As many folks know, I often say that I have spent a non-trivial amount of time drifting around the internet (and before that, Usenet) arguing with assholes. An editor said that would be a good title for a book, and I’ve often tried to write that book. But I can’t, because that title exemplifies what I keep saying is wrong with how we approach politics–that we make issues about who people are, rather than what or how they’re arguing. So, it isn’t that they’re an asshole (we’re all assholes to various degrees under various conditions), but that they’re arguing like one.
The second problem is that I think maybe writing about arguing like an asshole is better as an intermittent topic in blog posts rather than a book. So, here’s one of those posts. This one talks about two related mistakes that people make in argument: thinking that having data means one’s claims are true (that data is proof), and that confirmation bias means we treat the same data differently by attributing motives to actors in non-falsifiable ways.
I often taught Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, including in first-year composition classes. It’s a really good book for that course because my goal was to get students to understand what it means to do research in service of testing a hypothesis (which is very different from finding evidence to support an argument–their normal experience). The book lays out the various filters in such specificity that their argument can be falsified. I asked that students look at media coverage of various events—ones I picked. I gave students a list of topics to choose from that included political and cultural events, ones that a student could write about without divulging their political commitments. I also picked ones that I knew had been covered in media to which students had access, and which would oblige students to look at media from a relatively short period of time (a few days at most). Finally, I wanted ones that were open to interpretation—an ‘A’ paper could argue that the media coverage confirmed, contradicted, or complicated Chomsky and Herman’s hypothesis. There was no right answer.[1]
Chomsky, as everyone knows, has gone on to make claims about foreign policy, and he has his followers. He can support his claims. He can make a claim, and make other claims (many of which have data) that can be taken as confirming his argument. Just to be clear: Chomsky isn’t an asshole, and he doesn’t always argue like one, but he has his moments. He has been, for some time, arguing that American foreign policy caused/forced Putin to invade Ukraine because the prospect of expanding NATO threatened Putin. This is an argument about motive—Putin was motivated by the behavior of the US.
But, of course, Manufacturing Consent has a chapter arguing that reports of Cambodian genocide were fabricated, and he had data to support that argument. Providing supporting data is not the same as proving that your argument is true. (Even argument textbooks make this mistake.)
People who make the mistake of thinking data is proof get suckered all the time. There was a genocide–probably around 1.7 million people (about 20% of the population), and there were credible reports of it almost immediately. Chomsky dismissed the reports because he decided that the sources were biased–in fact, that’s the whole point of the chapter, that reports should be dismissed as biased.
Noting that people have motives, and that motives cause people to filter information is sensible. That observation is precisely what makes Manufacturing Consent such a useful book to use.
But, ironically enough, Chomsky’s dismissal of the Cambodian genocide shows just how prevalent those filters are. With his dismissal of Cambodian genocide, Chomsky proved himself prey to the error he condemns in others—that we filter information through ideological frames. Chomsky dismissed disconfirming evidence because, like the anti-communists he accurately criticizes, his position was non-falsifiable.
But, his data wasn’t proof.
Ironically enough, his defenders rarely mention Manufacturing Consent. They instead engage After the Cataclysm, which is itself problematic, and even their defenses argue that Chomsky dismissed the witnesses to atrocity (what his defenders call “atrocity stories”) because he believed they had bad motives–in other words, their defense admits that the problem is that Chomsky, too, is susceptible to filtering out information that disconfirms his beliefs, and that he does so through attributing bad motives to people who provide the disconfirming information. His defenders try to find all sorts of reasons that wasn’t a bad thing for him to do, and that argument too comes down to motive (but, in this case, good ones).
Having data to support a claim doesn’t mean the argument is logical, rational, or true, especially if the data is as vexed (and generally non-falsifiable) as assertions of motive. Chomsky’s argument about Cambodia was not logical, rational, or true.
Nor is his argument about Russia and Ukraine.
Chomsky can argue that Putin was motivated by the expansion of NATO, and he can give data to support it, mostly claims about motive. His argument isn’t falsifiable, and neither he nor his supporters are willing to acknowledge their own motives and biases. They seem to think that only other people have biases.
Acknowledging motives, like acknowledging other cognitive biases, doesn’t mean we’re landed in a morass of random attachments to beliefs.
It also doesn’t mean that we ask ourselves whether our perception is filtered by our motives (we never think it is), nor that we try to find some source of information who seems motive-free. That isn’t possible. Motives are the consequence of attachments, goals, aspirations, values. We all have motives. We all have biases. But we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them.
Chomsky says that Putin invaded Ukraine because of something Clinton did. Okay. There are two ways to think about this: Are people who make that argument making a falsifiable (aka “rational”) claim? What evidence would prove them wrong? And I think the answer is: nothing.
Second, so fucking what? If Clinton screwed up (and I loathe the man, so I’m willing to say he screwed up a lot), does that mean that Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Are we supposed to say, “Oh well, this is all our fault, so we’ll stand by and weep”? It’s plausible that the Khmer Rouge benefitted from the US bombing of Cambodia, but that doesn’t make what they did right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, that it’s being conducted through torture, kidnapping, mass killings just makes it worse.
Motivism is a fallacy that depoliticizes political issues. It takes problems out of the realm of “what policy should we follow” into questions about the relative morality of political actors. Whether Putin has good or bad motives, or was motivated by what Clinton did, doesn’t change that Russia is engaged, as was Cambodia, in mass killing. And that’s bad, no matter who does it. Chomsky bungled this kind of issue once; he’s bungling it again.
[1] This confused some students, who’d say, “but this paper that you’re showing us is really good is making the same argument I did, and I didn’t get a good grade.” That led to a really useful conversation.