October 2019 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Democratic deliberation and dog poop in my trash

Several smiling poop emojis

So, far I’ve argued that the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies two deeply problematic ways that Americans think about political deliberation:

1. For every policy question, there is one policy oriented toward the public good; all others are advocated by people representing special interests; [corollary: to the extent that we modify the policy that is in the public good in order to take into consideration the arguments and demands of other groups, we are compromising good on behalf of special interests (and their gullible stooges)]
2. That the public good is universally good means that any good policy is really in the best interests of everyone, and so interlocutors should universalize their claims (even if the policy is really in service of very particular needs) [corollary: people arguing from a place of fear, anger, and so on should not argue that they feel threatened, but that the Other is threatening.]

Both of these positions are strongly influenced by a kind of epistemological selfishness—my position is the only legitimate because it is mine. But they’re also influenced by the rational/irrational split. And, just to be clear: I object to the rational/irrational split, and how it’s taught and reinforced in argumentation courses, not because I think there is no useful distincti0ni to be made between rational or irrational argumentation, but because that distinction isn’t a zero-sum binary, and it isn’t the muddle 0f intention, emotionalism, data, tone, truth, identity, affect, and all sorts of other unrelated (or, at best, orthogonally related) criteria that attach to conventional notions about the rational/irrational split.

I’m arguing for what I think is a better, and much more limited, way to think and talk about what makes an argument or a claim rational, irrational, or something somewhere in the range between the two. (And I’m also saying that not all of our beliefs have to be, or even can be, rational, and I’m far from the only one making this argument.)

There is a third recurrent argument on my neighborhood mailing list (and nextdoor) that exemplifies another serious problem with how we imagine political deliberation: some dog walkers, on the day that the trash will be picked up, scoop up their dog’s poop in a plastic bag and put that plastic bag in the trash bin that is about to be picked up. And that enrages some people.

While the people arguing that putting plastic bags of poop into their trash is wrong make a lot of arguments, and they sincerely believe that they are making a rational argument, they aren’t. (And, just to be clear, my husband and I generally don’t put poop bags in anyone else’s trash, but, if we do, only in cans that belong to people we know walk their dogs.) Their arguments are hilariously irrational. But sincere.

The people who have someone else put poop in the bin they think of as theirs sincerely believe that their property has been violated. They have trouble making that argument rationally, though. Sometimes they try to argue that it’s robbery, since they pay for garbage pickup, and someone is putting something into their garbage. Since they aren’t charged for garbage by the ounce, they are not getting charged any more for someone putting a bag that contains dog poop, so this isn’t a rational argument. The bin is not actually theirs, but belongs to the city, so this is an even more troubled argument.

They argue that they are acting from a sense of public service (the public good) in that they’re worried about the additional work for garbage collectors (no kidding, that argument gets made). That’s irrational, in that they aren’t saying that people shouldn’t put plastic bags with poop into any trash can—only theirs. They don’t argue that people shouldn’t put used diapers in the trash. S0, their policy doesn’t really protect garbage collectors. At least one person argued that they tried to keep their trash bin clean, and plastic bags with dog poop … it got a little vague.

It does no harm to the public, or the trash collectors, or anyone, if a person puts a plastic bag with dog poop in a trash bin on the day that trash will be collected. The harm is to their sense of purity of the trash bin they think of as theirs.

This isn’t about a rational (falsifiable, with internally consistent premises, and standards across interlocutors) argument. But it’s sincere insofar as they sincerely believe that they are harmed by having plastic bags with dog poop in the trash bins they believe are their property.

It’s a purity argument. It’s an argument grounded in an irrational belief that some people have that they must keep their personal possessions pure of contamination. This is about poop. Putting poop, even in a plastic bag, into their bin means putting poop into a part of their realm they want to keep poop-free. Of course, poop is in their realm, and they probably have some pretty gross things in their trash, so this is a taboo.

I get that there are taboos. I don’t like the unopened box of (obviously, unused) poop bags to be on a kitchen counter or dinner table, but I don’t mind a box of plastic bags in the same places. That’s an irrational position; it’s a taboo.

I don’t think people are bad for having taboos, nor do I think people incapable of advocating their position through rational argumentation should be dismissed from our world of argument.

I think we should admit we are reasoning from an irrational position, and I think we have a world that is big enough to give fair consideration to taboos. But we shouldn’t try to pretend that taboos are universally valid premises—later I’ll mention how acknowledging the particularity and irrationality of the poop-bag-in-the-trash position can lead to better solutions than will ever be achieved by pretending it’s an issue of the violation of a universally accepted public good.

I think this problem, of a not very helpful frame, is at least related to the media’s tendency to frame harms a issues of someone being “offended.” The media (and too much public discourse) framed Trump bragging that he sexually assaults women as a problem because it “offended” some people; HRC claiming that many of Trump supporters were “deplorable” “offended” some people; someone using a racist slur “offends” someone.

Serious issues about institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry are reframed as issues of individual people being “offended.” In an informational culture in which a person hearing a racial slur is offended, as is a person who discovers someone has put a plastic bag with poop in it in their trash, the two actions seem to be the same importance. Framing actions as harmful because they “offended” someone inevitably leads to false equivalencies

Hearing a racial slur is offensive (to some people), but racism isn’t bad because it offends people. It’s bad because it harms people. It harms our world.

As long as we have a culture that irrationally makes policy issues about feelings, then people who think from a place of epistemological selfishness can sincerely believe that their being offended at someone putting poop in their trash bin is just as important as someone who has to listen to racial slurs.

So, the third thing that the neighborhood mailing exemplifies about toxic democratic deliberation is how our culture (and media) falsely frame policy arguments, not as arguments about policy, but about the feelings of the people involved. You might feel offended that someone might put poop in your bin; if I have to behave differently at work because the norms of appropriate behavior are different for men and women, I might feel anger about that. But that doesn’t mean those two feelings are equally valid, nor that the policy argument about either issue (poop v. gendered norms) is usefully reduced to who is or is not offended.

A reasonable world of public deliberation is not one in which those two feelings are treated as equally valid, nor one in which they’re both dismissed, but one in which we argue about their validity and relevance and the policies. I can make a rational argument that it matters that women are held to different standards than men at the place at which I work; a person arguing that no one should throw plastic bags with poop in them can make lots of arguments, but not a rational one. They’re just offended because it violates their sense of purity about their trash bin.

That you are offended does not mean the act is offensive.

Believing that you are harmed by someone putting plastic bag with poop in it in “your” trash bin on the day it’s going to be picked up is irrational, but that doesn’t mean your strong beliefs about poop and the trash bin you think of as yours should be dismissed or ignored.

They don’t want plastic bags that contain poop in their trash. Instead of trying to pretend that their position is universally valid, and everyone should agree, they could instead appeal to neighborliness. They could put a sign on the trash can saying, “Please don’t put dog poop bags into our trash can.” I think that would work pretty well.

Paradoxically, being willing to admit when our preferences can’t be rationally defended can enable us to have better policy arguments.

And it might also keep us from arguments grounded in false equivalency, in which issues of systemic discrimination are falsely framed as individuals (or a special interest) being offended.

Your being frightened doesn’t mean those people are dangerous

Earlier, I had a post about a very nice neighbor whose position on the issue of the marathon exemplifies a really damaging way that we are all tempted to think about public policies—there is the public good, and that good is obviously achieved through the one policy grounded in it. All other policies benefit special interests. That is, policy deliberation is simple because the right answer is obvious to people of good will.

Seeing our values as the values that matter, and all other values (goals or needs) as the consequence of special interest is a kind of imaginative selfishness. We can only imagine what impact policies might have from our self-oriented perspective. Our perspective is the universal one, and all others are particular.

