August 2021 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Chapter summaries of the Deliberating War book

[Various folks have asked about the book I’m currently trying to write, so I decided I’d post the part of the latest draft of the introduction that is the draft of the summary of the chapters I’ve drafted. You might sense a theme here. As it stands, the intro begins by talking about the Corinthian speech at the “Debate at Sparta” and then moves into these summaries.]

It’s conventional to think of rhetoric as changing the minds of an audience—gaining their compliance to one’s main claim or set of claims. Thus, to look at the rhetoric of the “Debate at Sparta” is to look at what strategies rhetors used to gain (or try to gain) compliance to their argument about whether to go to war with Athens. While those present eventually voted for a resolution that was implicitly a decision for war with Athens, it isn’t clear that they did so because the speech for war (the Corinthian’s) changed their minds. This chapter uses the Debate at Sparta and Alexander the Great’s speech at the Beas River in order to make two major points: first, what matters about rhetoric surrounding a decision to go to war is not whether it persuades listeners to go to war, but how the way the war is defined in the course of the discussion: what kind of war it is (e.g., preventive, pre-emptive, limited, total), and, closely connected, what the goals of the war are (in other words, at what point can we say that the war was successful, and can therefore be ended). Second, the strategies that are the most attractive to a rhetor who is simply looking for short-term gains in persuasion are ones that constrain policy deliberation and, therefore, threaten the long-term best interests of the community as a whole. Among the most effective—in the short-term—strategies is to deflect away from pragmatic disagreements about policy options by describing the situation as an existential battle between two entities, a description that can trap a culture into either a war of extermination or endless war.

The second chapter considers Charles Cambreleng’s speech in Congress in February of 1835 and several articles about the 1873 controversy concerning the ship Virginius. Both situations enable thinking about the relationship of factionalism, hyperbole, threat inflation, and bargaining. While presenting a situation as a zero-sum conflict of such intensity that we don’t have time to deliberate is rhetorically powerful (threat inflation), it isn’t always oriented toward starting a war. There are considerable benefits under various situations, including one of hyperfactionalism, in looking as though one is panting for war, even (or especially) when war is unnecessary and unwise. The problem is that appealing to the triumph of faction as a good in and of itself encourages communities to make “Vladimir’s Choice.” While the agonism of factionalism can function to ensure that there is disagreement, and that therefore policy proposals are disputed (“interrogated” is the term often used), it can paradoxically mean that irrational loyalty is admired and emulated. Thus, factionalism can either function to improve or prohibit policy disagreement, and even deliberation. The final point in the chapter is that our tendency to think in terms of binary paired terms (that is, assuming that all issues can be mapped as terms that are consistently opposed to some and associated with others) means we assume that our rich and varied spectrum of political commitments can not only be reduced to two opposing ones, but that they are opposed in every way and at every point. The more factional a community, the greater the pressure to present policy commitments as grounded in principle, and the less likely it is that they are—appeals to principle become sticks with which to whack the opposition, and not legs on which beliefs stand.

This book is an exploration of how communities do and don’t engage in effective public deliberation about war. But, I won’t rely on any very precise use of the term “war”—this book includes discussions of conflicts that never happened (such as the US going to war with France or Spain), conflicts in which war was never formally declared (Vietnam, the Falklands/Malvinas), failed attempts to prevent a war (appeasing Hitler, the Falklands/Malvinas), and times that people claim something is metaphorically war (factional politics as war). The third chapter focusses on the April 3, 1982 debate in Parliament, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the unenviable position of having to announce that Argentine troops had occupied the long-disputed islands of Malvinas/Falklands. Although the islands were not of strategic or economic importance to either Argentina or Britain, diplomatic negotiations over the future of the approximately one thousand people on the islands had sputtered without noticeable progress for almost twenty years. Oddly enough, neither Argentina nor Britain wanted a military conflict over the territory, and both governments thought they could avoid such a conflict almost until the moment that British troops arrived. Since the area was primarily of symbolic importance, and neither side wanted military conflict, it’s interesting to wonder how they ended up in a war neither wanted. In this chapter, I’ll argue that the situation exemplifies some of the ways that factionalism can create untouchable third rails in politics, and then we have the train wreck of a war no one wanted. Or, to mix my metaphors, the short-term gains of refusing to negotiate Falklands’ sovereignty coupled with the high costs of rational deliberation about the long-term policy options meant that pundits and politicians who hoped to keep their jobs were willing to take the gains and avoid the costs.

