There’s an argument that gets repeated a lot about the tearing down of statues, and it goes something like this: the extremists destroying statues are trying to erase history because ‘kids these days’ have grown up in “cancel” culture.
The argument is a tangled knot of misrepresentations, misunderstandings, myths, and clichés.
There are a lot of problems with how people talk about “youth today,” but most of them come down to the tendency for old farts to make that generalization on the basis of what we remember (or, more accurately, have chosen to remember) about what we were like as youth. Because, really, that is the comparison. People talking about “kids these days” are rarely people deeply-read in sociology, anthropology, history, let alone history of youth culture. That means we aren’t even pretending to know anything about what youth was like for generations prior to ours. A lot of the commentary of this kind is (and, to be honest, always has been) not on the part of the generation of parents (who have a lot of contact with “kids these days”), but grandparents—that is, people whose knowledge of youth culture is heavily mediated by TV and news.
So, at its base, it’s kind of a jerk move. It’s saying “Although I don’t spend a lot of time with kids these days, and haven’t read any studies about them, and am just relying on a small amount of data and a large amount of outrage media, I feel strongly that they suck because they aren’t as good as I like to think I was.”
Boomers’ outrage about “cancel culture” is exactly that. It’s based on a false comparison. The notion that kids these days grew up in a cancel culture is sort of true, but mostly irrelevant. It’s true that they grew up in a culture in which a public figure, artist, work of art and so on might be suddenly rejected, shunned, or even actively boycotted. If you want to call that cancel culture, fine.
It’s irrelevant as an explanation of anything because every American generation grew up in that culture. The internet made it different, of course, both better and worse. But the fact is that junior high and high school are cancel culture and always have been, with people cancelled for not being cool enough, or wearing the wrong thing, or getting on the wrong side of someone. And public figures, artists, and works of art have been cancelled for all sorts of reasons. Johnny Mathis had to leap back into the closet because his admission of homosexuality not only threatened his career, but led to death threats (in 1982!). Lenny Bruce was very effectively cancelled; Smothers Brothers was literally cancelled; many people in the South cancelled the Democratic Party for supporting Civil Rights; many of the people who complain about cancel culture cancelled “The Dixie Chicks;” Mohammed Ali was cancelled for quite a while; you don’t find a lot of statues for Longstreet in the South or any for Frederick Benteen anywhere.
So, the pearl-clutching about kids these days having invented cancel culture can stop.
“They’re trying to erase history” is a cliché being repeated as part of this argument, and I say it’s a cliché because I don’t think people are really thinking carefully about what they’re saying.
A statue is not history; a statue doesn’t even teach history. It could, in the right context (i.e., a museum), and part of the history would be why the statue was put up, and by whom. Statues aren’t for teaching history; they’re for identifying in-group heroes. Removing a statue doesn’t erase the history; it does erase the honoring of a particular figure in that spot. So, the question to ask is: why was that person honored in that spot at that time by that group? That’s the history we need.
And it’s typically for very specific political reasons important at that moment. For instance, honoring Columbus was about politicians getting the Italian vote . The large number of statues of Confederate heroes, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson put up just after WWI and during the 1950s had to do with celebrating white supremacy, the Confederacy, and slavery. That was the point. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both owned slaves, (although they both criticized slavery) so statues to them were often put up in response to Brown v. Board. Like the comeback of the CSA battle flag, these statues and monuments were intended to send a pro-slavery, pro-segregation message.
Yes, there is a problem of erasing history in regard to those statues. But it’s on the part of the people who don’t know the history of the statues—why, for instance, is there a statue to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C.? That is, a statue to a traitor? Because the history of that statue is erased (although it’s pretty interesting). And the people who don’t acknowledge that many statues and monuments were put up to defend and advocate racism, such as the ones put up in counter-protest to the Civil Rights movement—they are the ones trying to erase history.
The Civil War was about slavery; a quick read of the “Declarations of Causes” makes that clear. To say it wasn’t about slavery, but about states’ rights is to try to erase history. (There are reasons that some historians balk at saying that slavery alone started the war—it’s more complicated than that, and has to do with the relation of slavery and slave state ideology, political rhetoric, identity, and economy, but no major historian says that the Slave States were seriously committed to the principle of states’ rights, let alone that they went to war for it. The Fugitive Slave Lawmakes that an impossible argument to make.)
Am I saying they should tear down statues for slavers and racists? Actually, no. I don’t think protesters should tear them down. I think city or state officials should remove them and put them in museums where their history can be told.
When I was young, my mother and one sister and I went on a driving trip. My mother took to calling historical roadside markers “hysterical markers,” since I would cry if she wouldn’t stop at them. My field is history of rhetoric; two years of my graduate program consisted of coursework in the history of rhetorical theory. I had one course in historiography as an undergraduate and two as a graduate student. I love history. A statue to Jefferson Davis isn’t erased by being put in a museum. Jefferson Davis isn’t erased by having his statue defaced or destroyed. History isn’t erased. It’s erased by pretending that isn’t a statue to white supremacy.
[A more scholarly version of this argument will be coming out in “Not Light, but Fire”: Activist Issues and Contemporary Echoes in Nineteenth-Century American Rhetorics, edited by Pat Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli.]
From https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/06/22/keilar-murtaugh-rally-coronavirus-joke-vpx.cnn
On Sunday, June 21, Brianna Keilar interviewed Tim Murtaugh (Director of Communications for Trump’s 2020 election) about Trump’s speech at the disastrous Tulsa rally. She showed a clip of Trump talking about COVID testing, during which he says, “Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’ll find more cases. So, I said to my people slow the testing down, please.” Here’s the exchange between Keilar and Murtaugh about that clip:
KEILAR: Is that true, he’s asked for the testing to be slowed down?
MURTAUGH: No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, the United States leads the world in testing. We’ve tested more than 25 million Americans —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: So, why is he saying that then?
MURTAUGH: I understand there’s not a lot of a sense of humor at CNN. He was joking. When you expand testing, you will naturally detect the number of cases. That’s the very point he was making. I’m not surprised you’re unable or unwilling to understand the president has a tongue-in-cheek remark there. But that was the point he’s making.
KEILAR: I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?
MURTAUGH: He was trying to illustrate the point that when you expand testing —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: You said it’s a joke?
MURTAUGH: — in fact, leading the world. You can often use ironic humor —
(CROSSTALK)
KEILAR: Is it funny, Tim?
MURTAUGH: He was trying to use —
KEILAR: Dead Americans? Unemployed Americans? Is that funny to you? MURTAUGH: You can ask it 100 different ways. But the point the president was making —
KEILAR: And you won’t answer it. And there’s a reason why.
MURTAUGH: I am answering it. The president was illustrating the point that American testing has expanded to such lengths that we are now detecting more positive cases.
It stands to reason — it stands to reason we will have more positive cases when you do more testing. That’s just a fact.
KEILAR: You are aware that that hospitalization numbers disprove what you are saying. That testing does not solely account for the numbers we’re seeing, including Florida, a state you just held up as a model, which is certainly is not.
It is not funny that Americans are dying. It’s not funny that they’re unemployed.”
This interaction is painfully familiar to anyone who has tried to have a useful conversation (or set a boundary) with a bully. Bullies deliberately hurt a victim, in front of an audience of supporters and enablers, and then escalate the pain by simultaneously acknowledging and denying the deliberate injury. The cruelty is the point; it is the pleasure.
One of the ways that bullies simultaneously deny, acknowledge, and intensify the pain is through saying, “It’s just a joke, and you can’t take a joke.” While acknowledging that you’ve been hurt, and that they know it, they’re saying that they have no intention of apologizing for or even avoiding future instances of the injury. It’s a dominance move—the cruelty is the point. And it isn’t that they don’t care about feelings, or are particularly (or even any) good at taking a joke. Think about how thin-skinned Trump is, or how badly (and often violently) bullies respond when the joke is on them. It’s “Fuck your feelings.”
Murtaugh was claiming that Trump was “just” joking about reducing COVID testing. And Murtaugh got aggressive about it, saying that he wouldn’t expect that CNN would be able to see the joke, being humorless.
This is a talking point on the right (the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists especially like it): that “liberals” are humorless scolds. (It’s a very gendered insult.) Bullies want to be able to hurt others, without any accountability, and shifting the issue to “liberals”‘ lack of humor is a way they think they evade accountability. It often works.