The second problem with how we think and argue about politics exemplified on the neighborhood mailing list has to do with how our culture treats things like fear, anger, desire for vengeance, shame. And my argument is: not well.

There is another guy on the mailing list, who is (legitimately) angry about graffiti. Apparently, he owns a strip mall and has a real problem with graffiti. It’s reasonable for him to be angry about graffiti at his strip mall. And, apparently, the city won’t do much to help him, and that also makes him reasonably angry.

One of many problems with the rational/irrational split is that our culture tends to privilege the “rational” side of that split, with the mostly unspoken assumption that, if you have something that falls on the “irrational” side of that split—a belief you can’t defend rationally—then you should abandon it. That’s a disastrous way to think about decision-making and public deliberation.

A lot of beliefs that can’t be defended rationally (and which we don’t hold in a “rational” way) are central to our sense of identity. From within the world that says you have to abandon beliefs that can’t be defended rationally, then, if we have a belief that can’t be defended rationally–we’re angry about graffiti, fearful about the presence of the Japanese, shamed by being accused of being racist–we don’t abandon them, but just try to present them as “rational.”

Since our cultural notion of what makes a belief rational is so muddled and gerfucked–a witches brew of feeling, affect, tone, metadiscourse, in-group identity, surface features (like data, appeal to studies, appeal to facts), identity–then we just present our nonfalsifiable argument as though our nonfalsifiable and irrational belief (graffiti is damaging, the Japanese are threatening, people shouldn’t call me racist) is “rational” by making it fit some of those incoherent surface features of a “rational” argument. We find data, studies, experts who support us, or we make our argument with claims to universal truths, and we adopt a calm tone, bemoaning the emotionalism of our opposition.

As lots of people have argued (including me), our understanding of “rational” is an imbroglio of criteria: surface features (metadiscourse that signals calm affect, such as hedging, rationality markers), rhetorical appeals (such as the appeal facts, statistics, expert opinions, claims of expertise), deeper features (such as the relationship of claims), relationship to reality (an argument is rational if it’s true, a rational argument is universally accepted, whereas an irrational argument is particular to an individual). None of those are useful ways of thinking about what makes an argument (or belief) rational (and, no, I am not arguing that all beliefs are equally valid or there is no truth), but that isn’t my point here. My point here is that, if you are angry about graffiti (or frightened by the Japanese, as was Earl Warren, or threatened by integration, as was James Kilpatrick) then simply saying, “I am really angry about graffiti because it costs me a lot of money, and I’m angry that the city won’t do anything about it” would look as though you are irrational. That’s an argument about you (not universal, therefore particular and “subjective”) and it’s coming from a place of emotion (anger).

I think that we should live in a world where people can make that argument–“I am very angry about this”–and have that taken seriously as a datapoint to be considered.

I think the fact that Earl Warren (and many others) were afraid of “the Japanese,” and James Kilpatrick felt threatened about “whites” losing their privileges are arguments that people should be able to make in the public sphere. I don’t think Warren and Kilpatrick should be able to make those arguments because those arguments are good or valid, but because treating them as claims about their beliefs (and not about the world) would have opened up policy options off the table (such as people like Warren learning to distinguish between Americans of Japanese descent and the nation with whom we were at war),, and having to submit those arguments to public deliberation would have shown the policies (mass imprisonment, segregation) were grounded in indefensibly irrational arguments.

I think that, had they been clear what their argument was (“I am afraid” and “I feel threatened”) there could have been some interesting and useful discussions, especially about policy, since the policy they promoted didn’t actually solve their problems (mass imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent couldn’t make Warren any less afraid about the war with Japan, and that Kilpatrick was threatened by the possibility of “a coffee-colored” culture was not solved by segregation). But they kept their most relevant beliefs (“I am afraid of Japanese” and “Integration scares me”) off the table.

These are all instances of people with particular reactions to their particular situations, but that they reframed as problems for everyone, and they did so by transforming the objects of the feelings (“I fear the Japanese”) into the agents of those feelings (“The Japanese are dangerous”). If you insist on the objective/subjective distinction, then you’d say it’s that they make a subjective reaction an objective reality. But the subjective/objective distinction isn’t a useful way to think about these policy disasters because the people making these arguments sincerely believe they were describing, not a subjective perception, but an objective reality. No one thinks they’re being subjective.

I think it’s more useful to see this problem as someone taking their reaction and universalizing from it (as happened with marathons being universally good or bad) and projecting one’s feelings into the fabric of the universe. “I don’t like action movies” becomes “Action movies are bad.”

And that’s what happened with the issue of graffiti and the neighborhood mailing list. Instead of saying, “Graffiti is really hurting me, and I wish the city took it more seriously,” he argued that the graffiti in this blazingly white neighborhood was part of [dog whistle racist] gang activity. The notion that this neighborhood is in grave danger of turning into the site of [dog whistle racist] turf warfare is not just false, but fear-mongering in a neighborhood with a lot of elderly people. It’s damaging.

[That the moderators allowed him to engage in [dog whistle racist] and completely irrational fear-mongering about graffiti, nearly relentlessly, is why I left the list.]

A lot of people, Earl Warren among them, were frightened about how badly the war was going with Japan. Imprisoning Japanese wouldn’t make that war go better. His own policy didn’t fit his need. James Kilpatrick, like all whites, was genuinely threatened by desegregation—were desegregation to happen (and it still hasn’t), whites would no longer get a privileged status and a free pass for all sorts of things. Had Kilpatrick had to admit that was really his fear, then, perhaps, we wouldn’t be trying to make the point that black lives matter as much as white lives.

It seems to me legitimate that my neighbor is outraged about the graffiti on his strip mall, and even I found the graffiti in our neighborhood irritating (I really dislike graffiti unless it’s thoughtful), but it isn’t and never was a sign of gangs tagging our neighborhood. (I think I know what white kid up the street it was. He is not in a gang.) That was irresponsible and toxic rhetoric.

That a person is frightened by something doesn’t mean it is dangerous. We all feel threatened, offended, enraged, violated by various things. Those aren’t just feelings. They are beliefs. We believe that we are threatened, offended, enraged, violated. And, once we try to get others to share that belief, we are arguing, not that we are frightened but that those things are threatening. That slippage–“I am frightened” becomes “they are dangerous”–obscures that those two kinds of claims are supported in very different ways.

That some group is dangerous is not supported by your fear of them, nor your (and your in-groups) non-falsifiable claims about how everything they do is motivated by their desire to hurt the in-group. Warren said that the lack of sabotage on the part of Japanese was proof that they planned to engage in sabotage. Graffiti guy interpreted every instance of graffiti as proof of the impending gang war.

We can make arguments that our feelings are accurate assessments of the situation (as they often are)–that we feel frightened, threatened, uncomfortable, sexually aroused, sexualized, silence is a valid datapoint. It should neither be dismissed, but nor should it be seen as conclusive.

Graffiti guy’s really unhappy experience was a single datapoint. Relevant, worth considering, but not proof of impending gang warfare.

In a previous post, I argued that one problem with how we argue about politics is that we universalize from our belief system—because we are ethical people, then our policy agenda is the ethical one (and all other policies are unethical). For every apparently complicated political situation, there is a policy solution, and it happens to be the one that is obviously right to us.

I think that argument could be misunderstood as my saying that we shouldn’t argue from personal experience or personal perspective. Of course we should; in fact, that’s all we can do. And that’s how healthy argument works—with people bringing different perspectives. We can try to represent the perspective of people not like us, and we should, but, finally, we will still be representing our perspective on their perspective. The problem is when we insist that our perspective is the only valid one. Warren feared “the Japanese.” Black men fear the police. Kilpatrick feared desegregation. I fear climate change. Those are all datapoints.

