Author: Trish

Chances are good that how you assess bias is irrational

Many people believe that a biased argument is irrational, and vice versa, and, so, one way to assess the rationality of an argument is to see whether it’s biased. That’s an irrational way to assess an argument, and one that nurtures irrationality.

What I have long found difficult about getting people to think in a more accurate way about how we think is that many people assume that you either believe there is a truth, and we all see it (naïve realism), or you believe that all points of view are equally valid.

It’s grounded in an old and busted model of how perception can work—that “rational” people just look at the world and see it in an unmediated (unbiased) way. And that direct perception of the world enables them to make judgments that are accurate and ring true.

One of the ways that our media (all over the political spectrum) engage in inoculation is to promote the false binary of one position being that kind of “unbiased” and obviously true position, and “biased” positions (all others). They point out to their choir that this position seems obviously true to them, so it must be the unbiased position. That’s the confusion that Socrates pointed out—that you believe something to be true doesn’t mean you know it to be true. You just believe you do.

Imagine that two dogs, Chester and Hubert, disagree as to whether little dogs are involved in the squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball. Chester, and his loyal media, says to their base, “Hubert media is biased because it says little dogs aren’t conspiring with squirrels.” Chesterian media is inoculating its base against listening to any contradictory information. To the extent that it successfully equates “disagrees with us” and “biased,” any media—regardless of its place on the political spectrum—ensures that its audience can’t assess policies rationally.

That’s what far too much of our political media says—any source of information that gives information that contradicts or complicates our position is “biased” and therefore should be dismissed without consideration. And, as I said, that’s irrational.

It’s irrational because it’s saying that having a strong political commitment is irrational, but only if it’s an out-group political commitment. So, this isn’t really about the rationality of an argument, in terms of its internal consistency, quality of evidence, logical relationship of claims, but whether it’s in- or out-group.

It’s saying that people who believe what I believe are rational because they believe what I believe and I believe that my beliefs are rational and so I believe that anyone who disagrees with me is irrational because they don’t believe what I believe and what I believe is rational because it’s what I believe.

A rational position on an issue is one that is argued:
• via terms and claims that can be falsified,
• internally consistently in terms of its claims and assumptions,
• by fairly representing opposition arguments,
• by holding all interlocutors to the same standards.

Rationality has nothing to do with the tone of an argument, whether it appeals to emotions, whether the people making arguments are good people, or even whether you can find evidence to support your claims.

So, the argument that out-group media sources should be dismissed on the grounds that those sources  are biased is irrational because it violates everyone one of those criteria. It’s a circular argument; it doesn’t consistently condemn bias (only out-group bias); it frames all out-group arguments as biased by bad motives; and it privileges in-group arguments.

To say that all media are biased is not to say that they are all equally reliable (or unreliable). It is to say that we are all biased, and we can assess sources to see if their biases cause them to engage in irrational argumentation. If we find that a source is consistently irrational, then it’s fine to dismiss the source as unreliable–not because it’s out-group, but because we’ve found it to fail so often.We should assess arguments on whether they’re rational; not whether they seem true to us.

That you believe, sincerely, deeply, and profoundly, that what you are saying is true doesn’t mean it is, let alone that it’s a belief you can defend rationally. Just because you sincerely believe you’re right doesn’t mean you’re Rosa Parks, refusing to give up your seat; you might be George Wallace, committing to segregation forever.

[Btw, if any of you would like to put pressure on cafepress to make the circular reasoning visual a t-shirt, count me in.]

“This decision by ‘the government’ is obviously wrong” as factional demagoguery

My poor husband. This weekend, we went to a farmer’s market because it was a beautiful day, and I didn’t have to work, and the farmer’s market is fun, and, long story short, a person from whom I was buying earrings said to me and Jim, “Some people think government is the problem, and some people think government is the solution.” Jim, being a sensible person, just stepped back a bit. I don’t really remember what I said after that (I was in a white-hot rage), but I know I said a lot.

