Author: Trish

Migration to Hope: A Call To Action

[This is a guest blog post by Michelle Castillo]

I remember it like it was just yesterday: we had been learning about racisim and discrimination in Ms. Moxley’s fourth grade class. We had read a picture book about Rubi Bridges, and I had been reading Number The Stars – a book about a girl living through Nazi-occupied Denmark- as my take-home book on the unit.

And I was deeply affected.

I went home and at night in my prayer, I cried. I demanded that God tell me how people – how adults – could do such horrible things to other people, to hate so deeply without knowing them, just based on the color of skin or a different belief system. I promised God I’d do everything in my power to change that. And, as all little girls should, I felt I would.

In undergrad, I was blessed to have taken Trish Roberts-Miller’s class on the rhetoric of racism that helped me answer the “how” that comes down to, simply in my mind, fear. Fear of the “other,” that allows us to strip the “other” of humanity and project fear’s progeny of anger and hate into the unthinkable things we do to “others,” like enslave, hose, beat, bomb, and destroy.

Today, our government is tearing children, in some cases toddlers, away from their parents for seeking asylum in our borders. These are families that are fleeing violence and persecution from their countries, and the only way — let me say this again — the only way they can seek asylum is to present themselves at the border. And for doing that, our government is taking their children away. They could be us. Some of us are them. Some of us, our parents or grandparents or great grandparents were them. We could have been them had we been born in another place.

This administration is weaponizing the most powerful feeling on Earth, that many faith traditions use to explain God,
that of a parent’s love for a child — that would literally walk a thousand miles to protect their children from violence only to have that child ripped from their arms — to achieve its twisted immigration ends of deterrence.

Their message: “if you come here with your children fleeing violence, we’ll take your children, so don’t come.”

And this government is getting away with doing this state sanctioned violence towards children – today, right now – because 1) we’ve allowed Trump and his enablers to call immigrants “animals,” to strip all of us, really, that don’t see the world as they do of our humanity, and 2) because of the silence of some of our friends.

Friends that don’t like to talk politics.
Friends that voted for him because he was “prolife” but are now silent in condemning this torture of children.
Friends who, yeah feel bad this is happening, but it’s not happening to them, doesn’t impact anyone they know, so they’re staying out of it.
Friends that see this as a partisan issue and they’re Republican so even though they’re morally repulsed by the idea, they’re uncomfortable speaking out.
Friends that don’t yet know the power of their voice in creating change.

Friends, I realize this has been a long post, but since you’ve stuck with me this far, I’m here to ask you to break your silence. If you haven’t called your elected officials, if you haven’t donated for the legal defense of these children and their families, if you’re a person of faith and haven’t prayed for these families, please do.

As fourth grade Michelle quickly learned, she can’t change the entire world. But you can impact those around you. And that’s a hell of a start.

Advice for graduate students and junior faculty about writing

For years, I’ve been intrigued by the paradox that people who have written well enough to get to graduate school (or to finish, or to write a first book) at some point find themselves unable to write. I fell deep into the research on that issue, and I thought I would write a book about it. Well, actually, I did, but I’m not sure about trying to get it published. Today I found out that the place I published it still exists, and so here it is.

Demagoguery of the Elite (aka Rhetoric Society of America paper)

It’s common for people to assume that demagoguery is a subset of populism (so it is not a problem of elites), but the notion that demagoguery and populism are necessarily connected is actually problematic—and largely the consequence of some of most influential writers on demagoguery (such as Plato and Hobbtes) being what Robert Ivie calls “demophobic” as well as a misunderstanding of how the term worked in the classical era.

Basically, my argument is that assuming that demagoguery is necessarily a subset of populism is that it makes three characteristics crucial to the definition of the term:

    1. audience (non-elite)
    2. style (rhetoric with particular characteristics, especially recurrent topoi),
    3. and political consequences (sometimes simply policies with which they disagree, sometimes ones that are agreed to have been harmful).

Why have all three? You end up with a Venn diagram that, for no particular reason, makes the bad policy decisions of the non-elite more important than ones made on the part of the elite, or on the part of groups that include both.

There are four conditions under which it seems to me reasonable to restrict the study of demagoguery to the non-elite. The first is if the evidence suggests that the elite never make bad decisions; the second is if the mistakes of the elite are never due to demagoguery; the third is if the kind of demagoguery to which the elite are susceptible is significantly different from that to which the non-elite are susceptible, and the fourth is if the who study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy.

What I want to say is that, if we are instead concerned about this overlap—disastrous public decisions and a particular kind of rhetoric—then we should focus on that intersection. I’ve been doing that for some time, and, like many others, have ended up with a definition that emphasizes:

    • treating issues as us v. them (an in-group and out-group);
    • scapegoating an out-group for the problems of the in-group;
    • therefore calling for purifying our community, nation, or world of the out-group through disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating that out-group;
    • so, it’s a reframing of policy discourse as performances of in-group loyalty.

There are a bunch of other characteristics, but that isn’t really the point here—the point is whether any of the above four conditions matters—do elites never make bad decisions? when they do, is the rhetoric different? That isn’t what I see, and it seems to me that they are just as susceptible to demagoguery as any other group, but, as I’ll argue, that’s partially the consequence of the ambiguity in the notion of elite.

Before I get there, though, I should talk about why there is the assumption that demagoguery is necessarily populist discourse, and there are two brief answers. One is that, for people like Plato, Plutarch, Hobbes, Le Bon, and even Reinhard Luthin, the study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy. For them demagoguery epitomizes the unreliability of the “masses” and their profound lack of fitness for power. It’s a circular argument: democracy is bad because it gives power to people who are susceptible to demagoguery, and demagoguery is defined in such a way that only the masses’ supposed susceptibility to it is noted.

The second is the assumption that in the classical era it always meant populism and it was always use in a derogatory way. At least until Plato (and, in some cases, even after) it was a neutral term meaning simply the leader of the democratic party—that is, the one with policies oriented toward helping the demes. The leader of the that party was a demagogue, but he wasn’t necessarily a non-elite. Pericles, Cleisthenes, Alcibiades, and Themistocles were all demagogues, and they were all members of the elite.

Assuming that demagogues were necessarily non-elite (or populist) is like a scholar two thousand years from now assuming that any Democratic candidate was a populist who supported democracy.

Nor was there necessarily the assumption that demagogues were irresponsible in their rhetoric. Andocides, in Against Alcibiades, condemns Alcibiades not for being a demagogue, but for acting like one (4.27)–that is, pretending to be a champion of the demos, when he really is not. Hyperides, in his attack on Demosthenes, says a demagogue “worthy of the name should be the savior of his country, not a deserter” (Against Demosthenes Fragment 4, column 16b, line 26), suggesting that the term might be used as a term of praise.[3] Isocrates, for instance, praises Theseus and calls him a demagogue (Helen 37); he regularly refers to Pericles as a demagogue (see, for instance, Antidosis 234, To Nicocles 16, On the Peace 122). Like many other writers, Isocrates compares current demagogues to previous ones, criticizing the current ones as worse than those before (see, for example, On the Peace 126). At one point in Aristophanes’ The Knights, one of the slaves explains, “Demagoguery is no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the ignorant and disgusting” (The Knights 190).[4]

Thucydides is often assumed to be an elitist who objected to Cleon on political grounds—that Cleon was a populist. But Cleon was no more populist than Pericles, and Pericles is the hero of the piece. Thucydides objected to Cleon’s rhetoric, just as he objected to Alcibiades (a demagogue) and Nikias (an elitist). Thucydides’ history is a classic Greek tragedy, and the tragedy is about rhetoric, not about class.

Aristotle, interestingly enough doesn’t use the term demagoguery to mean populists exclusively. He mentions demagoguery within the oligarchs, for instance, thereby raising the question of a demagoguery of the elite. And that’s the question I want to pursue.

