People like stories, and they especially like stories that pit a good guy against a bad guy. This story is such an important part about how we understand the world that we try to make all sorts of situations fit into it, and, when there is a conflict, one of the first things we try to understand is: who is the good guy, and who is the bad guy?
Because this story has two (and only two) parts, one thing the bad guy can do is to point out something bad the good guy has done, and then people flip the characters: because the good guy looks bad, what had been the bad guy must be good.
[It was pointed out to me that this is a leetle abstract. So, I'll make it clearer. Pot. Kettle. Black.
Or, if that doesn't work, how about this? "Stop! Thief!" (One of my favorite Goebbels' quotes--he was pointing out how effective it is when a thief distracts someone from his having picked a pocket by accusing someone else of having picked pockets.)]
One way to get that to happen is what's called "defensive projection." You defend yourself from an accusation by accusing the other side. It works.
One reason it works is that very few people are saints, so you can always find something bad about them, and goodness/badness exists on a continuum (not as two categories). The "he's bad, so I'm good" argument works because people tend to think in terms of good and bad rather than better and worse.
So, if I am a politician, and the major flaw in my record is that I embezzled, the smartest move for me to make is to accuse my major opponent of embezzling. Even if it's totally false, I'll benefit from making that accusation. If I can get a third party to make the accusation, I'll look even better. And it is likely to be completely successful if I can find anything--even something trivial--to support my claim. So, for instance, if you once took some work pens home in your pocket, I characterize that as embezzling, and accuse you of it, and then people will lose track of my embezzling a million dollars.
If you don't believe me, think about the respective records of Bush and Kerry in Vietnam. George Bush had an appalling record in regard to Vietnam, and a record about which lies had been told. So, the Bush campaign raised the issue of Kerry's record, and whether he had been entirely honest about it. Kerry's record may have been less heroic than he presented it (or not--there were supporters of his, but they didn't get the media attention), but he had a record in dangerous places Vietnam, and Bush had gone AWOL from a safe situation in Texas. The Bush campaign's projection of "bad record regarding Vietnam" worked--many people got confused by that ploy, thinking Bush and Kerry had equally bad records, and many people thought Kerry's was the bad guy--the question of better and worse got lost.
Another place one can see this kind of dynamic is in abusive family situations, or in any case involving whistle-blowing. If there is abuse in a family, and a family member calls attention to it, the whole family will jump on that person. If there are bad consequences (e.g., legal problems), the family will accuse the person who objected to the abuse of having caused "the problem." "The problem" just shifted--the real problem is the abuse, and the legal issues are the consequence of that problem, and that problem is caused by the abuser. But, that gets lost when "the" problem gets projected onto the person who objected.
Whistle blowers, similarly, are blamed for having spoken up, as though they caused the problem to which they were just drawing attention.
Finally, people who resist are regularly condemned for resisting, and this, too, is a form of projection. If you threaten to beat me up if I don't give you my wallet, and I refuse to give you my wallet, and you attack me, and I fight back, who "caused" the fight?
You did.
But, that can get lost. There are two ways it can get lost. The most obvious is for you to say, "She caused the fight because she refused to go along with my request. If she had just given me her wallet in the first place, there wouldn't have been a fight." Rhetorically, that's risky, so the second choice is the savvier one: you say, "She fought me." That is, you don't mention what I was fighting against, or why. If the fight caused any damage--a broken window, for instance--then you make a big deal about how much I cost the community. You say, "Look at all the money she is costing the community through her fighting me."
What you do, in other words, is make "the fight" my fault because I resisted. Had you not tried to take my wallet in the first place, of course, there would not have been any need for me to fight, but, you can distract people from that. What a PR person would tell you to do is to make "the fight" (and the consequent costs) my fault.
So, what any decent PR person will tell someone who is costing a community a lot of money is: demonize the people who are fighting, and project your behavior on to them. Claim that *they* are costing the community money. If possible, get those claims made by a third party.
My analysis of this situation is: Wal-Mart has a decent PR person.
What is the problem right now? There are several ways you can describe it:
-Wal-Mart is trying to build a SuperCenter against the wishes of the nearby community;
-the city violated their own procedures for approving this kind of site plan;
-Wal-Mart and Lincoln, having benefited from an irregular approval process, are not willing to make the process right. They are willing to negotiate (to some degree), but not on the most important things.