As an aside, I’ll say that I think it’s possible to make jokes about awful subjects—that kind of dark humor is sometimes the only way to keep from crying. But Murtaugh had blocked himself off from that route of defense by having accused CNN of being humorless. Someone engaged in dark humor doesn’t think the situation is humorous; it’s bleak, and dark humor is an admission of just how grim it is.
Keilar responded by naming what he was doing: “I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?”
And he fell apart, unable to answer her question. He had tried to make the issue her lack of sense of humor, and she threw it right back at him, drawing attention to the implication: that dead and dying Americans is something people should find humorous. He deflated like a tired balloon.
“He was joking” was how the White House and Trump campaign tried to spin Trump’s statement that he would order a reduction in testing just to make the numbers go down (since the rising numbers make Trump look bad). Trump, however, betrayed them all, saying, “I don’t kid.”
And, in fact, the Trump Administration ended funding for COVID testing in five states. So, Trump wasn’t kidding, and his Administration is reducing testing. Or it isn’t. Some representatives of the Trump Administration are claiming this reduction of funding will not reduce testing (as are many Trump apologists).
So what is going on? They’re contradicting each other. Either Trump was kidding, and he was lying (or forgetting?) when he said he doesn’t kid, or else he wasn’t kidding, and he’s incompetent as a President, unable to get his Administration to do what he has “ordered.” Either way, that isn’t particularly funny.
But what is funny is what happened to Murtaugh. He and other Trump apologists had, again, been left hanging in the breeze, trying to deflect attention away from the chaos of the Trump Administration, and instead ended up looking like lying fools serving a chaotic and impulsive Trump. Joke’s on them.
When people think about rhetorical effectiveness, we imagine ourselves as the audience, and so we tend to universalize from our experience. If it appeals to us, we call it “effective,” as though our judgment is the only one that matters. And we condemn anyone who uses a strategy that doesn’t appeal to us as engaging in “ineffective” rhetoric.
But we really disagree.
Liberals (people who want progressive change, but gradually, and from within existing political, ideological, and media systems) get really uncomfortable with conflict, violations of civility, negative campaigns, what they perceive as “personal attacks.” They turn away from that; they advocate “positive” rhetorical strategies, that find common ground, humanize the opposition, and avoid calling anyone racism.
Some leftists (call them social democrats) think in terms of policies, and so they think that we need to keep the message on policy issues. In my experience, they tend to be more tolerant of conflict than liberals, as long as it’s conflict about policies. (I put myself in this category.) Some leftists (call them heirs to the Enlightenment) believe that they are advocating the right policies, and so we need to slam the opposition (which is anyone who has an even mildly different from them) and hold out for the right policies, refusing any kind of compromise. They advocate finding a political figure who refuses to compromise and promoting that figure.
I could go on. There are lots of other positions conventionally categorized as “leftist” that I’m not talking about. My point isn’t to create an exhaustive taxonomy of “the left,” but to show that people who have a very similar end in terms of policy agenda have very different standards about “effective” rhetoric.
I also think every one of these positions (and a bunch of the ones I’m not listing) is valid. There are times when finding common ground, kindness, and listening is a wonderful approach. Projects like Hands Across the Hills and Divided We Fall are tremendously valuable. But even they show that this deeper and more charitable understanding of people who disagree with us doesn’t generally lead to changing positions on policy issues.
What’s a little misleading about the three examples above is that I’ve only used positions for which there is a match between the rhetorical and political preferences, and that isn’t always the case. (There are people who are deeply committed to the kind of policy agenda often called “far left” and the civility model of rhetoric, for instance.). Sticking with examples where the rhetoric and politics match just makes the topic easier to discuss.
Speaking of which, as I keep saying, I think the whole tendency to reduce our complicated policy and ideological options to left v. right (whether a binary or continuum) is gerfucked. But, because it is the way we talk about politics in the US, that false binary is hard to avoid (much like trying to talk about racism in the US without talking about white v. black).
The media is committed to the left/right binary because it enables the horse race frame, which people mistake as “neutral.” It’s also simply easier. Reporting that relies on analyses of policy agenda is slower, takes more expertise, and requires a deeper understanding of history and politics than journalism majors provide. The left/right binary makes marketing more straightforward, and it’s more profitable. It’s easier to get a loyal audience for a network or outlet (and advertisers like loyal audiences) by appealing to us v. them (right v. left), and generating outrage about Them. Outrage is good for the bottom line.
Paradoxically, living within an informational enclave enables people who are in fact highly factional in our beliefs and behavior to imagine ourselves to be independent thinkers. A person who watches Fox all the time might take pride in their not always agreeing with what they see; sometimes they side with Wall Street Journal (or they brag that they never watch Fox, and get all their information from The Blaze). Or, we might say that Rachel Maddow is too extreme (or not extreme enough), and we’re independent thinkers because we don’t agree with everything in The Nation.
If we accept the false binary (or continuum) then we’re likely to essentialize the opposition (attributing the same beliefs and motives to everyone who disagrees). And that brings us back to the point of this post (you thought I’d lost it): we shouldn’t assume that all audiences are the same. In addition to the fact that we might have wildly different goals in a disagreement (discussed elsewhere), even if we’re talking about trying to persuade someone to agree on a specific policy, the kind of strategy we most prefer might not be the one most effective with them.
Right now, I’m seeing a lot of critics of Trump who are arguing with each other about the best way to try to persuade his supporters to stop supporting him, or at least hold him accountable. There are people who argue we should let the little stuff (his tendency to drink water with two hands) go, and focus on his corruption of democratic institutions (such as reframing SCOTUS decisions in terms of support for him personally, his demands for loyalty), or on his policies. I don’t think we have to choose one.
Some of his supporters are Followers, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, rational discourse is not the way to persuade them to change their support. Their support doesn’t have a rational basis. Some of his supporters are strategic—they loathe him personally, and are very worried about his policies, but they believe that Joe Biden wants to turn the US into the USSR (except with more homosexuality), and so they sincerely believe they have no choice. I think that’s a position that’s open to persuasion, but it involves persuading them first that they need to get a broader range of sources of information, and that means trying to do something about inoculation. There are people who argue that there is no difference between Biden and Trump, so there’s no point in voting (a stance that benefits Trump more than it does Biden). A fair number of those people are trolls, but not all. I haven’t found that they’re open to rational argumentation, but maybe I haven’t found the right strategies.
People have different reasons for supporting Trump, and are different in terms of what rhetorical strategies will be effective for them. The search for the one rhetoric to rule them all is fruitless.
Image from here: https://csl4d.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/policy-argumentation/
I’ve often mentioned that I think Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s rules for rational-critical argumentation are useful. But they’re written in a way that makes them really hard to understand, and I’ve long wanted to put them into more straightforward language. I’ve procrastinated doing that because first I have to explain a bunch of things. The first is one that most people don’t even consider: what are we doing when we disagree?
We’re in such a world of neoliberalism that the assumption is that we’re trying to sell each other something, or we’re competing for a market. But the notion that discourse must be a sales pitch is just one way of thinking about disagreement.
I’ve written and re-written about the various ways of thinking about what we might be trying to do when we disagree, and what I’ve written always ends up heady and abstract and hard to follow. So I’m going to go with a flawed analogy, one I’ve lifted from Aristotle.
Let’s think about wrestling. Also, let’s imagine the wrestlers are Winston and Emma (just so I don’t end up in ambiguous pronoun reference).
Why are Winston and Emma wrestling?
They might be wrestling because they’re trying to kill each other. This wrestling has no rules, no limits, and no goal other than the permanent extermination of the other.
They might be wrestling as champions of their communities; they’re not trying to exterminate the other, but to destroy the other’s political power, and generally to gain some specific political outcomes (change in territory, control of the government, exploitative relationships legalized). In other words, this would be modern warfare in light of the possibility of community judgment– post-Geneva convention warfare.
Or, perhaps, they’re wrestling for even more specific policy outcomes. They’re wrestling over who gets the salmon tonight. Tomorrow, they’ll wrestle again for who gets it tomorrow. This kind of wrestling may or may not have limits on what is allowed. If it doesn’t have limits, it’s outcome-specific demagoguery; if it has limits, particularly regarding tone and civility, then it’s decorous argument (note that’s “decorous,” not “rational”).