There are a lot of problems with assuming that demagoguery is necessarily exclusively connected to populist policies, audience, or discourse. One of them, as mentioned previously, is the toxic fantasy that the elite are inherently better at decision-making, and therefore elite rhetoric is necessarily better in some way—a notion that posits a stable elite, and even that doesn’t make much sense. Do we mean elite in terms of economic class, political power, education, or culture? Those aren’t the same, after all. University professors might be considered cultural and/or educational elite, but we generally aren’t politically or economically elite.

And, if you define demagoguery without attention to the class of the rhetors or audience, and instead by the rhetoric, you can see plenty of instances of demagoguery of the elite. Proslavery demagoguery often had an audience of political and/or economic elites (such as Congressional debate over the gag rule, pro-secessionist rhetoric in the secession assemblies, various state and federal court decisions, and very learned books on Scriptural defenses of slavery, legal and philosophical apologia for slavery, the Dred Scott decision); eugenics was predominantly an elite and even expert discourse and generally demagogic; I’ve sat in MLA Delegate Assembly meetings and listened to demagoguery; the US Supreme Court decision Hirabayashi v. US is sheer demagoguery; Alfred Rosenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Ludwig Muller were all elite Nazis writing to other elites; they were building on elite demagogues like Houston Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and Arthur de Gobineau. So, regardless of how “elite” is defined—cultural, political, economic, educational—there are instances of demagoguery within an elite audience.

Take, for instance, Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1916, the quote below is from the fourth edition, 1922)—sometimes called “Hitler’s Bible” (because of Hitler’s praise of it), and profoundly influential among the elite, but not a particularly big seller. This passage, picked at random, is typical:

Notice the hedging, also the uncited references to knowledge that is vaguely out there—Grant presents himself as someone announcing facts that are well known, and his hedging makes him seem to be a nuanced and careful researcher. He isn’t—he isn’t presenting an anthropological consensus, and his argument is circular (all good things come from Nordics because any sign of civilization is taken as a sign of Nordic presence).

Dimitra Koutsantoni notes that expert discourse often relies on what she calls “common knowledge markers:” “words and expressions that exclusively underscore authors’ beliefs by presenting them as given, as knowledge shared by all members of the community” (166). Koutsantoni argues that “By emphasizing certainty in and attitude toward claims, and by presenting them as given and shared, authors control readers’ inferences and demand their agreement and sharing of their views (power entailing solidarity)” (170). Grant’s use of hedging and common knowledge markers  gives him an air of precision and expertise—he seems to be doing little more than stacking data.

Racist demagoguery surprisingly often claims to be doing little more than stacking data and citing expert consensus, even if, in the cases of David Duke’s My Awakening (1998), Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), or Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice (1948), they are oriented toward a broader audience.

Demagoguery of the elite can mean demagogic texts and arguments circulated within a political elite (such as Henry Laughlin’s technical and very demagogic testimony in favor of the 1924 Immigration Act racist restrictions), in which he was speaking as an expert (disciplinary elite) to members of the political elite; pro-eugenics demagoguery such as his might also be purely within the disciplinary elite (communications within the Galton Society); and there might also be an attempt to translate disciplinary elite consenses to a less elite audience (Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color).

In many of those situations, rhetors used the same rhetorical strategies typical of expert discourse—hedging, technical language, and common knowledge markers. Sometimes, such as William Workman’s surprisingly boring pro-segregation The Case for the South (1960), the texts are dispassionate (Chappell 142); sometimes hyperbolic and explicitly fear-mongering, such as Bilbo’s 1948 Take Your Choice. Emotionality, like the populist criteria, doesn’t seem to me to have an important difference.

Because demagoguery scapegoats an out-group for all the problems of the in-group, there is almost always an element of fear—an existential threat—but demagoguery doesn’t always have emotional markers. As with the Grant, Workman, or Laughlin, it can have very few boosters and instead appeal to common knowledge markers to establish the existential threat—there can be an emphasis on the rhetor’s self-control in the face of the threat, so that the discourse is not about fear in the in-group, but the threat of the out-group.

Social psychologists call this complementary projection, “in which stereotypes serve as justifications of anxieties (e.g., I fear, therefore you must be dangerous)” (Glick 135). Earl Warren, in testifying for mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, used the existence of racist fear on the part of himself and various peace officers as proof that Japanese Americans were dangerous, proslavery rhetors regularly used their own fear of slave insurrection as proof that abolitionists were in a conspiracy to incite such insurrections, current anti-immigration rhetoric appeals to xenophobia as evidence of Mexicans being “bad hombres” and “animals.”

Demagoguery of the elite not only regularly engages in complementary projection, particularly through such rhetorical strategies as common knowledge markers, but I would argue it legitimates complementary projection, by making it seem as though there is expert consensus that an out-group is essentially and implacably dangerous. Thus, if we restrict the concept of demagoguery to populist demagoguery, we can seem to give a free pass to the equally damaging demagoguery of the elite, and thereby protect it from criticism.

My argument about demagoguery is that we should focus on the rhetorical strategies and recurrent characteristics, and not on the motives or identities of the rhetors engaged in it. In fact, I argue, the shift of stasis to identity and motive is one of the characteristics of demagoguery—not all such shifts are demagogic but demagoguery always has that shift. Thus, if, as scholars, we make the shift to the focus on identity, we have an inherently demagogic scholarly project.

In short, if we’re concerned about the ways that a kind of rhetoric contributes to disastrous public deliberation then I see no reason to assume that the populism of a rhetor’s political agenda or rhetoric is a distinguishing variable for demagoguery. The notion that elites are immune to demagoguery isn’t just false; it is perniciously so.

[2] Demosthenes uses it simply to mean a leader of the people (see, for instance, Against Aristogeiton II 4).

[3] Lane’s claim that “None of the historians, playwrights, and orators of classical Athens relied upon a perjorative term for demagogue in developing their analyses of bad political leadership” (180) seems to me slightly overstated—they seem aware that there is a perjorative connotation possible. It seems to me similar to how writers might currently use words like feminist, liberal, or progressive. But, certainly, I agree with Lane that they do not use the term in an exclusively perjorative way. Lane credits Plutarch with the demagogue/statesman distinction as we have inherited it—that is, thinking it was present in earlier writers (192).

[4] Although several scholars share this reading (Dover 69, note 1; Lane 185) it’s possible, of course, that Aristophanes is making fun of the tendency that demagogues have to accuse one another of demagoguery, and we’re not to take this comment seriously at all. Still, his criticism of demagogues is their tendency to rely on flattery—that is, not who they are, but their rhetorical strategies.

[5] Aristotle mentions a specific instance of this kind of situation in Rhodes: “the demagogues used to provide pay for public services, and also to hinder the payment of money owed to the naval captains” (Politics 1304b 30).

[6] That Aristotle could refer to “oligarchic demagogues” suggests that the term had shifted meanings between the time of Isocrates and Aristotle, and it no longer signified a leader of the demes.

[Some of] These People Are Animals

[From this article]

From Understanding Genocide

“We cannot expect bystanders to sacrifice their lives for others. But we can expect individuals, groups, and nations to act early along a continuum of destruction, when the danger to themselves is limited, and the potential exists for inhibiting the evolution of increasing destructiveness. This will only happen if people–children, adults, whole societies–develop an awareness of their common humanity with other people, as well as of the psychological processes in themselves that turn them against others. Institutions and modes of functioning can develop that embody a shared humanity and make exclusion from the moral realm more difficult.” (Staub 35)

“Similarly, the philosopher Beryl Land has written about how very often, before the Nazis exterminated Jews, they first reduced them to a ‘subhuman state’ through ‘systematic brutality and degradation.’ This, he argued, made killing them more ‘palatable,’ because it is easier to kill a person once he or she no longer resembles a human being. [….] [P]erpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justification for both their past and future victimization, even though the perpetrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.” (Newman 59)

I know that people defending our President’s characterizing people trying to come to America as “animals” by saying that he just meant some Mexicans–members of a dangerous gang. And that’s a common move. He didn’t mean everyone; he only meant one part of that group, and it is a justifiable and accurate way to characterize that one part. Thus, Trump’s use of the term “animals” for some people trying to come into the country is nothing like Nazi rhetoric.