Paradoxically, that we believe that the correct course of action is obvious to us, and would have been obvious to us had we be in the charge at various moments in the past, keeps us from learning from the past. It enables us to tell a story about gullible, oblivious, benighted, and possibly corrupt fools who ignored the obviously right policy. There are several errors in that narrative—the notion that there is a correct course of action, that it’s obvious to good people, that we are the exactly the good sort of people who see it, and that anyone who disagrees with us (or who took a different course of action in the past) did so because they are failed and flawed. The third chapter, about the Falklands War, and the fourth, about appeasing Hitler, are both about instances in which there was not an obviously correct course of action that all people of good sense and goodwill recognized immediately for what it was; more important, that there were people believed in a right answer, obvious to them, and obvious to everyone, and that disagreement about what should be done was unnecessary at best and villainy of some sort at worst, is precisely what led to decisions communities later regretted.

There’s a saying attributed to Santayana, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” The problem with that saying is that there is an awful lot of history to know, and we don’t know which past incident we should take as our model. As will be discussed in the fourth chapter, we think that appeasing Hitler was an obviously stupid policy—not just given what we now know, but given what was obvious at the time. And so the supposedly obvious mistake about Hitler is frequently, even compulsively, applied as the obvious parallel that should make it clear that we should respond with maximum aggression to this provocation. But it is also obvious to many people (and was obvious to many people in the 1920s and 30s) that the Great War had been caused by responding with excessive aggression, thereby provoking Germany and Austria. It is (and was) obvious to many people that appeasing Austria would have been the wise choice. Thus, history does not tell us that appeasement is always an obvious mistake. In fact, it isn’t even clear that the example of Hitler is a case of political leaders making a choice which was to them obviously wrong. I think they made the wrong choice, but not an obviously wrong one, and it may have even been that they made the choice they did because so many people believed that the correct political option is always the obvious one. That is, the tragedy might have come about at least partially because people thought not only that they were right, but so obviously right that they could dismiss out of hand any disconfirming information or arguments.

Throughout the book, I argue that rhetors are tempted to avoid policy argumentation because it’s hard, not particularly popular with audiences, even less popular with most media, and often obligates them to talk about their policy or party in ways that will expose flaws. As mentioned above, one of the flaws might be that the case is rhetorically difficult and the audience is unlikely to see the situation as meriting much concern. In 1947, Harry S Truman wanted Congressional approval for providing support for an anti-communist (and problematic) government in Greece, and for Turkey. Worried that the “ill” of his case would seem remote, and the aid risky (since it might lead to another European war), Truman and his speechwriters chose the same strategy as had the un-named Corinthian: make the conflict not a limited dispute but an existential and inevitable battle between two identities. This move put the specifics of Truman’s policies above the realm of pragmatic rational policy argumentation—if we’re facing extermination, it’s frivolous to count pennies or dispute data. If the situation is urgent, then asking for democratic deliberation helps the enemy. The fifth chapter looks at the rhetorical problem presented by this framing of American foreign policy arguing that it wasn’t possible for this remain a frame only for foreign policy. It must, inevitably, become the way that domestic deliberation about foreign policy would be handled, and it was.

If we are in an apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil, then there is no such place for the everyday politics of compromise, deliberation, fairness, reciprocity. The conclusion argues that what initially seems to be an effective solution (hyperbole and demagoguery) to an immediate rhetorical problem—how do I persuade people to adopt a policy (or support me) without relying on policy argumentation, since that probably wouldn’t work?—is a trap. At some point, hyperbolic rhetoric becomes threat inflation, and then that inflated threat becomes the premise of policies, both foreign and domestic. And then agreeing as to the obvious existential threat posed by the Other and uniting behind the obvious policy solution is a necessary sign of being on the side of Good. Thus, the rhetoric of existential war inevitably has as one its major casualties democratic discourse itself. And democracy without democratic discourse isn’t democracy.

I was an idiot at 18 (aka, compromise and incrementalism and progressivism can work together)

gaetz shouting — Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html

When I moved to Berkeley at the age of 18, I was frustrated by various lefties who had, I thought, “given up” on their convictions. They were working for short-term gains and willing to compromise. I believed that they had been worn down by years of political activism, and that their mistake was having abandoned their pure faith in the right policies—they should have continued to insist on settling for nothing short of what is right.

I believed that political change happens because there are people who are so purely committed to the right thing that evil capitulates to the people who refuse to compromise. I wasn’t entirely wrong. And yet I was.

There were four errors in how I thought. First, and most important, I thought that my perspective on what was “the right” thing to do was correct. I began from the premise that someone died and made me Kant. I believed that there is a perfect policy on every issue because people don’t really disagree, and/or that the people who disagree don’t count or don’t understand their own real interests. I was a toxic populist.

Toxic populism is profoundly anti-democratic and implicitly authoritarian, since it denies the value of inclusive democratic deliberation by saying that only one perspective is right. It isn’t necessarily “left” or “right” or even “political.” As Jan-Werner Muller says,

But above all, [populists] tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.