-they threatened to sue the city if the city tried to undo a bad process.
So, what is the problem? Either the plan or the process whereby it was approved. Neither of those was caused by RG4N.
As I understand it, Wal-Mart and/or Lincoln got a plan approved in ways it should not have been approved. If they wanted to make it better, they could retract that plan, and do it right. They haven't offered that, have they?
As I understand it, Wal-Mart and/or Lincoln has threatened to sue the city if they don't get their way. If they wanted to make it better, they could drop the threat of a suit. They haven't done that, have they?
Either Wal-Mart or Lincoln could make this problem go away instantly.
RG4N is resisting, but Wal-Mart/Lincoln started this fight. Unless there is information I've missed, and they've never threatened a lawsuit, or they've retracted their plan, and are willing to go through the process all over again (without any violations), they are the ones costing the city legal fees.
Does that mean that I think RG4N is the good guy in this story? Not really. I don't like their press release, I think their accusations of fiduciary misconduct are rhetorically (and maybe even legally) unwise, I don't like their hyperbole, and I wish they'd get a decent PR person. But, they're blowing the whistle here, and are at fault only to the degree you think the person who resists handing over a wallet is at fault for a fight.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Irrational Argument
There's more about rational argument that I want to explain. Before going there, though, I'll mention one more thing really fast: how do you know when you're arguing with someone who is irrational by this definition?
There are a bunch of ways, and it really isn't easy. A person can look rational in the sense of giving lots of factoids, lots of evidence, and coming back with arguments, when really, nothing in the world is going to change their mind--they aren't actually rational on the subject. The most straightforward way I know is if you know the person's history: do they admit error? have you seen them change their mind? do they abandon a precommitment when new evidence emerges?
This isn't to say that irrational people never change their minds. Sometimes there is no philosophical coherence to the positions they take, but there is always something sacred. So, for instance, John Calhoun sometimes supported states' rights and sometimes didn't, sometimes defended property rights and sometimes didn't, but he never did anything to hurt slavery. So, in the sense I'm using it here, Calhoun wasn't rational on anything that impinged on slavery (which was an awful lot). That isn't to say he was foaming at the mouth--his arguments had lots of logical moves, and he could quote chapter and verse from the Constitution (albeit with some odd interpretations), but his arguments weren't logically consistent except insofar as they consistently protected slavery.
Now, again, you might still want to argue with someone like that--because you think knock-down drag out arguments are good fun (after all, you don't play racquetball because you expect to solve world problems, and this is just a verbal version of an aggressive game), you're trying to persuade some other group entirely (as in a courtroom or public debate), you think it's fun to pound your head against a wall, you want to understand that other side better, you're procrastinating some other task, you're hoping to pound them into submission and get your way. But, if you are really trying to get some issues settled, and deliberate in a rational manner, this kind of person is not a productive interlocutor.
So, why do people argue irrationally? And, by "irrational," I want to emphasize that I mean "willing to defend precommitments at all costs."
Which I should explain, I suppose. Everyone has precommitments--that is, beliefs and values that they bring to a discussion--and there's nothing wrong with that. But, I'm saying that a "rational" discussion is one in which the people involved are willing to reconsider the beliefs and values they bring in. (That isn't all it is--there's more to it, but that's the post I keep promising.)
So, sometimes people are willing to reconsider precommitments because they're paid not to. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, is precommitted to the supporting the GOP because, as he says, he's most concerned with maximizing ad revenue, and he'll say what he needs to say to do that.
Sometimes people won't reconsider precommitments because they like a good fight, and that makes fights bloodier. I had two friends who, every time we got together, would argue about whether Renaldo Nehemiah was going to make a good football player. You could basically count--third beer, here comes the Renaldo Nehemiah argument. I noticed, around the fourth time they had this argument, that they didn't necessarily stick to the same sides. The previous time Bryce had argued Nehemiah would be a great pro football player and Bruce had said he'd be terrible, but this time it was flipped. But, whatever side one began (on that third beer), he would stick to with both hands, feet, and belt. So, they weren't really invested in answering the question; they were invested in having the fight.