I have spent my career working for big (and public) institutions, and got all my degrees at a big (and public) institution. And I spent far too much of my life irritated (and sometimes outraged) by various decisions that those institutions made—decisions that were, to me, not just wrong but obviously wrong.

There are, loosely, three categories of wrongness. There were decisions that were irritating and time consuming (such as providing physical documentation of every article I claimed to have published, having students sign for getting a small gift card, having to provide travel receipts). There were decisions that obviously ignored considerations central to the teaching of writing, for instance, or ethical practices regarding staffing. There were others that seemed to strike at the very notion of college education as a public good. All of those decisions were, to me, outrageously short-sighted. I was right. I was also short-sighted.

I’m really sorry about all that time I spent bloviating about how obviously dumb my administration was; it turns out that my administration was not necessarily being dumb. It turns out I was often the short-sighted one. I was right that about some decisions being unethical, and I was right about the harm some decisions did for the teaching of writing, but I was wrong to think that my Dean was the problem. Because I saw every entity above me as “administration,” I falsely identified the source of the problem, and therefore I never identified a workable solution.

And this is another post about the neighborhood mailing list, and how it exemplifies what’s wrong with American political deliberation. (Although, to be fair, I could use departmental faculty meetings to make the same point, with me as the person arguing very badly. I’ve also done my share of this on the neighborhood mailing list and various other places. I’ve loved me some pleasurable outrage about how obviously wrong the government, my university administration, the city  is).

Anytime there is a change in our neighborhood, we look at the proposed policy from our perspective, and we think how it will affect us. That’s a valid datapoint. But that’s all it is–one datapoint. I earlier wrote about how the Big Bike narrative assumed that cyclists in our neighborhood are outsiders, when in fact a lot of the people cycling in our neighborhood (including some of the cyclists who are jerks) are neighbors. They are us.

And, let’s be clear, we are in a neighborhood with streets paid for by all citizens of Austin. The notion that these are “our” streets is no more rational than the belief that the trash can loaned to you by the city of Austin is your trash can.

In the case of Big Bike, the assumption is that there is a policy that is obviously right to all sensible people of goodwill, and it happens to be the one I hold. Thus, anyone who advocates a different policy is stupid, corrupt, duped, selfish, shortsighted. I’m saying that, for years, I thought that way about my universities’ policies that didn’t agree with what policies I thought we should have.

At every university, there have been irritating, complicated, and time-consuming, and, to me, obviously dumb, requirements about submitting documentation for travel, absences of students, rewarding students for participating in a study, hiring student workers, keeping track of purchases, exposing personal data about sources of income. It turns out that, in many cases, the policies I thought were obviously stupid were a response (perhaps not the best response, but often good enough) to a real problem I didn’t know existed.  Because, at every university, those irritating, complicated, and time-consuming requirements were put in place because someone was an asshole. Someone filed false documentation, failed to note a conflict of interest, embezzled, falsely accused a student (or a student was a jerk and refused to admit to absences), exploited student workers, or filed a lawsuit.

I’m not saying that university is always right, but I have been wrong as to who was wrong. I have been at three universities with unethically low salaries for staff (University of Texas at Austin is one of them). I care about staff; that is part of my viewpoint. I’m not looking out for me; I’m looking out for others. And the salary structure at three of my universities was (and is) obviously ethically and rationally indefensible. I was (and am) right about all that.

I was, however, wrong to think that these unethical salary structures for staff were the consequence of my University administration being short-sighted in its policies about staff salaries. In two cases (I’m still unclear about UT-Austin), the salaries of staff were legislative decisions, and not the university.

I was right that the decision was wrong, but I was wrong as to who was wrong.

There is a different kind of decision in which I thought I was completely right, and the university was being stupid and short-sighted, and I was wrong.

When, for complicated reasons, I ended up on Faculty Council, I learned that most of what I thought about how the university ran was wrong, in all sorts of ways. Here’s one example: I had long thought it was obviously wrong to have the day before Thanksgiving a class day. A lot of students had to miss that class in order to get flights, and others risked their lives driving on a day with terrible traffic and accidents.

