Author: Trish

Margaret Mead’s definition of civilization

A quote attributed to Margaret Mead is going around, which she may or may not have said. People sharing that quote have had various commenters disagree with Mead about her implicit definition of civilization—as far as I can tell, none of them cultural anthropologists or sociologists. (I’ll come back to that.)

While the quote is very badly sourced, it’s possible that she said something along the lines of the quote, since it’s in line with other things she said. And, if she said it, it was not an invitation to debate the distinction between civilized and non-civilized cultures but her attempt to show that distinction is always grounded in the wrong goals. This is, after all, among the scholars who advocated “cultural relativism.” She was never in favor of anthropology as a justification for imperialism. And it often was, and the civilized v. non-civilized binary was crucial to various projects of imperialism and extermination.

When that binary was popular, and (for complicated reasons) I happen to have read a lot of “scholars” and “experts” who endorsed that binary, none of them put their favored cultures in the “non-civilized” category. That’s one sign that a binary is part of a set of paired terms, in which everything good is associated with the in-group, and everything bad is associated with the out-group. The entry from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences shows why it isn’t a concept much used by scholars (except for understanding rhetorics of exploitation):

“Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.” “Civilization.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 557-559. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

As an aside, I have to note that I keep telling people that what is kind of a throwaway in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric is actually crucial to understanding public discourse, especially as that discourse crawls up the ladder of demagoguery: the concept of paired terms. The civilized/non-civilized distinction is a great example of why the notion of paired terms is so useful. For each good term, there is a bad one, and so it reinforces the notion that there are two kinds of groups: good (in-group) and bad (out-group).

But, back to the Mead quote. The whole notion that there is some kind of line between civilized and uncivilized cultures is self-serving nonsense, and that was a point she often made. At the time that Mead was working, it would have been easy to notice that genocidal projects relied on this binary, even when it made no sense (Nazi rhetoric framed Slavs and Jews as uncivilized; genocides of indigenous peoples depended on pretending that they didn’t have organized cultures). And she noticed. There are problems with her research, and she was no saint, but, for her era, she was surprisingly aware of the political uses of cultural anthropology, and she tried to resist some of the nastiest uses.

The groups thrown into the “uncivilized” category were actually wildly different from each other. In other words, the distinction itself is demagogic—it’s saying that the complicated and nuanced world of cultures is really a binary. That binary, which was really just a strategically incoherent us v. them binary, “justified” violence against out-groups–all out-groups. Because this out-group is like that out-group, and that out-group is dangerous, all out-groups are dangerous in all the ways any individual out-group is. That’s what this binary does. The whole project of defining a culture as civilized or not is about rationalizing the exploitation, oppression, and/or extermination of some group.

There are two other points I want to make. First, if you pay attention to pro-GOP rhetoric, then you might be aware that they try to employ this same set of paired terms against “liberals.” If, like me, you pay attention to pro-GOP talking points, then you can see that they frame “liberals” (just as much a phantasmagoric construction as “Jews”) as (from the entry above): “non-Western; […] fanatical […] violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree.”

You might notice that I’ve removed “rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous” “literalist, and theocratic” “uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy.” Pro-GOP is either silent on those characteristics or actively promotes them as virtues.

And that bring me to the fourth point, and the most complicated.

Many years ago, I was talking with someone who hadn’t taken a history class since high school, but who, on the basis of a paper he wrote in high school, thought he was an expert on Hitler, whose opinion about Hitler was as valid as any actual scholar. Once, in front of a colleague who was a devotee of Limbaugh, I said, “Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could make a Hitler analogy without citing two scholars in support,” and he said, “Oh, so you think common people should be silenced.”

I was speechless. (That doesn’t often happen.) He was projecting his own tendency to think in binaries onto me—knowledge is either lay (true) or expert (head in the sky). That’s a Limbaugh talking point, but it had little to do with what I was saying. I was saying that lay claims about Hitler that were valid could be validated by appealing to experts. I didn’t (and don’t) see a binary of expert v. lay knowledge. After all, a lot of experts endorsed the notion of civilized v. non-civilized cultures. Experts aren’t always right, and they don’t always agree. If no expert supports a claim about Hitler (and there are lots of popular claims about Hitler that no expert supports, such as the notion that he was Marxist or even left-wing) then it’s probably a bad claim.

In addition, what does it mean to have lay knowledge of Hitler? This isn’t an issue for which there is direct experience v. expert (i.e., mediated) knowledge because I doubt there is anyone alive who had direct experience of Hitler. It’s all mediated. It’s all about what people have told us. All we have is what we have been told by teachers, articles we read, papers we wrote in high school. The reason this point matters is that it means that privileging lay knowledge on the grounds that it is more direct (less mediated) is nonsense.

If we acknowledge it’s mediated then we can talk about what mediates it. In other words, cite your sources, and then we can argue about your sources.

If we think about it this way—how good are your sources of information—then we can have a better argument about argument.

We aren’t in a world in which experts are right and non-experts are always wrong or vice versa. We’ve never been in that world because the whole project of responsible scholarship is not about being right, but about making the argument that looks the most right given the evidence we’ve got at this moment.

And here we’re back to people arguing that something that Mead may or may not have said is wrong because, although they aren’t cultural anthropologists, they have beliefs.

They can have those beliefs. And just because Mead has degrees they don’t doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They can engage in argumentation with Mead all they want (and there are a lot of reasons to engage in argumentation with Mead), but flicking Mead away because of something they assert to be true because it’s what they have been told without trying to understand why Mead (might have) said what she did or whether their sources were reliable is exactly what is wrong with our public discourse.

Showing that Mead is wrong in her definition of civilization requires understanding what she (might have) meant in that definition. She almost certainly meant that the civilized/non-civilized binary is nonsense, so saying her position was wrong because the civilized/non-civilized division should have been placed elsewhere doesn’t show she was wrong. It shows she was right.

“Libruls look down on you” and resentment as political rhetoric

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs


Since I’m a policy geek, it’s long interested me that a tremendous number of people don’t care about policy at all. An awful lot of people’s political affiliations seem to me to be motivated by two things: 1) a sense that being affiliated with this party means you are this sort of person (an ethos they like); and 2) the argument that you should be angry because They are keeping you from getting the things to which you’re entitled, so you should vote against them.

Some day, I’ll write about that first motivation. It’s really weird, and it’s really just my crank theory, based on my trying to talk to people, but I think this mobilizing ideology has been used at least as far back as the eighties. It seems to me to work better for the GOP than other parties, but I have no data to support that. It’s more than just identification, and it isn’t always charismatic leadership. Here’s my crank theory. The GOP doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda, but it has a coherent ethos. It presents itself as the party of people (mostly men) who have no doubts about their position, can see clearly what the right course of action is, will refuse to compromise, and know (and will act on the knowledge) that, in every situation, it is a binary of right or wrong.

And, paradoxically, right or wrong isn’t whether what you’re doing in this moment is right or wrong, but whether you’re endorsing the group that believes right or wrong is binary. If what you’re doing is helping the group that says right or wrong is binary, then your actions are right even if they’re exactly what you condemn the out-group for doing. This is Machiavellianism, in which the ends justify the means, and the ends are just in-group successes. I’ve written about the Machiavellianism part (which is far from particular to pro-GOP rhetors), but not about the extent to which people who support the GOP do so because they see it as the party of the strong and decisive man. But, that isn’t this post.

This post is about the second puzzle for me—that pro-GOP rhetoric (Fox and Limbaugh. are good examples of this) is a rhetoric of grievance, of being wounded, including being victimized by people saying that they are racist (while projecting that living in perpetual grievance onto others, so they can still seem to be strong men, what Paul Johnson calls “masculine victimhood”).

People advocating racist policies resent being called racist. It isn’t just that they dislike it, or that they disagree, but they resent it.

They are filled with and fueled by resentment. They sincerely believe that there is an “elite” of professors and out-of-touch artists who are keeping them down. They resent the power that this “liberal elite” uses against them. Were it not for this “liberal elite” they would… and here things get vague. Deliberately so. Limbaugh et al. never say what, exactly, would happen were this “liberal elite” to lose power because that would involve creating a coherent narrative of the “ill” created by the “liberal elite.” Limbaugh et al. can’t do that, because there isn’t one. And that’s how resentment works; it isn’t an affirming passion that enables progress; it’s entirely negative, about taking power and good things away from an out-group.

I spent a lot of time deep in the arguments that people made for slavery, and it was bizarre to me the extent to which people whose financial situation was grounded in the buying and selling of other humans felt victimized. They were victimized by having to abuse other humans in order to maintain their financial and political situation and by having to hear people point out that they were engaged in abuse. They resented the criticism. Pro-slavery rhetoric was a rhetoric grounded in slavers’ resentment that they were being criticized for being slavers.