Sometimes people won't reconsider a precommitment because they are filled with a personal loathing for their opposition. Their opposition could cure cancer, bring peace to the middle East, erase the national debt, and still that person would not grant that they might have a point or two. This is the kind of thing where someone needs to pay a hundred dollars an hour to work it out--argumentation isn't going to help.
You also get it the other way. If a person identifies with a major leader, for instance, s/he will take personally any criticism of that leader, and therefore can't think rationally about his/her real character. Leaders who make people think they are one of the people (the "little corporal," for instance) function this way. Since I am a good person, you reason, and this person is just like me, he cannot have done the terrible things they say he did, because I wouldn't do them. (So, supposedly, the more that a jury identifies with a defendant, the less likely they are to convict.) I think this is why people value "authenticity" and "sincerity" tremendously in leaders, although those are much harder to assess than people think (everyone who met him agreed that Hitler was sincere, and he struck even his opponents as a very "authentic" person), and are also totally irrelevant.
The more that one's ego is on the line in the argument, the less likely one is to give any ground. There are various factors that affect how much one's ego gets involved. Some people have their egos at stake in every single interaction, so can never admit error (it's losing face for them). There's a book called something like _Toxic Bosses_ that talks about working for someone like this, and, iirc, it recommends never pointing out that kind of person's error--you find a way to disagree with them that doesn't look like disagreeing because otherwise the person goes postal. People who are very drawn to authoritarianism, people who see all interactions as one-up/one-down (you're either controlling or being controlled), and people who take all criticism personally are all people who won't admit to changing their minds.
There are other conditions that make it hard to admit error. Having said the opinion in public, for instance, makes it harder to admit you were wrong, having suffered for it (which is why people who've given up all their belongings expecting the end of the world on a certain date will still stick with the cult after the date has come and gone), having staked one's reputation on it--those are all things that make it harder to perceive (let alone say out loud) that one has blown it.
For some people, the identity of the critic is hugely important. Adolescents won't admit that their parent might just have a clue or two; some people get enraged at dissent from a woman, subordinate, or member of an "outgroup" (whatever group--ethnic, religious, political, or whatever--they prefer to scapegoat) when they'd listen to it from another person. Sometimes someone just gets on our nerves, and we'd rather cut off a limb than admit they were right and we were wrong.
As per usual, I could go on, but my point is just that there are so many reasons that good faith argumentation is hard that none of us succeeds at it at all times. But, some people never manage it, and, unless you're on that third beer and you feel like a real adrenaline rush, save your breath.
There are a bunch of ways, and it really isn't easy. A person can look rational in the sense of giving lots of factoids, lots of evidence, and coming back with arguments, when really, nothing in the world is going to change their mind--they aren't actually rational on the subject. The most straightforward way I know is if you know the person's history: do they admit error? have you seen them change their mind? do they abandon a precommitment when new evidence emerges?
This isn't to say that irrational people never change their minds. Sometimes there is no philosophical coherence to the positions they take, but there is always something sacred. So, for instance, John Calhoun sometimes supported states' rights and sometimes didn't, sometimes defended property rights and sometimes didn't, but he never did anything to hurt slavery. So, in the sense I'm using it here, Calhoun wasn't rational on anything that impinged on slavery (which was an awful lot). That isn't to say he was foaming at the mouth--his arguments had lots of logical moves, and he could quote chapter and verse from the Constitution (albeit with some odd interpretations), but his arguments weren't logically consistent except insofar as they consistently protected slavery.
Now, again, you might still want to argue with someone like that--because you think knock-down drag out arguments are good fun (after all, you don't play racquetball because you expect to solve world problems, and this is just a verbal version of an aggressive game), you're trying to persuade some other group entirely (as in a courtroom or public debate), you think it's fun to pound your head against a wall, you want to understand that other side better, you're procrastinating some other task, you're hoping to pound them into submission and get your way. But, if you are really trying to get some issues settled, and deliberate in a rational manner, this kind of person is not a productive interlocutor.
So, why do people argue irrationally? And, by "irrational," I want to emphasize that I mean "willing to defend precommitments at all costs."