Warren’s fear of “the Japanese” became the basis of public policy, but he never made a rational argument that his fear of what the country of Japan was doing militarily was evidence that people of Japanese ancestry in this country were dangerous. A black man who fears an interaction with the police can make a rational argument that his fear of police is grounded in evidence.

That I fear something doesn’t mean it’s so dangerous that we need public policy changes. But my fear might be a sign of a larger political issue that should involve policy changes. Fear is, by itself, neither rational nor irrational. Whether the claims I’m making about what my fear means for us as a community are rational https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2019/10/18/people-teaching-argument-need-to-stop-teaching-the-rational-irrational-split/ or not has nothing to do with whether I appeal to fear or statistics, but with how I argue.

Democratic deliberation, marathons, and that nice neighbor down the road

I continue to believe that democracy is the best form of government there is, and that healthy democratic deliberation is not just a pipe dream, despite having spent years reading the neighborhood mailing list.

Democratic deliberation isn’t perfect, as I know from studying times it goes very, very wrong, and, unhappily, the ways it goes wrong are perfectly represented in my neighborhood mailing list. Those ways aren’t the consequence of bad people on the list, or the moderators doing a bad job, or some people being stupid (or brainwashed). They’re the self-reinforcing ways we think about politics, political decision-making, and political deliberation.

First: marathons, values, and fairness

One of many reasons I wanted to move into this neighborhood is that marathons came through it. For the first two (or three?) years we lived here, the marathon ran right in front of our house, and I thought it was fun to cheer people on. While I’m not a runner, I think it’s great that the city promotes running. I could try to argue that by promoting a healthy activity it is promoting a public good, and that’s more or less true, but, really, I just like having a city that promotes marathons, and I liked having the marathon run down our street.

There were opponents, of course. One of the most vocal opponents of the marathons is a very nice neighbor who lives down the road. She’s the kind of neighbor who would show up with a casserole if she heard that something bad happened to us, who spend a lot of her time doing volunteer work, and who is active in her church. She said marathons on Sunday mornings made it hard for people like her to get to early service at church, and, therefore, they should be moved to a different day, different time, or different route.

She argued that going to church was a selfless and essentially good act, but running a marathon was selfish, and, therefore, public policy should favor her behavior over others. She was thereby making two really interesting assumptions: first, that there is one right policy to be determined as far as marathons in our neighborhood on Sundays and, second, that policy should be determined as to what was best for good people.

She didn’t want to ban marathons, and she was open to various other policy solutions, such as not having marathons on Sundays. But, when it was pointed out that having marathons on Saturday mornings created much worse traffic problems than Sunday mornings, she emphasized that what she was doing was a public good, whereas marathon-running was only a private one.

This is one way of thinking about public policies, and it’s an unhappily common position in democratic discourse—because I am motivated by ethical considerations, and what I am doing is good for the community, I am motivated by a sense of public good. People who disagree with me are arguing from their special interests. And, since the public good should also be privileged over special interests, my policy should be privileged.

From within this world, to say that my policy cannot be enacted in its purity is to say that the public good must be watered down by special interests.

This tendency to think in terms of the public good (my preferred policy) v. special interests (all other policies) isn’t restricted to any place on the political spectrum. Many marathon runners made exactly the same argument as to why their position should be privileged over people going to church: running is an ethical action, because it’s healthy, promoting a healthy community is a public good, so marathons represent the public good, whereas going to church only benefits those individuals–that’s a private good.

In other words, opposing positions invoked the binary of the public good v. a special interest, and I think they did so perfectly sincerely.

When distributing public lands, the government saved spaces for churches, schools, and libraries because so many people believed that those three kinds of spaces contribute to the public good. Some people believe that attending churches makes people more ethical, some believe that a godly community will not be punished by God, some people believe that church attendance correlates to healthier living. I’m practically positive that my very nice neighbor (and she is nice) sincerely believed that all those people running marathons would benefit the community more if they went to church instead.

I’m equally sure that the marathon runners thought she should be running a marathon instead of attending church. It is, after all, true that a healthy community is a public good.

If you can identify a public good that your policy furthers, then you nab the position of being the group arguing for the public good, and that means everyone else is arguing from a place of special interest.

I’ve seen this same presentation of public good v. special interest when there were arguments about what to do with the roads, with cyclists, runners, dog walkers, people with strollers all each claiming that their position was the one grounded in public good. When there was a proposal for increasing funding for public schools, there were people who argued that reducing taxes serves the public good, whereas the only people who wanted more funding for schools were teachers and administrators, and they were just looking to line their own pockets–they were a special interest.

It’s fine that we disagree; that’s what democratic deliberation requires. It’s actively good that we feel passionate about getting to church, having a marathon, ensuring emergency vehicles can get places, wanting low taxes, wanting good public schools, and various other legitimate perspectives that come from ethical concerns. The problem is not that people are passionate, nor that people argue and sincerely believe that the policy they prefer (that happens to benefit them) is a public good.

Democracy is based on the premise that people legitimately disagree, that there are multiple legitimate points of view (but not all points of view are equally legitimate—a different post), that we come to a better decision when we argue together. Such a view assumes that there is not the public good, but a lot of public goods, and they’re inherently in conflict.

Something can be a public good and yet not the public good.

When we choose to support or compromise with a position that is not ideal for us, it is not because we are watering down the obviously right course of action with some amount of the obviously wrong course of action–the public good with what special interests demand–, but because we recognize that our world benefits from diversity, and that means a diversity of points of views and needs and goods.

That doesn’t mean we have to be nice to people who disagree with us; that doesn’t mean we have to speak to or about them in a measured tone; that doesn’t mean that passion, outrage, and anger have no place in our deliberations. That doesn’t mean we have to say “both sides are just as bad” or say something bad about this side if we say something bad about that side. Nor does it mean that we have to say that all positions are equally valid. We can, and should, argue vehemently for why our position is right, and even why some positions aren’t. But it does mean that none of us is, in fact, imbued with universal vision, that there is not only one possible right solution to our problems, and only one set of concerns that is legitimate.

In a healthy community, good people really disagree.

You’re the propagandist!

I wander around various dark corners of the internet, and find propaganda in all sorts of places.[1] And by “propaganda,” I mean Machiavellian compliance-gaining and uni-vocal discourse.

People who choose to rely on propaganda for their political information never think that’s what they’re doing. They sincerely believe that propaganda is what those suckers believe. Effective propaganda is good at persuading people that it isn’t propaganda—that’s its first task. Propaganda in a nation or community where people can choose what they consume can’t look like propaganda, or people wouldn’t choose to consume it. We don’t think we listen to propaganda, and—and this is really interesting– even if we recognize that we do listen to propaganda, we don’t think it has worked on us.

One of the ways that propaganda looks like not propaganda is by playing to the false rational/irrational split. The rational/irrational split says that you either reason from emotion, or you reason from, um, reason.

That isn’t what the last twenty years of research in cognition shows. It shows that decision-making isn’t monocausal, and that the process isn’t a binary of any kind. How we assess an argument is influenced by perception of in-group/out-group affiliation, beliefs about those groups, our sense of commitment/threat to the in-group (a combination of feelings and beliefs), how much the issue triggers/enables motivated cognition, how aware we are of our tendency to motivated cognition, various cues and triggers in the text and environment, memory, and various other factors. This is a good map of the processes, with conscious deliberation just h and i. The other factors are more or less unconscious (or intuitive), but that doesn’t mean they’re usefully described as emotional (they have a lot of cognitive content, and there is a logic to them) or logical.

Notice that neither the rational/irrational split, nor the false trichotomy of ethos/pathos/logos accurately describes this really complicated process. You can shove this model into the rational/irrational, or the ethos/pathos/logos, or the five parts of the mind, or the four humors, or lots of other taxonomies, but what you lose is what’s really useful about this model: the extent to which our assessments and decisions are influenced (perhaps restricted is a better word) by our pre-existing beliefs, and what we imagine our options to be.

