Here is the “simple” of the Proverbs, who “believes everything” (14:15), and here is the “scoffer,” who “does not like to be reproved” (15:12), the suggestible and the counter-suggestible, one echoing the current views and the other reacting against them, both wholly creatures of them, forming no judgment and offering no dialogical resistance. Opinion gains no coherence, and so has no prospect of growth. It is neither accumulative nor critical but reactive, a series of discontinued beginnings. …
The dialectic itself follows predictable currents. The phenomenon is familiar enough in politics: we assert things we know nothing about simply because those who deny them are those we habitually contradict. We speak of “moral attitudes” as “on the left” or “on the right.” We cannot recall too often that these polarized postures are no more than habitual responses to the noise of discourse going on around us. … Led by the Pied Pipers of the media we plunge into the caverns of imagination, framing our views on how the world may be put to rights and never giving thought to the fact that the world we are shown is a carefully constructed representation which demands interrogation. …
When from time to time we become aware that certain points of view have become fashionable, we should sense danger. We should know that complexities will be elided, so that even truths, when only partially grasped, will yield cruel and unjust implications. We should know that love of truth is corrupted (as Trollope’s John Bold found) when focused on a narrow campaign. And we double our guard against the need of politics (not only democratic politics, but that, too) to rally the active forces of mass judgment around narrowly conceived agenda. … It is the fate of the politician to concentrate on programs of action that can ignite and unite passions. But the quantitative massing of judgments is inhospitable to exploration, and so betrays the truths it purports to champion. The best such politics can aim for is that someone with good judgment should mitigate the common passions; the problem of mass democracy is that simply arousing them becomes so all-consuming and competitive a business that no one with good judgment has much success at it. To take the commonest of experiences: a circular mailing arrives, telling of some shocking event or state of affairs, and a lobbying postcard is enclosed with a one-line message we are to send to our Member of Parliament or the Prime Minister. We are not told to inquire further into the situation; we are not told to refrain from judgment until we are in a position to make up our minds on the rival accounts that are given of it. We are encouraged, in fact, to model our behavior on what we most disapprove of in professional politicians, bending our ear to the latest lobbyist. To do otherwise, we are warned, is to be complacent. Ignorant passion is thus taken to be the special line of political amateurs, and we are encouraged to indulge it, leaving it to our cunning but indolent masters to work out what is to be done with it. They, meanwhile, declare their great respect for our ill-informed agitations.
Oliver O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking. Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 2:86-88.