But when I looked at scholarship and theorizing of resentment, I kept ending back on Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, and it was deeply unsatisfying because his narrative seems to me unhelpfully elitist. And yet it’s common—the notion that resentment is the feeling that inferior people feel about people they secretly believe are better. I don’t think that’s a useful way to think about resentment for several reasons. One of them is that this way of identifying resentment means we’re deep in the world of motives and secret feelings (as well as seeming to accept that some people are better than others), and I think those criteria get us into areas that make self-diagnosis impossible. I’m not saying it’s wrong—I do think the way that resentful rhetoric works is a kind of mean girl strategy. I tell you the mean thing that Heather said about you (which she may or may not have said or even thought) in order to get you to ally with me against her. I tell you that Heather looks down on you, which triggers your defensively looking down on her for looking down on you. That’s the basic plot of a large amount of Limbaugh et al.’s broadcasts. That’s the whole strategy of “libruls look down on you”—it’s oriented toward triggering a kind of polarizing resentment that strengthens in-group commitment.

But an awful lot of political activism begins by pointing out that some group looks down on us, and they think we’re going to continue to put up with their shabby treatment, but we aren’t. So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if there is a difference in the rhetoric between the “libruls look down on you” and “this group in power is just throwing us crumbs to keep us shut up.” And I think it’s ultimately the point mentioned above—what are we supposed to do with our resentment?

The Limbaugh et al. resentment is purely reactionary and negative—taking power away from “libruls” is winning. As long as they are hurt, we win—the gain is their loss, and that’s the only gain there needs to be. Thus, you can have what is often called “Vladimir’s Choice.” “Vladimir’s Choice” is a term from a Russian tale. God comes to Vladimir and says, “I will give you anything you want, but whatever I give to you, I will give twice that to Ivan.” Vladimir thinks about it for a while, and then says, “Take one of my eyes.” Vladimir so resents Ivan that he is happy to be hurt, as long as Ivan is hurt more.[1]

If we feel that They are denying us something to which we’re entitled, we’ll settle for it being taken away from them. If we think we’re denied the vote, or good healthcare, or a decent wage, then we’ll feel that it’s a win if we deny Them the vote, good healthcare, a decent wage. That’s resentment.

But the other kind of entitlement is (or at least can be) affirming—it’s about gaining certain rights and powers. If we’re being denied the vote, then we don’t want them denied the vote; we want the rights and powers they have. They can keep their healthcare and decent wages, as long as we get those things too.

And here we come back to the point I keep making—how vague the pro-GOP rhetoric is about policies. There are a lot of statements of rigid commitment to slogans (“safe borders,” “pro-life,” “tough on crime”) but there aren’t clear statements of what policies will get us there, let alone policy argumentation to show that those policies will feasibly solve the clear problems. Affirmative entitlement arguments can (and do) make those policy arguments—“defund the police” (a slogan) was backed by detailed policy discussions and arguments. “Build the wall” wasn’t. I’m not saying that I agree with “defund the police”—in fact, there were a lot of very different policies that people meant by that same slogan. My point is that I think there is a useful distinction between affirmative entitlement arguments and resentment, and that resentment is purely reactionary and negative.

I want to end this post by pointing to two different yard signs. The one on the left lists six beliefs, with only one framed as a negative (“no human is illegal”). On the whole, it affirms positive statements. The one on the right has eight claims. It’s mildly incoherent: who doesn’t believe in legal immigration? And if violence is not the answer, isn’t that saying that the police shouldn’t be violent? Isn’t “police” a category of people? More important, notice how negative it is—five of the eight claims are explicitly negative, about what should not happen and how people should not think. It’s about how wrong They are.

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs






[1] Some studies show that Vladimir’s Choice increases with the perception of intergroup competition and what’s called “social dominance orientation” (essentially, the notion that groups should remain in a stable hierarchy, with “better” groups dominating the “lower” groups), an orientation that correlates to self-identifying as conservative.


“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric: on demonizing rational argumentation

In an earlier post, I said that the GOP is, like any other useful political movement, a coalition. Thus, like any other coalition, it has groups with profoundly different policy agenda. The normal way to solve that problem is through bargaining, compromise, and deliberation. But the GOP can’t openly engage in those practices because two of the major members of its coalition believe that compromise is not acceptable (the fundagelicals and neo-Social Darwinists). The GOP has to persuade people whose political agenda is toxic populism, libertarianism only when it helps the wealthy, Dominionism, racism, ethical theatre about abortion, social and cultural reactionary knee-jerking, fundagelical and often end-times politics, and the carceral industry.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keeping their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points. This coalition is very fragile, and falls apart if the people in it understand the positions of others in it. The last thing the current GOP can stand is policy argumentation.

Not all conservatives, and I sincerely mean that—this isn’t a list of all the sorts of people who vote Republican, but of the ones who create the rhetorical problem solved by “liberals look down on you.” I think our political discourse benefits by having people who are skeptical of social change and ambivalent about globalization, want small government, advocate being really cautious about military intervention (the traditional conservative position, abandoned by the GOP since Vietnam). I’m not saying they’re right, but I think the ideal public sphere has a lot of positions I think are wrong, as long as we’re all abiding by the rules of argumentation. The GOP can’t allow policy argumentation. And the “liberals look down on you” enables them to avoid it completely.

Here’s what I said in the previous post. Loosely, “liberals look down on you” enables GOP loyalists to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages them to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages GOP loyalists to feel victimized if they’re proven wrong (so the issue shifts from whether they were wrong to whether they were victimized), sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

As I keep saying, the whole “left v. right” false binary enables demagoguery. It enables this demagogic (it isn’t a question of policy but us v. them) move on the part of pro-GOP media because it’s always possible to find a non-GOP (and therefore, by the bizarre logic of the left-right false dilemma “liberal”) person who, for instance, treats disagreement as victimization. So, pro-GOP pundits can say, “Who are they to look down on us when they do it too?”

Were we to have an understanding of politics (and research on political affiliation) that wasn’t begging the question (research grounded in the assumption that “liberals” and “conservatives” reason differently) we could have better discussions about politics. Of course, were I to have a unicorn in my backyard that pooped gold, I could support various causes a lot more than I do. If wishes were horses and all that.

The “liberals look down on you” topos appeals to the epistemological populism (often falsely called “anti-intellectualism”) of the US. And here we get to two problems that puzzled me for years. It’s conventional to say that demagoguery is anti-intellectual, and that it’s grounded in resentment (what Nietzsche called ressentiment) and both of those claims seemed to me true, false, and damaging. Let’s start with the first—anti-intellectualism.

It’s true that demagoguery tends to have a rejection of “eggheads,” but it almost always cites expert sources. It isn’t opposed to expertise, but to a bad kind of expertise:

“Good” expertise confirms what common people know, what you can see by just looking. It shows why what sensible people already believe is right (even if it does so through very complicated explanations—here’s where conspiracy thinking comes in). “Bad” expertise says that what “common people” (and here “common people” is conflated with “in-group”) believe is wrong, that things aren’t exactly as they appear “if you just look.”

So, here we’re back at the point I make a lot. Demagoguery can thrive if we live in a world of argument (in which you have a good point if you can find evidence to support your claim), but it dies in a world of argumentation.

We don’t have a political crisis, but an epistemological one. Pro-GOP media can cite a lot of experts to support their positions, and dismiss as eggheads all the experts who don’t because pro-GOP media appeals to naïve realism and in-group favoritism (the truth is obvious to good people and good people are the ones who recognize this truth). That way of thinking about policy issues (there is a right answer, and it’s obvious to every sensible person, and anyone who presents data it isn’t right is not someone to whom we need to listen because their disagreement is proof that they’re bad) is far from restricted to the GOP, let alone to major political issues. (Do not get me started on my neighborhood mailing list fights about graffiti, putting dog poop bags in someone’s trash can on garbage collection day, bike lanes, or the noise wall).

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with racists, and they always argue from personal experience.[1] Affirmative action is bad because they didn’t get this job, anti-racist actions in the work place are bad because they got reprimanded for being a racist, there is no racism in policing because (as a white person) they’ve never had trouble with the police. They believe that those datapoints are proof of their position, but a POC getting denied a job, a person failing to get anything useful done about racism in their workplace, a POC having trouble with the police—the same kind of evidence—none of that matters. That’s argument, but not argumentation.

Argumentation would be assessing personal experience as just another kind of data, subject to the same tests as other kinds of data—is it relevant, representative (or an outlier), reliable, and so on. As I said, the GOP can (and does) give its base arguments, but those arguments collapse like a cheap tent in a hurricane if they run into actual argumentation. So, why not give its base talking points that can withstand argumentation? It can’t, for several reasons.

