Is Conversation Dead?

Written by Chinda Thoumakesone, MSc Global Development with Placement Year.

I think back to a night in 2022, walking home from a Philosophy society meeting during my undergraduate degree. The session had been about whether the university curriculum should consist almost entirely of white, heterosexual, male philosophers. It was presented as a debate. To me, it felt like something else: a group of people arguing for the continued dominance of voices that had already dominated our history and syllabuses.

A few of us were asked to justify why women and Global Majority philosophers deserved greater attention. How many could we name? How many had we read? The irony was difficult to miss. We had been phased out of our own histories and were then asked to prove that we belonged in them. 

One man who had spoken particularly loudly at the meeting invited himself to walk home with me. He talked about creating the universal, as though the thoughts and experiences of millions of people could be reduced to a single intellectual system. I told him that an individual cannot know how everyone in the world thinks and feels. He declared that he enjoyed the debate itself. I remember telling him that I had not found it fun. It is not a normal thing to have to explain your right to be in a room, to be seen, or to exist.

This is where I think our contemporary understanding of tolerance becomes confused. We have developed a strong cultural expectation that disagreement should be met with dialogue. Sometimes that is absolutely right. People do change their minds, and assumptions can be challenged. Contact can humanise people who have previously been reduced to abstractions; free speech matters precisely because bad ideas need to be exposed to criticism. But none of this establishes a moral duty to debate everyone.

"We should be able to leave room for people to change, but change cannot be outsourced to those they have harmed."

There is an important difference between tolerating someone's right to speak and volunteering yourself as the person who must listen, explain, and patiently demonstrate your humanity. I need not explain to the Global Majority what it’s like to live with distinct features. My observation is that many of us are exhausted and jaded, and feel like we cannot properly articulate ourselves; my grandma would say we have ‘frozen tongues’. I believe this lack of natural dialogue is born out of the fact that hateful people do not often care to ask for your personal perspective. A person can have the legal right to express a hateful opinion without having a corresponding right to my time, emotional labour, or company.

Today, in this digitally mediated sphere, our attention is farmed to engage with the opposing political perspectives, engage with the provocative post, and to engage with hateful people whose worldview reduces our existence to an argument. Online platforms reward this. Outrage generates attention; attention generates engagement; engagement becomes profitable. The person who says the most inflammatory thing can become the person everyone is expected to respond to.

But visibility is not the same as legitimacy. This does not mean that hateful ideas should automatically be censored, nor should we pretend that anger is always productive. It is possible to be wrong, cruel, or irrational when angry. But anger itself is not a moral failure. If someone is confronted with an ideology that questions their humanity, frustration can be an entirely rational response to being placed in an irrational situation. The solution, however, cannot simply be to silence everyone who holds an offensive opinion. It is to recognise boundaries. We can defend someone's right to speak while refusing to platform them, debate them, employ them, invite them into our homes, or give them an audience.

That is not apathy; it is choice. Progress is really implied through voluntary dialogue, not compulsory proximity. We should be able to leave room for people to change, but change cannot be outsourced to those they have harmed. The person targeted by racism, misogyny or homophobia should not be required to become the educator, therapist and reassuring friend of the person expressing it. Sometimes conversation builds something. Sometimes it reveals that there is nothing yet to build.

On that rainy night in 2022, the man walking beside me was still smiling. He enjoyed the debate. I was thinking about a hot shower and better company. The difference between us was not simply that we had reached different conclusions: where he experienced the conversation as an intellectual exercise, I experienced it as a question about whether people like me deserved intellectual space at all. That distinction has stayed with me.

We should defend the freedom to disagree. We should teach young people how to encounter difficult ideas without immediately retreating into intellectual bubbles. We should challenge our own assumptions and remain capable of changing our minds.

But tolerance should never require self-erasure. Some things should be argued; some things should be challenged; but some things should simply be refused. The refusal to participate is not necessarily a failure of dialogue. Sometimes it is the clearest statement that another person's humanity is not up for debate.