On “healthy” rhetoric and “healthy” democratic deliberation.

I’ve been struggling in my work to find a good term for when a community is firing on all cylinders as far as deliberation. I’ve ended up on “healthy” as the term, but I REALLY dislike the metaphor.

What I really mean is “good enough” argumentation. I’m moved by Winnicott’s notion of “good enough” mothering. But that’s too complicated a term, since it means explaining what Winnicott was saying. (And Winnocott is kind of problematic.)

The “healthy” term, though, is really vexed. For one thing, it’s kind of ableist. While I think that people with all sorts of disabilities can enact [whatever we’re calling good-enough] argumentation, so this isn’t some kind of intentional delegitimizing of people who aren’t healthy, I’m twitchy about how associational thinking is so dominant. If we talk about good enough argumentation as “healthy,” I think there is a good chance of it seeming to say than people who aren’t “healthy” can’t participate.

Second, the “healthy” metaphor seems to me twitch-inducingly close to the ultimately-genocidal metaphors of some people being cancers on or infections of the body politic.

In western culture, we tend to think of a “healthy” body as one that is free of bad things (some day, I would love to write a long post about how I think that’s a bastardization, in Burke’s term, of Christian notions). Were we able to think of a “healthy” body as one that is effectively incorporating the challenges of new situations, then “healthy” would be a perfect metaphor for what democracy needs to be.

I’m headed to a conference about healthy rhetoric, and I’d love to be able to offer useful alternatives to that metaphor. Thoughts?