Which I should explain, I suppose. Everyone has precommitments--that is, beliefs and values that they bring to a discussion--and there's nothing wrong with that. But, I'm saying that a "rational" discussion is one in which the people involved are willing to reconsider the beliefs and values they bring in. (That isn't all it is--there's more to it, but that's the post I keep promising.)
So, sometimes people are willing to reconsider precommitments because they're paid not to. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, is precommitted to the supporting the GOP because, as he says, he's most concerned with maximizing ad revenue, and he'll say what he needs to say to do that.
Sometimes people won't reconsider precommitments because they like a good fight, and that makes fights bloodier. I had two friends who, every time we got together, would argue about whether Renaldo Nehemiah was going to make a good football player. You could basically count--third beer, here comes the Renaldo Nehemiah argument. I noticed, around the fourth time they had this argument, that they didn't necessarily stick to the same sides. The previous time Bryce had argued Nehemiah would be a great pro football player and Bruce had said he'd be terrible, but this time it was flipped. But, whatever side one began (on that third beer), he would stick to with both hands, feet, and belt. So, they weren't really invested in answering the question; they were invested in having the fight.
Sometimes people won't reconsider a precommitment because they are filled with a personal loathing for their opposition. Their opposition could cure cancer, bring peace to the middle East, erase the national debt, and still that person would not grant that they might have a point or two. This is the kind of thing where someone needs to pay a hundred dollars an hour to work it out--argumentation isn't going to help.
You also get it the other way. If a person identifies with a major leader, for instance, s/he will take personally any criticism of that leader, and therefore can't think rationally about his/her real character. Leaders who make people think they are one of the people (the "little corporal," for instance) function this way. Since I am a good person, you reason, and this person is just like me, he cannot have done the terrible things they say he did, because I wouldn't do them. (So, supposedly, the more that a jury identifies with a defendant, the less likely they are to convict.) I think this is why people value "authenticity" and "sincerity" tremendously in leaders, although those are much harder to assess than people think (everyone who met him agreed that Hitler was sincere, and he struck even his opponents as a very "authentic" person), and are also totally irrelevant.
The more that one's ego is on the line in the argument, the less likely one is to give any ground. There are various factors that affect how much one's ego gets involved. Some people have their egos at stake in every single interaction, so can never admit error (it's losing face for them). There's a book called something like _Toxic Bosses_ that talks about working for someone like this, and, iirc, it recommends never pointing out that kind of person's error--you find a way to disagree with them that doesn't look like disagreeing because otherwise the person goes postal. People who are very drawn to authoritarianism, people who see all interactions as one-up/one-down (you're either controlling or being controlled), and people who take all criticism personally are all people who won't admit to changing their minds.
There are other conditions that make it hard to admit error. Having said the opinion in public, for instance, makes it harder to admit you were wrong, having suffered for it (which is why people who've given up all their belongings expecting the end of the world on a certain date will still stick with the cult after the date has come and gone), having staked one's reputation on it--those are all things that make it harder to perceive (let alone say out loud) that one has blown it.
For some people, the identity of the critic is hugely important. Adolescents won't admit that their parent might just have a clue or two; some people get enraged at dissent from a woman, subordinate, or member of an "outgroup" (whatever group--ethnic, religious, political, or whatever--they prefer to scapegoat) when they'd listen to it from another person. Sometimes someone just gets on our nerves, and we'd rather cut off a limb than admit they were right and we were wrong.
As per usual, I could go on, but my point is just that there are so many reasons that good faith argumentation is hard that none of us succeeds at it at all times. But, some people never manage it, and, unless you're on that third beer and you feel like a real adrenaline rush, save your breath.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Rational Argument
I grew up in a politically conservative area. It was conservative in several senses, the most important being a kind of evasion of political discussion. Political pronouncements were perfectly acceptable, as long as they were within line with what was the conventional wisdom, but disagreement with that wisdom was NOT considered tactful--this is one reason I start to hyperventilate when people talk as though "political correctness" was an invention of the left.
Something that people don't always understand is that evasion of conflict is fundamentally conservative--you can't have social change without change, after all. That doesn't mean that all conflict is the same, and that's sort of what this post is about: degrees and kinds of discursive conflict.