Second, I believed in hope. I remember that I decided that I must like George Berkeley’s philosophy because I was told he was an idealist. I had no clue what that meant in philosophical terms, and I’m not sure I understood what little of him I tried to read, but I had some vague sense that it meant something like holding onto your dreams even when things are bad. I believed that ignoring your past in favor of what you hoped might happen in the future was positive, and, to be blunt, it was very positive in my life. My high school life had not been good, and I needed to believe that that past life was not a prediction of my future life. It wasn’t. And it can be literally life-saving to believe in hope. Believing in hope is good.

But, third, for reasons I still don’t understand, I came to believe that believing in hope is enough to make things happen. What I didn’t understand is that hope is necessary but not sufficient for good things to happen when they haven’t been happening. Hoping is good, and having hope makes it more likely that you’ll take advantages of opportunity; it’s necessary for change and achievement. But success is not guaranteed to people who hope, no matter how much you hope. We have to be hopeful enough to look at the past honestly.

I was engaged in magical thinking about politics. There are lots of kinds of magical thinking when it comes to politics—the just world model, prosperity “gospel,” Social Darwinism, politics as eschatology. [1] What they all have in common is the notion that we shouldn’t learn from the past—we should reject it in favor of what we hope for the future, as though hope is all we need.

I also saw compromise as in an inverse relationship to hope I thought that, if people refused to compromise, and hoped more, something would magically happen. I believed that the universe rewarded uncompromised hope. [2]

And all of these errors are included in the fourth, which was that I thought there was one way that people should try to enact political change, and that we should find that one way. I thought that political change had happened because of one person or one group and their one policy to which they were unanimously and completely committed. (Granted, that’s how US history is taught, so my idiocy wasn’t venal.)

In other words, I was unidimensional in my thinking about politics—I thought there was one perspective that correctly saw the policy that was right for everyone, and to which every reasonable person would assent. I thought disagreement was failure to have the right perspective. I thought that’s what history showed to be true.

For instance, I thought abolition happened because abolitionists refused to compromise, segregation ended because Civil Rights workers refused to compromise, women got the vote because suffragettes refused to compromise, but that isn’t what happened at all. All the abolitionists made compromises of various kinds, MLK was condemned for making too many compromises, and the suffragettes rhetorical compromises in terms of racism are just unbearable.

There are so many things I didn’t understand. Among them is no major change happens because of one individual or one group. Political change happens because there are lots of groups working toward the same end and using lots of different methods. I didn’t know that because we don’t like history to be that way—we like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or David v. Goliath; we like stories in which individuals, by standing up for their beliefs, changed everything. There are admirable individuals who made big changes in our world, but they were always part of a group, and that group was part of a coalition of groups, and they never got all that they wanted.

No one person, and no one group, makes significant change happen. Political change happens because there are people who are willing to compromise, and people who think that compromise is the first step in more changes. Incremental change works to move a big community toward major changes when the people who want more work with those who negotiate incremental changes and vice versa. It doesn’t work if we see politics as bargaining, in which we reach an agreement and we’re done. It does work if we see each compromise as incremental movement toward a goal—if it becomes the place from which we climb higher.

What I didn’t see (but what’s pretty clear in much history) is that people who demand more need to be part of the conversation, and need to make their demands clear, and need to agitate for those demands aggressively, and they need to push hard on the people who want incremental change without making incrementalists the enemy. Those people are absolutely crucial in political change. And incrementalists need to think of what changes they’ve achieved as not nearly enough. When incrementalists get an incremental achievement, those people who dislike the compromise need to push for more.

DADT—which was incrementalist–turned out to be a good move. At the time, I didn’t think it was. LBJ’s very incrementalist Medicare was a good move. So was the Voting Rights Act, insofar as it stayed in place for a while, but it wasn’t the basis of even better incremental changes. The Civil Rights Act was the basis for more changes. I still think Obamacare was good incrementalism, but I worry that it’s in the Voting Rights Act category.

In any case, our world is a little better for those compromises, so incremental can make things a little better. Our world is much worse, however, because of the incrementalist compromises in the GI Bill, the 1876 resolution of the disputed election, the Missouri Compromise, compromises about Workfare and “tough on crime” initiatives of the 90s, and so many compromises that FDR made with racists. Incrementalism isn’t always good, and it isn’t always bad, but even when it’s good it’s good only if it’s seen as a step from which we will move. Because we hope for more.

I was right to think that hope is good; I was wrong to think hoping means you never compromise. In fact, useful compromises require tremendous compromise.

[1] I have to point out the heartlessness of any of these ways of magical thinking. They’re all versions of the “bad things only happen to people who deserve them” lie, as though slaves just had to hope more and…what…slavery would have evaporated? Slavers would have said, “Oh, shit, what we’re doing is unjust!”? People who get cancer didn’t hope enough? Sometimes our desire to erase uncertainty from our loves is the basis for extraordinary cruelty.