Nope, that makes it exactly like Nazi rhetoric about Jews. It’s also exactly like pro-internment rhetoric about Japanese Americans, anti-immigration rhetoric directed at Italians, eastern Europeans, the Irish, the Germans, Muslims, red-baiting, and, well, every argument for disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating some group.

Nazis regularly acknowledged that not all Jews were bad. What they argued is that some part of that group was so dangerous that none of them should be treated as full citizens (the same argument about all the groups mentioned above), and all should be treated with extreme suspicion.

That kind of move–allowing the worst members to stand for the entire group–is only something that happens with an out-group. But it does happen. And Trump’s rhetoric is vague; he does seem to be talking about all Mexicans, and he is heard as doing exactly that.

Trump’s rhetoric won’t necessarily hurt his chances with Latinx–it’s fairly common for recent immigrants to band together against this set of immigrants (my own family history demonstrates that), and so they are likely to hear him as criticizing some immigrants. It’s easy for people to acknowledge exceptions within the in-group. But non-Latinx aren’t.

But Trump’s way of talking about parts of some immigrant group is vague. A friendly reading says he’s talking about a small group and just failing to make clear that he doesn’t think that subset represents the whole group. A less friendly reading wonders why he keeps making that mistake.

Another friendly reading says he doesn’t make the group/sub-group distinction because the sub-group is a synecdoche for the group as a whole. After all, that’s how thinking about the out-group works–any member can be taken as representative of the whole. And, clearly, that is how many supporters of Trump hear him, especially the non-trivial number of his supporters whose racism motivated their support for him.

More important, that is how exclusionary rhetoric works, including Hitler’s, by allowing or encouraging the public to think that a group is dangerous because its representative members are. What Trump is doing, and has been doing for a long time, is encouraging people to fear immigrants because some of them might be bad. And it’s working.

On the issue of bias and the genetic fallacy

One thing that has bothered me about composition textbooks for years is how many of them endorse the genetic fallacy (and motivism). A lot of research advice tells students to find “objective” sources, and then proceed to a muddled definition of “objective” (usually meaning true, non-controversial, expert, universally-accepted, and from a non-perspectival epistemological position—so conflating ontology, audience reaction, and an indefensible epistemology).

Humans have biases. All humans. All sources. It isn’t possible to be unbiased. There are two thoroughly useless ways to respond to that fact: declare that every in-group source (that tells you what you already believe to be true is true) is unbiased and everyone else is biased (so you can dismiss disconfirming evidence on the grounds that it is disconfirming); decide everyone is biased and so everyone can believe whatever they want.

The first of those is the common response of dismissing every piece of uncomfortable information on the grounds that it’s from a biased source. It’s often a consequence of inoculation, and it means you only trust information that confirms what you believe. It’s toxic. It means you shouldn’t listen to anyone who might tell you that your in-group sources of information are wrong.[1]

The second is also toxic to democratic deliberation since it means that there is no need to listen to anyone who disagrees. If everyone’s position is irrational, then there’s no reason to worry about whether yours is.

There are two useful ways to respond: 1) admit your own biases, and try to account for them (if you’re biased in favor of thinking guns are evil, try to look more fairly at arguments for gun ownership); 2) try to find really smart sources of out-group arguments.

Inoculation works by telling people that they are being presented both sides (but they aren’t being presented the smartest version of other positions).

A source being “biased” isn’t a reason to dismiss it.

Good sources give their sources, represent the oppositions fairly, and are internally logically consistent. A “biased” argument that did all those things is still a good source—it’s a good argument for what that group believes.

As teachers of argument, we need to stop talking as though being biased and being bad arguments are the same. They aren’t.

We need to teach about citing sources, representing the opposition fairly, and having internally consistent arguments.

This isn’t a new argument. Dismissing an argument because it has bad origins is known as the genetic fallacy. And assuming that an argument can be dismissed because it’s presented by an out-group rhetor (and therefore on the part of someone with bad motives) is the fallacy of motivism.

Refusing to look at disconfirming information because the source is biased is fallacious. But that doesn’t mean all sources are equally valid, nor that you should never give up on a source.

I gave up on Mother Jones, Blue State, and DailyKos (unless I’m willing to click on all the links) because too often I found them to have misrepresented data and/or their opposition. Giving up on a source because it doesn’t give sources, misrepresents its opposition, and/or is internally inconsistent is perfectly reasonable, but that judgment isn’t about the “bias” of the source—it’s about that source being shitty at argument.

[1] Really cunning media engage in a kind of double inoculation by appearing to present criticism of an in-group political figure—but it’s trivial, or stupid. Thus, consumers of that media think they’ve been given “both” sides since they heard something “negative” about the in-group. They’ve been presented weak versions of the opposition, and that’s what makes it inoculation. Yet, at the same time, they sincerely believe they’ve listened to both sides, and so aren’t in a bubble.

Peter declared, “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert you.”

Listening to the exchange with Peter in “Matthaus Passion,” and the exchange with Peter makes me a little weepy.

This is the script (from here)

Recitative [Tenor. Bass I. Bass II]
Violino I/II, Viola, Continuo Evangelist (T), Peter (B.I), Jesus (B.II)
Evangelist:
Petrus aber antwortete und sprach zu ihm:
But Peter answered and said to him:
Peter:
Wenn sie auch alle sich an dir ärgerten,
Even if everybody else is offended because of you,`
so will ich doch mich nimmermehr ärgern.
yet I shall never be offended.
Evangelist:
Jesus sprach zu ihm:
Jesus said to him:
Jesus:
Wahrlich, ich sage dir: In dieser Nacht,
Truly, I say to you: this night,
ehe der Hahn krähet, wirst du mich dreimal verleugnen.
before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.
Evangelist:
Petrus sprach zu ihm:
Peter said to him:
Peter:
Und wenn ich mit dir sterben müßte,
Even if I had to die with you,
so will ich dich nicht verleugnen.
I shall not deny you.
Evangelist:
Desgleichen sagten auch alle Jünger.
The same said all his disciples.

Other translations are here. 

As many of you know, I’ve been reading a lot about the Holocaust, and especially the era when Hitler was able to put into place the culture, processes, and propaganda that would enable the Holocaust. Hitler’s serial genocides didn’t begin in 1941, but in 1933, when the people who could have stopped the processes being put in place chose not to because they liked the short-term outcome they were getting (triumphing over socialists, a conservative political agenda, a rhetoric that openly promoted nationalism and ethnocentrism, and rabidly anti-immigration rhetoric, as well as the open equation of the national identity with one ethnic/political group). The military liked the new open militarism, and lots of people liked the rhetoric that said that Germany had never been wrong in its previous invasion that had had disastrous outcomes in terms of economics and prestige.

And I see so many people now condemn Hitler as though they would have resisted. And, of course, I like to think I would have resisted. Timothy Snyder’s powerful Black Earth ends with a moving description of various people who resisted, and we want to see ourselves as someone like that.

And so did Peter.

I think we’re all Peter. Peter did eventually resist, of course—he got a second chance. I think he resisted later because he knew that resistance was hard, because he hadn’t resisted before. Peter’s problem when Jesus first told him that Peter would not resist was that he thought resistance was easy. We underestimate what resistance means, and we overestimate our ability to resist because we forget how oppression happens.