It can’t have rational argumentation about abortion, for instance, because its policies aren’t supported by data. There are other issues on which the data is just plain bad (climate change) and can’t stand up to the weakest questioning. There are also issues for which the accurate and relevant data would make one member of the coalition of the happy, and another very unhappy. One group might be thrilled to find that Trump’s foreign policy has increased the chances of nuclear war in the Middle East, while that would sow doubt in the minds of other members of the coalition.

The GOP can’t actually give its base rational talking points that will serve its base well if they get into it with someone skilled in argumentation. All it’s got is ad hominem, whaddaboutism, and a kind of driveby shooting of data because that’s all it can have. So, what the GOP has to do is make a virtue of its greatest vice—make the ability to defend or attack policy claims through argumentation (what its critics can do and they can’t) a bad thing. Instead of acknowledging that being able to defend your positions through rational argumentation might be a good thing, they characterize it as what libs do. “Liberals look down on you” (for being unable to defend your position through argumentation) makes the inability to engage in rational argumentation a sign of in-group loyalty and a performance of in-group identity.

Just to be clear, I think that lots of “conservative” positions can be supported through rational argumentation. (That an argument can be supported through rational argumentation doesn’t mean it’s true—it just meets a certain standard.) The GOP can’t support its policy agenda through rational argumentation because it has wed itself to an identity of people who refuse to compromise, bargain, or deliberate and it’s a coalition. A coalition has to unify disparate groups with disparate needs and goals. It can do so through openly admitting that there are compromises that need to get made for strategic purposes that will, on the whole, benefit the coalition. There’s another strategy.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, when talking about Hitler’s strategy in unifying the very disparate group that was the recently-created identity of “German,” said that unification through a common enemy is the easiest strategy with a disparate group. In the case of the GOP, the common enemy is rational argumentation.







[1] They also argue from data that doesn’t actually prove their point. For instance, in order to prove that policing isn’t racist they show data that African Americans are arrested more than white people. Logic isn’t their long suit. That’s why they need to make being bad at logic a good thing.

“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric

headline "liberals look down on people"
Headline and image from here: https://stream.org/liberals-look-people-conservatives-look/

If you drift into the pro-GOP public sphere (meaning both the formal media and pundits, but also the people who are repeating the talking points in social media, at Thanksgiving dinner, or yard signs), then you’ve seen the talking point that “liberals look down on you.” It’s evil genius rhetoric.

It does a bunch of things at once, all of which benefit the GOP by distracting potential supporters away from its inability to defend its policy agenda through rational argumentation, while providing a feeling of certainty and self-righteousness. The GOP has five major problems in terms of talking openly about its policies.

First, it has the classic problem that toxic populism always has—wanting to get the support of working classes and the extremely wealthy, but those groups have opposing policy agenda. Any rational defense of particular policies would mean discussing in detail what the costs and benefits of the policy would be, and that would alienate some group. Since the GOP has opted for policies that give the rich material benefits at the expense of the non-elite, they have to keep any public discussion off the material consequences for the non-elite of their policies.

Second, a lot of people in the GOP don’t really want a democracy in which all citizens have equal access to voting and all votes count equally—they want a hierarchy of power, in which their supporters have more power (and more voting power) than any group that doesn’t fully support them. They don’t see any benefit in disagreement, so they want to end it thoroughly. Arguing against democracy in a democracy is tricky, and generally achieved by arguing that some other group has already so corrupted democracy that we need to abandon democracy temporarily to purify it of Them. Then we can get to a democracy of the believers (what Giorgio Agamben so elegantly described as “not-law”—we have to abandon the law to save it).

Third, they want to be seen as the party of principle, as God’s Party (they have to do this to keep the fundagelical vote), but they don’t have consistent principles. Neither do fundagelicals, except the “principle” that they are magically able to read Scripture unmediated, and therefore able to be absolutely certain about what God wants. In other words, the GOP has to hold on to the support of people who mistake rigidity for principle. This unholy alliance with people who value rigidity (and who hide their own compromises and changes by rewriting history) means that the GOP can’t engage in the compromises, negotiations, and deliberations that all healthy groups use to resolve disagreements.[1]

Fourth, GOP rhetoric flips and flops—immigration is good (Reagan) and bad (Trump); Russia is bad (every GOP figure till Trump) and good (Trump); chain immigration is bad (Trump) and good (Trump’s use of chain immigration for his family); the government is too powerful (GOP till 9/11) and should be given all the power (GOP after 9/11). There’s nothing wrong with a party changing position—that’s what they should do. I had a coworker who was a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. I watched that coworker love, hate, love, and hate John McCain, dependent on nothing more than whether Rush Limbaugh said McCain was really a Republican—that is, whether McCain was supporting whatever was the party line for the GOP at that moment. But neither Limbaugh nor the coworker said it that way, as though McCain had changed. Every time the (new) stance was presented as a recognition of McCain’s essence.

Parties change positions all the time—that’s fine, and potentially even good. The problem is that strategic changes of position are in direct conflict with the third desideratum.

Fifth, the GOP has become the party the Founders had nightmares about. The second, third, and fourth problems mean that they really don’t want a democracy. Those problems can only be solved with a one-party state. Democracy is premised on a content-neutral standard for behavior—that whether you’re Whig, Anti-Masonic, Jacksonian Democrat, Federalist, or whatever, you are held to the same standards as every other party. Supporters of the GOP (largely because of the rhetoric created in order to solve the second through fourth problems) don’t believe that the GOP should be held to the same standards as other parties. After all, if you’re the party of God, and they are the party of the Satan, then nothing you can do is wrong, and nothing they can do is right.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keep their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points.

“Liberals look down on you” solves all those problems, mainly because it keeps people from noticing them, and it guarantees that people will look away if those problems are drawn to their attention. Loosely, it enables people to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages supporters to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages people to feel victimized instead of wrong, sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

It isn’t just the pro-GOP media machine that uses this kind of strategy (which can also have the form of something like, “They’ll say you’re crazy”)— cults, and cult-y churches, MLM, the skeezier kinds of self-help businesses (not all self-help books or businesses are skeezy) use it; it seems that some tech startups seem to use a version of it (Bad Blood describes it being common at Theranos), and I’ve run across in some fringe political groups. It’s just particularly damaging when it’s embraced by the mainstream media (and the pro-GOP media is the mainstream media). As I’ll argue in the last post in what will be a series (I hope just three, but maybe four posts long) non-GOP media engages in various taxonomies and frames that virtually guarantee the “liberals look down on you” rhetorical strategy works.







[1] The notion that people get their way by “sticking to their principles and refusing to compromise” is all over the political spectrum. Refusing to compromise only works for people who have more power—while throwing tantrums and refusing to settle works in an awful lot of families (and not necessarily on the part of the toddlers), it’s rare that it works in political situations except for people who have a tremendous amount of power. We love stories of individuals who refused to compromise, and thereby toppled oppressive regimes, but I don’t know that there is ever a time that happened. (I have more than once had confusing interactions with people in which I had to explain that FDR compromised—confusing because he was famous for compromising, perhaps too much when it came to issues of race.)




Arguing with Trump supporters: associative thinking

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington
MLK Jr. at the March on Washington

Many years ago an acquaintance told me that she was voting for Reagan because his secret security agents loved him. I told her that Hitler’s security guard loved him. She was offended that I had said that Reagan was Hitler.

I was trying to make a point about her major premise. That is, I was looking at her argument from the perspective of argumentation. I was trying to say that her major premise (if your personal guard likes you, then you are a good person) was not one she believed. She understood me to be making an associational argument (which is how she thinks).

For both of us, the question was, how do I know I’m right? For both of us, the question was, can I find evidence to support my belief? For me, the question was, do I agree with my own major premises? For her, the question was, is this thing I believe to be good associated with other things I believe to be good?

Far more people approach issues the way she does than reason the way I do. And, in fact, her way of thinking makes sense under some circumstances. I like this store, and they have this product, and it’s a lot like another product of theirs I like, so I’ll probably like that product too. This person recommended this movie, and I’ve liked other recommendations they’ve made, so I’ll probably like this movie too.

Liking this kind of store, or this kind of movie, or this kind of restaurant, and therefore wanting to find stores, movies, or restaurants like that is a good enough way to make some initial guesses. What I mean by “good enough” is akin to what Winnicott said about “good enough” parenting. If we set our standard as perfectly rational reasoning at all times, we’ll never make any decisions. Relying on associations is a good enough way to start. It becomes problematic, and actively damaging, when

1) our chains of association are unreasonable. For instance, I might decide that, since you and I both like a restaurant (“Chester’ Burgers”), then I’ll like a different restaurant you recommend (“Hubert’s Vegan Noodle House”). That’s a bit weak—it would probably be a stronger way to think about the situation if it’s unusual to like that first restaurant, or you like all the same restaurants I do, but it’s good enough to give the second restaurant a try. If you and I both like a movie, or we vote the same way, or I think you’re a “good” person, then the relevance of your restaurant recommendation is much more tenuous.[1] A lot of people assess the world in that tenuous way (I’ll come back to this)—they decide that people are good or bad, and that a good person is good in every way, and every good thing is associated with good people. Therefore, a person who is a good actor must also be a good President.

