By now it is a truism to observe that practices of U.S. public argument are badly broken. Public discourse in the United States is characterized by polarization, outrage, disinformation, and the information silos of social media. We have developed an ever-expanding nomenclature to describe the toxic condition of our public arguments: post-truth, fake news, gaslighting, bots, troll farms, and more. Scholars argue that the debasement of public discourse undermines democratic practice and frays the bonds of civic culture. Perhaps this is why we seem increasingly incapable, as political theorist Danielle S. Allen puts it, of “talking to strangers,” or engaging those with whom we disagree in productive conversations about race, immigration, sexuality, the environment, and other issues.

In this talk, John Duffy (Professor of English, University of Notre Dame - Author, Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, & the Teaching of Writing) argues that teachers of writing have a central role to play in addressing the dysfunctions of contemporary public argument. This is so because teaching writing always and inevitably involves the teaching of what Duffy calls “rhetorical virtues,” the ethical discourse practices, such as honesty, generosity, and intellectual courage, that are implicit in the arguments we make. Should teachers of writing make explicit the ethical dimensions of their work, they will lay the foundation for alternative forms of public argument—a rhetorical counterculture—through which they and their students can resist and perhaps transform the toxic culture of contemporary public discourse.