Hitler didn’t start out saying that he intended to expel and/or exterminate all the inferior races/identities (Jews, Romas, Sintis, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, leftists), nor that he intended to restrict the churches, start another world war, and engage in serial genocides, but he did. He claimed he intended the opposite, that he would respect all religions, work for economic stability, and maintain peace. He would, he said, never start a war. (And, as it happens, he continued to insist on that–he never admitted that his aggressions were aggressions, always insisting he was forced into military action by other countries refusing to go along with his plans or that they were about to attack.) Hitler’s rhetoric was one of national entitlement, and he was clear in Mein Kampf what that meant—Germany was entitled to military domination, European hegemony, its own way of narrating history, the expulsion of Judaism and Bolshevism (which he saw as the same) from Europe, and a kind of Aryan colonialism in Europe. When 1933 rolled around, he continued to argue for the same policies, but, through a careful use of dog whistles, made it seem as though he had become more reasonable.

In other words, Hitler said to people, “I am a completely different person from who I have always been,” and people accepted it.

They accepted it because they had a conversion narrative about how a person who has always been and behaved a certain way would suddenly behave a new way. Thus, they said, you can ignore everything he has always been and said. Because they were getting the political agenda they had always wanted.

So, even though they had every reason to think his intentions weren’t good, they didn’t worry about the processes he was putting in place—they liked the short-term outcome. They liked the political agenda. They ignored the process.

People often quote Martin Niemoller.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

When I first came across this quote, I thought it was metaphorical. But it wasn’t. It’s exactly what Niemoller did. Neimoller, a Lutheran pastor, really didn’t object when socialists, unionists, and Jews were arrested. He continued to try to work with the Nazis. The Nazis, whose religious beliefs are complicated (since Hitler lied like a rug, it’s hard to say what his beliefs were, other than that he genuinely believed himself to be chosen by the Almighty to cleanse the world), clearly wanted something along the lines of a state church (in an odd way, they were theocrats), and therefore intended to undermine the power of other sources of power, but they did so slowly. Just as Hitler made a pact with the USSR that he fully intended to abrogate, so he made promises to the Catholic and Lutheran churches he fully intended to violate. And, so, those churches chose to ignore his history of being a liar in favor of believing that he wasn’t lying to them, and they did so because, at first, he came through with his promises to them.

When liars lie in ways that benefit the in-group, we think they are on our side, and can therefore be trusted. That Hitler also delivered a passionate and loyal group of voters, and that his base would enable others to get their policy agenda passed (such as restricting birth control, banning homosexuality, enhancing the military) just simply meant that people were willing to overlook how he was getting those policies through—his demonizing of democracy in favor of some kind of authoritarian understanding of “true” people, his insistence that the judiciary follow his policy agenda (rather than worry about whether judges were fair, deeply knowledgeable, or respected), his equation of dissent with disloyalty, his throttling of the Reichstag.

Niemoller was a conservative anti-Semite who genuinely didn’t care when groups he disliked were silenced and imprisoned. He didn’t mind that they were silenced because he was okay with the outcome, and didn’t pay attention to the process. He only realized he should have cared when the same processes and logic were used to silence and then imprison him.

We are told that Jesus’ disciples wanted to fight when he was arrested, so perhaps, like many people, Peter was willing to engage in a big, public battle. But his courage failed in the little moments—in the moment that would have meant he would have been arrested without drama, without spectacle. No one would have known. Bravery isn’t about the big moments; it’s about the little ones.

Niemoller, a conservative anti-Semite, later realized that he should have been brave on behalf of people he found dangerous and very other. Peter realized he should have been brave in the private moment, when there was danger to him and no public display of his bravery.

When we imagine a movie moment in which we are brave, and there is an audience approving of us, we are not imagining how people enable tragedy.

Persuasion happens

Recently, I heard a really good discussion by a couple of people who do and promote a lot of good research on how people think. And one of them said, “We used to believe that you could change peoples’ minds by presenting them with research, but research shows that isn’t the case, so I don’t believe that anymore.”

He didn’t appear to notice the irony.

A lot of research on persuasion isn’t very good, in that it shows something that Augustine talks about—people are not likely to believe completely different things from listening to one speech. And people in a study who are presented with new information don’t change their minds because they shouldn’t—for all they know, since they know it’s a study, the information is deliberately false. Even the better research on persuasion shows that a lot of people don’t change their minds on issues associated with in-group loyalty on the basis of one argument.   (The one exception is if they are presented with information that the in-group supports a particular position—then they are likely to get their position in line with the in-group.)

But, as in the case above, people do change their minds. Philip Tetlock shows that even authoritarians change their minds—they just deny they did. It’s hard for authoritarians and naïve realists to admit they’ve changed their minds because admitting that they were wrong means admitting that their whole model of judgment is wrong.

And research does have an impact on that process of changing our minds. The short essays in How I Changed My Mind About Evolution have a common theme: people realized that the anti-evolution rhetoric they’d been taught depended on a misrepresentation of evolution. The inoculation technique  —presenting people with a weak version of an argument they will later hear or read—backfired because the authors in that book realized it was a weaker version.

Inoculation is, it seems to me, a particularly unethical strategy when it comes to religious issues, since it’s a violation of Christ’s requirement that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And, unhappily, it often results in people rejecting religion rather than rejecting the narrow and bigoted religious ideology that can only survive by misrepresenting its opposition.

For inoculation to be effective, it has to be coupled with either demonization/pathologizing of out-groups (out-group views are so spiritually dangerous or intellectually infectious that you can’t even let yourself listen) or insistence on pure in-group loyalty. If inoculation is promoted in a culture that also emphasizes victimization—the in-group is in danger of being exterminated, and so listening to the out-group is treasonous—then people might not realize they’re being presented with a weak version of out-group arguments.

Inoculation (coupled with demonization/pathologizing of the out-group) isn’t specific to reactionary politics, although, because of “conservatives”’ privileging of in-group loyalty , it tends to work better with people who vote conservative, but one can see it everywhere on the spectrum of political arguments.

Non-conservatives unintentionally enhance the effectiveness of inoculation through various practices: 1) repeating misrepresentation of out-group belief systems (no, conservative Christians are not hypocritical because they cite Hebrew Bible rules about sex and yet reject the rules about shellfish)—just stop that); 2) not knowing the best arguments for the positions we oppose (for instance, not only are there instances of people stopping crimes by having a gun, but gun bans have a complicated consequence ; 3) treating all out-group members as identical; 4) relying on sources that misrepresent their own sources (Blue State, dailykos, and Mother Jones—I’m looking at you).

Projection is also important in persuasion, and one aspect of projection that works well for various in-group enclaves is to condemn others for being in an enclave. Really effective propaganda machines appear to offer both sides, by presenting the audience with the desired political outcome, and then a more extreme version (so segregationists like Boutwell could claim to be reasonable because he didn’t support violence — keep in mind that that stance worked, so that people presented Boutwell’s implacable opposition to integration was reasonable, and King’s position was unwise) All factional media insists that we are getting our information from objective sources; they only consume factional media. And, that we are consuming media that engages in inoculation means we don’t think we are in a bubble. We think we are listening to the other side.

People are persuaded by research. They are persuaded by research they consider valid and that they are persuaded represents the consensus of responsible experts on the subject.

All of those terms–research, validity, consensus, responsible experts–are vexed, and heavily influenced by in-group favoritism, but persuasion happens.

We are all persuaded. The worst thing about our current political situation is that there is so much discourse that says “I have become persuaded that persuasion is impossible, and so we must stop trying to persuade others.”

No. When people are persuaded that persuasion is impossible, they are preparing themselves for violence.

[The image is of Nazis enjoying humiliating Jews on Austria abandoning democracy and joining Germany.]