[2] Refusing to compromise is a great and effective strategy under certain circumstances–it’s useful for someone who has all the power, or who has enough power to stop anything from happening if they don’t get their way, someone who wants to burn down the system, someone who is fine with how the system is working, and spoiled children.

Patricia Roberts-Miller cv

Patricia Roberts-Miller, Professor Emeritus
Department of Rhetoric and Writing
University of Texas at Austin
patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com
patriciarobertsmiller.com

Scholar of pathologies of deliberation—that is, how communities persuade themselves to make decisions they later regret, although they had all the information necessary to make other decisions (e.g., demagoguery, propaganda, racism).

Education: University of California at Berkeley, Rhetoric PhD (1987), MA (Distinction, 1983), AB (Highest Honors, 1981)

Selected Books: Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring US Together (2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery (2019), Demagoguery and Democracy (2017), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (1999).

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters
• “Who Says What Is…Always Tells a Story”: White Supremacist Rhetoric, Then and Now” Nineteenth-Century Activist Rhetorics. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli. MLA. 2021. 279-289.
• “How to have more productive conversations about racism: Stop focusing on individual intent.” Salon (February 15, 2021)
• “On Not Bullshitting Yourself, or Your Teaching.” Composition Studies, 48:3, 129-131, 2020.
• “Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 233-247, 2019. DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2019.1610638
• “Why “I don’t like his rhetoric, but I like what he’s doing with the economy” is not a good reason to support any leader.” Washington Spectator. September 25, 2019.
• “Ocasio-Cortez Exploited as Clickbait and Outrage Porn Magnet.” Washington Spectator April 2, 2019.
• “Trump’s Demagoguery.” Washington Spectator March 11, 2019.
• “Charisma Isn’t Leadership” Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Ed. Ryan Skinnell. Societas, 2018.
• “Demagoguery vs. democracy: How “us vs. them” can lead to state-led violence.” Salon (June 10, 2017).

Selected Recent Invited Lectures/Presentations
Rhetoric Society of America (co-leader of seminar on “Rhetoric in Dark Times,” 2021), University of Georgia Athens (2020), University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020), “Unbecoming a Democracy.” Open Mind (2/10/2020), University of Maryland College Park (First Year Book 2019), Penn State University (Kenneth Burke Lecture, 2019), “Demagogues are More Common Than You Think.” Democracy Works (May 20, 2019), “Demagoguery and Democracy” Pardubice University, and Clemintinium National Library, Czechia (2019), University of Nevada-Reno (2019), Scranton University (2019)

Referee/Reviewer (presses and journals): Canadian Journal of Political Science, CCC, College English, Composition Studies, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Journal of the History of Rhetoric (formerly Advances in the History of Rhetoric), Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, Penn State University Press, Political Studies, Praxis, Profession, Review of Politics, Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Southern Illinois University Press, Texas A&M University Press, University of Alabama Press, University of Pittsburgh Press

Reviewer (promotion and tenure): Arizona State University, Cal State Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, Florida State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Simon Fraser University, Syracuse University, Temple University, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, University of Illinois, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, University of Texas San Antonio, Wayne State University

How myths about snakes can tell us a lot about how not to think about politics

Photo of Americans being sent to concentration camps — https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

I grew up in an area that had a fair amount of non-landscaped areas, and so there were things like snakes and coyotes. Every year, the local fire department (who had, I think, not enough to do much of the time, but when they were needed, they were really needed) would come to my elementary school and engage in what is called “threat inflation” about snakes. I’m certain they felt justified—there were rattlesnakes in the area, and kids can be idiots about trying to tease or catch a snake. And, so, in order to prevent some kids who might be tempted to mess with snakes to be more careful they deliberately tried to terrify all of us about snakes (in rhetoric, this is called the problem of the “composite audience”). They persuaded me that rattlesnakes were under every rock and would at every chance try to leap out and attack me. I was terrified of snakes. There were gopher snakes in that area who looked a lot like rattlesnakes and, who, if in dry leaves, could seem to make a rattling sound. (I would later hear the real rattling sound, and it was completely different. Luckily, I had a dog who was better at identifying the danger of the real rattling sound.)

As I’ve often lived or hiked in areas with snakes, and so I’ve been told many things about them, all of which I believed. Here are some of the things I was told by people who seem authoritative.

• Venomous snakes have a triangle-shaped head, as opposed to beneficial snakes.

• Here’s how to identify a coral snake:

Red Touch Yellow – Kills a Fellow
Red Touch Black – Venom Lack
Yellow Touches Red – Soon You’ll Be Dead
Red Touches Black – Friend of Jack

• On my neighborhood mailing list, during a summer when water for wildlife was scarce, someone posted a warning that they had been standing on a pedestrian bridge that is twenty feet above a creek and saw at least a dozen cottonmouths congregating.