2) the preliminary conclusion we come to is then protected at all costs (we aren’t open to changing our minds). The second flawed application of this way of reasoning is if I try the restaurant, and have a bad experience, but refuse to admit it was a bad experience (or decide that you didn’t really like the first restaurant).

3) we rely more on the negative associations than the positive–for instance, if I refuse to go to a restaurant you like because there is a restaurant you like and I don’t. This one also has lots of exceptions, depending on how much alike the two restaurants are. It makes less sense if I won’t go to a restaurant because you like a movie I don’t like, or vote differently, or I think you’re a “bad” person (with the reverse of some of the exceptions noted about the first method).

4) we use this method for all situations (this is particularly damaging if it’s connected with the first). The fourth is self-explanatory—there are times that this kind of associative thinking isn’t very useful. A person might be a very nice person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re giving you good medical advice.

Obviously, a tremendous number of decisions are based on these sorts of associations. The best way to think about this sort of decision-making is that associations are most useful when they are treated as analogies. The more that the next case is like the previous, the more relevant your judgment is. Thinking about these associations as analogies means that we think about them in terms of degree—how much is this restaurant like the other one? The more that I understand your reasons for liking the first restaurant, the better able I am to determine how much your judgment applies to other restaurants, let alone movies or Presidents.

A lot of people who think associatively don’t approach the associations as analogies, but as equations. This method of thinking is what Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecths-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms.” Very few scholars of rhetoric pay attention to them because thinking via paired terms doesn’t fit our normal schemes of argumentation, but they’re important to understand because, if someone is “reasoning” this way, then normal schemes of argumentation won’t work. It took me years to figure that out.

And Hitler analogies are a great way to explain the problem I kept running into when trying to argue with someone who thinks via paired terms.

Normal schemes of argumentation are (more or less) relations of causality. So, the claim that “Reagan is a good President because his secret service agents really like him,” to me, was a claim that there is something that causes secret service agents to like someone that also causes that person to be a good leader. Hitler’s security liked him, and he was not a good leader, so the Hitler example shows there is a not a causal relationship.

Once I realized that people weren’t thinking in causal terms, I thought they were reasoning by signs. In other words, I thought they believed that having a security team that likes you is a sign that you are good. And so I thought we were talking about whether something was a perfect or imperfect sign. I tried to show that it was an unreliable sign, but that didn’t work. And it didn’t work because the person couldn’t get past that I had said Reagan was Hitler. And, of course, I’d said no such thing. People like that really seemed to have trouble understanding the concept of analogy, especially the concept mentioned above—that analogies are valid to varying degrees, depending on the degree of likeness. If you are saying this person is like that person, you aren’t saying they’re the same.

For people who think in paired terms, chains of association are links that equate the two linked identities, concepts, people.[2] They divide the world into good and bad, with all the good things chained to each other and in opposition to the bad (which are also chained to each other). Bad people must be bad in every way, and associated with every other bad thing, and good people must be good in every way, and associated with every other good thing.

Thus, as with another way of reasoning (discussed elsewhere), it’s possible simply to attribute a quality through opposition. What I mean by that is that if I believe that everything can be divided this way, and I’m Christian, and you disagree with me (about anything), then I conclude you must not be Christian. It’s this way of thinking that causes some Trump supporters to accuse everyone who disagrees with them of being a socialist.

There are two ways to try to persuade someone who is thinking in terms of paired terms. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca describe one method—dissociation. You can see MLK engage in dissociation in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he tries to take the paired terms of the “Eight Alabama Clergymen” and dissociate them. Loosely, their argument associates their policy (cease protests and try to work slowly with the new Mayor and City Council) with: patience, peace, lawfulness, faithfulness, “insiderness.” Each of those terms is contrasted to the ones they try to associate with King (an outsider, they insist): impatience, violence/conflict, lawbreaking, communism (this one implicitly). King slowly and patiently (thereby performatively refuting one of their claims) argues that his organization’s position shows real patience, peacefulness, and so on, while their position settles for apparent (superficial) instances of those values.

This method generally leaves in place the binaries, and tries to persuade the person they’ve miscategorized things. It didn’t persuade the Eight Alabama Clergymen, but it did persuade others.

I think the reason it didn’t persuade them is that the most important (albeit unstated) term associated in those paired terms is: me. Reagan is good, and I am good for liking Reagan (and for recognizing his goodness). For people who live in the world of paired terms, if you aren’t good, you’re bad. So, by saying Reagan wasn’t in the good category, I was saying she didn’t have good judgment, and she isn’t good.

Paired terms provides a kind of clarity and certainty that is breath-taking. So, the second way of trying to argue with someone who believes that Biden must be a socialist because he isn’t a Republican (an instance of thinking via paired terms) is to try to persuade them that that way of thinking is flawed. As you can guess, that isn’t easy.

You’re trying to take away their clarity and certainty. And you’re telling them that they’re not only mistaken in this instance, but in their whole view of the world. You aren’t just saying that Reagan might not be good; you’re saying they might not be good.

In my experience (I’ve never seen any studies on this issue), people who think this way are often suckers who’ve spent (lost) a lot of money on dodgy cures, bad investments, and get-rich schemes, over and over. I think it’s because they can’t learn from their mistakes, since they can’t admit that this way of making decisions isn’t working for them. They’re often Followers, who idolize (and believe they have perfect insight into) various celebrities. This is also the sort of person with whom I have made the least headway in terms of persuasion. Consistently.

The only thing I’ve sometimes managed to do is point out that connections between two terms are invalid, such as showing that people who claim to be Christian are violating basic dicta of Christianity. But that usually causes them to block me, or to say, “Democrats are the ones who kill kids.” And we’re back to the pretense that Republicans care about abortion.




[1] I can imagine situations in which these connections wouldn’t be so tenuous—perhaps we like the movie because we both really like the star, and you mention that star often goes to the restaurant, or the owners of the restaurant contribute a certain amount of profits to the political party we like, or I think you’re good because you only eat at restaurants with ethically-sourced food. But they’re pretty unusual, if not actually rare.

[2] Another way to think about this is in terms of Venn diagrams. I would map the diagrams as “people who are good leaders” intersecting with “people whose security detail likes them,” but for some people there are only two circles, and they don’t intersect at all. There is the circle of good things/people/concepts, and the circle of bad ones. Having your security detail like you puts you in the good circle. If it puts you in the bad circle, as she understood me to have suggested, then I must be putting Reagan into the same category as Hitler, meaning I’m saying that Reagan killed six million Jews, and he didn’t.

Everyone claims that they’re forced into war

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas

[I’m back to working on a book I started almost ten years ago, that came out of the “Deliberating War” class. I’m hoping for a book that is about 40k words, so twice the length of my two books with The Experiment, but half the length of any of my scholarly books. It starts with “The Debate at Sparta,” goes to this (hence the comment about a previous chapter), moves to wankers in Congress in the 1830s, and then I think the appeasement rhetoric, Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, Falklands, and then metaphorical wars (like the “War on Christmas”). I wanted to post this section for reasons that are probably obvious.]

When I had students read Adolf Hitler’s speech announcing the invasion of Poland, they often expressed surprise—not that he had invaded Poland, but that he bothered to try to rationalize it as self-defense, that he presented Germany as a perpetual victim of aggression. They were surprised because they expected that Hitler wouldn’t try to claim that Germany was a victim, let alone that he was forced into war by others—they thought he would openly warmonger. He had been quite open in Mein Kampf about his plans for German world domination, and he wasn’t the first leader of Germany to plan to achieve European hegemony through war—why claim victim status now?

And I explained that, regardless of their motives or plans or desires, people generally don’t like to see ourselves as exploiting others, or engaged in unjust behavior. And even Hitler needed to maintain the goodwill of a large number of his people—while actual motives might have been a mixture of a desire for vengeance, doing-down the French, relitigating the Great War, making Germany great again, racism and ethnocentrism, German exceptionalism, Germans (just like everyone else) wanted to believe that right and justice were on their side. It’s rare, in my experience, that people explaining why they should go to war (or, as in the case of Hitler and Poland, why he has gone to war) will claim anything other than that they were forced into war, they tried to negotiate their concerns reasonably, and that their actions are sheer self-defense. One of the functions of rhetoric is legitimating a policy decision; in the case of arguing for immediate maximum military action, that position considered most legitimate is self-defense. So, almost everyone claims self-defense. Even the “closing window of opportunity” line of argument for war is (including when used by both sides, as in the Sparta-Athens conflict) an assertion of a sort of “pre-emptive self-defense”—we are not in immediate danger of extermination, but the enemy will exterminate us some day, and this is our best opportunity to prevent that outcome, so it is self-defense to exterminate them.