Gun nuts and sloppy rhetoric

 

There’s a blog post that’s been going around Facebook that cites a bunch of studies in order to come to the conclusion that

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

I’m not claiming that the article is entirely wrong, nor that every claim it makes is invalidated by the “notallgunowners” objection (although I’ll make that objection below). But it really is a deeply problematic article.

Some of the studies aren’t very good (really? 20 men?), but some seem to me perfectly valid. Except for one thing—the tendency in social science research to conclude X group does Y because the studies show that 60-70% of X group does Y. That kind of conclusion assumes that the 30-40% are outliers who can be ignored, as opposed to their being a different kind of person, who should be separated out because they show that there is a significantly different causal relationship (this is one of my objections to a lot of the research on persuasion).

So, for instance, the SSQ study (linked above) that looks really good to me doesn’t show a perfect correlation between voting Republican and gun ownership (let alone gun culture). It shows that a lot of people who own guns don’t vote GOP.

That’s interesting. It seems to me that a really good study (and article) would pose the question: why don’t they?

Another of the studies linked is also really good, and it shows how symbolic racism is coded into much pro-gun rhetoric. But even that study doesn’t support the argument of the SciAm blo post. The conclusion of the study is “that racial prejudice influences white opinion regarding gun regulation in the contemporary United States” (emphasis added, 271). And they persuasively conclude:

We believe that racial prejudice colors all aspects of the debate regarding gun policy, including crime and its representations, and the role of government in society. Reshaping the gun regulation debate requires a deeper understanding of the relationships among racial prejudice, partisan politics, and the foundational but unconscious emotional role that guns play for a significant portion of the white population in America. (272)

So, racism colors the gun debate, and the study is persuasive on that point, but it doesn’t show that concern about gun control necessarily correlates to being racist. Not all gun owners, in other words. And, while that “not all” move can be irritating, sometimes it’s valid.

One of my pet peeves is when a study clearly says, “Many people in X category do Y,” and people attack the argument as though it said, “All people in X category do Y.” But, really, I think the SciAm article did move from most to all.

And here I should engage in full disclosure. Because of Texas common property laws, I’m a gun owner (I own quite a few, actually.) My father owned guns, and I’ve shot them from time to time. My son and husband shoot with some frequency, and my husband has spent a fair amount of time hunting. (Full disclosure on full disclosure: my father also hunted, but he was pretty bad at it.)

But there are reasonable arguments for gun ownership. And all of the research shows that there are different kind of gun owners. (I found that article because it was a suggested article from a study the SciAm article cited, but not mentioned in the blog post). Just as the research on persuasion shows that people react to different kinds of arguments differently–which is never represented in pop articles about “no one is persuaded by evidence” or “no one can think straight when mortality is mentioned”– so the research being cited for showing that gun owners are toothless racist rednecks who buy guns to manage the precarity of their masculinity ignores that a lot of gun owners aren’t like that at all. And here’s why that matters. For far too long, I have been really irritated by the large amount of lefty rhetoric that engages in us v. them binaries, often blazingly in opposition to actual research. We are supposed to be the people committed to evidence, to inclusion, to nuance. What the research cited in the SciAm article actually shows is that a lot of gun owners vote Dem (or can be persuaded to do so). Rural gun owners are different from urban ones.

And, really, it’s once I was spending a lot of time in a rural area that I realized why rural people carry guns. If you’ve got an active cattle ranch, you’ve got rattlesnakes and feral hogs. I don’t carry a gun when I wander around the ranch, mainly because I’m a bad shot, and I don’t take the dogs with me when I hike, but I get it. I’m not sure anyone needs an assault rifle (except to resolve the precarity of toxic masculinity), but there are lots of things people have that they don’t need. I’ve several times seen people shoot some pretty powerful guns, that weren’t even remotely necessary, and their attitude was that it was really fun.

Here’s the analogy I think fits. Think about car ownership. There are people who are opposed to governmental controls about gas consumption of vehicles because they want a Humvee, and they want that vehicle because they fantasize about end-of-world scenarios in which they’re Mad Max. There are people who are outraged about possibly not being able to buy Humvees because they have precarious masculinity, and owning a Humvee makes their tiny hands seem bigger. There are people who might need a Humvee because they have a shooting ranch, and that’s what people want to ride in, and there are people who might actually need something pretty close to a Humvee for their needs. And there are people who love cars, including ’69 Camaros, Humvees, Pintos, and Vegas. As someone who sometimes drove a Jaguar XKE and a Mustang Mach 1, I understand that impulse. I’m sure it’s fun to drive a Humvee. I’m sure it’s fun to shoot an AK-47.

Here’s the important point: the last three sorts of gun nuts (they actually need guns, they recognize that their desire to own certain guns is the collectors’ impulse, they think it’s fun to shoot) are open to reasonable restrictions about gun ownership.  

So, articles like the SciAm one are rhetorically unwise. It’s a sloppy article, in that there is an argument that would involve useful distinctions—one that would, simultaneously, point out how irrational one position is, while building bridges with reasonable people. We can and should be better in our rhetoric.

I sincerely believe that our current gun policies are irrational, and that we need ones that are more rational. And rational public policies take into consideration the needs and pleasures that citizens have, such as collecting guns in the same spirit in which one might collect first editions, cars, or dogs (all of which can be regulated). And having various guns for various purposes (perhaps even enjoyment) can be fully rational. But, just as we don’t let everyone drive any vehicle they want, we shouldn’t let everyone use any weapon they want. That’s just sensible. And the SciAm article doesn’t help us have that sensible argument.

American Christianity, tribalism, and refusing to “do unto others…”

It’s really troubling to me the extent to which American Christianity is now a kind of tribalism that argues for special treatment of their kind of Christian. People who want businesses to be able to opt out of offering birth control don’t want businesses to be able to opt out of paying for war–even though being pacifist is just as much a “sincere religious belief” as being opposed to birth control. Businesses owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses have health plans that allow blood transfusions. If we’re going to allow a doctor to refuse to perform life-saving abortion, are we going to allow a Jehovah’s Witness doctor to refuse to perform a blood transfusion?

What are “sincere” religious beliefs? Current political discourse (and media coverage) suggests that only right-wing, pro-war, anti-abortion people are sincerely religious. Supporting a particular political agenda makes you a real Christian, as far as they’re concerned. When pro-war Christians talk about Christian arguments for pacifism, suddenly it isn’t whether a belief is sincerely held, but whether they think pacifism is really authorized by Scripture.  James Dobson argues that  sharia law requires terrorism, yet he doesn’t argue that their terrorism should be permitted, even though he thinks Muslims have sincerely held religious beliefs requiring them to be violent, and he argues that the law should not require that people violate sincerely held religious beliefs.

It would be interesting to know what kind of crossover there is among people who insist that people should be allowed to exempt themselves from laws on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs” AND who are engaged in fear-mongering about Muslims and sharia law. I suspect it’s pretty large.

My point is simply that this isn’t an argument for allowing exceptions for sincerely held religious beliefs–it’s an argument for treating members of some religious groups better than others. So, this is an argument that “we” are entitled to better treatment by the government than “they” are.

And that argument usually comes down to a no-true Scotsman argument. All real Christians have this political agenda (which is, I think, how they think they’re avoiding the antinomianism problem).  If you don’t have that agenda, you aren’t a real Christian. Suddenly, sincerity isn’t a measure–anyone who disagrees with them isn’t sincere. And, so, since they read the Hebrew Bible as advocating all political power being invested in people of the correct religion, they think that the Christian way to behave politically is to ensure that people with their religious beliefs (the in-group) should be held to different standards, given more power, and have their religious beliefs preferred, even centralized. They advocate a system in which people like them are treated differently from others. They think the laws should favor them.

Jesus also faced an issue of laws. He was in a tradition with an emphasis on certain behaviors, and he said he wasn’t saying those laws should be rejected (although he also said certain ones should) but/and he said that intention mattered. Breaking the rule about the Sabbath was fine if you were part of doing something good, for instance. Breaking laws about touching blood was possibly good. Appearing to follow the law could be bad if your heart was in the wrong place.