• Since many of my dogs have been only slightly smarter than slime mold, I’ve worried about them interacting even with a non-venomous snake (since they will bite), and have seen various commercial products that claim to repel snakes from your yard, as well as home remedies like using moth balls.

• Another person on the mailing list posted a picture of what she insisted was a Burmese Python that had been living in their shed until disturbed. When various other people said that the photo was a Texas Rat Snake, the poster insisted it wasn’t, since the person who said it was a Burmese Python was a Texas native, and therefore knew Texas snakes.

I believed all of these things (except the Burmese Python thing), and I am very well-educated. The person who insisted on the Burmese Python was also highly educated. Believing things that are completely wrong, even choosing to die on the hill of being wrong—all of that has very little to do with being educated or smart.

All of these ways of being wrong exemplify many of the ways all of us—not matter how well-educated—are wrong. But it’s wrong not because people are stupid when it comes to snakes, or beliefs about snakes are peculiarly prone to wrongness in some way. The way that these beliefs are wrong exemplify how people reason badly about all sorts of things, including politics.

Let’s start with the last way of thinking ineffectively, since it’s also the first, and it has to do with what constitutes expertise. Firefighters aren’t necessarily experts in snake behavior, and, in fact, having lived in Texas (or wherever) one’s whole life doesn’t necessarily mean that one’s identifications are correct. A person can spend a lifetime being wrong. What makes a person a reliable identifier of venomous snakes isn’t whether they’re certain about it being venomous, and especially not how often they’ve identified a venomous snake, but how often they’ve identified a non-venomous and yet similar-looking snake.

Of course, the firefighters weren’t trying to give accurate information about snake behavior. The snakes in that area are protective, not aggressive, and I suspect the firefighters knew it. But they also knew that kids are dumb, and would probably provoke snakes. The firefighters were engaged in threat inflation in order to try to get dumb kids to be a little less dumb. The problem with threat inflation as a rhetorical tactic is that it only works if the audience doesn’t realize it’s threat inflation, and so, unless someone comes along and explains that rattlesnakes will not go out of their way to attack a human, that person will spend a lifetime over-reacting to rattlesnakes, real and imagined. People who have been persuaded that rattlesnakes are out to get us will try to kill all rattlesnakes, and even all snakes who look like rattlesnakes.

And they are likely to make a lot of mistakes because it isn’t all that easy to distinguish venomous v. non-venomous snakes consistently.

It turns out, for instance, that quite a few non-venomous snakes have triangle-shaped heads, the rhyme about yellow v. black doesn’t work outside of the US, in the US (west of the Mississippi) there are four non-venomous species who would be misidentified as venomous by the rhyme, and there can be what are called “aberrant” individual snakes all over the US that don’t fit the rhyme (meaning venomous ones that wouldn’t appear venomous, and non-venomous ones that would appear venomous).

Take two water snakes in my area: cottonmouth and various kinds of nerodia, but especially the Diamond-Backed Water snake. Telling the difference between the two of them involves seeing their underside, their eye shape, and seeing how they swim (and the last isn’t foolproof). I mentioned someone who posted that there were cottonmouths gathering, but there is no way that the person on the bridge could know whether they were looking at cottonmouth or nerodia, since they weren’t watching the snakes swim, and they were too far away to see the eye shape. Even if they spent their whole life in Texas.

We tend to think in binaries, especially about something frightening (like snakes), and the basic binary we have is good v. bad. That’s generally a mistake, but it especially is when we decide that beings are good or bad. And, so, we talk about venomous v. harmless snakes (or more explicitly “bad v. beneficial” snakes), but that isn’t how nature works. (That isn’t how the world works, in fact.) Cottonmouths aren’t entirely harmful—they are beneficial in an environment—but a person with dogs or small children might legitimately feel that their yard is not a place in which their benefits outweigh the various serious problems. On the other hand, nerodia aren’t “harmless” if we believe that harmless is the same as good and friendly. So, oddly enough, if we talk about venomous v. harmless snakes we’re likely to set someone up to make bad decisions about whether to handle a nerodia. Harm is a question of degrees, and it’s contextual.

There are better and worse reasons that someone might be frightened at the prospect of a yard with snakes. The more that one lives in an area with a lot of backyard wildlife, the more likely there will be snakes. The various ways of making a yard inhospitable to snakes are a little complicated—essentially don’t create habitat. For people who have chickens, it’s even more complicated. And various products and home remedies are a waste of money and possibly even unsafe. Furthermore, there is no way to make a yard friendly to “good” snakes (e.g., rat snakes) and not “bad” snakes (e.g., venomous ones), because nature isn’t divided into good and bad. And if one succeeds at creating a yard that is entirely snake free, there might be more problems with other kinds of “bad” critters.