There is an interesting exception. According to Arrian of Nicomedia (a Greek historian probably writing in the second century AD), in 326 BCE Alexander the Great faced resistance from his army. He was on the Beas River, considering conquering the Indian region just past Hyphasis, but his army was less than enthusiastic. Arrian says, “the sight of their King undertaking an endless succession of dangerous and exhausting enterprises was beginning to depress them,” and they were grumbling. Scholars argue about whether the incident should be properly called a mutiny, but of more interest rhetorically is that the speech that Arrian reports is one of few instances of a genuinely “pro-war” speech, in which the rhetor doesn’t base the case on self-defense.

Alexander begins his speech by observing that his troops seem less enthusiastic than they had been for his previous adventures, and goes on to remind them of how successful those ventures have been.

“[T]hrough your courage and endurance you have gained possession of Ionia, the Hellespont, both Phrygias, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Lydia, Caria, Lycia, Pamphylia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; the Greek part of Libya is now yours, together with much of Arabia, lowland Syria, Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Susia; Persia and Media with all the territories either formerly controlled by them or not are in your hands; you have made yourselves masters of the lands beyond the Caspian Gates, beyond the Caucasus, beyond the Tanais, of Bactria, Hyrcania, and the Hyrcanian sea; we have driven the Scythians back into the desert; and Indus and Hydaspes, Acesines and Hydraotes flow now through country which is ours.”

It is an impressive set of accomplishments, but Alexander goes on to make an odd (and highly fallacious) sort of slippery slope argument—since we’ve accomplished so much, he says, why stop now? Is Alexander really proposing to keep conquering until they start losing? If people have gained territory in war, the cognitive bias of loss aversion (we hate to let go of anything once we’ve had it in our grasp—the toddler rule of ownership) means we will go to irrational lengths to keep from losing it, or to get it back. Since that bias will kick in as soon as he stops winning, he is in effect, arguing for endless war. It’s one thing to say that we have to fight till we exterminate a specific threatening enemy, but another to argue for world conquest, for an endless supply of enemies.Yet, that does seem to be his argument: “to this empire there will be no boundaries but what God Himself has made for the whole world.”

He says that the rest of Asia will be “a small addition to the great sum of your conquests,” easily achieved because “these natives either surrender without a blow or are caught on the run—or leave their country undefended for your taking and when we take it.” But, if they stop now, “the many warlike peoples” may stir the conquered areas to revolt. In other words, he has the problem of the occupation (it’s always the occupation). That argument is the closest that he gets to a self-defense argument, and he isn’t claiming that Macedonia faces extinction unless they try to conquer India; he’s saying that they might lose what they’ve gained. And it’s a vexed argument. Are the people in Asia to be feared or not—they seem both easy to conquer, but threats to the Macedonians? Second, and more important, he has established an “ill” (there might be revolt) that isn’t solved by his plan (conquering all of Asia). No matter how much he conquers, unless he conquers the entire world, there will always be a border that has to be defended. And conquering more territory doesn’t make it easier to occupy existing conquered areas.

I mentioned in the previous chapter that the complicated range of options available to one country in regard to provocative action on the part of another tend to get reduced into the false binary of pro- or anti-war. Rhetors engaged in demagoguery do the same thing.

There were rhetors opposed to the Bush plan for invading Iraq who were not opposed to war in general, or even invading Iraq in principle, but they wanted to wait till the action in Afghanistan was completed, or they wanted UN approval, or they wanted to begin with more troops. Yet, they were often portrayed as “anti-war.” Similarly, Alexander’s troops can hardly be called “anti-war”—they’ve spent the last eight years fighting Alexander’s wars. They don’t want this war, at this time.

This tendency to throw people opposed to this war plan into the anti-war bin is ultimately a pro-war move because it makes the issue seem to be war, rather than the specific plan a rhetor is proposing. It isn’t really possible to deliberate about war in the abstract; we can only deliberate about specific wars, and specific plans for those wars. And, since being opposed to war in the abstract is an extreme position, the tendency to describe the problem as pro- v. anti-war puts the harder argument on anyone objecting to this war—they look like they’re pacifists or cowards or they don’t recognize the risks the enemy presents. They can easily be framed as though they are arguing for doing nothing (which is how they’re almost always framed). I’m not saying that the general public should deliberate all the possible options and military strategies—in this chapter I’ll talk about some ways such open deliberation can contribute to unnecessary wars—but that we should remember that it’s rarely (never?) a question of war or not. We have options.

If another country has done something provocative, we can respond with: immediate maximum military response (going to war immediately); careful mobilization of troops, resources, and allies that might delay hostilities (but we fully intend them to happen); limited military response; a show of force intended to improve our negotiating position when we are genuinely willing to go to war; a show of force that we have no intention of escalating into war (a bluff); economic pressures; shaming; nothing. Even the last option isn’t necessarily an anti-war position—it might simply mean that this provocation doesn’t merit war.

But notice that Alexander doesn’t have all those options because the countries he wishes to conquer have done nothing provocative, other than to exist. If there is a legitimate casus belli—that is, if a country has strategic or political goals other than sheer conquest—then negotiation is possible, and the threat of war can add rhetorical weight to one side or another in that negotiation. If conquest is the goal, however, then the “negotiations” are simply determining the conditions of surrender (or, as in the case of the “Melian Dialogue,” allowing the choice between slavery and extermination).

In the case of Hitler, he tried to look like someone who had negotiable strategic and political goals, and he succeeded for quite some time. His rhetoric about the invasion of Poland was part of that rhetorical strategy, of looking as though he didn’t have sheer conquest as his goal, and was simply using negotiating as a way of keeping his window of opportunity open as long as possible. Alexander makes no such move, perhaps because the rhetorical situation meant he wasn’t constrained by the need to establish some kind of legitimacy for his hostilities. His troops didn’t need to be told that this was anything other than a war of conquest. They’d known that for eight years.

Arguing with people who want the US to be a theocracy of their beliefs

Ollie's bbq
Ollie’s bbq, the subject of the SCOTUS case, Katzenbach v. McClung (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1964/543) [image from here: http://joshblackman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/scan0001.bmp]


Someone asked me about arguing with someone who says we should have the death penalty for homosexuality because Leviticus 20, and it turned into my writing a blog post I’ve been thinking about for a while.

How do you argue with someone who says they’re Christian, and who cites Leviticus 20:13 as proof that “conversion therapy” (using the cover of psychology to abuse people) is good, and allowing non-het people full civil rights is bad?

Trying to argue with people who use Leviticus (and other “clobber verses”) to support homophobia is hard because they don’t understand their own argument. They’re just saying something that makes them feel better about the commitments they have for reasons not up for argument. Persuading them to understand the problems with the various claims they’re putting forward isn’t about refuting those claims, but about getting them to notice those claims don’t add up to a coherent position.

Too often, we think that persuasion involves changing what people believe, but, in my experience arguing with extremists all over the internet (and all over the political spectrum), persuasion requires getting people to reconsider how they believe.

Let’s imagine that you have a friend, call him Rando, who has cited Leviticus 20:13 as to why we should not allow gay marriage, “conversion therapy” is good, and overturning Obergefell v. Hodges is only slightly less important than overturning Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board. Oh, sorry, that last one isn’t supposed to be said out loud (although it too was a Supreme Court decision that prohibited white Christian evangelicals from dragging their religious beliefs into the civic realm).

I have to start by pointing out that Leviticus 20:13 says nothing about whether conversion therapy is effective, nor whether we should allow gay marriage. But it does say that the death penalty is involved. Pretty clearly.

Rando has a serious problem with his citing that text as authoritative unless he wants the death penalty for homosexual acts. If he sincerely believes that Leviticus 20:13 condemns consensual gay sex (it probably doesn’t), and we must follow it, then, then he’s insisting on the death penalty for gay sex. If he is citing that Scripture as authoritative, and he isn’t advocating the death penalty for homosexual acts, then he is cherry-picking bits of the verse he is citing as authoritative.

He’s cherry-picking Scripture, while pretending he isn’t. Rando does that a lot.