And propaganda works by creating a very limited world of beliefs and options.

A really effective propaganda outlet is good at making its suckers believe that it is an essentially transparent medium, so that, even if we are at some point forced to acknowledge our reliance on propaganda, we underestimate how much of our world was constructed by that propaganda. We think we didn’t fall for it.

So, for instance, Tapping Hitler’s Generals is a collection of conversations that Nazi generals had while held captive in a house in Britain from 1943-45. They often talked about Nazi propaganda, with considerable contempt for the masses who fell for it. Yet they continued to believe in its central tenets(such as that the war could be won, even after the disaster of Stalingrad, see especially 44-45, 73), that the Allies would exterminate all Germans (46), that Germans were morally superior (50, 68), and they continued to support Hitler (61, 66, 73). Milton Mayer’s post-war interviews with Germans, and the interrogations of Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg show the same thing: people who know that they had spent years listening to propaganda still believed many of the lies they were told. Knowing that they listened to propaganda didn’t cause them to doubt their beliefs or judgment; they just rejected some beliefs.

And that is why propaganda is effective. Really effective propaganda doesn’t look irrational, because it looks as though it is arguing from good reasons and data. It seems true because it fits with what people already believe.

In a culture of choice, it says, they believe propaganda, but we are giving you the truth, and, even if we don’t, it’s okay because people like you have great judgment and can always recognize the truth. You are never mislead by us because you are too smart to be misled. The main move of propaganda—they are idiots, and you are too smart to fall for their propaganda—is how you get suckered.

When people ask themselves about whether their sources are propaganda, they ask all the wrong questions. They ask themselves:

is this source saying things that are false?
does this source have reasons?
is this source overly emotional?
are the claims of this source supported by experts?

Those are the wrong questions. Better questions are:

what are the conditions under which I would decide my beliefs are wrong?
if there was evidence that the major claims of this medium were wrong, would they tell me?
does this medium accurately represent the best counter-arguments, or does it engage in inoculation?

If we can’t answer those questions with specific instances, especially that second one, then our beliefs are probably grounded in propaganda.

So, instead of feeling good about ourselves because our propaganda outlet has persuaded us that those consumers of that propaganda are bad, perhaps we should worry about whether our sources are propaganda?

[1] I don’t find it “on both sides,” since the very notion that the complicated world of political stances can be divided into two is how the skeezy salesman of bad decisions gets his foot in the door of democratic deliberation. The first thing a skeezy salesman says to a possible mark is, “I’m not a skeezy salesman because I’m not like that guy.” There is always a “that guy” who is worse, but it doesn’t mean this guy is good. Saying that “both sides do it” is a silly thing to say—partially because the next (fallacious) step is to say “both sides are just as much at fault” which is rarely true even if there are two sides, and secondly because there are rarely two sides. “Both sides”—meaning “liberal” and “conservative”—means pretending that neo-conservatives, neo-Nazis, libertarians, paleo-conservatives, neo-liberals, and conservative evangelicals are all interchangeable in terms of their rhetoric and actions. So, Daily Sturmer and The Economist have the same rhetoric. They don’t.

People teaching argument need to stop teaching the rational/irrational split

If you had said to a theologian in the era when Aristotle was considered the authority that, perhaps, the substance v. essence distinction was not useful, you might have found yourself with burning wood at your feet. You certainly would not have been popular. Yet we now think it was a thoroughly useless distinction—meaning we now think they never needed to make it, and that they only did so because they thought it was important to Aristotle, and he was The Authority, and working within that odd binary was what you did.

We now consider the substance/essence binary kind of a joke since it really only made sense within Aristotelian physics, which was wrong.

Scholars and teachers of writing can sit smugly in our chairs and smirk at those dumb people who worked so hard to make things work within what we now see as the false binary of substance v. essence, while we work, write, teach, and assign textbooks that work just as hard to promote the equally false binary of rational v. irrational.

You can tell it’s a false binary by asking someone to define what it means to be “rational.” They will describe five wildly incompatible ways of determining rationality:
1) the emotional state of the person making the argument (whether they seem emotional);
2) which is determined by linguistic cues, such as what linguists call boosters (words like “absolutely,” “never”)—generally whether the tone of the argument seems to the reader more extreme than the argument merits;
3) whether the argument “appeals to” data, “logic” (this is generally bungled);
4) whether what they say is obviously true to reasonable people;
5) whether the argument appeals to expert opinion (or the author is an expert).

These five criteria for determining rationality are, loosely, the person making the argument strikes us as rational kind of person, whether they’re emotional about the issue, whether they have data, whether what they say seems true to the reader, whether there are experts support the claims.

Those are all useless ways of trying to figure out whether an argument usefully contributes to deliberation about any issue.

Granted, those are the characteristics common usage dictionaries identify, although in a different order from mine. Dictionary.com provides this definition of rational:

1. agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible: a rational plan for economic development.
2. having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense: a calm and rational negotiator.
3. being in or characterized by full possession of one’s reason; sane; lucid: The patient appeared perfectly rational.
4. endowed with the faculty of reason: rational beings.
5. of, relating to, or constituting reasoning powers: the rational faculty.

And every side (there aren’t just two) says that the problem is that our public discourse is irrational, by which they mean the other side is irrational. That’s irrational twice over—they reduce the complicated world to us v. them, which is irrational, and in that irrational argument, they accuse the other side of being irrational, based on a definition that is irrational. We are in a culture of demagoguery because we believe that there is a binary of rational/irrational, and we think that people who are irrational don’t really need to be taken into consideration when we’re arguing about policies. In fact, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate. We believe that democratic deliberation requires that only people on the rational side of the rational/irrational split really count.

The rational/irrational split is not only a false dilemma, but a thoroughly incoherent and profoundly demagogic way to approach any decision. We are in a culture of demagoguery not because they are irrational (from within the that false rational/irrational split) but at least partially because we (all over the political spectrum) accept that false and demagogic binary of rational v. irrational.

Far too often, we assess arguments as rational or not on the basis of whether the person making the argument seems like a rational kind of person, they’re making the argument with an unemotional tone, whether they have evidence, whether what they say seems true to us, and whether the person speaking can cite authorities.

And we don’t always require that last one. We often treat argument from personal experience as rational evidence, especially if it’s our experience.

For instance, since I have the bad habit of reading comment threads (I know, I really should stop), I ran across a comment on a thread about why you should be hesitant to call the police if you have POC neighbors who get on your nerves, and one commenter said something along the lines of, “I’m a 60-year old white woman who has never had any issues with the police.”

I noticed that comment in particular because I’m a 60-year old white woman who has never been badly treated by the police, and I know so many POC who have, and therefore the experience of someone like me is proof that there is disparate treatment of white women and POC. So, I thought her comment would go in that direction. But it didn’t. Instead, she went on to something like, “So, you just have to treat them with respect.”

It’s important to note that she was using her personal experience to discount the personal experiences of POC who report problems with the police. So, her one argument from personal experience—that they treated her well—was, she thought, proof that they treat everyone well. She was treating herself as an expert, on all experiences with the police.

That’s irrational. But it isn’t irrational because she’s an untrustworthy person, she was emotional in the moment, she failed to provide evidence, or what she was saying would come across as obviously untrue to everyone. Her argument would look rational to someone like her, and to someone who thought as she did.

But it’s a really bad argument. Her experience as a white woman doesn’t refute the claim that POC are treated differently by police than are white women.

Her argument is irrational, but not by the dominant way of thinking about what makes a rational argument. The rational/irrational split is just another instance of confirmation bias—if you agree with the argument she’s making, then her argument will seem rational. If you don’t, it won’t.