Perhaps Winston is a bully, or a faux-bully, who talks a lot about how he beat up others, and he’s using that status as a strong guy to recruit others to his group, or encourage them in their bullying. Emma might choose to wrestle with him to show he’s a bully and a fraud. Since this is most effective when it stays within the rules for rational-critical argumentation, I always think of it as the rational-critical alpha roll. (The point isn’t to engage Winston in rational-critical argumentation, since he probably isn’t interested in it, but to show show that he isn’t, and to shame him. Some people argue that’s what Socrates is doing in some dialogues.)
They might be wrestling as part of a for-profit show, in which everything is scripted, and they’re just following their scripts because the pay is great. This is argutainment. The point is the conflict, not resolving it, because the conflict becomes unprofitable the second it’s resolved. So, Emma and Winston have to keep fighting. But that’s also unsatisfying, since the audience will attach to one or the other.
The most profitable version of this scripted wrestling is that Winston is in-group for the audience, and always nearly loses, and rarely loses, and in which Emma cheats egregiously while the ref isn’t looking. Sometimes, after Emma has cheated relentlessly, Winston cheats once and wins. So, his win looks like payback. It’s still scripted, and it’s still really for show.
Another kind of argutainment is so dominant that I think I have to mention it. This is when Emma and Winston don’t actually wrestle at all. Winston wrestles with a plastic doll that has “EMA” written on it (or a man filled with straw) and wins (what a shock). I think of this as straw man argutainment.
Emma and Winston might be members of a college wrestling team, and the point of their wrestling is to bring honor to their college. (Or just to win.) There are lots of rules. This is decorous agonism.
Perhaps they’re friends, and they think it’s fun to wrestle. They each want to win, but not badly enough to hurt the other. There’s no referee because they’ll try to be fair. This is friendly wrangling.
Perhaps they believe that wrestling is a really good sport because it gives a healthy kind of flexibility and strength, and they want to wrestle with each other in order to improve themselves and each other. When we make the analogy to argumentation, this is rational-critical argumentation.
Sometimes Emma and Winston aren’t wrestling with each other at all. This is the tai-chi of argumentation, in which people simply admire the moves an individual makes. This has two types. One is very rigid, and says that there is a right way to make every move, and Emma and Winston can be assessed as to which one most fits the correct form, regardless of whether it’s actually a good way to wrestle. Let’s call this standardized testing. The second is that Emma and Winston each demonstrate the moves they like to make, and they simply watch each other, perhaps learning, perhaps not. I tend to think of that as the expressive model.
Generally, when people set out a list, it’s an expeditio—a list that sets one up for being the right choice. I think every one of these is a valid choice, depending on the circumstances. Every single one is also a bad choice, depending on the circumstances.
[As an aside, I’ll say that one grump I have about scholarship in rhetoric and writing is that it too often begins by assuming that only one of the above goals is valid, or that we all have to agree as to which is the model we should be promoting. That notion that there is only one kind of correct public discourse is a claim that can’t be defended through rational-critical discourse, which is kind of funny if you have the excessively pedantic sense of humor I have. I’m on the side of people arguing for various goals, various needs, various means, and teaching students that there are those different ways of arguing.]
One more piece of background information before I can get to the ten rules. The market model of knowledge says that the belief that sells the most is the best belief—that’s a version of the argutainment model. It says that the argument that pleases the most people is the best. There is, as far as I can tell, no evidence that claim is anything other than a Moebius strip of justification. Slavery, Nazism, eugenics, surgeons refusing to wash their hands, mullets—all of those meet the market model of belief standard for good belief. It’s a bad model. What’s popular, especially when not all opinions are weighted equally (the market model gives more preference to the opinions held by people with more money), is not necessarily what is ethical, in the long-term best interest of the community, or what the majority of people want.
If Winston and Emma are disagreeing about who should do the dishes, they could see it as a zero-sum argument—they win to the extent that they get the other to do the dishes. Their disagreement then becomes a way to get the other to submit. They’re either in outcome-specific demagoguery or decorous argument still oriented toward getting their way. If Winston and Emma see their disagreement about the dishes as a question of who wins, who gets the other to submit, or who is the better person, they’re seeing the disagreement about the dishes as just one of many instances that are really about a zero-sum contests as to which of them is a better person (or which one is doing more, or sacrificing more).
Fuck that shit. I had that marriage. It was bad.
So, let’s imagine that Winston and Emma disagree deeply but they don’t think the other is evil. They have, basically, two ways of approaching the disagreement that will serve them well. One is the expressive model, in which they each express what they believe, and they try to understand the other. Agreement, persuasion, argumentation—all of those are off the table. It’s just about listening. This way of approaching disagreement is incredibly powerful, as shown by projects like Hands Across the Hills or Divided We Fall.
That model is about resolving about our serious cultural problems that come from people who breathe deep in a media world that relies on the demonization of others. The expressive model is vexed when it comes to systemic issues, ones that don’t necessarily rely on the conscious intentions or feelings of individuals. Imagine that Winston refuses to wear a mask. He doesn’t intend to infect others or get infected; he thinks that, by doing exactly what his media tells him to do, he’s showing his individuality and independent judgment.
There is no way to get Winston to understand the irrationality of his position (and it is irrational) from within the expressive or argutainment model. From within those models, his position seems fine.
So here we are at the rational-critical model. It isn’t persuasive. It doesn’t work within the market model of discourse. It isn’t about selling anything. It isn’t about making everyone feel good. It isn’t about an agent who gains compliance on the part of the object.
It’s about both Emma and Winston believing, simultaneously, that their positions are so right that they can withstand the strongest counterarguments, and that they might be wrong, so they’re open to disproof. And these are the conditions of disproof. I find that, when I’m talking about this issue, I have to emphasize that these are not the rules everyone has to follow in every conversation (that’s why there’s this long lead up). You can have a great conversation without following these rules. If you’re playing soccer, and you pick up the ball and run with it, you’ve either committed a foul or you aren’t playing soccer any more. You might have just invented rugby.
If I say, “Here are the characteristics of warblers,” someone saying, “But kangaroos aren’t like that” is not actually proving me wrong. Kangaroos are great; I’m not saying they aren’t. But they aren’t warblers.
One more piece of background information. Because we are so polarized, if I say anything about Democrats or Republicans, hot cognition is triggered, so let’s imagine that there are two political parties—one led by Chester (called Chesterians), and the other led by Hubert (Hubertians), and they disagree about the best methods of keeping squirrels (considered bad by both parties) from getting to the red ball (considered good by both parties). Winston is a Chesterian, and Emma is a Hubertian.
Okay, the rules.
1. Freedom rule “Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.”
This rule prohibits argumentum ad baculum—Winston can’t threaten to hurt, fire, or harm Emma for disagreeing with him and still have their discussion be a rational-critical disagreement. Of course, there are lots of situations in which a good and productive disagreement might have Winston telling Emma she is not allowed to make certain arguments. If Emma is CEO and Winston is the company attorney, and Emma advocates a course of action that could get them sued, Winston would be wise to say, “If you advocate that ever again, I will quit as your attorney.” Winston might threaten to fire Emma if she keeps making racist arguments; Winston might threaten to break up with her if she says abusive things to him. It isn’t a rational-critical disagreement, but Winston might be wise to decide that a rational-critical argument was never on the table anyway.
Appeals to emotion aren’t necessarily a problem in rational-critical argumentation. They are fallacious (argumentum ad misericordiam) under some circumstances. If Winston says that it will break his heart if Emma makes certain arguments, and Winston really doesn’t want to hear that argument, he can set that boundary, but it isn’t a rational-critical disagreement from that point on.
In other words, people can set boundaries for discussions; if they can’t agree on those boundaries, then they might need to have a rational-critical disagreement about what those boundaries are. It might not be possible for them to agree on boundaries; it might be an issue that isn’t subject to rational-critical disagreement, or one of the people involved might be incapable of arguing rationally about it.
2. Burden of proof rule “A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.”
In general, the rule of thumb is that the affirmative (“A is B” or “A leads to B”) has the burden of proof because negatives (“A is not B” or “A does not lead to B”) can be hard to prove. For instance, if Emma and Winston are arguing about whether a politician, Hubert, is racist, it’s going to be almost impossible to have a good conversation unless Winston first says why he thinks Hubert is racist (he’s making the affirmative case, affirming that something is true). Then Emma can refute it (since she has the negative case, saying that Winston’s claim is not true). But, once Emma starts to refute that claim, then she has the burden of proof to support whatever claims she is making (such as that Winston has a bad definition of “racist”).