Paul, similarly, advocated breaking various laws, and insisted on abiding by others that fundagelicals don’t follow (assuming you read Timothy as a genuinely Pauline text), such as women teaching in church. Very few Christian churches follow what Paul said about sex.  He advocated celibacy as the best practice, after all.  And he doesn’t advocate non-procreative sex, so were all Christians to follow all of Paul’s rules on sexual behavior, they would try to be celibate, and, if that wasn’t possible marry, and not engage in any birth control. And, really, even the Catholic church has given up on that–they allow birth control, just not effective birth control–which they call “artificial contraception.” 

Everyone agrees that you need to take the major messages of Scripture, and stick with passages that reinforce those, and reject the ones that are just “cultural.” You would be hard-pressed to find a Christian, even one citing Leviticus on men lying with men, who doesn’t have a garden with mixed seeds. And let’s talk about cattle breeds.

So, how do we choose what laws to follow?

You could do it numerically, by what themes are most common. Bible verses that insist you honor God are pretty common, perhaps dominant; ones that ask you have a personal relationship (whatever that means) with Jesus are a much rarer than current Christian discourse might lead you to think. (Ones about Hell as a place of eternal punishment are up there with fig trees being bad, by the way.) Verses that ask that God smite your enemies are pretty common (along with killing babies, usually of the enemy), but I’d like to emphasize the large number that have to do with God asking that we take care of the marginalized—the poor, the widows, and orphans (who would have had no method of support in that economy). So, it seems to me, there are an awful lot of verses asking that we take care of those whom the market would ignore. The Hebrew Bible demands ethical treatment regardless of economic situation, and insists that the rich care for the poor.

The Hebrew Bible could be read (if you turn your head this way and kind of look at it that way) as only insisting on ethical treatment of in-group members. That’s how various Christian thinkers justified slavery—some argued that the rules regarding slavery only applied to fellow Hebrews, so enslaving Christians was wrong. Then, when one argument for slavery was that it made heathens in Christians, the argument shifted to those rules meaning that … argle bargle…they don’t apply to US slavery. Jesus explicitly (and, probably, deliberately) rejected that interpretation. Jesus said, quite clearly, ethics means treating all people the same, regardless of group membership. That’s the whole point of the good Samaritan story—you care for the people not of your religion, just as you would people of your religion.

And that was, and is, radical.[1]

When Jesus said “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” he didn’t say, “unless they’re out-group.” He didn’t say, “Look out for your tribe first.” He didn’t say, “Do unto others, except like really really others…” He said ethical behavior transcends group membership. Jesus calls us to treat Muslims as we would want to be treated. And, certainly, people who can call themselves Christian can find things in the Hebrew Bible to justify treating Muslims badly, and I could dispute those readings, but I don’t need to, because they can’t find any way to get past what Jesus said: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

People who want their kind of Christianity to get special treatment can find texts in the Hebrew Bible that they can work to support their claim (I’d say they’re misreading, but that’s a different point), but they can’t get past what Jesus said.

[1] But it wasn’t necessarily new, and Christ was not establishing the only tradition to follow the rule that an ethical behavior means treating in- and out-groups the same way—look at the long tradition of Jewish activism on behalf of other groups.

Teacher Neutrality and Fairness in a Culture of Demagoguery

Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, when talking about what they call “the ferocity of today’s political battles,“ point out that our political discourse isn’t primarily policy argumentation:

Democrats and Republicans not only attack each other for subscribing to misguided beliefs about optimal public policy but also regularly question each other’s motives, intelligence, and judgment; suggest their opponents are not making good-faith arguments; and accuse each other of merely doing the bidding of special interests or pandering to popular prejudices. (329)

To the extent that we talk policy, it’s about what advocating or critiquing the policy means about the identity of the rhetor—we don’t argue about whether policies are racist, but whether rhetors are. The foundational cultural logic of too much of our public discourse presumes that all questions can be reduced to the question of the motives of the rhetors, and that question can be settled by determining their in-group.

And I need to begin with an aside about what I’m not arguing in this paper since I’ve found this is such a fraught topic. In addition, and this is fundamental to our challenges as teachers—Arlie Kruglanski, Daniel Kahneman, and others have shown, we tend to reason syllogistically. That is, on meeting a new person, or even reading an argument, our first cognitive task is to categorize the person or argument—to put them in a social group, genre, political or philosophical affiliation. We decide what larger group they’re in, and they deduce that because they’re in That Group, they must believe These Things. They must believe the other things we assume are necessarily connected with being in That Group.

Since a large part of what I’m critiquing is the reduction of all political questions to in-group/out-group membership, it might sound as though I’m advocating some kind of neo-Habermasian public sphere of brains arguing with one another, and I’m not. A public sphere in which identity arguments were prohibited would be not only impossible, I suspect, but irrational—identities are relevant claims. I’m not objecting to arguments about or grounded in identity; I am saying that reducing all questions to ones of social group identity (in which each identity group is presumed to be homogeneous and perfectly constitutive) is vexed. It becomes actively damaging when that reduction is tied to the assumption that only one of those groups (an in-group) is constituted of people of intelligence and goodwill whose views are the only valid bases for public policy.

In other words, when the point of raising the question of identity is because we, as a community, are trying to hand deliberative power over to an individual (or individuals) who embody/ies that homogeneous Real American, Real Slaveholder, Real German, then we’re in a culture of demagoguery. There are other characteristic.

I’ve argued elsewhere that we’re in a culture of demagoguery, by which I mean that there are certain widely-shared premises about politics and public discourse:

    • Every policy/political issue has a single right answer, and all other answers are wrong;
    • That correct answer to any political question is obvious to people of good will and good judgment (that is, to good people);
    • The in-group (us) is good;
    • Therefore, anyone who disagrees with the in-group or tries to get a different policy passed isn’t just mistaken or coming from a different perspective or pointing out things it might be helpful for the in-group to know, but bad, and
    • Deliberation and debate are unnecessary, and compromise is simply making a good policy less good.
    • So, in a perfect world, all policy decisions would be made by the in-group or the person who best represents the in-group’s needs,
    • And, therefore, the ideal political candidates are fanatically loyal to the in-group and will shut or shout down anyone who disagrees.

[By in-group, social psychologists don’t mean the group in power, but the social group of which one is a member. So, for some people, being a dog lover is an in-group, even (or especially) in the midst of a culture in which that identity is marginalized.]

This is not the conventional way of thinking about demagoguery—if you look at a dictionary, it will probably define demagoguery as speech by demagogues (in other words, it reduces the issue to one of identity—a demagogic move).

In common usage, demagoguery is often assumed to be obviously false speech that is completely emotional, untrue, and evidence-free on the part of bad people with bad motives.

That’s a useless definition for various reasons (including that it doesn’t even apply to many of the most notorious demagogues); it’s also actively harmful in that it impedes our ability to identify in-group demagoguery—that is, demagoguery on the part of people we like. And it does so because we can tell ourselves this isn’t demagoguery if:

    • we think we are calm while reading the text, and the text (or rhetor) has a calm tone
    • we believe the claims in the text are true
    • the claims can be supported with evidence
    • we believe the people making the argument are good people
    • we believe they have good motives

One of the things I want to suggest in this talk is that teachers of writing are often unintentionally engaged in reaffirming the premises on which demagoguery operates, and we can do so in two general ways: first, by teaching criteria of “bad argumentation” (or demagoguery or propaganda or whatever devil term is in question) that don’t productively identity the problems of certain kinds of public discourse, thereby giving people a false sense of security—as in the above criteria. We can feel comfortable that we aren’t consuming or producing demagoguery when we are. Second, a lot of writing and especially argumentation textbook appeal to the rational/irrational split, assume a binary in epistemologies (so that one is either a naïve realist or relativist), require that students engage in motivism, and rely on a modernist formalism about what constitutes “good” writing.