I sat at a Faculty Council meeting, and listened to someone explain that, because the fall semester is already shorter than spring (which I’d never noticed), and because of various legislated weirdnesses about the UT calendar, taking away that class day would mean that some of the Engineering departments would lose accreditation. Accrediting organizations require a certain number of labs, and removing that class day would mean they wouldn’t have enough labs.

We would, they said, have to refigure the entire calendar to ensure that they could have enough labs, and that any decision about that Wednesday should be delayed till that refiguring could happen. And I listened to faculty stand up and talk about how we should, right now, cancel that Wednesday class because of what it meant for them personally. Of course, were UT to lose its engineering accreditation, all those faculty would suffer far more than they were suffering by having a Wednesday class day. But they didn’t think of that because they assumed that their perspective was the only valid  one.

And I realized I was them. I also assumed that the policies of the university should enable my way of teaching. And suddenly I empathized with engineers. I was engaged in epistemological selfishness, only assessing a situation from my perspective. A decision that was obviously wrong from my perspective (such as requiring that the day before Thanksgiving be a class day) was a great decision for a university that wanted to ensure its engineering programs were accredited.

My perspective about the day before Thanksgiving—enable students to leave earlier—was a legitimate one. But the perspective of the Engineering faculty concerned about losing accreditation was also legitimate. In fact, I’d say that, since my university would be seriously hurt by losing Engineering accreditation, and my students would be hurt, that my interests and the concerns of the Engineering faculty were intertwined. That my perspective was legitimate doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered. That the Engineering faculty had a legitimate concern doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered.

The University worked it out.

I’m not saying that all positions are equal, nor that we should never decide our administration has made a bad decision. I have twice been at universities with an ambitious Provost who made every decision on the basis of what would enable them to have great things on their cv because they saw this job as a stepping stone to being Chancellor. Try as I might (and I did try), there was no perspective from which their decisions were the best for the university—they were (are) splashy projects that look great on a resume but aren’t thought through in terms of principles like sustainability, shared governance, financial priorities.

I also sat at a Faculty Council meeting and listened to various faculty from business, math, and economics explain that a report arguing for major changes in various university practices had numbers that literally did not add up. And they didn’t, and those major changes never did save anywhere near the predicted amount. The changes were eventually abandoned.

Three times I have been at universities that had a state legislature actively hostile to my university, that made decisions designed to get the university to fail.

Big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work.

What I’m saying is that just looking at a policy, and assessing it from your perspective as a good or policy doesn’t mean it is a good or bad policy. You have to look at it from the perspective of the various stakeholders, after which you might decide it’s a terrible policy (because it might be). My university should not make every decision on the basis of what is best for me, or even people like me. My university has people with genuinely different needs from me. My university makes bad decisions, but that a decision is not the best one for me is not sufficient proof that it is a bad decision. My university should not be designed for me.

And, similarly, the government should not be designed for me. Or you. Or us.

The notion that, in regard to any question, there is an obviously right answer is epistemological selfishness. The notion that, because you can see flaws in a policy, that policy is obviously dumb and wrong, is just bad reasoning.

Every policy has flaws. You have to decide how to get to work. That’s a policy argument—you are deliberating the policy of getting to work. Is there a perfect route? Nope. Parenting, having a dog, gardening, buying a car—those are all policy deliberations. Is there a perfectly right decision? No. You have to deliberate among various pressing concerns—cost, size, resale value, gas mileage, loan options. Any big institution has to do the same weighing.

Despite the fact that we all get by in a world of vexed and nuanced decisions in our moment to moment decisions, when it comes to what we think of as “political decisions,” a troubling number of us reason the way I did for far too many years—that, when it comes to policy, my perspective is obviously right. Even though my personal life was not a series of perfect decisions, from the day to day (whether to bring an umbrella, wear a heavy coat, take that route to work) through the slightly more important (whether to grant an extension to my students, how to manage my time, agree to that commitment) to the big ones (whether to marry that guy, take that job, get that haircut), somehow I was convinced that I knew the right thing for my university, city, state, or country to do. I had made the wrong decision about a haircut multiple times, but, when it came to politics, my belief was some kind of perfect insight spit from the forehead of God?