It was the late sixties and early seventies, and I had the sense that people around me didn't want to discuss Vietnam. There was just a kind of laying down of the law--that if we didn't fight them there, we'd be fighting them on the beaches of Santa Monica. No kidding--that's what people said. Why Santa Monica? I'd wonder. Why not Huntington or Haggerty's? That was such an obviously loony response, and so thoroughly evaded the questions I had, and it was generally said in such a loud voice, that this was clearly not a discussion going anywhere helpful. And then I happened to go to India, and all these people (including a beggar in a loin cloth) wanted to talk to me about Vietnam. They were vehement, and passionate, and very informed. And I had better discussions with them that I did at home, and that struck me as very weird--why, in America, with its emphasis on free speech, do we have so many cultural stigmas against disagreement?
Americans seem to have a bifurcated view of political discussion. Either you have a community (which is in perfect agreement), or you have conflict (which has disagreement). Community is good, and conflict is bad. Conflict is screaming, and vehement, and vicious, and different only in degree (not kind) from violence. So, the only real difference between a verbal disagreement and a physical battle is the degree of vehemence with which people fight.
This is rhetorical fatalism. It presumes that, when people are passionate, they cannot be persuaded through reason, so you don't try reason, you try various forms of verbal intimidation. Those don't work, which seems to confirm the premise (that people can't be persuaded). Or, to put it another way, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think you can't persuade people, so you fight, and strive for just getting the other person to give up. "Reason" becomes "things with because clauses" or "assertions with something that looks like evidence" attached. And they're weapons. You don't persuade people, not because people can never be persuaded, but because the strategy you're using is not persuasive.
This bifurcated view (conflict=verbal violence; community=agreement) is also all wrong, one of those conglomerations of wrongness so mangled and mungled that even sorting out the ways it's wrong (and the wrong-headed ideologies that contribute to it) is incredibly complicated. I'm not doing that here, but I will mention a couple of books that do a good job of explaining what's wrong with equating disagreement and a battle: Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; and Tannen, The Argument Culture. If you're looking for something more philosophical, I think Mouffe, The Return of the Political is really brilliant, and she's relying heavily on Arendt, The Human Condition which is beautifully explained by Pitkin, Attack of the Blob.
But, the fact is that a really vehement argument often does turn into (or maybe even starts out as) something that just makes people feel awful. So, people have proposed solutions.
First, since the arguments that make some people feel icky are generally vehement, then good arguments must be not vehement! Bad premise, bad conclusion.
This is not only a bad argument (although it is that), but a dangerous and damaging one. The short version is this: when I started doing research on proslavery rhetoric, the thing that stunned me was that the most common argument that proslavery rhetors made about abolitionists was that they should be censored because abolitionists made slaveowners feel bad. This line of argument continues to today--any discourse that makes people feel bad is bad, and should be stopped.
But, of course, however you do this, only the feelings of some people count. If I criticize Hugh, and that makes him feel bad, then I should be silenced, right? But now I feel bad, too. So, Hugh should be stopped from making me feel bad by having me silenced.
Or maybe we shouldn't be so sensitive.
But, there's another version of this. Basically, being told that you're wrong makes you feel bad, so what people who want to avoid bad feelings do is to say that you should never be direct about telling someone you think they're wrong. You avoid words like "but," and you don't contradict, and you don't hurt anyone's feelings. Well, you know what? There's no way to tell someone that you really think it's bad for them to be a slaveowner without hurting their feelings. And you know what else? That's fine and dandy. Slaveowners should feel bad.
The problem with trying to have a discourse that doesn't hurt anyone feelings is that you've just thrown out the possibility of a critical discussion. Criticism hurts. Unless you dress it up so much that it's no longer criticism (which William Ellery Channing tried, and it still made slaveowners mad), criticism hurts people's feelings. So, the first step that people who talk about productive conflict say is that people should not intentionally make personal attacks, but, equally important, people shouldn't take criticism of their ideas personally. The responsibility is reciprocal. Still and all, that doesn't get you very far in terms of distinguishing good and bad conflict, I think (although it's a good start).
Second, another way to think about this is that, since vehement criticism makes people mad, and since mad people don't reason well, good arguments can only be had by people who aren't emotional about the issues--vehemence and feeling bad are both prohibited.
Another bad premise leading to another bad conclusion.