For instance, if you look at the criteria for determining demagoguery, you can see the standards often advocated for a “good” argument.

If, as I’ll argue, that isn’t a helpful way to think about demagoguery, then the consequent way of teaching argumentation not only ends up reinforcing demagogic premises about public deliberation, but puts teachers in a really difficult place for talking productively about issues like bias and fairness.

There are other ways that we unintentionally get ourselves into a complicated situation:

    • Teaching writing process as first coming up with the thesis and then doing research
    • Teaching research as finding sources to support one’s point
    • Teaching audience in terms of social groups (e.g., teachers, conservatives, women) and identities (as though those identities are necessarily connected to particular values and beliefs)
    • Reinforcing the notion that rational and irrational are issues of logic versus emotion
    • Teaching bias as something that can and should be determined by identity, and thereby encouraging motivism

It’s important to note is that the above criteria for assessing whether something is demagogic are useless insofar as they’re circular—demagoguery is what THEY do. And a community in which we’re all flinging the accusation of demagoguery like bricks over a wall isn’t one in which we’re going to come to good decisions. We’re still participating in public discourse on the basis of assuming that only our in-group is good and has legitimate policies.

This premise—that only the in-group has a legitimate political agenda—has various important premises and consequences:

    • the notion that the true course of action is obvious to good-willed people comes from our cultural tendency to rely on naïve realism (a notion reinforced by public discourse that says the only two possible epistemologies are naïve realism or sloppy solipsistic/relativism);
    • the rational/irrational split: that is, the notion that an argument is rational (unemotional, true, and supported with reasons) or irrational (emotional, untrue, and made by the out-group)
    • the fundamental attribution error (the tendency to attribute different kinds of motives and behaviors on the basis of group membership)

For the next part of the talk, I’m going to go through each of those.

Naïve realism is both an epistemology and ontology—it presumes a Real world entirely external to human cognition or perception (so it’s a foundational ontology) AND that the unmediated perception of that world is easy.

In such an epistemology, the assumption is that we perceive things accurately and then distort those perceptions through the imposition of prejudice or bias. Thus, if you are biased, you can know, because you simply ask yourself if you distorted what you initially perceived—if you are not aware of any distortion, then you can’t possibly be biased.

It is a talking point in some media that you either believe this epistemology (that whether something is right or wrong, true or untrue, is immediately obvious to good people) or else you are a postmodernist, which is a devil term for a sloppy kind of solipsistic relativism—that all beliefs are equally true, there is no right and wrong, and no one has the right to judge anyone else. But those aren’t the only options.

Such a world implies that either there is one right answer to political issues or it’s just a question of what party manages to force its agenda on everyone else—neither of those epistemologies supports democratic deliberation. And neither is accurate for how most of us spend most of our days.

We rely heavily on science, for instance, which is grounded in a foundational ontology, but a skeptical epistemology (with various scientists at various points on a continuum of skepticism about human’s abilities to perceive accurately as individuals or communities, and another continuum about our ability to justify our beliefs—that is, to know whether we know).

So, one thing teachers can do is avoid the false binary of naïve realism or solipsistic relativism, and encourage students to see ourselves as in a place of more and less educated guesses—certainty is a question of degree, not a binary.

The next premise is complicated to explain, and it’s complicated largely because American teaching of argumentation has been unhappily oblivious to the field of argumentation theory.

In formal logic, one can determine whether an argument is logical purely internal by the internal moves. A good argument has certain forms. That works with formal logic, since the arguments are about p and q but, as even Aristotle pointed out, it doesn’t work when you get into the world of politics. Politics, like ethics, is a phronesis, not an episteme.

Informal logic relies on what is happening within a disagreement; it’s about context—the straw man fallacy, for instance, is the dumbing down of an opposition argument. To know if a rhetor has engaged in that fallacy, we have to know what the opposition argument is.

That’s important because it means that it isn’t possible to stay within an informational enclave and judge the rationality of an argument. Being a rational participant in public deliberation doesn’t mean being unemotional—that’s neither possible nor desirable—but it does mean actively seeking out and listening to the best versions of the opposition arguments. It means the opposite of what demagoguery tells us—stop listening to any argument the second you determine it’s an out-group argument—and it also means acknowledging that the out-group is varied enough that there are various arguments that might be made.

Once you start trying to find the best out-group arguments, you quickly determine that there are a lof of non-in-group groups. The whole in-group/out-group binary collapses. We have a tendency to homogenize the out-group, and to treat them as interchangeable, so if we can find one member of the out-group with a stupid argument, we attribute that argument to the whole group.

Rationality isn’t about emotionality or lack thereof; it’s about how an argument works in a disagreement, and it can come down to three rules: first, a rational argument is internally consistent (terms are used consistently, it appeals to premises consistently); second, whatever rules there are apply across groups; third, the issue is up for argument—participants can identify evidence or arguments that would cause them to change their minds. Rational argument is about taking on the responsibilities of argument, and those responsibilities apply equally across groups.

When we rely on in-group/out-group thinking, we apply responsibilities differently.

Good behavior Bad behavior
In-group Internal narratives of causality External narratives of causality
Out-group External narratives of causality Internal narratives of causality

The in-group always has the moral highground, even if doing something we condemn the out-group for doing: when the in-group behaves well, it’s because that’s who we essentially are. If the in-group behaves badly, we were forced, that’s an exception, it wasn’t a true in-group member.

But, if a member of the out-group does something bad, that bad behavior is a sign of their essentially bad nature, and that is the fundamental attribution error.  And that’s the third factor that contributes to demagogic reasoning and discourse.

And these three factors—naïve realism, misunderstanding rationality, and the fundamental attribution error—contribute to very unhelpful ways of thinking about bias, precisely the ones that get teachers into complicated situations.

“Bias” is often assumed to be the necessary consequence of group identity—that is, having a particular group identity necessarily biases us in specific ways , and that makes sense in a culture of demagoguery—all arguments can be reduced to questions of identity because, in this world, it is assumed that identity is constitutive of belief, and that groups are essentially homogeneous.

As I said, demagoguery appeals to the unhappily common notion that the correct course of action is always obvious, even in politics, and that the in-group advocates that obviously correct course of action.

The only criticisms of the in group that is allowed in a culture of demagoguery are to say that members of the in group are not sufficiently passionate or fanatical about in group policy agenda, or have been allowing the outgroup to get away with too much.

Being willing to consider substantive criticism of the policies or premises of the in-group is proof that one is not loyal to the in-group—a member of an out-group, in other words. And, since out-group members have distorted perception, criticism of the in-group is, in and of itself, proof of “bias.”

In a culture of demagoguery, the very act of disagreeing demonstrates that one is too biased for one’s criticisms to be considered.

And, since, in a culture of demagoguery, the out-group is figured as demonic, even listening to an out-group member is risking contamination, so disagreement is itself a sign of the presence of evil that is to be crushed, rather than a point of view that might have value. Giorgio Agamben argues that in a state of exception, groups that claim to honor law do so through not-law; I’m suggesting that we might think about not-logic—that some groups claim that we are in such a state of exception that groups claim to be entirely logical by rejecting logic. It’s not-logic.

Since the premise of democratic deliberation is that disagreement benefits a community, and the premise of a college education is that it prepares students for effective participation in a democratic culture, teachers who want to promote the democratic values of empathy, fairness, and reasoned disagreement can find themselves in a fraught situation.

And it’s a situation about which everyone should be concerned.

We live in a culture in which it is only allowed to condemn them—we are supposed to be in such an existential crisis (the in-group is about to exterminated) that we should not allow in-group criticism. We are in Agamben’s state of exception, in which free speech is honored by silencing people who disagree.