Just to be clear: what I’m saying is that the desire to divide snakes into “good” and “bad” and to find simple ways of purifying our community of the “bad” snakes (through expelling or exterminating) just sets us up for giving our money to grifters, exterminating “good” snakes, and making the whole situation worse. If we add to the mix relying on simple ways of identifying the good v. bad snakes (and simple solutions include relying people whose authority comes from their experience of believing themselves continually confirmed in their ability to identify “bad” snakes), then we are pretty much guaranteed to make a mess.

You can take that paragraph and substitute various words for “snakes”—people, political parties, nations, voters, and so on–and see what is wrong with how we tend to think about politics and policies. That there is something bad (dogs getting bitten by snakes) doesn’t mean that our problems are caused by there being bad beings in our world, nor that it can only be solved by ridding our world of those bad beings, let alone that there are simple ways of doing so.

When people make the argument I’m making (the situation is not a binary, there are various solutions and the ones most likely to be effective aren’t simple), the response is too often, “Oh, so you’re saying we should do nothing?” or “So you don’t think venomous snakes leaping out from under the couch and attacking babies is a problem?”

This post is already too long, so I can’t explain this part very well (a different post, I guess, although I say that a lot), but saying, “Your simple solution based on a completely false binary won’t work” is not the same as saying, “Let’s do nothing.”

I have had dogs for years, and have always had at least one who was barely smarter than many (but not all) rocks. I have no doubt they would be in grave danger if we had a venomous snake make a home in our yard. I think having a venomous snake take up residence in a yard with dumb dogs, small children, or adventurous older kids is a big problem that should be taken seriously. That I agree there is a problem doesn’t mean I endorse ineffective solutions grounded in misunderstandings of the situation–when it comes to snakes or politics.

One more post about writing

I frequently hate everything I’ve written. I hate that I rely on the same verbal tricks to cover that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that my vocabulary seems so limited, my metaphors are simultaneously mixed, cliché, and not quite right, a reader trying to follow the overall structure probably feels as though they’ve woken up in an MC Escher drawing, and that the insight that was so smart in my head looks as smart and interesting on the page as an aging hairball.

I hate that it never turns out to be what I was trying to write.

Robinson Jeffers’ “Love the Wild Swan” is something so useful at those moments.

“Love The Wild Swan”

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

[If you like poetry, and don’t know Jeffers, read him. So good.]

Jeffers is referring to Yeats’ poem, “The Wild Swan at Coole,” and also to Jeffers’ own (I would say successful) attempts to write poetry about the natural world of Northern California. If I’m right about that, then the “one bird” is likely a Great Blue Heron, a bird that set me on a journey.

I’m not a literary critic, nor an expert on Jeffers, so I could be completely mistaken, but this poem seems to me about Jeffers’ feeling a failure when he compares what he’s written to a hero (Yeats) and to the thing about which he’s trying to write (the Great Blue Heron). And, while he’s a great poet, I think that’s all reasonable, to be honest. We’re never as good as our heroes (that’s why they’re heroes), and nothing we write is as beautiful, complicated, elegant, or powerful as the thing about which we’re trying to write.

One line I particularly like is “Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast.” I was incredibly troubled when I discovered that Audubon collected samples of birds by killing them, and I think that’s a good metaphor for a troubling way of thinking about writing. It’s more straightforward to write about something if you kill it—that is, if you stop it from moving. A lot of talk about writing relies on metaphors of aggression, as though writers are at war with our own writing. There are metaphors of domination, control, and force. What if, instead, we imagined the thing about which we’re writing as something we can love, and never kill or capture?

Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude” is another poem on which I rely when I hate my writing. For me, it’s an exploration of trying to imagine what it would mean to do good work without falling into thinking about achievement in terms of mastery and domination.

It ends with sitting down in a kitchen and bringing together all sorts of things—pretty, ugly, dangerous, comforting. I’ve also found that a really useful way to think about scholarship—sometimes it’s just bringing things together:

“a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk, the finest findings
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.”

Good writing isn’t creating an argument, but following one

I read John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman a long time ago, but there is one part that still sticks with me. Sarah (the woman) is standing at a window in a storm, intending to jump from it. If you don’t know the book, then you might not know that Fowles frequently stops the action of the novel in order to say something about Victorian culture and politics, or his writing process. At this point, he says that his “plan” was that she would “lay bare” all of her thoughts. But she doesn’t. She walks away from the window. And Fowles explains why the novel doesn’t do what he planned. And then there’s a lovely excursus about writing. He says that authors cannot plan what their characters will do.