So, how do you argue with him? The rhetorical problem is that Rando believes four things: 1) his interpretation of Scripture is right because that interpretation makes sense in light of everything else Rando believes; 2) he can find reasons to support his interpretation; 3) if you “just look” at the evidence, and you’re a good and reasonable person, you can see the truth (naïve realism); 4) if you don’t think the truth of any situation—including the true interpretation of Scripture—is immediately and completely clear to people of good will and intelligence, then you’re a hippy relativist who thinks all interpretations are equally valid.

If you’re trying to persuade Rando to change his mind, then it all comes down to the first and fourth. Arguing with Rando about his interpretation of Leviticus 20 is really arguing with him about how he reads Scripture and how he thinks about belief (the binary of certain or clueless). If Rando believes the first and fourth, then he believes that being open to persuasion about his reading of Scripture is a sin–he thinks being less than fully committed to what your church tells you is right is being a hippy smoking dope and saying people can believe whatever they want.

That’s why arguing with Rando so hard. You aren’t arguing with him about claims; every argument in which he engages is an argument about whether he’s totally right or there is no right and wrong at all. That’s why he digs in so very, very hard.

What follows is drawn from my experience of arguing with Rando over the years when it comes to the Leviticus argument.

Rando might be the kind of person who wants the US to be a theocracy (he’ll call it a “Christian nation” but that isn’t what he means—he has zero intention of including Christian denominations with which he disagrees, let alone that asshole who argues with him in Bible study). He wants the US to enforce his reading of Scripture. What he wants isn’t a “Christian” nation for a couple of reasons. The first is that Christians disagree about a lot of things, so many that Christians benefit from the notion of a separation of church and state. After all, a lot of the crucial rulings about separation of church and state were because Christians were being legally disadvantaged and prohibited from practicing their religion by other Christians. Keep in mind the number of times that Christians have killed one another in the name of religion, the Albigensian massacres through the death toll in Ireland.

Rando doesn’t want a “Christian” nation—he wants a “nation that makes my way the only way.” In my experience, if you point that out to Rando, he won’t understand the point. When you point out that he wants a nation that would persecute other Christians, and not allow them to practice their religion, he’ll say that those practices aren’t really Christian. He’ll say those people are rejecting the Bible, cherry-picking, or reading it in a biased way. His model of exegesis is (and various Randos over the years have said this to me), “Just read the Bible.”[1]

One interesting strategy is to point out that even figures like Augustine, Luther, Jerome, and Calvin don’t agree on crucial aspects of Scripture, and all of them said that Scripture is unclear at parts. So, is Rando claiming to be smarter than Calvin? A better reader of Scripture than Calvin? (It can also be fun to point out that Calvin didn’t use the King James translation.)

Everyone picks and chooses from Scripture—does Rando’s church ban pearls in church? Or braided hair? Does the altar follow the rules laid out in Deuteronomy?

A lot of times the impulse is to ask if he eats shellfish, but argument isn’t a great one–Paul explicitly rejects the rules about food (and animal sacrifice).

But there are strategies that sometimes work. One is asking Rando if he follows all the laws in the Hebrew Bible. Does he have to marry his sister-in-law if his brother dies? In my experience, he’ll say that those rules are cultural, and peculiar to the time, and then you can point out that homosexuality is also very much a cultural issue. (That argument can get pretty weird, even unintentionally funny on Rando’s part, and you get extra points if it gets around to when Rando shows he spends a lot of time thinking about what gay men do in the bedroom.)

Sometimes Rando will admit that Scripture requires a process of interpretation, but he’ll insist that his process is not something he is imposing on Scripture, but something in Scripture. He’ll say that Scripture has two kinds of laws, civic and moral (this is just the cultural argument above, but you don’t end up getting TMI about Rando’s thoughts on gay sex). Civic laws are time and culture-specific, but the moral laws are timeless and endorsed by Jesus. This is not a distinction that appears anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, even implicitly. It’s just a way that Rando can rationalize his cherry-picking.

Leviticus 20 , for instance, has a prohibition that is often read as prohibiting same sex relations (it doesn’t). Rando wants to keep that one as a moral law. But Leviticus 20 also prohibits seeing one’s aunts naked, having sex with the followers of Moloch (how worried should we be about that?), having sex with a menstruating woman, or mixing up clean and unclean beasts. Those prohibitions are interspersed in with the rest—it isn’t as though Leviticus 20 is only about what Rando wants to call “moral” laws (unless he’s squeamish about pigs, I guess). And that’s the way all the various prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible are (and quite a few in the Epistles)–if there is a distinction between cultural and moral, it’s a distinction that we, as interpreters, choose to make. There’s no reason to think that the authors of it saw themselves as creating two different kinds of prescriptions and proscriptions.

Jesus rejected some of the Hebrew Bible laws (such as the imposition of the death penalty), and strengthened others (such as loving our neighbor), but he never did so by saying, “Well, those were just cultural, but these are moral.” He did it on his own authority. And, tbh, if you’re Jesus, you get to do that. Rando isn’t Jesus.

Since Jesus never condemned homosexuality, then its inclusion in the moral laws that Jesus strengthened is a bit vexed.

Here’s the final point I’ll make about the cultural/moral distinction being a filter we impose to make sense of Scripture, rather than one Scripture commands us to use: were that distinction in Scripture, and were Rando’s application of that distinction not motivated reasoning, then there would be unanimous (or nearly unanimous) agreement in the Christian tradition as to what rules we should keep and which ones we shouldn’t. Or even agreement on one of those categories. And there isn’t. To pick one example from Leviticus 20, Calvin was very strict about Sabbath keeping, Luther not so much. Major American denominations (*cough* Southern Baptists *cough*) treated the presence of slavery in Scripture as proof that it was God’s will, while rejecting various specific practices (such as jubilee) as cultural.

So, once again, Rando’s position—that his reading of Scripture is Scripture, and anyone who disagrees with him is imposing their prejudices onto Scripture—necessitates that he say he’s better at interpreting Scripture than major theologians in the Christian tradition.[2] No one in the history of Christianity got that distinction right, but Rando has? Once again, he’s smarter than Calvin? Rando’s distinction isn’t in Scripture; it’s in his head.[3]

A variation on the strategy of trying to make Rando take seriously his own reliance on the Hebrew Bible rules is to ask if he wants the US to have as legal code all of the rules in the Hebrew Bible. Again, his answer is no. If you ask why he wants the US to follow the rules he personally thinks matter, you get one of two answers. Both are dependent on the way he reads Scripture (and thinks about belief) mentioned above—that he (or his church) has the unmediated correct interpretation of Scripture (a belief belied every adult Sunday school class). After all, if Rando is right that it’s from God’s mouth to his ear, and he’s right that homosexuality sends you to Hell, then he could just not have gay sex. Why prohibit other people engaging in it? Or keep them from getting the material benefits of marriage? He could just let them go to Hell, or even spend a lot of time thinking about them in Hell, and thinking about the acts that got them there. Whatever floats your boat, Rando.

Why get the nation-state involved? In my experience, the most common answer is that my neighbor not behaving the way I want will involve my being punished. And now we are on the topic of Sodom and Gomorrah—the notion that God will destroy the US for allowing sin. Sodom and Gomorrah are stories of God saving the righteous–there is no Scriptural text of which I’m aware that has God destroying righteous people because of the sins of the people around them. Rando is not going to be destroyed because he has gay neighbors who are allowed to marry, and nothing in Scripture says he will.

And Sodom wasn’t destroyed because of what came to be called sodomy (this is discussed in three of the links included above). If you’re arguing with Rando, you can point out that even the most hardcore fundagelicals have given up on the argument that God destroyed Sodom for homosexuality—it was for oppressing the poor. Hmmmmm….should the US worry about whether we oppress the poor? Is Rando up in arms about the poor? Or does he spend more time thinking about what gay men do in bed?

As an aside, the whole notion that God will destroy a nation for being sinners is Scripturally vexed, but that’s a long argument and not very productive in the short run because it’s so complicated. If Rando is a follower of the “just world model,” and he thinks it’s endorsed by Scripture (prosperity gospel), then persuading him out of that model is something that takes years. As far as I can tell, people who are strongly attached to the just world model and give it up do so because of lived experiences.

Every once in a while (it’s pretty rare in my experience), you get the argument that it’s for their own good—that you’re saving people from damnation by keeping them from sinning. It’s John Locke who has the best answer to that, in Letter Concerning Toleration. If a person goes to church just because they’re forced to by the law, they’re still going to Hell. If they behave well just to avoid going to Hell, that’s where they’ll end up.[4]

If the disagreement does go in the direction of using the power of the state to force people to behave as you think they should, you might have a good discussion of the principle of liberalism. A lot of people seriously believe (because they’ve been told) that they will be forced to have a gay pastor or something. Their church will not be required to perform gay marriages—we don’t even force churches to perform “mixed” marriages, or second marriages. Churches can allow or prohibit whatever members they want—this is about civil society. This isn’t about what Rando’s church is allowed to; it’s about what Rando will allow my church to do. In my experience, Rando doesn’t understand that you can believe that what someone is doing is wrong, and not try to use the power of the state to force them to stop.