My model of political deliberation–despite my long and documented history of being wrong, even when it came to major policy decisions in my personal life, I was magically infallible–is unhappily common.

My experience with big institutions—that they make policies that are ridiculous from my perspective, and even burdensome—is how most people experience the government. And that mantra—this big institution is terrible because their decisions don’t make sense from my perspective–is a constant mantra on my neighborhood mailing list. Every decision “they” make is not just dumb, but obviously dumb. And there are no good reasons or legitimate perspectives that might make “their” decision makes sense.

According to many people on my neighborhood mailing list, everything the city does is wrong. It isn’t just flawed, but completely, obviously, and pointlessly dumb.

And, unhappily, my neighborhood mailing list exemplifies how smart, well-intentioned, good people who are deeply committed to thinking about the public good reason.

My neighborhood mailing list is, ostensibly, non-partisan. But it isn’t. A recurrent (perhaps even dominant) topos (as people in rhetoric say) is that “the government” (an out-group) is making an obviously bad decision because “the government” is dominated by “special interests.”

That’s as political and factional as political discourse gets. It’s toxic populism. It’s the false assumption that there is some group (us) made up of “regular people” who see what really needs to happen. If anything happens that “regular people” (us) don’t like, or that hurts us in any way, then this is the government being dumb, oblivious, or corrupt.

Toxic populism dismisses that the policy we hate might help some other group of people by saying those people aren’t “real Americans.” For complicated reasons, I had to listen to some guy repeat what he said he had heard on Rush Limbaugh, about how Native Americans were getting “special” benefits from the government (those “special” benefits were simply honoring agreements). There was something about Native Americans not being “real” Americans that caused steam to come out my ears.

My neighborhood mailing list claims to be non-factional, but it tolerates dog whistle racism and demagoguery about graffiti. It also tolerates the “the government always fucks things up” rhetoric that is, actually, profoundly factional.

As various studies have shown (Ideology in America summarizes a lot of them), the public, on the whole, supports policies that we tend to identify as “liberal,” but votes for anyone who plausibly performs the identity of “conservative.” And “conservative” is associated with being opposed to government intervention—“the government” is associated with Democrats. This association explains why so many people complain about aspects of Obamacare that Republicans enacted (such as the failure to expand medicare).

And irrational.

In all those years when I was whingeing that the huge institution wasn’t enacting policies that were the best from my perspective, I was engaging in profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric. It was political, and it was factional. Rhetoric about how government sucks isn’t just anti-democratic; it’s pro-Republican.

The government screws things up, and we should engage in loud and vehement criticism when it does. But “the government” making a decision that inconveniences us and “the government” screwing up are not necessarily the same thing—the first is not evidence of the second. Good governmental policies inconvenience everyone at least a little.

After Proposition 13 passed in California (which greatly reduced the state budget), I frequently found myself in situations in which—in the same conversation—someone celebrated the passage of Prop 13 and bemoaned that government services had declined. They shot themselves in the foot and then complained they had a limp.

Americans, till Reagan, lived within a world of well-financed government projects—roads, bridges, water services, public schools, non-partisan science research. Since Reagan, the infrastructure has deteriorated. We now have people complaining that taxes are too high and the infrastructure sucks (which is why we should take more money from government).

We need to stop assuming that “the government” is always deliberately, stupidly, and obviously wrong. “The government” is neither the problem nor the solution; voters are.

I don’t remember much about what I said when I lost my temper with the guy at the farmer’s market, but I do remember one thing. I said, “If you think the government is the problem, then why haven’t you moved to Somalia?”  (And, yes, I know, that situation in Somalia is more complicated than that, but, by that time, I’d figured out his sources of information, and that those sources said Somalia is hell.)

And then he did start talking about how the government should stick to what it does well and leave other things aside.