“We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.” (81)

He goes on to explain that his characters sometimes refused to do what he wanted them to do, such as the character Charles deciding to stop at a dairy, and he imagines that the reader suggests that Fowles changed his mind while writing because he imagined a more clever plot. Fowles then says,

“I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to come to me clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I want him to be real.” (82)

Yesterday, I had blocked out four hours for writing the conclusion to chapter five of the book I’m currently writing. This is the chapter about critics of US policy in Vietnam, and my plan for the chapter was that it would discuss MLK, Henry Steele Commager (a big deal at the time, and classic liberal), and Hans Morgenthau (a conservative, anti-communist “realist”), all of whom had extremely similar criticisms. My plan was to write about how, despite their different places on the political spectrum, they all shared criticisms that were dismissed at the time and later admitted to be accurate by no less than Robert McNamara, although they were demonized and dismissed at the time for making those arguments.

That’s a good argument; that was a good plan.

But, once I got near the end of it (and this was perhaps 2k words, which I’d taken four hours to write), I started to think that, not only was I making an argument very different from my plan, but that I wasn’t writing a conclusion to a chapter. I was writing the introduction to the book.

I was trained in a program that required that students turn in a thesis statement for their paper before they turned in the paper. Then there was a class day in which all those thesis statements were critiqued (by very sensible standards—and this was the thesis statement, not the topic sentence, and the paper had to be structured such that the thesis statement didn’t appear until the conclusion, if at all) [1] I often had students tell me that they worried that the more they researched or thought about the issue, the more they disagreed with their thesis, and they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.

“Change your thesis,” I said. They were always shocked at my saying that. For various reasons (mostly having to do with trying to prevent cheating), many of their teachers had told them that they were not allowed to change their argument.

It seems to me that it should be a premise of education, and of writing, that, if your argumentation doesn’t support your argument, then change your argument.

I think we have to respect our evidence and analysis as much as Fowles had to respect his characters. I think we should teach students to do the same.

I will say that I think Fowles was being hyperbolic. He did have a plan, and he changed the plan because the characters he’d created made the plan obsolete. If he had tried to write without any plan, it’s hard to imagine that he would have gotten there at all. Writers should plan—the plan is what gets you to the place that you can develop a new plan. Every plan is a ladder you should feel free to pick up and move to a new place. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

. I think his point is that, if your writing is honest, you have be honest about where your writing has gotten you. And you create a new plan.

I’m not sure it’s the introduction, but I have to try to draft a version of the book in which it is.

[1] For non-writing geeks, I should explain: the thesis statement is the proposition that the text argues. In non-student writing, it is rarely in the introduction. It’s usually in the conclusion, but it’s sometimes never stated (e.g., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The more controversial the claim, the more likely the thesis is to be delayed or unstated.

What a lot of people call the “thesis statement” is what is more usefully called the “contract.” Outside of student writing, it’s sometimes the problem statement, the hypothesis, the thesis question, a vaguer version of the thesis statement, a map (“this paper will discuss…”).

Hans Morgenthau: what happened when a conservative criticized US policies in Vietnam

On April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial written by Hans Morgenthau, in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.” The assumptions were false, he argued, and the policies grounded in those assumptions were therefore unreasonable and unlikely to succeed. Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy in regard to Vietnam is interesting not because it was unusual (it wasn’t), but because the response to his criticism exemplifies how people avoid the responsibilities of democratic deliberation through motivism and fallacious arguments from association. That kind of response undermines useful policy deliberation, and ultimately contributes to authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter who it is used by or for.

Morgenthau was anti-communist, self-identified conservative, and one of the founders of what is generally called the “realist” school in international relations (e.g., Kissinger’s realpolitik). Thus, Morgenthau granted that China should be contained, but he argued that military intervention to prop up the Diem regime was not the way to do it. He argued that it was a fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” He insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.”

In many ways, Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy was more or less the same as others elsewhere on the political spectrum (like Henry Steele Commager, MLK, Reinhold Niebuhr). He said that Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” (so this was not like Soviet aggression in Europe). Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like other critics of US policy in Vietnam (e.g., MLK), he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform). We were violating the fundamental characteristic of democracy—abiding by the results of elections—in some mistaken notion that it would protect democracy.

Morgenthau’s anti-communist, conservative, and realist opposition to Vietnam shows how false is our tendency to talk about policy affiliations in terms of identity (left v. right, “conservatives” v. “liberals”). To take a policy affiliation and assume it has a necessary relationship to an identity is anti-deliberative, anti-democratic, and proto-demagogic, and what happened to Morgenthau shows just how damaging that deflecting of argumentation is.

Being opposed to US policy in Vietnam didn’t necessarily mean that one was sympathetic to communism—it could, as it did with Morgenthau, be the consequence of such a commitment to anti-communism that one only wants to support polices that will actually succeed. Ironically, that would eventually be the position that Robert McNamara, the (liberal and Democratic) architect of US policy in Vietnam, would adopt. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara would say that he came to realize that everything people like MLK, Morgenthau, and Neibuhr had been saying was true. He didn’t mention them by name, or acknowledge that he could have listened to them. But he could have.