The problem is that you can't hope to have a public sphere of people disagreeing without their emotions getting involved. A discussion of slavery that didn't involve how slaves feel about it is an incoherent (and essentially irrelevant) discussion. Feelings are reasons, and a feeling-less discussion is, actually, an unreasonable one. It is irrational.
Now, that may sound weird, as the common notion is that rational=emotion-free and emotional=irrational. But, that's a poisonous legacy of a bastardized version of logical positivism (which, even in its legitimate forms is not helpful for thinking about public discourse). Again, this is a long argument, and I'll say that I think Martha Nussbaum is really helpful (especially the essays in Love's Knowledge). But, basically, the point is that it would be irrational, for instance, to try to think about what career a person should have without taking into consideration how they feel about things like working outdoors versus in an office, working with people or alone, the sight of blood, and so on.
Third, since icky arguments tend to be distracting, misleading, and fallacious, then a good argument must be one that consists of arguments that follow the logical forms.
If "logical" means "unemotional," then this is just a variation of the second option, and just as vexing. If not, then it still isn't much help. Going as far back as Plato, logicians have tried to figure out how to apply the rules that work so well in regard to geometry to public affairs. Aristotle said they don't apply--math is capable of certainty, because you can begin with a universally valid first premise, but politics and ethics don't follow from universally valid first premises. That made people nuts (and was one reason that Aristotle's writings were banned from the University of Paris till Aquinas made his thinking more acceptable--but even Aquinas had his troubles). So, various people have tried to find universally valid first premises for political and ethical discussions ever since. (They get into a tricky place with "universally valid"--they have to decide whether something is "universally valid" even if not everyone accepts it.)
The problems with this line of pursuit are really interesting, but, again, too complicated to follow here. The short version is that formal logic doesn't apply to political and ethical arguments because an argument can be formally valid and still untrue, and true although formally invalid.
Premise: Chester is a dog.
Premise: All dogs are canines.
Conclusion: Chester is a canine.
If either of those premises is untrue, then the conclusion isn't true (if, for instance, Chester is a cat, or if Chester is a "dog" in the sense of being ugly or unreliable.)
Gazillionth, I'll skip a whole bunch of intervening ones, including the notion that rationality is bad, so people should just rely on feelings, or that verbal disagreement is pointless, so just hit people who disagree (a surprisingly popular notion). It isn't generally helpful to try to distinguish a rational from an irrational argument by looking at single arguments; you have to look at them in context.
Now, to some extent, you can look at a single argument--does it appeal to consistent premises throughout (is it internally contradictory). And that's a little helpful, but it falls into the formal problem pretty fast (that an argument can look formally good and yet be completely untrue). Even more helpful is to look at argumentation--that is, the whole process in which the argument happens, and the person(s) who is(are) making it, and the person(s) to it's being made.
What makes an argument rational, in this sense, is that the person(s) making it can articulate the conditions under which s/he would abandon it.
An "irrational" argument is an assertion (with or without reasons attached) that a person will not abandon, regardless of evidence--the belief cannot be disproven or tested. There's nothing inherently wrong with irrational beliefs--I have plenty of them--but there also is no point in trying to prove them wrong. Because they can't be proven wrong. That's their nature.
I'm perfectly happy to tell people about why I think democracy is the best form of government, and I can cite chapter and verse. But, fundamentally, nuffin you say is going to make me abandon that belief. It's the foundation for all sorts of other beliefs (most of which are up for debate--what is the role of representation in democracy? what kind of representation is most democratic? and so on). But, I'm perfectly willing to grant that my faith in democracy is irrational. As I said, nothing wrong with that, but it means we won't have a rational debate about democracy--we might have an interesting exploration, or a really fun talk, but not a rational discussion.
But, that isn't enough as a definition. There's another set of traits, but that's for another post. The short version of that is that a debate is rational when the rules apply equally to all parties--when the "rules of argument" (whatever they are) apply reciprocally. So, however "inaccuracy" is defined, it is defined the same way for everyone. (In other words, I can't slam you for inaccuracy if your facts are no more accurate than mine.)
(to be continued)
Something that people don't always understand is that evasion of conflict is fundamentally conservative--you can't have social change without change, after all. That doesn't mean that all conflict is the same, and that's sort of what this post is about: degrees and kinds of discursive conflict.
