Mill's marketplace

The marketplace of ideas metaphor has been around for some time, notably in John Stuart Mill's 1859 On Liberty but not only there, as MTSU's helpful online First Amendment Encyclopedia reminds.

Mill: 

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either[Pg 68] led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

We don't see a lot of rational "suspension of judgment" lately, or even acknowledgement that there might be something negligent or amiss in allowing oneself to be "led by authority" or in surrendering to untutored inclination. We don't really have a thriving marketplace of ideas. It's more a marketplace of partisan malevolence, misrepresentation, misinformation, and misogyny. Was it ever thus? Was there a time when Mill's marketplace was vital, vibrant, and instructive? A time when collaboration, not vicious confrontation, was the marketplace norm?

Good questions for historians. For the rest of us, a better question is: what can we do to improve public discourse now and tomorrow? And for those of us in my corner of the university, we must ask what we can do to realize that "genuine philosophic universe" of healthy plurality and mutually-satisfying instigation that William James found so alluring in the Harvard philosophy program of his day. If we can learn to model even a modest version of that, the market may one day prosper us after all.