And the issue of using the power of the state to force others to behave as you think they ought brings up what can be the most productive strategy, when it works. This is only worth pursuing if you have some hope for Rando.

If he is open that he wants a nation that has as its laws the rules he thinks are important in Scripture, rejecting any other Christian readings, then ask if he thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a theocracy of their religion. When he says no, then say something like, “So, you want to be able to force people of other religions (even other kinds of Christianity) to live by your reading of Scripture, but you don’t want anyone to treat you that way?”

When he says yes, as he usually does, then you can say, “So, you want to be able treat others in a way that you don’t want to be treated. Someday, you will be face to face with someone who said you should do unto others as you would have them to do unto, and you will get to explain why you decided to ignore what he very clearly said. Good luck with that.”[5]


[1] This is why I always end up on the question of epistemology. He thinks his perception is unmediated. Other people are biased, but he isn’t. And he knows he isn’t biased because he knows his beliefs are true. He knows his beliefs are true because 1) he can find evidence to support them, and 2) he can ask himself if his beliefs are true, and he always get a YES!
[2] I’m tempted to say every theologian, but I’m not sure that’s true. I’m pretty sure I could find some belief of every theologian that they identified as central and necessary that he wouldn’t, but I’m not certain.
[3] I’m not saying that we are hopelessly lost in our own projections when it comes to reading Scripture, but that we are all humans, and humans are prone to motivated reasoning. Rando’s mistake is thinking that his method of reading is unmediated by his own political and personal commitments. In my experience, Rando is a binary thinker, and so he has the binary of certain/clueless. He believes that, if he isn’t certain about what Scripture means, then he’s clueless, and all interpretations are equally valid. That’s like saying that, if you aren’t certain about what a complicated contract means, then you have no clue, and you can believe whatever you want.
[4] In my experience, Rando believes in Hell—yet another belief not well-supported by Scripture.
[5] Almost all of also this applies to how people often talk about the Constitution, and their reading being unmediated.

I got banned from Facebook (again)

dates I got banned from FB

Loosely, here is the chain of events that got me banned. In March, I shared Nazi propaganda about euthanization, in order to make the point that social Darwinism (which is what people were advocating for covid) was exactly the line of argument used by Nazis. Personally, I would encourage everyone to share this image, as it is a very effective way to get people who are (still) arguing for “let covid run its course as it will only hurt the weak.” If hundreds of people get banned for it, that would be good.

I got a “you’re banned for 24 hours for this violation,” and then “you keep violating our standards and so are getting more punished” for the same post. It ended up being at least three and maybe four times. When a human looked at it, the decision was made (correctly) that I wasn’t promoting Nazism, but using a Nazi image for appropriate purposes of discussion. Therefore, I was let out of Facebook jail for the last violation. To make the whole thing more irritating, I’m still on record for having violated Facebook standards for a post they said was not a violation of their standards.

It happened again on Friday—banned twice, with increasing penalties—for the same post, and then I got a notice that the post is fine. But, since it was reported twice, I’m still unable to post on Facebook till the three days are up. Only one of those posts was removed from my permanent record.

I’ve often posted about how I think we should use good old policy argumentation when trying to solve problems, and this is a great example. It might be tempting to say that my problem is Facebook, and there are lots of things to say about what’s wrong with Facebook. If “Facebook” is the problem, then the solution is to refuse to participate in Facebook, but my refusing to participate in Facebook doesn’t mean they handle issues of crappy censorship any better. If I quit Facebook, I have solved my problem of Facebook banning me, but I’ve solved it by banning myself.

Facebook banned my post because its policies assume: 1) reducing hate speech can be solved through bots; 2) racism and hate speech are all clear from surface features; 3) sharing is supporting. The first follows neatly from the second and third.

Around the time I was banned last spring, Facebook was being sued by people paid to review posts because their work was so awful that it was giving them serious health issues. Having spent a tiny amount of my time throughout the years trying to engage with the kind of rhetoric those people would have had to read, I can say that their claims were completely legitimate. It would be awful work.

The people who sued argued that the pay should be better, and there should be more support, and those claims seem to be reasonable to me. What puzzles me is why Facebook would decide that someone’s job would be to wade into that toxic fecal matter for forty hours a week at $16-18$ per hour. I assume that settlement is why, last spring, they started relying heavily on bots.

The bots don’t work very well, and so people can complain and get the posts reviewed by humans, but it’s still gerfucked (as in the multiple reports for the same post). It’s also indicative of how people think about “hate speech.” It’s long been fascinating to me that people use “hate speech” and “offensive speech” as though those terms are interchangeable. They aren’t—they don’t even necessarily overlap.

People assume that the problem with “hate speech” is that it expresses hate, and that’s bad. It’s bad on its own (because you shouldn’t hate anyone), and it’s bad because it hurts someone else’s feelings. So, “hate speech” is bad because of feeeeelings. I’m not sure hate is necessarily bad—I think there are some things we should hate. In addition, you can hurt my feelings without expressing hate—if you tell me that I’ve hurt your feelings, I’ll feel bad, so does that make what you did “hate speech”? It’s approaching the whole issue this way that makes people think that telling someone they’re racist is just as bad as saying something racist. They’re wrong.

“Hate speech” is bad because it encourages, enables, and causes violence against a scapegoated out-group.

And it isn’t necessarily offensive. I’ve known a lot of people who didn’t intervene (or think any intervention should happen) for passive-aggressive hate speech because they didn’t notice that it was hate speech. It didn’t seem “hateful” because they, personally, didn’t find it offensive. If we think hate speech is offensive, then we either aspire after a realm of discourse in which no one is ever offended (and that is neither possible nor desirable) or we only care about whether the dominant group is offended.

If we think of hate speech as hateful and offensive, then we’re likely to rely on surface features—that is, whether the speech is vehement and/or has boosters. Vehement speech isn’t necessarily hate speech (although it makes people very uncomfortable, so they’re likely to find it offensive, and mischaracterize it as hate speech), and hate speech isn’t necessarily vehement. It’s hard to notice passive-aggressive attacks on a scapegoat (or scapegoated out-group) because we don’t feel attacked. Thus, the most effective hate speech doesn’t have a lot of what linguists call “boosters” (emphatic words or phrases), but instead seems calm and even hedging. Praeteritio and deflection are useful strategies for maintaining plausible deniability while rousing a base to violence against a scapegoated out-group because people not in the scapegoated out-group won’t be offended by it. (“I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard very smart people say…”)

Thus, surface features aren’t good indicators of whether something is hate speech, nor is whether we are offended by it.

The third bad assumption in this whole dumb process is that sharing is supporting. There’s a big problem as to whether we should share hate speech, even if we’re criticizing it, since we’re thereby boosting the signal (and there are people, like Ann Coulter, who are, I think, deliberately offensive for publicity purposes). But I’m not really talking about that particular dilemma. It struck me when I was working with graduate students how many of them refused to teach a book or essay with which they disagreed, or which they disliked. We still see teaching as profoundly inculcation, as presenting students with admirable things they should like. There are a lot of problems with that way of thinking about teaching (it presumes, for one thing, that the teacher has infallible judgment), and one of those problems is shared with the larger culture—the desire to live in a comfortable world of like-minded and pleasurable things. That is why Facebook is such an informational enclave—because we choose to use it that way.

So, unfortunately, Facebook is probably right that most of the times someone shares an image or post, they’re indicating agreement. I don’t, therefore, object to a post of Mussolini’s headquarters being stuck in timeout for an hour till a human can look and see if it’s approving or disapproving of Mussolini. I do object to the fact that, because of their incompetent system, I’m banned from posting for three days for a post they have decided doesn’t violate their standards. I also object to how difficult it is to get my (not) penalties removed from my permanent record, and I do wish they had smarter bots, and I do wish we were in a world that was smarter about hate speech.





How do you teach SEAE?

marked up draft


I wrote a post about how forcing SEAE on students is racist, and someone asked the reasonable question: “It has been very challenging, especially in FYC classes, to reconcile my obligation to prepare students for academic writing across disciplines with my wish to preserve their own agency and choice. How do you strike that balance?”

And my answer to that is long, complicated, and privileged.

University professors are experts in everything. I had a friend who was a financial advisor who said that financial advisors routinely charge doctors and professors more, because both of those groups of people think they’re experts in everything and so are complete pains in the ass. He thought I’d be mad about that, but I just said, “Yeah.” And, unhappily, at a place where people have to write a lot to succeed, far too many people think they’re experts in writing..