That’s the fallback position for people repeating Libertarian positions that are internally inconsistent but sound good as long as you don’t think too hard. I made no headway with him.

But, what I did see is that his position was thoroughly indefensible logically, and it was the position I have taken far too often in far too many situations. He thought the government was stupid because it made some decisions that he didn’t like. He didn’t notice that “the government” paved the roads that got customers to his place, enabled the trade that got him what he needed for his shop, ensured that he didn’t get robbed, enabled him to do something if someone wrote a bad check. He wants a government that gets him everything he wants and nothing he doesn’t.

And so do I. And that’s a bad way to think about government.

That a policy seems wrong to me doesn’t actually mean it’s wrong. I am not (yet) Queen of the Universe with perfect and universal insight. None of us is. People all over the political spectrum need to stop talking as though the government is the problem. It isn’t. We are.

“OK, Boomer” and intergenerational demagoguery

Growing up with relatives prone to saying really offensive and bigoted things, I quickly learned the rule: saying something offensive, even if it clearly insults someone sitting there at the table, is okay, as long as you’re older than the people who might object. The person who calls attention to how offensive that statement was, especially if they’re younger, that is who people blame for “starting the conflict.” Calling attention to demagoguery that other people haven’t noticed is seen as “confrontational,” and perhaps even “aggressive.” That is “divisive.”

Someone saying out loud that something was racist isn’t what started the problem—the racist (or otherwise bigoted) person did. But, time and again, I saw someone directly insult someone else at the table, sometimes openly, sometimes passive-aggressively, almost always through saying insulting generalizations about a group of which the other person was a member. Someone might say something like, “Well, young people today just don’t know how to work, and […]” then tell a rambling story about how they had to walk eight miles to school, uphill both ways. Most of the people at the table wanted to let all that demagoguery go by un-noticed. They got upset if the person who had, in fact, very clearly been insulted said, “I was just insulted.”

This is the “OK, Boomer” controversy, I think.

There has been divisiveness about generations for a long time, and it isn’t new. But I have to say that demagoguery about “young people today” (in current public discourse oddly often mis-identified as “millennials”) is pernicious and ubiquitous and damaging. Demagoguery about how awful this generation is is in everything from comment threads to best-sellers, and it’s often engaged in on the part of boomers, probably the most privileged generation ever. For instance, consider that this profoundly incoherent book about what’s wrong with young people is a best seller. It actually argues that this generation is the dumbest because they’re on the phones all the time, and therefore not reading.

It’s available in kindle.

And it’s worth remembering that Culture of Narcissism was written about boomers.

If you’re now outraged about divisiveness about generations because of the “ok, boomers” meme, then you are blaming the person at the table who says, “Wow, that was racist” as “starting the conflict.” You didn’t notice all the divisive demagoguery about young people today.

If you haven’t called out that pernicious and pervasive boomer demagoguery about kids these days, and you are condemning “ok, boomer,” then either put “I’m a demagogue” on your sleeve, or STFU. If you think that the “ok, boomer” meme has called attention to how boomers have been profiting by demagoguery about kids today, and you’d like to reduce the generational demagoguery by acknowledging the role of authors like Bauerlein, then go for it. But don’t pretend for a second that the “ok, boomers” people started intergenerational demagoguery.

They’re responding to it.

And I think it’s a pretty good response.

I think it’s asking boomers to hold young people today to the same standards they had to meet when they were 20. And good luck with that.

Demagoguery and stigginit to them (Maryland talk)

little girl eating crackers

Here’s my basic argument: demagoguery is best seen as the reduction of the complicated array of political—that is, policy—options to the false binary of us and them. There are various characteristics that reduction tends to have (projection, scapegoating, binaries, and others). But, here’s another part of my argument that matters: we’re all demagogues. We like demagoguery; we promote it. Demagoguery isn’t just something they do; in fact, if my book enabled you to be better at identifying their demagoguery, then I just contributed, unintentionally, to our culture of demagoguery.