It was the late sixties and early seventies, and I had the sense that people around me didn't want to discuss Vietnam. There was just a kind of laying down of the law--that if we didn't fight them there, we'd be fighting them on the beaches of Santa Monica. No kidding--that's what people said. Why Santa Monica? I'd wonder. Why not Huntington or Haggerty's? That was such an obviously loony response, and so thoroughly evaded the questions I had, and it was generally said in such a loud voice, that this was clearly not a discussion going anywhere helpful. And then I happened to go to India, and all these people (including a beggar in a loin cloth) wanted to talk to me about Vietnam. They were vehement, and passionate, and very informed. And I had better discussions with them that I did at home, and that struck me as very weird--why, in America, with its emphasis on free speech, do we have so many cultural stigmas against disagreement?
Americans seem to have a bifurcated view of political discussion. Either you have a community (which is in perfect agreement), or you have conflict (which has disagreement). Community is good, and conflict is bad. Conflict is screaming, and vehement, and vicious, and different only in degree (not kind) from violence. So, the only real difference between a verbal disagreement and a physical battle is the degree of vehemence with which people fight.
This is rhetorical fatalism. It presumes that, when people are passionate, they cannot be persuaded through reason, so you don't try reason, you try various forms of verbal intimidation. Those don't work, which seems to confirm the premise (that people can't be persuaded). Or, to put it another way, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You think you can't persuade people, so you fight, and strive for just getting the other person to give up. "Reason" becomes "things with because clauses" or "assertions with something that looks like evidence" attached. And they're weapons. You don't persuade people, not because people can never be persuaded, but because the strategy you're using is not persuasive.
This bifurcated view (conflict=verbal violence; community=agreement) is also all wrong, one of those conglomerations of wrongness so mangled and mungled that even sorting out the ways it's wrong (and the wrong-headed ideologies that contribute to it) is incredibly complicated. I'm not doing that here, but I will mention a couple of books that do a good job of explaining what's wrong with equating disagreement and a battle: Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; and Tannen, The Argument Culture. If you're looking for something more philosophical, I think Mouffe, The Return of the Political is really brilliant, and she's relying heavily on Arendt, The Human Condition which is beautifully explained by Pitkin, Attack of the Blob.
But, the fact is that a really vehement argument often does turn into (or maybe even starts out as) something that just makes people feel awful. So, people have proposed solutions.
First, since the arguments that make some people feel icky are generally vehement, then good arguments must be not vehement! Bad premise, bad conclusion.
This is not only a bad argument (although it is that), but a dangerous and damaging one. The short version is this: when I started doing research on proslavery rhetoric, the thing that stunned me was that the most common argument that proslavery rhetors made about abolitionists was that they should be censored because abolitionists made slaveowners feel bad. This line of argument continues to today--any discourse that makes people feel bad is bad, and should be stopped.
But, of course, however you do this, only the feelings of some people count. If I criticize Hugh, and that makes him feel bad, then I should be silenced, right? But now I feel bad, too. So, Hugh should be stopped from making me feel bad by having me silenced.
Or maybe we shouldn't be so sensitive.
But, there's another version of this. Basically, being told that you're wrong makes you feel bad, so what people who want to avoid bad feelings do is to say that you should never be direct about telling someone you think they're wrong. You avoid words like "but," and you don't contradict, and you don't hurt anyone's feelings. Well, you know what? There's no way to tell someone that you really think it's bad for them to be a slaveowner without hurting their feelings. And you know what else? That's fine and dandy. Slaveowners should feel bad.
The problem with trying to have a discourse that doesn't hurt anyone feelings is that you've just thrown out the possibility of a critical discussion. Criticism hurts. Unless you dress it up so much that it's no longer criticism (which William Ellery Channing tried, and it still made slaveowners mad), criticism hurts people's feelings. So, the first step that people who talk about productive conflict say is that people should not intentionally make personal attacks, but, equally important, people shouldn't take criticism of their ideas personally. The responsibility is reciprocal. Still and all, that doesn't get you very far in terms of distinguishing good and bad conflict, I think (although it's a good start).
Second, another way to think about this is that, since vehement criticism makes people mad, and since mad people don't reason well, good arguments can only be had by people who aren't emotional about the issues--vehemence and feeling bad are both prohibited.