I agree that democratic deliberation requires that people take on the responsibilities of rational argumentation, but rational argumentation isn’t about false binaries regarding identity, affect, evidence, truth, or expertise. It’s never about feelings v. emotion, so it isn’t about calm or angry, nor is it about data or not.

People teaching argumentation need to run screaming from the rational/irrational split, and from textbooks and teaching methods that reinforce it.

There are scholars who set high standards for rational argumentation, and others who set low standards. I’m on the low standards side: people are engaged in rational argumentation when we
1) can be very specific about the conditions under which we would change our minds—in other words, what we believe is open to falsification;
2) have internally consistent arguments (that is, basically, we have the same major premises for all our arguments);
3) hold the opposition(s) to the same standards in regard to kinds of proof and logic as we hold ourselves. Thus, if cherry-picking from Scripture proves we’re right, then cherry-picking from Scripture proves we’re wrong. If a single argument from personal experience proves we’re right, then a single argument from personal experience proves we’re wrong. Arguments from Scripture or personal experience aren’t necessarily rational or irrational—but how we handle them in an argument is.

This way of thinking about what makes a rational argument means we can’t assess the rationality of an argument without understanding the argumentation of which it is a part.

An argument—a single text—can’t rationally be assessed as rational or not on the basis of just looking at that single text.

Or a single personal experience. If you think about rational argumentation this way, then things like arguments from personal experience are part of the deliberation, and they are datapoints we have to assess just as we would a study. If there is a study that contradicts a lot of other studies, we don’t immediately assume it’s right, nor do we immediately assume it’s wrong. We look at its methodology, relevance, quality relative to the other studies; we look at whether it’s logically relevant to the case at hand.

We treat personal experience the same way. A white 60-yo woman who has always had good experiences with the police is a datapoint. One that shows that white women are treated well by the police. It shows nothing about POC experiences with police.

I think it is useful to characterize arguments as rational or irrational, or, more accurately, to talk about the ways in which they are rational and irrational (since many arguments are both). But, dismissing an argument as irrational simply on the grounds of surface features of a text (the argument is vehement, contradicts what we believe) or purely on in/out-group grounds (the source is irrational because out-group, it contradicts beliefs I think are true), or categorizing the argument as rational because of surface features (it has data, it seems calm, it makes gestures of fairness, it cites experts) or purely on in/out-group grounds (it confirms what I believe, the person seems in-group)–that’s irrational.

[The image is from Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, as this is all thoroughly grounded in Booth’s argument.]

Hyperbole and the publicking of the private

It’s common to sit around with friends in your living room or a bar and watch a game, movie, debate, TV show, or whatever and make snarky comments. You’re making those comments for the other people in the room, and it’s all about being snarkier, more clever, more funny, and more loyal to the in-group. This isn’t some nuanced discussion of how reffing or basketball or movies or whatever work. You’re watching a game, and you make a snarky and hyperbolic comment about how bad that ref’s call was.

And perhaps it really was a bad call. Or perhaps not.

But whether it was really a bad, good, or ambiguous call isn’t really the point. The point is to have fun by talking trash about the opponent, confirming in-group attachment, gaining the approval of the other people by offering hilariously clever comments, hyperbolic statements (generally, but not necessarily, about the out-group). That whole experience is about bonding with others, about creating and fostering an in-group.

And that’s fine. It’s fun to say something snarky, unfair, hyperbolic about a ref, player, plaintiff on Judge Judy, competitor on Bachelorette, candidate in a debate, actor in a movie. And, as long as you’re saying it to your circle of friends, it’s fine.

Because it’s directed at your friends in the room, all norms of civility, decorum, respect, and fairness are not norms that apply to you and the candidate on Bachelorette, but to you and the friends in the room. The operative norm is whether your friends like it. And that’s fine in your living room.

The problem is that we have social media that are sort of your living room and sort of not. You have a youtube, Instagram, or whatever account with 20 followers, so it feels like the living room (even if it’s technically public). Or you have a twitter or Facebook account with 800 friends, but about 20 interact on any regular basis. You think you’re in your living room, making snarky, unfair, and hyperbolic comments about the ref, to a known and in-group audience, but you might not be. You might be. You might only continue to have 20 followers, or 20 people who interact, but something you say that you intended for that known audience might get publicked, and then you’re out there in the world.

Jon Ronson has written about this a lot, and about how to handle it. He shows that people can have their lives destroyed because they think the audience of their normal social media communication is the only audience they imagined when they wrote the text, but it reached a much broader audience (in rhetoric, this is called the “intended” v. “actual” audience).

Social media enables the gerfucking of the rhetorical situation of me talking trash with my small group of friends and me taking a very public stance. Social media publicks that trash-talking, when I never consciously intended to make as a public, context-free, statement. Ronson is interested in the personal consequence of that gerfucked publicking of the two audiences: the intended and actual. And it’s a good book.

I’m more interested in the political implications of that gerfucked publicking.

Just to be clear: the snarking in the living room isn’t intended to be a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation. The snark in the living room about the ref isn’t offered as some kind of reasoned contribution to political deliberation about refs, the three-point rule, corruption in professional basketball. It might, at best, be a kind of “YEAH ME TOO! I LOVE MY IN-GROUP!” moment of performance of in-group loyalty that a person is fine being publicked (they’re happy letting the entire world know that they’re passionate about the Cubs, Gwyneth Paltrow, Republicans). But it also might not. It might be a more hyperbolic, unfair, snarky take on the situation than the person really wants to defend were s/he participating in public deliberation.

Snarking in the living room and making a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation are, and really should be, different.

And that is the challenge of our current world of social media.

Imagine that we’re in a living room, and someone says, “That ref is fucking blind shithead who must be getting paid well for how bad his calls are.” And imagine that someone responds with, “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team.” That measured, thoughtful response, even if accurate, would be considered a party foul. The living room is not a place for rational deliberation, and that’s fine. It’s a place where rants that are completely and totally unfair, unhinged, and unreasonable are welcome, as long as they’re about someone not present, they’re funny, clever, and/or mobilizing. They don’t contribute to thoughtful political deliberation because they aren’t intended to. That isn’t the function of this space.

Social media feels like hanging in the living room making snarky comments for the pleasure and approval of the like-minded, and we all treat it that way. But it’s also the only place in our informational world in which we might argue policies. It’s the only place in which we might argue with people who disagree with us about politics. It’s the last place of political deliberation.

Good decision-making requires that we look at the situation from perspectives other than our own. I work in a building built in 1953. I have watched an EMS team be completely unable to get a stretcher up to a classroom because, when that building was built, no one looked at it from the perspective of someone trying to get a stretcher to someone in need. The viewpoint of EMS workers, people who can’t walk up stairs (there are stairs everywhere that are actually unnecessary), fire marshalls—all sorts of people should have been included in the deliberation about the building.

I was in a long series of deliberations about the building of a unit, and the architects really wanted a “pony wall” in a particular place. We kept saying, “Take out the fucking pony wall” and they would say okay, and it was still there. I was feeling really victimized until I noticed that a particular guy would show up from time to time and say something along the lines of, “Not enough doors.” Finally, at one meeting, he said something along the lines of “I am the Fire Marshall, and your design is illegal because it violates fire code. You must have doors here and here, or this building will go no further.”

The architects were ignoring me, not because they thought me unimportant, but because they thought everyone unimportant. They couldn’t look at their design from any perspective other than their own. Including the guy in charge of making sure people can get out quickly in case of fire.

We need to hear from people who disagree with us, even if they ruin our beautiful design. Cultures in which groups can keep from hearing criticism of their arguments are cultures cheering themselves off a cliff (WeWork and Theranos would be good examples of that). Believing in yourself, believing in your own beliefs, believing that you’re right—those are all great bumper stickers, but they aren’t actually great ways to reason.