People try to avoid the burden of proof by shifting the stasis (that is, trying to change what the argument is about). Motivism, ad hominem, genetic fallacy, and various fallacies that result from binary thinking fall into this category. If Emma says to Winston, “Oh, you’re just saying that Hubert is racist because you’re a Social Justice Warrior, and you think you’re so woke,” that’s motivism and ad hominem (Emma gets a twofer!). She’s violated this rule because she’s trying to make Winston’s character the issue rather than Hubert’s racism. If Emma believes that only Chesterians think Hubert is racist, and she believes that all Chesterians are socialists, and all socialists are Stalinists, then she might say, “Oh, Hubert is racist? Well, how did that whole gulag thing work out?” and try to engage Winston in a defense of Stalinism. That’s a violation of this rule—she’s trying to make Stalinism the issue.
Most people arguing for conspiracy theories violate this rule—the more that they’re claiming there is a huge coverup, the more likely they are to avoid the burden of proof. People arguing about the existence of God throw the burden of proof back and forth like a long and boring tennis game.
A move that is often (but not always) a violation of this rule is the fallacy of tu quoque (sometimes called the accusation of hypocrisy). If Winston says, “Hubert is racist,” and Emma says, “Well, what about that time that a Chesterian said something racist?” she might be violating the rule. It depends on what claim Winston is making. If Winston is claiming that Chesterians are better than Hubertians, what she’s saying is relevant. If he’s saying that Hubert shouldn’t be in charge of the Senate Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, it’s irrelevant, and a violation of this rule.
This point—what are we arguing about?—is important for understanding fallacies, since a lot of moves are fallacious because they’re irrelevant. If Winston says, “Chester is a young and strong dog who can withstand the stress of protecting the red ball,” then Emma pointing out that Winston has a long history of lying about Chester’s health is relevant. It’s part of a rational-critical argument. But Emma arguing that Winston shouldn’t be believed because he likes Nickelback is an ad hominem since it’s irrelevant.
If Emma points out that Winston has often lied about Chester’s health and so shouldn’t be believed now, and Winston says that Emma really hurt his feelings, and she owes him an apology for hurting his feelings, he’s trying to shift the stasis to the question of his feelings. If he says that Emma shouldn’t criticize him because he recently broke a nail, and he’s really upset about it—it’s either a violation of the first rule (some claims are off the table) or this one. Or both!
3. Standpoint rule “A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.”
This rule prohibits the straw man fallacy—if Emma has a complicated and nuanced argument, and Winston attributes to her a really stupid argument, he’s violated this rule.
People violate this rule while thinking they’re making good arguments for three reasons: first, in-group/out-group thinking (which reduces everything to us v. them); second, and closely related, the tendency to think in paired terms; third, and perhaps most important, inoculation.
In a culture of demagoguery, and we’re in one, people believe that our vexed, complicated, varied, and nuanced world of policy options is reduced to two groups: us and them. Us is narrowly defined, and “Them” is simply anyone who is not Us. The research on us v. them thinking (in-group v. out-group) is clear that people committed to this way of thinking about the world homogenize the out-group. So, if your in-group is Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, and you’re deep in a culture of demagoguery, then you’re quite likely to believe that Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims, atheists, Satanists are pretty much all the same. [1] Therefore, you think you have proven that this ELCA person is bad by presenting an example of something a Satanist did or said. [2]
This rule and the “unexpressed premise rule” have a complicated relationship. In a good argument, people sort them out. In the fallacious version, the unexpressed premise is inferred by identity: the sort of person who argues this is a member of that group, and they also argue that. An example of false inferences from identity would something like this. Imagine that Emma argues that we should be nice to little dogs, and Chesterians are known for hating little dogs, then Winston might infer that she must not be Chesterian. If Chesterians are also known for hating squirrels, then Winston might infer that Emma must like squirrels. (That’s how the false inference about ELCA Lutherans being Satanists works.)
It feels like a logical inference, but only if Winston falsely assumes that all Chesterians are the same. The way his argument works is: Everyone is either A or B. All A do C. All B do D. Emma does not do C; therefore, she must not be A. Therefore, she must be B; therefore she must do D.
(Everyone is either Chesterian or Hubertian; all Chesterians hate little dogs; Emma does not hate little dogs; therefore, she must be Hubertian; all Hubertians like squirrels; therefore, Emma must like squirrels.)
His whole chain of inferences becomes at best a possible inference if there are options other than A or B (Chesterians or Hubertians), most (but not all) Chesterians hate little dogs, and so on. Winston is attacking Emma on a point not related to the standpoint she actually advanced.
4. Relevance rule “A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.”
This rule is pretty straightforward; again, it’s about staying on-topic. It prohibits fallacies of relevance—such as ad hominem, ad misericordiam (irrelevant appeal to pity), ad vericundiam (irrelevant appeal to authority), and non sequitur (the large category of drawing a conclusion that doesn’t follow).
As mentioned above, an attack on the character of an interlocutor isn’t necessarily irrelevant and therefore not necessarily fallacious. Similarly, appeals to emotions or authority aren’t necessarily irrelevant. All arguments have an emotional connection—we disagree because we care about something. If we didn’t care at all—if we had no emotional attachment to the issue—we wouldn’t bother disagreeing. If Winston argues that being nice to little dogs helps squirrels get to the red ball, it’s because he believes that squirrels getting to the red ball is a bad thing. He doesn’t want it to happen. He is afraid of it happening.
If Emma believes that the Chesterian position about little dogs causes unnecessary cruelty to little dogs, then she cares about little dogs; it makes her sad. People who argue that a policy is good because it will save a lot of money or it’s bad because it will cost a lot of money have an affective attachment to money; they like it.
If Winston and Emma are disagreeing about whether little dogs are conspiring with squirrels, and Winston tells a highly emotional story about how a little dog once took food from a Great Dane puppy, that’s a violation of this rule. Not because it’s highly emotional, but because it’s irrelevant.
Appeals to authority are similar. Imagine Emma says, “Little dogs are not involved in the conspiracy; I am personally certain of this.” That’s probably an irrelevant appeal to authority—it’s an appeal to her personal conviction, and her personal conviction is irrelevant. It’s only relevant if she is an expert who has read every study on the issue, and looked at all the evidence. Emma saying, “Well, Ruth has concluded that squirrels are not involved, and she is a Supreme Court justice” (or Nobel prize winner, famous professor at a prestigious university, person with impressive degrees, tremendously successful entrepreneur) is a violation of this rule, since there isn’t a Nobel prize in the squirrel conspiracy.
Similarly, appeals to Scripture, a quote from Einstein, something your stylist told you that her brother-in-law’s chiropractor’s lawyer told him is an irrelevant appeal to authority.
It’s possible to have really fun and interesting conversations in which non-experts speculate on topics, but it’s just shooting the breeze.
The last fallacy of relevance I want to mention (there are lots more) is the big category of non sequitur. There are lots, and many lists of fallacies split them into different kinds. But, basically, they all come down to a tendency we have to think a true argument is a valid argument, and a true argument has the form of “true statement because another true statement.”
Emma might believe that “little dogs are good because many bunnies are fluffy.” Many bunnies are fluffy, but that has nothing to do with whether little dogs are good (although, personally, I do think they are). That argument about bunnies is irrelevant, even if true, so it’s a violation of this rule.
5. Unexpressed premise rule “A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.”
This one is really hard for some people to understand—that an argument they’re making might assume a premise of which they’re unaware. They think that you know what you’re assuming. We’re especially likely to violate this rule when we adopt an argument from another source that sounds good, and we haven’t really thought it through.
I got into this argument recently. Someone said something along the lines of, “Liberals are idiots because they appeal to stereotypes.” That’s appealing to a stereotype, but the argument assumes that appealing to stereotypes is idiotic. So, the person was saying they’re an idiot. I couldn’t get them to understand that their argument logically assumed a premise they didn’t believe. They got mad because they thought I was calling them an idiot, and I couldn’t get them to understand that by their own argument they were an idiot. They were calling themselves an idiot, and that’s what made it a bad argument.
We’re responsible for our premises. A lot of interesting disagreements arise because we disagree about the premises, and so we end up having to talk about things like whether stereotypes are bad, if we can reason without them (we can’t), what distinguishes good from bad stereotypes.