Another bad premise leading to another bad conclusion.
The problem is that you can't hope to have a public sphere of people disagreeing without their emotions getting involved. A discussion of slavery that didn't involve how slaves feel about it is an incoherent (and essentially irrelevant) discussion. Feelings are reasons, and a feeling-less discussion is, actually, an unreasonable one. It is irrational.
Now, that may sound weird, as the common notion is that rational=emotion-free and emotional=irrational. But, that's a poisonous legacy of a bastardized version of logical positivism (which, even in its legitimate forms is not helpful for thinking about public discourse). Again, this is a long argument, and I'll say that I think Martha Nussbaum is really helpful (especially the essays in Love's Knowledge). But, basically, the point is that it would be irrational, for instance, to try to think about what career a person should have without taking into consideration how they feel about things like working outdoors versus in an office, working with people or alone, the sight of blood, and so on.
Third, since icky arguments tend to be distracting, misleading, and fallacious, then a good argument must be one that consists of arguments that follow the logical forms.
If "logical" means "unemotional," then this is just a variation of the second option, and just as vexing. If not, then it still isn't much help. Going as far back as Plato, logicians have tried to figure out how to apply the rules that work so well in regard to geometry to public affairs. Aristotle said they don't apply--math is capable of certainty, because you can begin with a universally valid first premise, but politics and ethics don't follow from universally valid first premises. That made people nuts (and was one reason that Aristotle's writings were banned from the University of Paris till Aquinas made his thinking more acceptable--but even Aquinas had his troubles). So, various people have tried to find universally valid first premises for political and ethical discussions ever since. (They get into a tricky place with "universally valid"--they have to decide whether something is "universally valid" even if not everyone accepts it.)
The problems with this line of pursuit are really interesting, but, again, too complicated to follow here. The short version is that formal logic doesn't apply to political and ethical arguments because an argument can be formally valid and still untrue, and true although formally invalid.
Premise: Chester is a dog.
Premise: All dogs are canines.
Conclusion: Chester is a canine.
If either of those premises is untrue, then the conclusion isn't true (if, for instance, Chester is a cat, or if Chester is a "dog" in the sense of being ugly or unreliable.)
Gazillionth, I'll skip a whole bunch of intervening ones, including the notion that rationality is bad, so people should just rely on feelings, or that verbal disagreement is pointless, so just hit people who disagree (a surprisingly popular notion). It isn't generally helpful to try to distinguish a rational from an irrational argument by looking at single arguments; you have to look at them in context.
Now, to some extent, you can look at a single argument--does it appeal to consistent premises throughout (is it internally contradictory). And that's a little helpful, but it falls into the formal problem pretty fast (that an argument can look formally good and yet be completely untrue). Even more helpful is to look at argumentation--that is, the whole process in which the argument happens, and the person(s) who is(are) making it, and the person(s) to it's being made.
What makes an argument rational, in this sense, is that the person(s) making it can articulate the conditions under which s/he would abandon it.
An "irrational" argument is an assertion (with or without reasons attached) that a person will not abandon, regardless of evidence--the belief cannot be disproven or tested. There's nothing inherently wrong with irrational beliefs--I have plenty of them--but there also is no point in trying to prove them wrong. Because they can't be proven wrong. That's their nature.
I'm perfectly happy to tell people about why I think democracy is the best form of government, and I can cite chapter and verse. But, fundamentally, nuffin you say is going to make me abandon that belief. It's the foundation for all sorts of other beliefs (most of which are up for debate--what is the role of representation in democracy? what kind of representation is most democratic? and so on). But, I'm perfectly willing to grant that my faith in democracy is irrational. As I said, nothing wrong with that, but it means we won't have a rational debate about democracy--we might have an interesting exploration, or a really fun talk, but not a rational discussion.
But, that isn't enough as a definition. There's another set of traits, but that's for another post. The short version of that is that a debate is rational when the rules apply equally to all parties--when the "rules of argument" (whatever they are) apply reciprocally. So, however "inaccuracy" is defined, it is defined the same way for everyone. (In other words, I can't slam you for inaccuracy if your facts are no more accurate than mine.)
(to be continued)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)