Please give us new human beings

Today I received a call for papers in my email inbox. At first I thought it was satire. But in following the links, I ended up on the EU funded European Network for Social Intelligence.  As we know, European bureaucrats would not risk the ire of the increasingly skeptical public and openly fund satire (of itself). So, what to make of this call for papers? (As an aside, I note that parts of the call are plagiarized from this paper's abstract; I don't mean to suggest that this is anyway an ethical lapse; it's just amusing given the high minded tone.) I quote first, then comment:

Argument and debate form cornerstones of civilized society and of intellectual life. As online interaction usurps many traditional forms of interaction and communication, we would hope to see these processes alive and well on the web. But we do not. In spite of the ever-growing volume of online interaction,  its current mechanisms hamper and discourage serious debate; they facilitate poor quality argument; and they allow fuzzy thinking to go unchecked. Meanwhile, these same online resources are increasingly being trusted and adopted with little critical reflection. The problem needs to be addressed from two different but converging perspectives:

• We need better understanding and widespread awareness in the use of current and future ICT, to enable people to profit from new opportunities for argumentative interaction, instead of being mislead and thwarted by lack of familiarity with the emerging socio-technical systems. Several research areas are critical to this purpose, but their contributions need to be integrated in a concerted effort: among others, philosophy of information, critical thinking, digital literacy, e-inclusion, persuasive technologies, CMC.
• We need new tools, new systems and new standards engineered into the heart of the internet to encourage debate, to facilitate good argument, and to promote a new online critical literacy. This is the vision of the Argument Web, a web platform that brings together different domains and interaction styles (e.g. argument analysis, real-time debate, blogging) by combining linked argument data with software tools that make online debate intuitive for various audiences, including mediators, students, academics, broadcasters and bloggers.

What is "serious debate?" We are not told, but evidently it does not contain fuzzy thought and sloppy argument. So, instances of high stakes stakes debate (say, a Presidential election, a war motion, etc.)  with intense partisanship, messy alliances, appeals to authority, and disagreement over values and conflicting emotions will almost certainly never qualify.  Here's a nice bit of evidence about the celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debate(s):

Major papers from Chicago sent stenographers to create complete texts of each debate...with some partisan edits.-_WIkipedia (Obviously, my reliance on Wikipedia is in the minds of the conference hosts evidence for the debasement of our public culture!)

There is no doubt that argument and debate are essential to intellectual life, but it is by no means obvious that these are crucial to "civilized society." Impartial rule of law, separation of powers, an independent press, and good manners are undoubtedly more important. Of course, debate matters, too, of course, but it is by no means obvious that we should want these to approximate the Habermasian idea of public reason. It's not just because that ideal also has a tendency to systematically privilege some groups (as I learned from the much missed Iris Marion Young); it's also because we are not communities of wise angels, but affective beings of flesh and blood.

It must be tempting to have some sanitation mechanism that can cleanse the public sphere from fuzzy thinking. Some such impulse was at the heart of all censorship ideals. We could, indeed, develop ever subtle expert-reasoning-systems that monitor the public media and bloggers. This could be grafted onto NSA technologies, of course. But why not simply insist, instead, that public office holders (and their bureaucratic consiglieri) obtain doctorates in logic; why not introduce a license for bloggers and journalists (and anybody with a camera pointed at them) pass an advanced logic exam? This would be cheaper, easier to monitor, and would eliminate the problem of fuzzy thinking root and branch.  (I recommend that we also only permit the most austere, intuitionistic logics.)

One wonders what conception of public debate one has that encourages "new systems and new standards engineered into the heart of the internet" as a means "to encourage debate," rather than as yet another means to develop a system of easily centralized monitoring and control? (And given the genre, let's ignore all the unsubstantiated, Spenglerian claims in the cfp.)

Don't get me wrong; sometimes I think it's great that public spirited philosophers and computer scientists are on the EU gravy train, working hard at making our world a better place. ('Better my friends, after all, than a lot of other folk.') As an active blogger, I look forward to experimenting with their new tools. I have also come to acept that the scientific grant system makes all of us who are forced to participate in it (i.e., academics), professional optimists and liars to some degree. But it's one thing to put this kind of quatsch in a grant proposal; it's quite another to address one's peers with it.