6. Starting point rule “A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.”
This violation of the rule often goes by the phrase “begging the question” (a phrase that leads to a lot of confusion, since people now use that phrase to refer to something else entirely—when something we’re arguing leads us to have to consider another question), or “assuming what’s at stake.” It’s really a kind of circular argument.
So, if Emma were to say, “Okay, we both agree that size is unrelated to goodness,” that would violate this rule, since Winston assumes size and goodness are related. (Socrates does this all the time in Platonic dialogues, tricking his interlocutor to agree to a premise they don’t actually believe.) Van Eemeren and Grotendoorst give examples of people sliding premises into an argument via adjectives, adverbs, nouns or noun phrases (if Emma were to refer to “the ridiculous notion that size and goodness are related,” “Chester’s dishonestly arguing that,” “the delusion,” or “the proposition only promoted by idiots that…”).
Again, I’m not saying those sorts of moves are prohibited, but when a disagreement is in this realm, it isn’t rational-critical argumentation. It might be useful; it might be productive; it might be necessary. It just isn’t rational-critical.
I’ve run across the second part of this rule less often—when people try to deny a premise that is an accepted starting point (except in the kind of situation discussed in #5, and I don’t think that’s what they mean here). That’s probably because most of my disagreements are in social media, and so when people try to misrepresent the beginning of the argument, it’s easy enough to go up a thread and quote them.
It does happen sometimes—“I never said that…” when they clearly did. When it’s pointed out that they did say it, you can sometimes have a good conversation—they really did express themselves badly, leave out a word, use terms that have different meanings in different contexts. But if they did say it, and they won’t own it, this isn’t a good faith argument at all.
7. Argument scheme rule “A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.”
There are a few ways to think of this one, and here I part company with Van Eemeren and Grootendorst. They go on to describe a really limited way of thinking about argumentation that is hard to apply for how people actually think. They don’t seem to imagine disagreements that happen within the messy world of ideological commitments (including religion). I think we are all always within that world.
That we are always arguing from within our ideological commitments doesn’t mean we’re incapable of rational-critical argumentation.
They’re making a crucial point: it isn’t just what you say, but how you’re arguing for it. Winston might argue that little dogs are part of the squirrel conspiracy by: – relying on a single example of a little dog that was friends with a squirrel; – finding one quote from The Book of Dog that can be read as condemning little dogs; – arguing that since Goehring liked little dogs, defending little dogs makes you a Nazi; – appealing to one study that said little dogs are evil; – describing a personal experience with a little dog.
These are all argument schemes, ways of arguing.
If Winston is engaged in rational-critical argumentation (or even good faith argumentation—a lower bar, and a different post), then he is committed to viewing those ways of arguing being valid, regardless of what position they support. So, if Emma can provide a single example, find one quote from the Book of Dog, point out Hitler’s love of big dogs, cite one study, describe one personal experience, if Winston is engaged in rational-critical argumentation, he has to abandon his claim or find new evidence.
If Winston won’t abandon the claim or find new evidence, then his argument is grounded in ways of arguing he thinks invalid. Winston is admitting that he is using “argument” to defend a position he will neither abandon nor open to scrutiny.
In my experience, the sort of person who thinks a single example proves them right, but dozens of counter-examples are irrelevant isn’t open to persuasion at all. They’re also total suckers for cons because they tend to reason from in-group loyalty, and so anyone who appears to them to be in-group can sell them a used car with neither engine nor wheels.
8. Validity rule “A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.”
For me, this is compressed in the previous rule, since I’ve never run across anyone who violates this rule who didn’t also violate #7. But, basically, if you’re engaged in rational-critical argumentation, you worry about the validity of the arguments you’re making, not just whether you’ve found talking points that make you feel good about the stance you already had.
9. Closure rule “A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.”
Eh, kind of.
A lot of arguments on social media end up with someone doing their impression of the knight that clearly lost. People need to enter a disagreement with some clear sense as to what it would mean to be proven wrong. If Emma and Winston engage in rational-critical argumentation, and Emma can’t defend her position, she really should say, “Yeah, I can’t defend this.”
And that should be an important moment of self-reflection. But she shouldn’t abandon an important belief just because she “lost” one argument. She should, however, look into why she “lost” it. Perhaps she was relying entirely on arguments her in-group media had told her; perhaps the argument moved fast, and she didn’t notice the skeezy moves of Winston; perhaps she needs to develop a more nuanced argument.
Perhaps she needs to get out of her informational enclave, and try to find and read the smartest opposition arguments.
Yeah, actually, we all need to do that.
10. Usage rule “A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.”
It’s always puzzled me that Van Eemeren and Grootendorst make this the tenth rule (Habermas makes it the first).
It seems to me that the beginning of any disagreement is that people mean what they say.
The less charitable interpretation is that this rule is silly. I’ve spent years arguing with people, and I’ve rarely run across an individual who is deliberately ambiguous or who chooses to be unclear. People say things that seem clear to us at the time. If someone posts something, and later tries to say they meant something else, we’re litigating rule #6.
There are lots of people who are deliberately ambiguous (“what is is,” “quality,” “natural”), but that’s bad faith argumentation.
So,, if you do find yourself arguing with someone who refuses to clarify their position, they’re a jerk. They aren’t just refusing to engage in rational-critical argumentation; they’re also uninteresting.
[1] I’m sorry to say that this is not one of my ridiculous hypotheticals. [2] It’s all about paired terms, which is another post I need to write, although Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecha already explained it very well.
Image from https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/central-park-five
When the videos came out of Rodney King getting assaulted, I found myself in a conversation with a Libertarian (call her Emma Libertarian) who said something along the lines of “What the police did was justified because he was driving drunk.”
I don’t exactly remember what I said, but I think I tried to point out that a beating is not the punishment for drunk driving, that King hadn’t even been convicted yet, so shouldn’t be punished, and that beating would be cruel and unusual punishment. What Emma was advocating would violate the Bill of Rights at least twice. To me, that seemed the opposite of Libertarianism.
I misunderstood Emma’s commitment to Libertarianism.
There’s another conversation in which I’ve found myself so often that I’m not even sure I can pick a specific episode (call the interlocutor Hubert Lawandorder). The police officer does something illegal—in other words, commits a crime—and the victim of the crime refuses to go along with it. And so the officer escalates the situation, and the person who objected to a crime being committed ends up arrested or perhaps dead.
So, for instance, an individual gets the attention of a police officer. An officer insists that the person leave their house, submit to a warrantless search of themselves or their home, not have a gun, confess to a crime, not ask what the charge is. What’s confusing about this conversation with Hubert Lawandorder—which I have had far too many times—is that Hubert agrees with me that the officer is violating the rights of the accused, and even violating very specific laws and regulations. We agree that the officer is breaking the law. But Hubert, who sees himself as a believer in Law and Order, not only believes that the police don’t have to follow the law they are supposed to be enforcing, but that the officer is justified in arresting anyone who objects to the police officer’s illegal activity, and that the officer is justified in escalating the interaction.
Hubert, like Emma Libertarian, believes in police vigilantism. To me, that seemed the opposite of supporting Law and Order.
I misunderstood Hubert’s commitment to Law and Order.
There are lots of ways of explaining why they don’t see their position as contradictory, and I kept thinking that with Emma it had to do with varieties of Libertarianism, and with Hubert it was something about a higher Law. I misunderstood that too.
I realized that I’d misunderstood why they didn’t see their positions as problematic when disagreeing with a Hubert Lawandorder, and I finally asked the question with which I should have started every one of those conversations: “So, if a police officer asked to search your house without a warrant, you’d say yes?”
[I’d sometimes asked, “If a police officer handcuffed you just because you asked why you were pulled over, would you be okay with that?” And Hubert would say, “I’m always polite and deferential to officers, so that would never happen to me.” That response meant we ended up in a weird argument as to whether the victim of police abuse had been polite.]
But the warrant question got a different response. Hubert would say, “No, I wouldn’t let the police search my house without a warrant.”
And, then, quite often, Hubert would say, “But I would never give the police reason to suspect me.” So, it wasn’t about a principle of searching with or without a warrant—it was about a failure of imagination.
It was at that moment that I realized that, while both Emma Libertarian and Hubert Lawandorder talked a lot about principles (people should respect the constitution, people should respect the law), that talk had as much relation to their thinking as the word “quality” (in quotes) in a business logo has to the quality of the products. It’s just a sales pitch.