Various research in political science (including Uncivil Agreements and Ideology in America) show “cross-cutting voters” to be, if not the heroes of democracy, at least pretty close. These are people who listen to various sources of information, who have friends of various political affiliations. We should all be cross-cutting voters; we should all be listening to points of view that disagree with us, and not representations of opposition positions, and not hate-watching.

But a depressing amount of empirical research shows that few of us talk about politics with people who disagree with us (Ideology in America, How Partisan Media Polarizes America).

Before cable, and when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, we used to be forced to watch centrist news, but the internet has allowed people to fall in enclaves of deeply pure in-groups. Enclaves of in-group ideology become increasingly extreme. It’s not uncommon, when I’m trying to talk to people who self-identify as conservative, for them to say that they don’t watch Fox because it isn’t in-group enough for them, and I once fell into the informational enclave of anti-globalism, a self-identifying lefty group which has sub-groups promoting the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax and the Protocols is a legitimate document. There are informational worlds of youtube videos, private Facebook groups, Instagram enclaves that are entirely in-group amplification, in which the goal of the discourse is nothing but cheering the in-group team and yelling about the other team. That’s a party in which furniture gets broken, and someone wakes up naked on the front lawn.

That’s a different post, but my point here is that far too many of us reason from within informational enclaves so refined that we spend all our time arguing about who is more purely in-group.

We are all thinking in a world of people who think like us, while we think we know what they think because our in-group enclave inoculates us, whereas good deliberation requires including the views of people who don’t think like us. We can’t make good decisions about anything without trying to think about how and why we might be wrong. There is no position from which the universal right is accurately perceived. (Again, a different post.)

Democratic deliberation requires that there is some place that the decision-makers engage in rational-critical democratic deliberation. The people who wrote the constitution imagined a series of proxy deliberations—people would select a person they thought had good judgment, who would then go to a place in which people deliberated together, rationally, inclusively, and absent of factional commitment. In such a world, citizens don’t deliberate about what policies to follow, but about who deliberates well. It didn’t work, and quickly turned into exactly the kind of factional system the people who wrote the constitution were trying to prevent. Our political system has shifted that place of deliberation from elites (who deliberated just as badly as any other group) to “the people.” That is, to us. So, now we need to engage in rational-critical policy deliberation.

And rational deliberation includes listening to the best arguments of the oppositions.

Social media, especially Facebook, google, and twitter, are places in which we might engage in points of view other than our own, but the algorithms help us to avoid difference. I have to work to find political arguments from out-groups. There are other places–comment threads on places as varied as Slate, WSJ, captainawkward, FARK, WaPo, NRO—that have a dominant ideology (an in-group point of view) and out-group views get piled on (and the whole genre of commenting isn’t inviting for good deliberation). Those comment threads are not places in which people thoughtfully engage the best arguments of the opposition. They are places in which in-group hyperbole is allowed—they are the living rooms in which the furniture isn’t broken, but in which “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team” is still not a welcome argument.

I am not saying that all comment threads must be equally welcoming of all points of view. I think that having site-specific informal norms is to be expected when people are looking for a place to vent, be entertained, snark about the ref. I’m saying that, for all of us, social media is the living room in which we try to make statements that resonate with people who already agree, that are clever and funny snarks about out-groups. And we pick our living rooms.

But where is the hard work of democratic deliberation? Of paying attention to the person we really don’t want to hear who says that we’re being unfair, hyperbolic, and irrationally dismissive, who says it isn’t a zero-sum battle between two sides, who insists that we pay careful attention to people we think are intellectually and morally bankrupt?

If social media isn’t that space, what is?

“They always say that”: Radicalizing the opposition

As someone who has been teaching argumentation for a long time, I’ve found puzzling a lot of the ways that people approach and think about argument. One of them is the tendency to radicalize the opposition argument, taking an opposition argument that has hedging and modifiers (often, sometimes, rarely, frequently, occasionally, infrequently, tends) and recharacterize that argument as an extreme claim (“sometimes” becomes “always” and “infrequently” becomes “never”). So, if Chester claims, “The squirrels tend to try to get the red ball when it’s easy,” Hubert says, “Chester believes that the squirrels never do anything but try to get to the red ball.”

Notice two things about that recharacterization: Hubert has framed the issue as a question of Chester’s beliefs, not his argument, and he’s radicalized Chester’s argument.

At first, I thought it was because I was a grad student teaching in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. That department attracted a lot of aspiring lawyers, and many (most?) of them had had debate experience. I thought students to often radicalized opposition arguments was because radicalizing your opponent’s argument was debate weeny move 101 (and one any good judge or opposition team would catch).

But then I moved to colleges where debate training was rare, and I noticed how common that shift from a modified claim to an extreme one was still common. I caught myself doing it (especially when angry or frightened), as well as colleagues (in rhetoric, who should know better), pundits, editorials, people complaining about spouses, partners, room-mates.

Perhaps because of my training, I had always thought of it as a deliberate misrepresentation of the opposition, a conscious use of the straw man fallacy.

But then I ran across relationship advice that said, essentially, if you hear yourself saying (or thinking), “You never…” or “You always….” you aren’t in the realm of talking to the person in front of you. It’s pretty unlikely that the person in front of you—spouse, partner, room-mate—has literally never done the dishes, or helped around the house, or taken out the trash. They probably washed a glass here and there, or wiped off a spill, or took out one piece of trash. It’s unlikely that they always interrupt you, leave dirty dishes in the sink, or talk on the phone. There are hours in the day when they aren’t, at that moment, interrupting you.

Because those accusations aren’t true, a person who treats relationship arguments in bad faith (they’re just trying to get their way and not solve the problem) can dismiss your claim by pointing out that they once did dishes, or are not, at this moment, interrupting you. A person who treats relationship arguments in good faith has a really hard time figuring out how to respond to such hyperbolic claims. That’s really good relationship advice—listen to yourself when you’ve radicalized their behavior.

It doesn’t work for people who see relationships as zero-sum battles between the two people, and who like it that way; it takes the fun out for them. They like the big blow-up arguments that are all about throwing hyperbolic accusations at one another (and sometimes physical objects) and the makeup sex afterwards. YKINMKBYKIOK

But I found it to be good advice for me—to pay attention to when I was radicalizing someone else’s argument. And then I realized it’s really good advice for policy deliberation. And I don’t mean just national politics, but I noticed that intra-departmental policy arguments (what should we do about the photocopier) often triggered all-or-nothing thinking in some people. In faculty meetings, a person would say, “I’m concerned because I think this policy might lead to [this outcome] under these circumstances,” and someone would respond with, “So you’re saying [this outcome] would always happen,” and then they would engage in a long speech about how silly it was that their opposition would think it would always happen. Smart people, people trained in close reading, radicalized the claims of people with whom they disagreed. And they hadn’t been trained in debate.

And, working individually with students, I found that they could read a nuanced argument, and, if it was in-group or confirmed their beliefs, they could read it with nuance, but if it disagreed with them, they radicalized it.

The tendency to radicalize what they believe, in my experience, is pretty rarely a strategic and conscious rhetorical choice. I’ve come to think it’s entirely sincere. I’m not going to say that “both sides” do it, because I think the whole notion that our nuanced, vexed, and rich array of political options can be reduced to two sides (or a continuum) is not only empirically false, but proto-demagogic.

I will say that many people all over the political spectrum, and in the realm of non-partisan policy issues (such as what policy should we have in our house about doing dishes), radicalize the beliefs of anyone who disagrees with them, and all of us often radicalize the beliefs of people who disagree with us, especially under certain circumstances.

My crank theory is that there are various conditions that make people prone to radicalize the opposition:
1) That’s how some people think. Honestly, this is, I think, the most common explanation. There are people who can’t think in nuanced terms, or understand probability. They think in extreme terms. They’re the kind of people who, if the weather predictors say, “There is a 90% chance of rain,” and if it doesn’t rain, they say the weather predictors were wrong.