We now often equate opposing the Vietnam War with “liberals” and supporting the war with “conservatives” and we assume that “liberals” were Democrats and “conservatives” GOP. We do so, not because we’re operating from any coherent mapping of policy affiliation, but because reducing policy affiliation to a false binary or continuum of identity throws policy argumentation to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that’s the point, especially if the policy agenda of a party is contradictory. Under those circumstances, instead of trying to defend policies, the most short-term effective rhetorical strategy is to go on the offensive, and deflect attention from one’s policies to the motives of the critics.

That’s exactly what the liberal and Democratic LBJ and his supporters did in regard to his Vietnam policies, as exemplified in their treatment of Morgenthau. Morgenthau put forward a sensible plan that was, it should be emphasized, grounded in anti-communism:
(1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States.
In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”

Realism, as a political theory, claims to value putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?

That’s an argument worth considering. Morgenthau thought we should. Clearly, McNamara should have. He didn’t. We didn’t. Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted Morgenthau’s argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam.

The Chicago Tribune published a short guest editorial (from National Review) June 12, 1965, and it’s worth quoting in full:

Prof. Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protestor against our policy in Viet Nam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping. (He was, it is reliably reported, distressed to see a photograph of himself standing next to Linus Paulding, and we cannot believe he looks forward to sharing the Madison Square Garden platform with the infantile leftist, Joan Baez.)

Morgenthau is a fine scholar and a first-rate dialectician. His Asiatic policies are heavily conditioned by his adamant Europe-firstism—much as the politics of Dean Acheson were. Then too, in 1960-61, Morgenthau went to Harvard as a visiting professor, expecting appointment to a new chair of government, McGeorge Bundy, then dean, nixed it—and may thereby have lit a fuse that is now exploding in anti-Johnson (and anti-Bundy) rallies around the country.

The Tribune editorial doesn’t misrepresent Morgenthau’s argument—it doesn’t even acknowledge he has one—nor does it characterize him as a dangerous person. Instead, it infantilizes and trivializes him by associating him with Linus Paulding and Joan Baez, embarrassment, infantilism, and leftism. It never argues that he’s infantile, trivial, and so on—the argument is made through association (such as characterizing his criticism of US policy regarding Vietnam as a “hyperactive role”).

There is a gesture of fairness–acknowledging that Morgenthau is a Professor and intelligent, but with a smear and dismissal. Morgenthau was Jewish, and one of many anti-semitic strategies for othering Jews was to refer to them as “Asiatic” (and therefore not really white)—Morgenthau’s ethnic background is irrelevant to whether he’s making a good argument. But, given the anti-semitism of the time, it would discredit him for some audience members. Similarly, whether he was a “Europe First,” or even whether that’s a bad thing to be, is irrelevant to whether his claims are logical, reasonable, and so on. The narrative about what happened at Harvard—whether true or not—also has nothing to do with the quality of Morgenthau’s argument.

But, dismissing an opposition argument on the grounds that the person has bad motives for making it (and it isn’t therefore a real argument) is persuasive to people who believe dissent constitutes out-group membership. We have a tendency to attribute good motives to the in-group and bad motives to the out-group for exactly the same behavior. Thus, the editorial says Morgenthau’s stance on Vietnam is purely the consequence of an academic rivalry. Why not assume the same of McGeorge Bundy’s stance? Why not assume that Bundy, if he did “nix” Morgenthau’s appointment, did so out of personal spite, and personal spite means he is taking the opposite position on the war from Morgenthau?

The slippage between Cold War rhetoric and policies meant that, as in the case of Vietnam, the US was in the paradoxical position of claiming to promote democracy, freedom, and independence while helping major powers (like France) hold on to colonies, supporting anti-democratic (even openly fascist) governments, suppressing elections, and silencing free speech even in the US:

The cold war was an all-encompassing rhetorical reality that developed out of Soviet-American disputes but eventually transcended them to reach to American perceptions of Asia and to American actions against domestic dissidents. This ideological rhetoric became so embedded in American consciousness that it eventually limited the political choice leaders could make, created grossly distorted views of adversaries, and finally led to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. (Hinds and Windt xix)

Given the way the Cold War rhetoric paired terms worked, to criticize an “ally” or any US policy could be framed as endorsing the USSR. This despite the fact that we were often not promoting democracy, that not all forms of communism were imposed by a Soviet-led minority on an unwilling populace, and that silence of dissent was one of the main criticisms of the USSR. Thus, in service of battling an enemy one of whose crimes was silencing dissent, we silenced dissent.