I’ve had far too many faculty and even graduate students (all over the U) who’ve never taken a course in linguistics or read anything about rhetoric or dialect rhetsplain me. They think they’re experts in writing because they write a lot. I walk a lot, but that doesn’t mean I’m a physical therapist. It was irritating, but as a faculty member (especially once I got tenure), I could just shrug and move on.

In other words, I’m starting with the issue that how I handled this in my classes was influenced by my privilege. Even as an Assistant Professor, I was (too often) the Director of Composition, and so I knew that any complaints about my teaching would go to me. When I found myself in situations in which I had to defend my practices, I knew enough linguistics to grammar-shame the racists. (Grammar Nazis are never actually very good at grammar, even prescriptive grammar. Again, the analogy is accurate.) I think I have to start by acknowledging the issue since not everyone has the freedom I did.

So, what did I do?

I was trained in a program that had people write the same kind of paper every two weeks. This was genius. It was at a time when most writing programs had students writing a different kind of paper every two (or three weeks). That was also a time when research showed that no commenting practice was better than any other, since none seemed to correlate any more than any other with improvement in student writing (Hillocks, Research in Written Composition). But, even as a consultant at the Writing Center, I could see that the writing in Rhetoric classes did get better (that wasn’t true of all first-year writing courses).

Much later, I would read studies about cognitive development and realize that that classic form of a writing class (in which each paper is a new genre) makes no sense cognitively—even the Rhetoric model that I liked was problematic. The worst version is that a student writes an evaluative paper about bunnies, and the teacher makes comments on it. Then the student is supposed to write an argumentative paper about squirrels. A sensible person would infer that the comments about the evaluative paper are useless for their argumentative paper about squirrels (unless they’re points about grammar, and we’ll come back to that). That’s why students read comments simply as justifications of the grade. The cognitive process involved in generalizing from specific comments about a paper on one genre and topic to principles that can be applied to the specific case of a paper about another topic and in another genre is really complicated.

The Rhetoric model was a little better, insofar as it was the same genre, but even that was vexed. A student writes an argument about bunnies, and gets comments about that paper, and then has to abstract the principles of argument to apply to a different argument about squirrels. With any model in which the student is writing new papers every time, the student has to take the specific comments, abstract them to principles, and then reapply them to a specific case. That task requires metacognition.

I’m a member of the church of metacognition. I think (notice what I did there) that all of the train wrecks I’ve studied could have been prevented had people been willing to think about whether they might be wrong—that is, to think about whether their way of thinking was a good way to think.[2] But, I don’t think it makes sense to require (aka, grade on the basis of) something in a class that you don’t teach. So, how do you teach metacognition?

You don’t teach it by requiring that students already can do it. You teach it by asking students to reconsider how they thought about an issue. You teach it by having students submit multiple versions of an argument, and you make comments (on paper and in person) that make them think about their argument.

Once again, we’re back on the issue of my privilege. I have only once had a thoroughly unethical workload, and that ended disastrously (I was denied tenure). Otherwise, it’s been in the realm of the neoliberal model of the University, and I’ve done okay. But, were I in the situation of most Assistant Professors (let alone various fragile faculty positions) I would say use this model for one class at most.

I haven’t gotten around to the question of dialect because the way I strike the balance between being reasonable about how language works and the expectation that first-year composition prepares students for writing in a racist system is to throw some things off the scale. We can’t teach students the conventions of every academic disciplines; those disciplines need to do that work.

There was a moment in time (I infer that it’s passed) when people in composition accepted that FYC was supposed to be some kind of “basic” class in which people would learn things they would use in every other class with any writing. The fantasy was (and is, for many people) that you could have a class that would prepare students for all forms of writing they will encounter in college. Another was that you could teach students to read for genre, so that you should have students either write in the genre of their major or write in every genre. Both of those methods have students needing to infer principles in a pretty complicated way.

A friend once compared this kind of class to how PE used to be—two weeks on volleyball, two weeks on tennis, two weeks on swimming. You don’t end up a well-rounded athlete, but someone who sucks at a lot of stuff.

What I did notice was that a lot of disciplines have the same kind of paper assignment: take a concept the professor (and/or readings) have discussed in regard to this case (or these cases), and apply it to a new case (call this the theory application paper). We can teach that, so I did. That kind of paper has several sub-genres:
1) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to demonstrate understanding of the theory/concept/definition;
2) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to critique the theory/concept/definition;
3) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to solve some puzzle about the case (this is what a tremendous number of scholarly articles do).

So, I might assign a reading in which an author describes three kinds of democracy, and ask that students write a paper in which they apply the definitions to the US. I might have an answer for which I’m looking (it’s the third kind), or I might not. I might be looking for a paper that:
1) Shows that the US fits one of those definition;
2) Shows that the US doesn’t quite fit any of them, and so there is something wrong with the author’s definitions/taxonomy;
3) Shows that applying this taxonomy of democracies explains something puzzling about the US government (why we have plebiscites at the state level, but not federal, or why we haven’t abandoned the Electoral College) or politics (why so few people vote).
Of course, I might be allowing students to do all three (if students think it fits, then they’d write the first or third, but if they don’t they would write the second).

Students typically did three papers, and turned the first one in three times (the third revision was late in the semester). They turned in their first version of their first paper within the first three weeks of class; I’d comment on it (I’d rarely give a grade for that first version) and return it within a week. They’d revise it and turn it in again a week after getting it back (we’d have individual conferences in the interim). I’d get that version back in a week. They’d turn in their first version of their second paper a week or two after that, and so on. Since the paper would be so thoroughly rewritten, I barely commented on sentence-level issues (correctness, clarity, effectiveness) on that first submission of the first paper (or second, for that matter). For many students, the most serious issues would disappear when they knew what they wanted to say.

I’ve given this long explanation of how the papers worked because it means that students had the opportunity to focus on their argument before thinking about sentence-level questions.

Obviously, in forty years my teaching evolved a lot, and so all I can say is where I ended up. And here’s the practice on which I landed. In class, we’d go over the topic of “grammar,” with the analogy of etiquette. And then I’d do what pretty much everyone else does. I’d emphasize sentence-level characteristics that interfered with the ability of the reader to understand the paper (e.g., reference errors, predication), only remarking on them once or twice in a paper. If it was a recurrent thing, I might highlight several instances (and I mean literally highlight) of a specific problem. I might ask them to go to the Writing Center or come to office hours, so we could go over it.

But, and this is important, I gave them a specific task on which they should focus. Please don’t send a student to the Writing Center telling them to work on “grammar.” It’s fine to tell them to go to the Writing Center to revise the sentences you’ve marked, or to reduce passive voice (but please make sure it’s passive voice that you mean, and not progressive or passive agency). Telling a student to work on “grammar” is like saying a paper is “good”—what does that mean?

I didn’t insist that students write in SEAE—that is, I didn’t grade them on it. I graded on clarity, and let students know about things that other people might consider errors (e.g., sentence fragments). And that seems to me a reasonable way to handle those things. If a student wants to get better at SEAE (and some students do), then I’d make an effort to comment more about sentence-level characteristics. My department happened to have a really good class in which the prescriptive/descriptive grammar issue was discussed at length, so students who really wanted to geek out on grammar could do it.

I think the important point is that students should retain agency. The criticism that a lot of people make about not teaching SEAE is that we’re in a racist society, and students who speak or write in a stigmatized dialect will be materially hurt. Well, okay, but I don’t see how materially hurting them now (in the form of bad grades) is helping the situation. It’s possible to remark on variations from SEAE without grading a student down for them. It’s also possible to do what the student wants in that regard, such as not remark on them.

Too many people have the fantasy of a class that gets rid of all the things we don’t want to deal with in students. Students should come to our class clean behind the ears, so that…what? So we don’t have to teach?





[1] I love that people share my blog posts, and I know that means people read them who don’t know who I am. Someone criticized my “casual” use of the term Nazi, and that’s a completely legit criticism—people do throw the term around–but it isn’t casual at all for me. Given the work I do, I would obviously never use that term without a lot of thought. People who rant about pronouncing “ask” as “aks,” make a big deal about double negatives, or, in other words, focus on aspects of Black English, aren’t just prescriptivists (we’re all prescriptivists, but that’s a different post)—they’re just people who want to believe that racist hierarchies are ontologically grounded, citing pseudo-intellectual and racist bullshit. Kind of like the Nazis. I call them Nazis because I take Nazis very seriously, and I take very seriously the damage done by the pseudo-intellectual framing of SEAE as a better dialect.

[2] My crank theory is that metacognition is ethical. I don’t see how one could think about thinking without perspective-shifting—would I think this was a good way of thinking if someone else thought this way? And, once you’re there, you’re in the realm of ethics.