Lots of people in our muckled public/private realm engage in hyperbole, and so do these people. If something is bad, it’s the worst thing ever; if something is good, it’s the best thing ever. But these people talk that way because that’s really how they think—their in-group is entirely good, and made up of good people who all agree as to what is good, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is entirely bad. You are either in-group (double plus good) or out-group (double plus ungood).

They have a lot of trouble admitting that in-group people are deeply flawed or out-group people have any virtues at all. Because they think everyone thinks in such all-or-nothing terms, they project that way of thinking onto everyone else. They read “often” as “always” because that’s what it really means to them.

2) That’s how all of us think in situations when we have been effectively inoculated against the opposition. Inoculation https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2019/07/28/democracy-and-inoculation/ works by giving us a weak version of “the” opposition argument. It’s generally paired with training us to associate certain terms or positions with one opposition (so, all feminists are lesbians who want to convert all women to lesbianism, if this woman says she thinks women are unfairly treated, she must be a feminist lesbian missionary).
3) It’s also common if we’re naïve realists—if we believe that our position is the only possible reasonable position, then we are prone to reframe all opposition arguments as arguments. That is, we radicalize them.
4) If we believe that there are only two positions on every political issue, then we’re going to throw all unreasonable positions into the “other” side. We all tend to think of our in-group as nuanced, heterogeneous, and diverse, but the out-group as essentially all the same. So, if I believe that vaccines are great, and someone says they’re not wild about the HPV vaccine, I’m likely to assume that they’re opposed to all vaccinations.

I think the unconscious (and sometimes deliberate, when it’s part of inoculation) of “the” opposition is one of the major contributors to our culture of demagoguery.

It’s common now to say that we’re in a bad situation because civics is no longer taught, and there certainly seem to be an awful lot of people who don’t seem to understand some of the basic features of our governmental system (all over the political spectrum), but I think more important is that we don’t teach logic.

I don’t mean formal logic, but the very straightforward, and yet very challenging, skill of teaching students to recognize various fallacies, like straw man, not when those people engage in it, but when we do.

That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean your policy is right

I’m a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times that communities came to bad decisions, although they had all the time, information, and counter-arguments necessary to come to better ones.

And, although they smear across eras, cultures, and particular situations (but all more or less within what is considered the “Western Tradition”), they share the same characteristic: the communities abandoned policy argumentation in favor of thinking of the variegated, nuanced spectrum of policy options actually open to them as a binary between right (loyal, ethical, in-group) and wrong (treacherous, unethical, out-group). That is, demagoguery.

There was, often, a legitimate need, a serious problem. There was also a situation in which the community had multiple—not just two—policy options available to them. But, when people tried to argue about multiple plans, the response was for people to argue that the need was great, and that we must do this thing. And they treated people who wanted to argue about the plan as people who wanted to do nothing.

That was Cleon’s argument. His opponent wanted retribution (severe, in fact) against the rebellious Mytileneans. Cleon wanted genocide, and he framed his opponents’ argument as doing nothing. Cleon briefly argued solvency (being brutal would terrify other “allied” states into submission) and the feasibility argument was pretty clear (I mean, they could kill all the Mytileneans whom they didn’t sell into slavery and raze the city—as the Athenians would in regard to Milos), but he didn’t even acknowledge the potential unintended consequences. His argument was, in an enthymeme, “We should kill all male Mytileneans and sell everyone else into slavery because the rebellion endangered the empire.” In other words, “My policy is good because the need is real.” That enthymeme has an appalling major premise: that Athenians should commit genocide against any city-state that has people whose actions endanger the Athenian empire.

Nor did he engage the arguments his opponents actually made. Diodotus, who argued against Cleon, didn’t disagree about the need–he, too, was outraged about the Mytileneans revolt; he had a different plan. He certainly didn’t advocate doing nothing.

This might all seem very weird, and very distant, but it isn’t. We are always in the world of Cleon and Diodotus–a world in which we can decide that our policies should be about exterminating anyone we think dangerous, and in which we declare any dissidents from that policy to be corrupt on the grounds that, if they disagree with our policy, they don’t care about the need (Cleon’s position); or a world in which we argue the advantages and disadvantages of our various policy options (Diodotus’ position).

After 9/11, I found myself arguing with many people about the proposed invasion of Afghanistan. 9/11 was appalling, and terrifying. It was an extraordinary act of violence against the US, but I didn’t think that invading Afghanistan would solve the problem of anti-US terrorism. I didn’t see why that was the right plan. Clearly, something had to be done, but it seemed to me that solving the problem of terrorism couldn’t be solved by invading one country, especially when it wasn’t even the country from whom the terrorists had come. I was asking for good old affirmative case construction, in which people argue on the stases of feasibility, solvency, and unintended consequences of their plan.

And, over and over, the people with whom I was arguing emphasized the need (as though I disagreed about that) and then said something like, “We must do something” and sometimes went on to argue that doing nothing was a terrible plan. I agreed with the need, and I never advocated doing nothing—I didn’t like their plan. Our situation in regard to Afghanistan was never invade Afghanistan or do nothing. It was never invade Iraq or do nothing.

In the train wrecks I study, that false frame of “do this thing or do nothing” won the rhetorical contest. Arguments about policy were thoroughly evaded in favor of rhetoric that associated one group (the real Athenians, Christians, Southerners, Germans, Americans, progressives, Democrats, Republicans, animal lovers, dog lovers, Austinites) with one policy, ignoring that that group had a lot of policy options.

Being convinced that the need is real never means that you are necessarily committed to this policy. That’s demagoguery.

We are, as citizens in a democracy, never exempted from arguing policy. To say we are is to promote demagoguery.

In my train wrecks, and my own experience trying to argue with people about why we shouldn’t invade Afghanistan NOW, people who want to argue about our policy options (rather than believe that this need means there is only one possible policy option) are told, quite clearly, that they aren’t taking the issue seriously. That’s what I was told, over and over. That’s what Cleon said to (and about) Diodotus: Cleon said that Diodotus didn’t think what the Mytileneans had done was bad. That’s what the pro-invasion media said—any dissent from this policy was only on the part of people who didn’t take the need seriously, who didn’t care about terrorism, or who actively helped it.

You either supported Bush’s very odd and problematic policy, or you supported terrorism. And that was, and always is, a false binary. A demagogic binary.

When I tried to argue that invading Afghanistan wasn’t necessarily a good policy, I was lectured about the need. Over and over and fucking over. That there is a legitimate, pressing, and even urgent need doesn’t mean this policy is right. This policy has to be defended on its merits, as opposed to other policy options—not as against doing nothing.

Diodotus wasn’t arguing for doing nothing; I wasn’t arguing for doing nothing in regard to 9/11.

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City with problematic water. A guy selling water filters came out and talked to us about how terrible the water was. He could never explain why his company’s filter was any better than our other options. The water really was bad, but that doesn’t mean his company’s filter was right. Our choice was not his policy or doing nothing.

A few years ago, a Texas state legislator argued that teen pregnancy is bad, and therefore we should ban suggestive cheerleading. Teen pregnancy should be reduced, but that doesn’t mean that banning suggestive cheerleading is a good policy. He was never able to argue that his plan solved the problem, was feasible, or didn’t have consequences worse than the problem he was trying to solve. What he could argue was that teen pregnancy was bad, and thereby frame anyone who wanted to point out how bad his policy was as a person who didn’t care about teen pregnancy (or liked suggestive cheerleading).

Anti-abortion rhetoric works by advertising the number of abortions and insisting that the only possible solution is banning abortion and restricting information about effective birth control. The number of abortions really is troubling; there is a need. But banning abortion and demonizing birth control (their plan) doesn’t solve that need. It worsens it.