One of the reasons that cultures of demagoguery tend to crash is that they cannot learn from their errors—because they can’t admit that they made errors. Think about German nationalists, none of whom would admit that fear-mongering about encirclement, belief in the redemptive power of war, racism, and a sense of entitlement to European hegemony all contributed to the tragedy that was World War I, and so they ratcheted up fear of encirclement, rhetoric about the redemptive power of war, racism, and assertions of entitlement to European hegemony, and made the same mistake again, with tragic world consequences.

Assuming that criticism of the in-group claims or policies signifies bias ensures that the in-group will keep making the same mistake over and over—it precludes argumentation about means and process. Hitler wasn’t just wrong as to whether Germany was entitled to European hegemony, survival of the fittest, and his incoherent racial policies, he was wrong as to how communities should make decisions—he was wrong about content and process.

As teachers, we aren’t just teaching content; we’re teaching process. But people often assume we’re teaching content—in an authoritarian model of teaching, the teacher pours knowledge into the head of students. We are trying to get students to understand that it’s about metacognition.

Students are inoculated to see us as teaching a sloppy relativism, and trying to force them to adhere to our political agenda—that is, a lot of students listen to media that always equates “out-group” and “biased” and that projects their kind of indoctrination onto everyone else. So, the message is that teachers, who are all Marxists, will force students to repeat Marxist talking points.

One way to try to move students to a more fair analysis of politics if for us to be very clear that we don’t equate “out-group” and “biased” by identifying some out-group texts as good, and some in-group texts as biased. We shouldn’t be engaged in demagoguery. We should model that the world isn’t in-group and out-group, but a lot of people with different perspectives.

There is another way that people reason from identity, and it’s very concerning for people who believe in democracy. A disturbing number of Americans believe that they represent true Americans, and that anyone with a different set of political concerns shouldn’t count. Thus people on various forms of government subsidy are outraged about other people on government subsidy, not because they’re hypocrites, but because they believe that their needs (and the needs of people like them) are legitimate because they embody true Americans. The Ur assumption is that there is a single identity of True American—if we could get people past that, everyone would benefit. But that’s a different talk.

So, government subsidies for corn is the government looking out for true Americans, but government subsidies for solar energy is pandering to special interests—because corn farmers are true Americans, and solar energy people are not. That’s in-group/out-group reasoning.

We need to teach a different way of reasoning.

I’m not advocating what is often called a “liberal” pedagogy, in which all positions offered are treated as equally valid, nor a liberatory pedagogy, in which positions the teacher considers oriented toward genuine critique are privileged, but a fair pedagogy, in which all positions are assessed on the basis of whether they engage the most informed and intelligent opposition positions. It is a classroom in which students have to be fair to opposition positions—that is, holding them to the same standards they hold the in-group arguments—and in which teachers do the same.

Does that mean that every class has to relitigate evolution, or the causes of the Civil War (if you think it wasn’t slavery, read the declarations of causes), or racism? No.

But it does mean that we either begin the class with an open premise that the conversation of the course will be within certain premises (a literature course about slave narratives can begin with the premise that slavery was bad, a physics course can begin with the premise that gravity is a thing) or we set up the parameters of the writing assignments such that students aren’t writing about something we aren’t willing to relitigate.

In other words, “open” assignments are just asking for trouble, and the resulting papers can’t possibly be assessed by the standards of rational-critical argumentation unless the workload is unethical.

“Open” assignment prompts assume one of two things: either the rationality of an argument is entirely internal to a text, or the teacher assessing the argument knows the entire sphere of argumentative possibilities.

The first is indefensible, and the second requires that someone be even more of a political geek than I am, or that the teacher do massive research for every paper. Or, the teacher is engaged in in-group/out-group thinking and believes that out-group arguments are pretty much all the same. Open assignments mean teachers have an extraordinary engagement in political discourse, an unethical workload, or are promoting demagoguery.

And, unless the teacher really does read all the arguments about all the issues, a teacher cannot assess the logic of an argument.

I’m sure I just alienated almost everyone in this room, but I’m going ahead with this argument, because I think it’s important.

A huge part of the problem in rhetoric and composition is that the most popular textbooks of argumentation are cheerfully uninformed by actual scholarship in argumentation theory. For a long time—such as at least since Aristotle—there have been people who have argued that logic operates differently in spheres of inherent uncertainty (such as politics and ethics) and those who insist that logic is universal (Plato appears to have been in this category, but there are arguments about that—after all, he did have Aristotle teaching rhetoric). Logical positivism tried to ground all discourse in formal logic—that is, the notion that a logical argument has a particular form, one that operates universally. So, a specific argument is logical or not regardless of context. The Anglo-analytic tradition treats formal logic as the true logic, and informal logic as just bad formal logic. That’s a fallacy.

Also, that way of approaching argument led to a binary—since it obviously doesn’t work when people are arguing politics, there was a sense of logic either being a dominating and normative smackdown that seemed to make all actual political arguments illogical, or (and therefore) the embrace of the logic of an argument being determined by audience reaction.

In the 1970s, scholars of argumentation made a move that is still not represented in argumentation textbooks: the logic of an argument is determined by its place in a particular kind of conversation.

Were argumentation textbooks informed by argumentation theory, then teachers would asses arguments on this basis:

    1. Freedom rule
      Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
    2. Burden of proof rule
      A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
    3. Standpoint rule
      A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
    4. Relevance rule
      A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
    5. Unexpressed premise rule
      A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
    6. Starting point rule
      A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
    7. Argument scheme rule
      A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
    8. Validity rule
      A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
    9. Closure rule
      A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
    10. Usage rule
      A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible. (Van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002, pp.182-183—which I got from Wikipedia, meaning that argumentation textbooks are lagging behind Wikipedia)

These rules are anti-demagoguery rules. If people argued by these rules, demagoguery would not be a problem, and demagogues would be strange relatives in your twitter feed that you eventually block because they’re irritating.

But here is the important for teaching, and especially about “open” assignments: A person cannot assess the logic of an argument by these rules without knowing the conversation in which the author is engaged.

So, I’ll say again, unless the teacher really does read all the arguments about all the issues, a teacher cannot assess the logic of an argument.

What I hope I made clear is that fairness across groups is the antidote to demagoguery. Demagoguery says our group is good, our group is threatened with extinction, anything done for our group or by our group is good, and anyone not in our group should be silenced. When people deeply engaged in demagoguery are asked to behave in a world of fairness, they respond with violence (because they know they can’t win if they have to abide by the ten rules listed above).

And that means that teachers should assign topics about which we can model fairness. We should assign paper prompts about which we don’t have a right answer, that aren’t about identity, and on which we can fairly assess the logic.

I spend a lot of time wandering around dark corners of the internet, and I’m a historian of public deliberation, and I’m normally the one to say that this problem is not new, but even I believe that we are in an era in which the very notion of democracy is under attack.

And it all comes down to fairness.

Demagoguery dies when people promoting their in-group talking points have to argue within those ten rules. So, as teachers, we should live by and impose those rules. It isn’t easy, and it’s operating against our culture of demagoguery, but I think it’s the right, the compassionate, fair, inclusive, and rational thing to do. Just to be clear, what I’m saying is that, in a culture of demagoguery, people assess arguments this way:

There is one perspective from which the truth about our situation can be perceived, and it’s the perspective of TRUE [Americans, liberals, conservatives, lefties, environmentalists, squirrel-haters].

So, to determine if an argument is good, you first determine whether the person making the argument is a true [member of the in-group].

To counter that THOSE people aren’t really good isn’t undermining a culture of demagoguery; it’s reinforcing it.

We need to stop arguing about bias; we need to talk about democracy. And democracy is about fairness. It’s about doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. And that should be a value about which all of us can agree.