Were those actual principles, they would apply across groups, and they didn’t. Emma Libertarian wouldn’t think it okay if the police pulled her out of a car and beat her just because they thought she disrespected them. Hubert Lawandorder wouldn’t say “Well, okay,” to a no-knock warrant that meant people who might not have identified themselves as police crash into his house at night with weapons drawn. It isn’t that they thought police vigilantism was always right—it’s that they couldn’t imagine it happening to them. They imagined themselves as people protected, rather than endangered, by vigilante police not beholden to the law.
They did so because of what’s called the “just world model.” The “just world model” says that, if something bad happens to you, it’s because you did something to deserve that outcome. The just world model is attractive for two reasons. First, like all magical thinking (if you do this, that will definitely happen), it takes a world of inexplicable outcomes, a world we can’t actually control, and draws it into our control. It enables Emma to believe that something like police violence won’t happen to her because of what she does. [1]
Second, and closely related to the first, it says that we aren’t called to help the marginalized—the poor, ill, elderly, the victims of racism–, nor are we facing systemic injustice. The just world model is radically individual (which is why it’s so closely associated with neoliberalism). If you fail in life (or get cancer, or get shot by the police), it wasn’t because of larger issues of poverty, pollution, racism, or a police force indoctrinated to see itself as an army of occupation.[2] The just world model says we earned what we have, and are entitled to keep all of it.
They’re often successful in that scam for quite a while. So, were those con artists good people whom you should trust because they were rewarded with wealth? The just world model says they are. The just world model says you should have given all your money to Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay.
The just world model gets you scammed.
And it does so by triggering an aspect of confirmation bias that enables deflection of uncomfortable information. That was a complicated sentence. Here’s what I mean. We are primed (biased) to notice information that confirms what we believe. Let’s imagine that I believe that people who own poodles are snobby jerks, and I love Great Danes. I am likely to notice every instance of a poodle owner being a jerk. More important, I’m likely to interpret ambiguous data (a fight between a poodle and Great Dane) as the poodle being at fault. If it isn’t ambiguous (the Great Dane attacked the poodle), all of my first impulses will be to blame the poodle—it provoked the Dane; it deserved it. That is the just world model.
What’s funny about people who believe in the just world model is that, when they find themselves on the wrong side of policies or decisions, they whine like an over-tired toddler. Where is your just world now?
The just world model is a complete failure of empathy. And that’s why it’s racist.
A white person saying that anyone who gets shot by the police deserved it is unintentionally acknowledging that we have a system in which white people are protected. Because they’re admitting they don’t think it can happen to us. All those white people confronting POC in parks, pools, sidewalks of their own homes—that wouldn’t happen to me. Not because I’m polite. But because I’m white.
If you, as a white person, have any POC in your world (if you actually “have a black friend”) then you have heard them describe experiences with the police you have never had. If you have never heard (or listened to, or read about) those experiences, then you’re racist. Not because you act with feelings of aggression, but because of your failure of imagination. You never listened.
If, having heard that POC behave just as you do, and yet they get hassled, harassed, or even arrested by the police, and you still blame them for what happened, you’re racist. You’re also an asshole.
If a POC individual can behave as well as a white individual, and get shot or arrested, then policing is racist.
And here is the other point. If police officers can’t enforce the law without thereby making themselves someone who should be arrested for violating the law, then there is something very wrong with the system. We need a different system.
The argument that the police shouldn’t be held to the law is an admission that it’s a broken system—it isn’t about a few bad apples.
When pushed on this point—that they don’t imagine themselves on the wrong side of a vigilante police officer who will violate the law in order to arrest them–, people with whom I’m arguing sometimes show what’s really at stake. Some of them say that it’s okay for the police to treat white people differently from African Americans because African Americans are more criminal. (This claim is often premised by “I’m not racist, but it’s a fact that…”) They say that the African-American community (that isn’t always the term they use) glorifies criminality, promiscuity, drug use. Their evidence for this stereotype about the African-American community is what their media tells them about rap music. (I’m not kidding—that’s what they cite as evidence to me. Sometimes they cite Ben Carson saying the black community is bad. They used to cite Bill Cosby, but they don’t anymore.)
Emma and Hubert are racist. They might never have said the ‘n’ word; they might even give to “liberal” causes; they might have a relative or friend who is POC. But if they refuse to see that policing is racist, it’s because they’ve got blinkered loyalty. And it’s blinkered to keep them from acknowledging racism.
Ian Kershaw, a scholar of the Holocaust, famously said that “The road to Auschwitz was built with hate, but it was paved with indifference.” I would put that somewhat more strongly. It was paved by people willing to rationalize the injustice. Emma and Hubert are busily engaged in paving a road.
[1] Self-help rhetoric does this a lot. (“The three tricks that successful investors have…” or CrossFit). I should say that I, personally, have found a lot of self-help rhetoric tremendously helpful. When it gets into reinforcing the just world model is when it makes claims about “all you have to do is” or this method “guarantees” an outcome. Anytime it says that success is guaranteed if you have sufficient commitment or will, it’s toxic, and quite possibly a scam.
[2] The just world model simultaneously reinforces privilege (of class, race, ableism, gender) and denies its existence. But that’s a different post.
People are using “it’s a few bad apples” to say that we shouldn’t try to make major changes to policing, but a few minor reforms at best. And I don’t understand why people say that.
The saying is not, “A few bad apples give the other apples a bad reputation,” or “A few bad apples shouldn’t be used to think about the bunch as a whole.”
The saying is, “A few bad apples ruin the whole bunch.” The metaphor means that, once one apple starts to rot, it starts a process that will quickly rot all of the apples. If that rotten apple has been there a while, the whole bunch is rotten.
Putting a rotten apple on suspension doesn’t make it any less rotten.
If people think that police brutality and racism is a “few bad apples,” then they should be advocating for more firing of police officers, a more rigorous selection process, more thorough investigations of accusations of abuse, punishing of police officers and administrators who balk at firing abusive officers. In other words, people who are saying things like, “There are always a few bad apples” are saying the bunch is rotten.
That isn’t solved through reform. It means, at least, massive re-imagining of how policing works.
I lived in Berkeley from the mid-seventies till the mid-eighties, and in that era it had four different communist student groups. One group I thought of as Stalinist (I think they called themselves Leninists)—whatever the USSR did or had done was entirely right. If you pointed out to them that the USSR was doing (or had done) something less than perfect (and, let’s be honest, that was pretty easy to do), they responded by saying, “That’s just capitalist propaganda!” Or, equally often, “Come the Revolution, motherfucker, you’re the first up against the wall.”
They often had facts to support their argument that the US foreign policy was not as liberatory and high-minded as many Americans liked to claim (also pretty easy to have), but they wouldn’t even engage any information critical of the USSR. They refused to look at it, listen to it, or even consider it. They dismissed it on the grounds of it being propaganda just because it was information they didn’t want to hear.
And what’s interesting about that response—that refusal to look at (or listen to) evidence that might trouble their beliefs—is that it showed weakness. It showed that, at some level, they knew their faith in the USSR couldn’t be defended through rational-critical argumentation.
In other words, they were making an interesting admission about the fragility of their beliefs. They couldn’t argue for their position. That isn’t how they thought of it to themselves; they told themselves, “I’m so right that I don’t need to listen to anyone who disagrees.”
But, what does it mean to be so right that you can’t even look at evidence that you might be wrong? If you’re really right, then there’s no harm in looking at that evidence. If you refuse to look at any evidence that you might be wrong, then you’re admitting that your beliefs are rationally indefensible.
All of us have some beliefs that we hold that way— times that we’re both anxious and out of control and decide that knowing bad news wouldn’t make any difference. But some people approach all political issues (or all issues) with that “I believe what I believe, and I’m afraid to look at information that might prove me wrong.”
This way of thinking about an issue is often called blind loyalty, but I think that metaphor is wrong for a lot of reasons. One of them is that people like the Stalinists are perfectly willing to look at information that says they’re right or the other group is wrong. They just won’t look at information problematic for their position. I think it’s better to call it blinkered loyalty, because it’s as though people have put on the kind of blinkers that are put on horses to keep them from seeing anything other than what the rider wants them to see.
In this case, people put the blinkers on themselves, and calling something something “capitalist propaganda” made the Stalinist feel better about wearing the blinkers.