Were people really concerned about reducing abortion, and were they people who considered reducing abortion the most important value, they would model policies on places that have reduced abortions. They don’t. They insist that if you don’t want to ban abortion, you don’t care about the number of abortions (when, in fact, there are better policies for reducing abortion). We don’t have a world in which we either have our current number of abortions or we ban it, but that is the world they promote. It’s a world of the false dilemma—either you agree with my policy or you want to do nothing. That was Cleon’s argument; that was the argument for invading Iraq.

I think impeaching Trump immediately is not the best policy. That doesn’t mean I misunderstand the need to impeach Trump. Showing that Trump needs to be impeached immediately is not the same as showing that Trump needs to be impeached. People who are arguing for Trump immediately aren’t supporting their case by showing that Trump should be impeached. They need to engage in the policy stases.

My belief that we shouldn’t impeach Trump for a while (perhaps as late as March) doesn’t mean I think people who believe we should impeach him immediately are bad, stupid, or irrational. That guy in Kansas City really might have had the best water filter. But his arguing need over and over didn’t show that his plan was the best. It really might be the best policy to impeach Trump immediately, and that case is made through engaging, reasonably and fairly, the arguments for engaging him later. It is not made by reasserting the need.

That Trump should be impeached is not actually proof that he should be impeached immediately. That there is a need doesn’t mean that this policy is right. And, really, that’s the larger point I’m trying to make continually: our culture needs to engage in policy argumentation. Instead, we have a demagogic world in which people argue need, and then say, if you acknowledge this need, you must support this policy. If you reject the policy, you must be a person who fails to recognize the need.

People arguing for delaying impeachment aren’t arguing for doing nothing. We aren’t arguing about whether to impeach Trump; we’re arguing about when. That’s a good argument to have. Because arguing policy is always a good policy.

Trump will get impeached, and then this argument will appear to be over. But it won’t really. The argument about argument will be with us: arguing need doesn’t exempt you from arguing plan. That there is a need doesn’t mean only one plan has merit.

[image from here: https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/train-wreck]

Two ways of thinking about politics

I have a visceral aversion to binaries, and therefore to any argument that claims something can be divided into two. Yet, the more that I study train wrecks in public deliberation, the more that I think there really might be a binary.

It isn’t, though, that there are two kinds of people, or our political options are usefully divided into two (or a continuum of the two), but that it might be that the ways that people assess claims can be (more or less) divided into two.

Imagine that I say that Chester Burnette is the right candidate for President. That’s a claim.

We can assess that claim through the filter of assuming that the in-group is the only group with legitimate claims, objective views, good evidence. So, we look at a claim and accept it (as “objective” or “true”) or reject it (as “biased” or “false”) purely on the basis of whether it supports/contradicts what we already believe, and/or is from a source we consider loyal to the in-group.

We stride through our vexed, complicated, nuanced world confident that we, only we, are people who see things clearly. And we see things so clearly that we refuse to see things that might suggest we aren’t seeing things clearly.

Most of us spend most of our time striding through social media this way.

We assess arguments and claims on the basis of whether the people making them are in-group or out-group, they support in-group v. out-group beliefs.

Or, we can assess every political argument on the grounds of the stases of policy argumentation, which means that we apply standards of rational argumentation equally across groups.

If you look at our political landscape through the lens of proto-demagoguery, then you spend your political life drinking deep from the genetic fallacy (any information that complicates or contradicts the in-group talking points or that criticizes an in-group political figure can be dismissed because it comes from a non-in-group source).

I think there are times that the source of information is relevant to assessing the information, but it’s always a secondary consideration. The first consideration is what their evidence is.

Imagine that you have a cousin who always has a new get-rich-quick scheme. After two or three of those schemes have blown up and lost him a lot of money, you can conclude he has bad judgment and ignore him. It’s the genetic fallacy if you refuse to consider his evidence because he supports Trump; it isn’t the genetic fallacy if he’s consistently been wrong, repeatedly shared false memes and debunked claims, and often misrepresents things he’s read. It’s rational to abandon a source, not because it’s out-group, but because it’s consistently irrational.

After you’ve been burned a few times by a source, you can conclude you won’t rely on it anymore (for me, that would be RawStory, The Drudge Report, PETA, Mother Jones, The Blaze, Rush Limbaugh, and various other sources). I still read them, but I never believe anything I say without checking their sources (which is complicated if they don’t give their sources, and some of them don’t).

I think it’s valid to conclude that PETA is just completely unreliable as a source. But, concluding that PETA is completely unreliable (and, honestly, I think it is) doesn’t mean that criticisms of animal testing, Big Agra, or our reliance on beef are invalid.

To argue that all criticisms of animal testing are invalid because those criticisms are made by PETA and PETA can’t make a rational argument to save its life is an irrational argument. And yet that’s how far too much of our political world works. And, just to be clear, PETA cannot make an irrational argument to save its life. It’s kind of a bad car crash for me–if I want to find an example of a fallacy, and I’m teaching, I just go to PETA. I know I’ll find it there.

And I say this as someone committed to animal rescue, opposed to (almost all) animal testing, vegetarianism.

Our world is not PETA or no restrictions on animal experimentation. Our world is not the NRA or Obama personally kicking down your doors to take your guns. Our political world is not a world of binaries and identities. You don’t have to choose between PETA and all animal experimentation all the time; you don’t have to choose between the NRA and Obama personally kicking down your door to take your guns.

I don’t believe we are in a political world of left v. right. I think that model is not only false, but toxically so. I think it’s like saying that all colors are either yellow or blue. You could organize all colors that way, just as you could organize all the things in your house as square or round, or all animals as bunnies or ants. You could do it, and that binary would be self-fulfilling, but the important questions would be: why that binary? Is that a useful binary? If it’s useful, to whom?

The binary is self-fulfilling insofar as, were we in a world in which all animals were categorized as bunnies or ants, then that would seem natural.

Our political world is no more “left” v. “right” than the animal world is bunnies v. ants.

And here is the important point: so what? Even were our world actually bunnies v. ants that wouldn’t mean we should argue about policies in terms of a zero-sum between bunnies and ants.

I shouldn’t assess the claim that Chester Burnette would be a great President purely on the basis of whether in-group media supports him, nor whether he feels in-group to me. I should consider his policies, whether his voting record suggests he really supports those policies, and what various media say about him. And I shouldn’t decide to dismiss any criticism of him on the basis that only bad people criticize him.

It’s perfectly fair to decide that some sources are engaged in bad faith argumentation, but that they are critical of the in-group or an in-group candidate is not adequate evidence. If I firmly, thoroughly, and completely believe that squirrels are evil because they are trying to get to the red ball (the basic belief of my favorite dog) that doesn’t actually mean that it is rational for me to frame my entire world in terms of pro- or anti-squirrel.

It’s fine for me to be passionate about squirrels; it’s fine for me to ask every political figure about his stance on squirrels. I have that right. But having that right and having a rational argument aren’t the same thing.

If you dismiss every source (or rhetor) who disagrees with what you think is true without considering their arguments, then you are not engaged in rational argumentation. (It’s fine to dismiss some sources and rhetors, either because they’re consistently wrong and you’re done with them –me and PETA–or because they never engage in argumentation to support their point. Oh, wait, that was PETA again.)

All sources should be held to the same standards. If a source consistently fails to represent the opposition(s) fairly, engage in internally consistent arguments, make falsifiable claims, you can decide it’s an unreliable source, not engaged in good faith argumentation. But you’re making that assessment on the basis of how they argue, not what they argue or who they are.

If you read something that says your admired political figure has done something wrong, and you dismiss it as “biased,” since it was critical of your admired political figure, you’re the one who is biased. If you aren’t willing to listen to the most fierce criticism of your political group and figure, then your political position is not a rational position about policies. You’re just a person screaming in the bleachers for your team.