We are in a culture of demagoguery. We are in a world in which every argument is assessed demagogically—that is, when presented with a claim, the first thing we want to know is whether the person is in or out group. If they’re in-group, then we’re open to their argument; if they’re out-group, we think skeptically.

Demagoguery assumes that our vexed and uncertain political world is really a zero-sum battle between us (good) and them (evil). Thus, any political action that helps them hurts us; any political action that hurts them helps us. It’s kind of like seeing politics as a game of basketball—if they make any baskets, that’s bad for us; if we keep them from making any baskets, that’s essentially a gain for us. One of their players getting injured, their getting a bad call against them, a bad bounce of the ball—that’s all good for us.
Except a loss for them isn’t necessarily a gain for us, even in basketball. If they got the bad call because it’s an incompetent ref, we’ll get hurt too. Setting fire to the stadium, committing an egregious foul that hurts their best player, delaying the game by supergluing the doors to their locker room, breaking the play clock, filing a lawsuit that prevents the game from being played—those are all actions that hurt the other team, but they don’t help us, and they might even hurt us more than they hurt the other team. And that is the problem with assuming that hurting or “stigginit” to them is necessarily a win for us. It isn’t.

This way of thinking about politics—hurting them is just as good as helping us because it amounts to the same thing—is also called the “fixed pie” bias. It’s a notorious cognitive bias, an unconscious way we approach decisions.
It’s as though all the goods in our shared world—access to clean water, good schools, low taxes, personal safety, good roads, honest political figures—are a pie. The more you get, the less I do, so anything that keeps you from getting pie helps me. But it doesn’t, even as far as pie. I’m not hurt by your getting good water; I’m not helped by your getting bad water. I can keep you from getting pie by throwing it out uneaten; I can harm your pie eating by poisoning the pie, and then we both die.

The zero-sum model is actively harmful in systems of mutual dependence. We all benefit by having a citizenry that doesn’t have anyone consuming water that has brain-damaging levels of lead, that has good public schools available to everyone, that has tax burdens shared reasonably, that isn’t afraid, that can trust that political figures are (on the whole) not making political decisions purely on the basis of what benefits them personally, nor are they trying to claim that—because they won an election—the law doesn’t apply to them.

We think politics is a zero-sum game because that’s how the media frame it—the media says there are two (and only two) sides to every political issue (the Democrats and the Republicans), and the media (through what is called the “horse race frame”) discusses every policy issue in terms of how it might help or hurt the Dems or Republicans in elections.
That isn’t information that citizens need to know. But it’s what media do because people think (falsely) that such coverage—this person is doing this to try to win an election—is objective. It isn’t. What we need to know is whether what various political figures are saying about policies is within the realm of rationally defensible policy argumentation.

But it’s hard to get that information because it requires reading the best arguments from a variety of points of view, and that’s really hard. The algorithms of social media mean you’ll get exclusively in-group sources.
And, so, a lot of people—especially people under the age of thirty—don’t rely on mainstream media sources (which, btw, includes Fox News, which is the main source of information for a plurality of people). They rely on whatever shows up in their world—youtube, perhaps Facebook, groupchats, google. That’s the same informational strategy that people over thirty have, but it’s just a different set of sources—more reliance on Facebook, cable and broadcast news. We are in a world in which most people make important political decisions on the basis of sources that will confirm our sense that we are right because we are good people, and so we are on the side of good, and we are opposing bad people who are, well, really bad.
Because they’re so bad, we shouldn’t listen to them.

This way of thinking about politics—we are in an action movie battle between the obviously good and the obviously bad—is how democracies end.

Of course, neither the Athenians nor the Romans were watching action movies, but they both tanked their democratic republics (neither was purely democratic, nor purely republic) because the rich and varied world of their political options got reduced to a zero-sum game between political factions. People were cheerfully willing to make decisions that hurt the community as a whole just because (they thought) it hurt “the other side” more than it hurt them. They burnt down their own stadium to keep “the other side” from winning.

What should they have done?