I’m not saying we’re obligated to engage every person who disagrees with us, or to look at every piece of evidence they present—there are people and sources that aren’t worth engaging, such as “fake news” sites. “Fake news” was initially the term used for sites that openly identified themselves as providing fabricated information (if you looked at the whole page, you’d find something saying the site was “satire”).
The research suggested that Trump supporters (I’ll say again, they were far from alone in this) didn’t read the fine print; they didn’t know they were passing along information that was obviously false although they could have if they had looked at the sources carefully. But they didn’t.
The more that you think about politics as a question of loyalty, then the more likely you are to accept as true anything that supports your in-group and reject as untrue whatever is problematic for your in-group simply on those grounds. You’re likely to have blinkered loyalty.
I began this post with the example of a Stalinist because I wanted to emphasize that I don’t think this way of thinking about politics is limited to “conservatives” (and I think the tendency to divide politics in a binary or continuum is false and destructive, but that’s a different post). It also isn’t equally true of “both sides” because the range of political ideologies and commitments in the US is no more usefully divided into “left” and “right” than the world of animals is divided into “up” and “down.”
I think it’s more useful to think of politics in terms of a color spectrum, since that enables us to think about there being more than two political positions, and also different degrees of commitment (how “saturated” a color is—such as the difference between a deep and a pale purple). Some people (such as the “political compass” site) uses the continuum of “authoritarian” v. “libertarian” to describe a similar concept (but I’ve found that people get confused by those terms). People who are more on the authoritarian side of the continuum (the deeply “saturated”) see politics as a question of in-group loyalty, only consume in-group media, change their beliefs not because of new information but because the in-group position has changed, reject the notion that any political position other than theirs might be legitimate, and are comfortable with the government silencing anyone who disagrees.
Because people who heavily saturated only get their information from in-group sources, they are engaged in blinkered loyalty. But they don’t think they are because their media claim to give them “both sides”—the media spends a lot of time saying what “the other side” thinks. It’s all straw man, of course, except what it’s outright misrepresentation. It’s inoculation. The surprising paradox is that, not only are heavily saturated people the most politically engaged, they’re the most uninformed. They’re very informed (armed even) with data or talking points that support the in-group, but they’re actively misinformed about out-group beliefs, and completely uninformed about weaknesses or flaws in in-group arguments, policies, or political figures.
So here is what I’m saying. Calling everything that disagrees with you “fake news” is no more rational than the Stalinist shouting “capitalist propaganda!” Rejecting any source that has disconfirming information, refusing to look at non in-group sources, dismissing anything we don’t want to hear—that’s openly announcing one’s place in the heavily saturated places on the color spectrum, that the position is just blinkered loyalty.
Image from https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/central-park-five
Trump advocated using hydroxychloroquine; a lot of studies said it was unsafe. Now, because two of the studies that said it was unsafe have been questioned on the grounds of the motives of the people engaged in the study, many people are saying that Trump was right after all, and that shows that people who criticized Trump were wrong. I’ll begin by saying that I think it’s possible that hydroxychloroquine is a good choice in treating COVID—studies are all over the place, and I don’t have the expertise to assess treatment choices. But, even if all the experts and researchers end up deciding that it is a good treatment, Trump was wrong to advocate it. Because he doesn’t have the expertise to make that kind of recommendation.
The episode got polarized and factionalized quickly, and in a way that epitomizes most of what’s wrong with current American public discourse. For supporters of Trump, if it turns out that hydroxychloroquine is a valid treatment, then that would be proof that his critics are factional, and their criticism of him is irrational.
First, notice that that’s projection. That defense of Trump, that reframing of a question about whether it was a responsible thing for a President to say into a referendum on whether supporters or critics of Trump are entirely right—that is factionalism. (I’m not saying that they’re the only ones who factionalize everything; as I said, this situation is typical of American public discourse.) And the argument about whether it’s responsible for a popular President with no scientific or medical expertise to give medical advice is that it’s irrational for him to be making medical recommendations.
Second, if it turns out to have been a good recommendation, that doesn’t confirm that Trump was right to make it because he could have been wrong. Part of what is at stake in this disagreement is about how knowledge works. This is hard to explain, but what I mean is that, for some people, the world is a stable place that can be known, directly, by anyone with good judgment. A person with good judgment can, with no training or expertise, look at any situation and see the truth. That fantasy of judgment that transcends fields is often called “universal genius,” and it’s an important part of the myth of charismatic leadership.
For followers who are in a “charismatic leadership” relationship with Trump, the issue of hydroxychloroquine is a referendum on whether Trump has that “universal genius”—for them, if it turns out that it is a good treatment, then that is proof that is a person with that kind of untrained and yet universally valid insight.
Except it isn’t a referendum on whether he has universal genius. Because if it turns out to be an unwise treatment, his followers won’t abandon that belief and his insight. He’s already been wrong about lots of things, including whether hydroxychloroquine has harmful side effects. One of the more important midjudgments on his part, particularly relevant right now, was his calling for the execution of five innocent men. So, Trump doesn’t have universal genius (no one does), but that isn’t really my point. The important point is that, for people who believe in “universal genius” or information-free insight, it is a belief that can be proven, but not disproven.
It’s irrational.
“Universal genius” is supported, I’m saying, through a form of “survivorship bias”—a cognitive bias in which only the survivors are noticed. It happens in popular advice on success and business a lot. An article might look at “what the richest people know about success” or “how the most successful people manage their time.” Looking at what the successful people—the survivors—have in common doesn’t mean we can infer what caused them to be successful; they might simply have been lucky. Nassim Taleb has a nice analogy for this kind of bias. If a thousand people play Russian roulette, some (very small) number of people will manage to pull the trigger five times without harm. Interviewing those people to see what strategy they shared will not get us good information about how to win at Russian roulette.
If we only look at the time that a person happened to be right, then we can believe that a person has this extraordinary insight. And that’s what happens with arguments about police violence.
I was very puzzled after the Trayvon Martin murder because defenders of the killing said it was a justified shooting, since Trayvon Martin had texts describing himself as “gangsta”—a fact that George Zimmerman didn’t know. I kept trying to point out to people that playing a tough guy in texts does not carry the death penalty, and Zimmerman didn’t know any of that anyway, so Zimmerman’s shooting was racially motivated and reckless at best. He had no evidence for shooting Martin. Eventually, I came to understand that they saw the information about Martin that Zimmerman didn’t have as proof that Martin was a bad person, and they believed that George Zimmerman saw the signs. Zimmerman, they believed, had made an information-free judgment because of a kind of “bad guy” detector—an ability to read the signs of badness.
If pundits and reporters can turn up negative information about the victim—information the shooter didn’t have—then a lot of people will perceive the shooting as oddly retroactively justified. If the victim can be framed as a bad person, then they “deserved” getting shot, a desert that the shooter magically perceived via signs (rather than evidence).
This, like the issue of Trump and hydroxychloroquine, is a belief that can be proven, but not disproven. People who want to justify police violence look for information that the victim was a bad person and therefore deserved it, information that the police officer didn’t have at the time. And information about crimes that don’t have the death penalty attached. The officer, they believe, saw the signs.
The signs aren’t universally valid—that Zimmerman has a more problematic record than Martin isn’t retroactively proof that Zimmerman was the bad guy. The signs only point one way.
There isn’t “universal genius.” There isn’t information-free extraordinary insight. There is, however, confirmation bias.
There is a video of two police officers who take a protestor to the ground. One of them has his knee on the protestor’s neck. Since this was a protest about how an officer put his knee on the neck of a black man and killed him, that was a significant choice on the officer’s part. After about ten seconds, the other officer makes him move his knee.
This might seem to be a good story, about an officer doing what should have happened with so many other cases—correcting a fellow officer. But, from the second the first officer puts his knee on the neck of the protestor, a bystander starts yelling, “GET YOUR FUCKING KNEE OFF HIS NECK!” The second officer looks over directly into the camera, and then moves the knee.
So, did he make the first officer move his knee because it was the right thing to do, or because they were being filmed?
Unhappily, I think it’s likely it’s the second. He stopped what was excessive and potentially deadly force because of the optics, so to speak, because what that officer was doing was going to get publicized—there would have been bad consequences. Would he have done the same thing had there not been someone with a camera, and no one would know (other than the person with the knee on his neck, but who’s going to believe him?)
