truth best emerges from having the smartest people debate everything.

This is something we have also known for a long while. In the field of science, it has led to an ocean of “studies” forever contradicting other studies and eventually themselves and to an enormous replicability crisis that calls the whole prospect of “believing the science” into permanent question. Ah, we are lectured, but true science hasn’t been tried! Or, well, it has, and it has produced ... ever more powerful weapons! How’s that for a theory of truth?

The lie at the heart of the promise that the smartest will produce truth through argument has led to the collapse of science into mere technology and technology into mere militarism. Few Americans hope to become defenseless in the face of our leading rivals and adversaries. But more and more Americans are thirsting to death for some stable and trustworthy spiritual authority, which — as we all know deep down — is the real place to turn for truth, not to policies, slogans, memes, propaganda, or especially the “politics of meaning.” No matter how obvious it is whether someone is your friend or enemy, the meaning of these things is determined not by the political but the theological.

Digital technology’s galloping transformation of our inner and outer worlds has intensified the return of politics to the grounds of theology. Leading AI engineers openly refer to themselves as worshippers of the god or gods they’re building. Startups cheekily yet earnestly call themselves cults. CEOs are apt to seek not the life of the ultimate businessman but that of the temple priest, pronouncing with piety on what counts as purity. The two great factions in American politics increasingly agree on the “underlying facts,” only differing on whether “that’s a good thing” — spiritually speaking — or not.

But tech is only reminding us of something that was also obvious not long ago: Democracy is lots of things, but sacred it is not. Alexis de Tocqueville, who literally wrote the book on democracy in America, used that loaded term not as a holy relic but as a sociological label. Rather than a form of government worth jailing opponents over, democracy was, in Tocqueville’s analysis, a social form in which what he called “equality of conditions” prevailed over almost all. Crucially, Tocqueville did not limit himself to a materialist understanding of equal human conditions, focusing correctly on the conditions of the psyche or soul.

This proper understanding of what truly held Americans together — their cast of mind and heart amid their inescapable predicaments — led him to recognize that debate held extraordinarily little purchase on the American soul.

“When the conditions of men are almost equal, they do not easily allow themselves to be persuaded by each other,” he warned. “Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust. Not only is confidence in the superior attainments of certain individuals weakened amongst democratic nations ... but the general notion of the intellectual superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the rest of the community is soon overshadowed.” Here’s the kicker:

As men grow more like each other, the doctrine of the equality of the intellect gradually infuses itself into their opinions; and it becomes more difficult for any innovator to acquire or to exert much influence over the minds of a people. In such communities sudden intellectual revolutions will therefore be rare; for, if we read aright the history of the world, we shall find that great and rapid changes in human opinions have been produced far less by the force of reasoning than by the authority of a name. … Even when the reliance of a democratic people has been won, it is still no easy matter to gain their attention. It is extremely difficult to obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak to them of themselves. ... I think that it is extremely difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a democratic people for any theory which has not a palpable, direct, and immediate connection with the daily occupations of life.

Tocqueville reveals that the major obstacle to advancing agreement through debate is democratic life itself! Large and sudden changes come more from those with spiritual authority over everyday life than from experts explaining abstract theories designed to stir up the passions.

That is why, unfortunately, these times are so perilous. Those who seek to usurp the position of spiritual authority in American life historically held by the Christian churches see their chance amid the digital revolution, whether their god is the woke god of justice or the cyborg god of consciousness. Their disinterest in debating is more attuned to the reality of our social situation than the belief of too many others that our fortunes hinge on the spiritual resurrection of John Stuart Mill. Unless American Christians can once again muster the authority to bear witness against today’s soul-destroying idolatries, the idolaters will win in a walk — no debate necessary.