They shouldn’t have assumed that their side was so good, and the other side so evil, that winning at any cost was morally or even rationally justified. They shouldn’t have assumed that there were only two sides. That’s a false binary.

When I say this, a lot of people—who are still mired in thinking that there are two sides—assume that, since I’m saying that our political options are not accurately represented as a contest between good and evil, think I’m saying there is no evil, or there is no good, or all positions are equal. That’s another false binary: you either believe that there is a clear binary between good and evil and it’s easy to see and you’re some kind of hippy-dippy moral relativist.

I believe in evil. Slavery was evil. Nazism was evil. But, even in regard to slavery, there wasn’t a binary between two positions. There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but slavery had to be protected because reasons. This is called the “necessary evil” argument.

There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but we couldn’t possibly have freed slaves in our country (the anti-slavery/pro-colonialism argument), we should abolish slavery and immediately grant all slaves the full rights of citizenship, we should end slavery gradually, we should give slaves 40 acres and a mule, and others.

Demagoguery says there are only two choices. Democracy says there aren’t.
There are people making arguments in bad faith; there are bad arguments. But our political world is not a binary in which all the good arguments are on our side and all the bad arguments are on the other.
No one deliberately chooses to succumb to a rhetoric we recognize as demagoguery. We never think we’re suckered by demagoguery. They are.
And that is how a culture of demagoguery thrives.

Demagoguery withers when people recognize our own attraction to it, when we call out in-group demagoguery, when we hold in- and out-group rhetoric to the same argumentative standards.

Demagoguery thrives when we approach every issue from the perspective that the in-group deserves to be treated differently (because we are good, with good motives) from any out-group. It withers when we decide that we will treat others, and their arguments, as we would want to be treated. People who believe that you should treat others as you want to be treated are called to step away from thinking that any harm to others is a win for us. It isn’t.

Policy issues are about policies: Or, the problem of Big Bike

I’ve been writing about how the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies damaging (and proto-demagogic, if not actively demagogic) ways that Americans think about policy deliberation.

This one is about bike lanes. Our neighborhood happens to be a great place for biking, and, so, many people come to the neighborhood to bike. Some of those cyclists are total jerks. Some cyclists run stop signs, get really aggressive in intersections with pedestrians, have lights so bright they could trigger a migraine, and some have no lights at all; a surprising number shout at people at the off-leash dog park for having dogs off leash.

Yet, many cyclists argue that cycling is a public good. And that’s an argument with legs.

There’s a lot of research to show that electric cars aren’t actually all that green, nor are hybrids. They’re probably better than many cars, but, really, the greenest method of transportation is walking, biking, or bussing. Biking as a method of commuting is great for the environment. So, if there is one group that can claim the public good, it would be people who bike to work.

Most of them are not, at that moment, cycling to work, and I have no idea how many of them finish their route around the neighborhood and then get in a car and drive to work. And running or walking to work is just as good for the environment as cycling, so this doesn’t end the debate. And there is a debate.

My neighborhood has been debating a change to the bike lanes, and far too much of the argument has been about whether cyclists are good. That’s transmogrifying the vexed issues of how to encourage cycling rather than driving, reduce cycling/vehicle and cycling/pedestrian accidents, and deal with the pox of scooters into the irrelevant question of whether cyclists or non-cyclists are better people.

The question of whether our neighborhood should have bike lanes isn’t about whether cyclists are better people than non-cyclists, but about whether they have the right not to be killed.

Austin has decided to try to reduce vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist fatalities to zero. That should be a shared goal for everyone in Austin. It isn’t a goal, however, for people who realize that making Austin a safer place for cyclists will mildly inconvenience us. The most sensible policy in terms of reducing vehicle/cyclist accidents would be one that would reduce the ability of people in my neighborhood to park on the street, including me and my husband.

The rational decision for the community as a whole  will make parking in front of our house  more limited. I’m very grumpy that the right decision isn’t the best decision for me personally—I’m not a cyclist, and I can get very grumpy about them. As I said above, a lot of them are total jerks.