Academics are expressing outrage at police officers who don’t report racism or abuse, who don’t pull a knee off a neck unless there is a camera. And my response is, “Are you kidding me? How good are we at standing up to in-group abuse and racism?” Because the answer is: not very. [1]
If you do the kind of work I do, then you can’t much value in-group loyalty, and yet I can look back on decisions I’ve made, and recognize I got suckered by in-group loyalty claims. And, so, at far too many times in my career, I have been aware of abusive behavior on the part of faculty toward various non in-groups (graduate students or staff), and I didn’t do anything but complain to like-minded colleagues who also did nothing. Or I bleated ineffectually at department leadership who didn’t do anything effective, and when they didn’t do anything, I stopped bleating. I’ve seen faculty genuinely try to do something about faculty abuse of students, junior faculty, and/or staff, and to a person, the person complaining was criticized as much as the abuser (and sometimes more). And the accusation? That they were not collegial—in other words, not loyal to in-group.
It’s like a dysfunctional family at Thanksgiving dinner, at which grandpa’s racist comments or abusive treatment of other family members is open and tolerated, but the person who says, “Wow, that’s racist,” or “You shouldn’t do that” is condemned for being the problem, the one who started the conflict.
For instance, at one institution, a faculty member actively “bullied” students to work with her (that was the term that came up a lot), as well as insisted that undergraduates fill out evaluations in her office, with her watching. The chair, when pushed, “talked” to the faculty member. It didn’t work, so he did nothing further. She kept doing it.
A faculty member with a long and admitted history of abusing staff was put in charge of staff, and the chair said that they would talk to this person if he abused staff in this new position. Although he had talked to this person before. And talking to him hadn’t worked. So now it magically would? Narrator: it didn’t.
An openly homophobic faculty member was put on a search committee, and did her best to tank any applicant who seemed queer (let alone did queer theory), and was deliberately hostile to the only one interviewed at MLA. Although the entire faculty saw this, it was only one faculty member—an assistant professor–who tried to do something about it. It didn’t end well for him.
A faculty member wouldn’t let anyone touch his computer, and so couldn’t get it to attach to the printer. In the evening, he would take a floppy drive (this was in those days) to an admin assistant’s computer, print what he needed, and then, because he was so concerned about someone stealing his work, would delete Word from the admin assistant’s computer. Every time. So, every Monday and sometimes other days during the week, the admin assistant would have to reinstall Word (and this was in the days when it took multiple disks and about an hour to do that). The Department Chair (a good man) wouldn’t do anything about it, on the grounds of collegiality and compassion for the faculty member. (I’m not kidding.)
In each of these cases, leadership had so many options. They could have required that the faculty member with a history of abusing dissertation students co-chair, they could have put a password on the admin’s computer, insist that evaluations be filled out in a class with a proctor present, insist that a faculty member put requests to staff in email. More important, all it would have taken would have been colleagues (who were open that they thought the behavior was abusive) to say to the person, “Wow, that is not okay.”
In some cases, the departmental leadership was allowing the abuse because higher administration told them they had to. A friend was at a university that had a faculty member who cornered junior faculty in their offices (and staff and graduate students) and shouted at them (especially women). He claimed that it was the consequence of a medical condition, so the “accommodation” was that no one could complain about it. That’s the most extreme version, but protecting faculty with a long record of abusive behavior can also happen because the administration is lawsuit-phobic. The homophobe was protected by higher administration because she was the sort of person to have a lawyer on speed dial.
I was at a university where a faculty member called out a fellow faculty member for being a Holocaust denier. The Holocaust denier, while using his affiliation with the university as part of his credentials for being a credible expert on the Holocaust (he was, by the way, in the School of Engineering), was simply told he couldn’t deny the Holocaust in class. Nothing said about office hours, conversation, or the conferences he attended, or the writing he did—again, all the while citing his University credentials. But the faculty member who called him out publicly—that person was disciplined. The Holocaust denier had a lawyer.
I once met with an ombudsperson to complain about the fact that the major admins and many faculty participated in a regular mens-only poker game. That person didn’t see the problem. (The University Attorney did, and told them they could still do it, but couldn’t talk.) I met with another ombuds about a situation, and that person told me, “Oh, junior faculty can always speak freely at meetings; they’re just paranoid if they think it will be held against them.” ORLY? The people in positions of power can’t be counted on to support ethical behavior, and that’s one reason that people don’t bother reporting it.
But, in my experience, the problems are at the departmental level. I once found myself involved in a case (not in my department or even college but at my U) of a faculty member who courted students during the coursework period. He was a big name in his field, and had placed students at some impressive jobs, which he emphasized to students in his courses a lot (what the students didn’t notice is that he hadn’t had good placement in fifteen years). But he also had the classic abusive relationship dynamic—during coursework, he praised a student to the heavens, said that they wouldn’t have the problems other recent students had had because they were so good. Once a student was really tied to him (this was a department in which it was hard to change your committee once you’re ABD), he stopped paying attention to them because he was too busy. He wouldn’t let students share their chapters with other committee members until he approved the chapter, and he took three to four months to read a chapter. His students regularly ran out of funding. (There are variations of that story at several places I’ve been.)
I got involved (very peripherally, just supporting someone who had decided to do something about this situation), and discovered that, not only was this pattern well-known, but that it was known to be a pattern he had with women, and that a woman faculty member had complained. She was now marginalized in the department. He did, after all, bring in a lot of grant money.
Academics do not have clean hands (or, perhaps, the right metaphor is that we have well-washed hands) when it comes to being willing to name abusive behavior and do something about it.
So, why do people jump on the faculty member who says, “That’s racist” more than they jump on the actual racist? Because saying something racist is racist, but violating in-group norms about loyalty is equally bad (or worse), because, as captain awkward might say, colleagiaaaaaaality.
A faculty member can be abusive even to another faculty member and in-group loyalty requires that other faculty not notice it, and certainly don’t remark on it. Abusing another faculty member is less of a violation of in-group norms than saying out loud that a faculty member is abusive. Calling out another faculty member as racist makes people feel that, unless they can ignore or dismiss the charge of racism (or abuse), they need to do something. And they don’t want to. Grandpa saying something racist/homophobic/misogynist, even if directed at another family member is not as “disruptive” (in faculty terms, violating norms of “collegial”) because Grandpa doesn’t ask the community to acknowledge the problem. The person saying Grandpa was racist does. That is violating collegiality.
One of many disastrous consequences of valuing in-group loyalty is that loyalty to the in-group is more important than holding in-group members accountable for their abuse of out-group members. That’s the kind of “reasoning” that makes police officers think they’re behaving ethically when they don’t report the abuse of fellow officers. They are behaving ethically, by their understanding of “ethical” behavior, because their understanding of ethical behavior means first and foremost being loyal to their in-group. In addition, they believe that there is no point in complaining about behavior—the higher-ups will do nothing, and they’ll get sidelined.
I initially wrote this post in mid-February, and had gotten about this far. It has now become even more salient. I hear (and see) faculty express shock that police officers stand around while an officer is verbally or physically abusive, says or does racist things—“Why don’t the bystanders do something,” they say.
Well, why don’t we do something?
[1] I have to issue a general caveat—it shouldn’t be inferred that I’m talking about my current department. Also, I’ve picked examples in which I was not the person who spoke up or made changes happen—I’ve been singularly ineffectual in that regard in my career.
The events of the last few days make it clear that racism is not about how individuals feel about each other. It’s about how structures and systemic practices fuel our racist system—everything from how cop shows narrate events to the history of Supreme Court rulings on qualified immunity. Our system is racist in a lot of ways, and one of them is that it privileges the feelings of white people. (That’s why Trump is the whitest of Presidents—everything is about his feelings.)
So, if you’re a white person interested in helping make our world less racist, then writing about how badly we feel about what’s happening is still doing the thing. Racism isn’t about how white people feel bad. Racism won’t be ended when white people feel more bad, or more white people feel bad, or, whatever. Racism isn’t about individual white people having individual white people feelings.
Racism is about white people feelings driving the world. So, white people treating our current situation as though the solution is white people telling POC how we feel is still saying that white people fee-fees are the most important thing right now. Making racialized and unaccountable policing about white people fee-fees is doubling down on the racism. Just don’t. It’s about the policing, not our feelings.
It also doesn’t help if white people turn to our “black friend” and say that we are now willing to listen to them. Our “black friend” is not our spiritual guide. S/he might have other things to do, and we have google.
There are some great lists out there of really helpful books to read. Here is Ibram X. Kendi‘s .