But policies issues are never actually about which group is better. Policy issues are about policies.

The City of Austin had hearings about the issue of planning of bike lanes. And various people argued in favor of policies that are demonstrably successful in terms of reducing car/cyclist (and car/pedestrian) fatal accidents.

And my neighborhood mailing list had people flinging themselves around about how there were a lot of people at the hearings who were cyclists. And they didn’t argue that the cyclists’ data was wrong, or that their argument was irrational. In fact, they didn’t engage in rational policy argumentation to refute the cyclists’ cases at all. Instead, they argued that the cyclists had all gone to the meeting and thereby overwhelmed the views of regular people. (I’m not citing or linking because these are neighbors.) They said, in other words, it was Big Bike.

This is the classic—and profoundly anti-democratic—way to describe political disagreements. I’m a scholar of how communities make bad policy decisions, and so I know that, when people are facing a decision in which members of that community have legitimately different positions, the first impulse is to deny that disagreement is legitimate on the basis of the identities of the people making the argument. The people who disagree are part of a special interest conspiracy (Big Bike), stupid, prejudiced, misinformed.

The irony is that: if you think that your political position is obviously right, if you think that you and only people who think like you are right (whether it’s about Trump, the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, this change to teaching evaluations, bike lanes in my neighborhood, the need for the wall), you subvert democracy.

Democracy is about a world in which people argue together knowing that it isn’t a question about the right answer but about the policy that best seems to answer the needs we all present in the context of the information we now have. Democracy is a world of understanding that our world is more than my world.

Demagoguery is a world in which people whine that the policy doesn’t personally solve their specific issues.

People who whine that two or three times a year they have to be mildly inconvenienced, that the city doesn’t treat graffiti as a sign of our being on the edge of West Side Story levels of gang warfare (although, to be blunt, I would love to participate in any walking down the street with some kind of “Jets” song), that bagged poop in your trash is a crime against God and Nature and specifically prohibited by Leviticus, that the only reason we have argumentatively defensible bike lanes is that Big Bike flooded the hearing—they’re all demagogues. We’re all demagogues.

If you say that Bernie was obviously the right choice, and Hillary was a shill promoted by neo-liberals, if you say that Hillary was obviously the right choice, and Sanders supporters were dupes of Russia, if you say that Trump was obviously the right choice because Hillary’s corruption and unsafe email practices show she shouldn’t be President…. if you say that our vexed and uncertain world of an array of political options is really a world of the right answer (yours) and dumbass/evil/corrupt answers, you’re a demagogue.

You can, and should, be passionate about politics, and even passionate about the policy you’re advocating. But being passionate about your policy should mean that you’re passionate that it is the best policy among many, and that you passionately believe it can meet the standards of policy argumentation. Being passionate about solving a problem should mean that you’re so passionate about solving the problem that you’re willing to admit your plan is wrong. You should be so passionate about solving the problem that you treat in- v. out- group loyalty issues as distractions.

I don’t care whether you’re arguing that Trump is obviously right in everything, libs are obviously wrong in everything, GOPpers are obviously wrong in everything, Dems are obviously wrong not to support this candidate, or any other claim that frames vexed and nuanced and complicated issues as things in which there is an obvious right answer, your boss is a fool for not doing the right thing, your spouse is an idiot for not agreeing with you. You’re engaged in demagoguery. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But you aren’t oriented toward a reasonable discussion of your policy options.

My neighborhood is not threatened by Big Bike.

A lot of cyclists in my neighborhood really are aggressive jerks. But a lot of them aren’t. And here is the most important point: they aren’t a they. They’re an us: a lot of them are neighbors. The people arguing for bike lanes are not an Other imposing their special interest on us; they are our neighbors, they are people who disagree with us.

Democratic deliberation and dog poop in my trash

Several smiling poop emojis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your being frightened doesn’t mean those people are dangerous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First: marathons, values, and fairness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a healthy community, good people really disagree.

You’re the propagandist!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those are the wrong questions. Better questions are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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