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The Sacred Band of Thebes and gays in the military

I’ve never read Plutarch cover to cover–just the parts relevant to the topics and people I teach or write about. And I’ve tended not to read much about Thebes. Still and all, I think it’s embarrassing that I didn’t know about the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Plutarch (CE 46-120) talks about them relative to the Battle of Leuctra (July 371 BCE), a battle between Thebes and Sparta. Paul Davis’ 100 Decisive Battles (a really fun read, btw) says that the “Theban victory broke the power of Sparta” (23) and, perhaps more important, “the prestige of the Spartan army had been broken” (26).

This is what Plutarch (CE 46-120) has to say about the Sacred Band of Thebes (this is a 1917 translation, so bear with me–if you really can’t stand it, just skip the long quote):

“This battle first taught the other Greeks also that it was not the Eurotas, nor the region between Babyce and Cnacion [that is, Sparta] which alone produced warlike fighting men, but that wheresoever young men are prone to be ashamed of baseness and courageous in a noble cause, shunning disgrace more than danger, these are most formidable to their foes.”

The sacred band, we are told, was first formed by Gorgidas, of three hundred chosen men, to whom the city furnished exercise and maintenance, and who encamped in the Cadmeia; for which reason, too, they were called the city band; for citadels in those days were properly called cities. But some say that this band was composed of lovers and beloved. And a pleasantry of Pammenes is cited, in which he said that Homer’s Nestor was no tactician when he urged the Greeks to form in companies by clans and tribes, “That clan might give assistance unto clan, and tribes to tribes,” since he should have stationed lover by beloved.

“For tribesmen and clansmen make little account of tribesmen and clansmen in times of danger; whereas, a band that is held together by the friendship between lovers is indissoluble and not to be broken, since the lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other. Nor is this a wonder since men have more regard for their lovers even when absent than for others who are present, as was true of him who, when his enemy was about to slay him where he lay, earnestly besought him to run his sword through his breast, ‘in order,’ as he said, ‘that my beloved may not have to blush at sight of my body with a wound in the back.’ It is related, too, that Iolaüs, who shared the labours of Heracles and fought by his side, was beloved of him. And Aristotle says that even down to his day the tomb of Iolaüs was a place where lovers and beloved plighted mutual faith. It was natural, then, that the band should also be called sacred, because even Plato calls the lover a friend ‘inspired of God.’

“It is said, moreover, that the band was never beaten, until the battle of Chaeroneia; and when, after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the three hundred were lying, all where they had faced the long spears of his phalanx, with their armour, and mingled one with another, he was amazed, and on learning that this was the band of lovers and beloved, burst into tears and said: ‘Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.’” (2.14: Plutarch, Pelopidas 17-19)

Or, in other words, it was a band of 150 homosexual male couples, and they were fierce, and they were feared.

It’s been a while, but, when I was crawling around homophobic corners of the Internet it was around the time there was a lot of pearl clutching about letting openly gay men into the military. And one of the arguments made, in addition to that there would be sexual harassment (I could never figure out whether the people who made that argument were thereby admitting that women in the military are sexually harassed), was that it would weaken the military because gay men can’t fight.

As Codex Melcher says on their blog, “People often ask when LGBTQ concerns arise ‘Why are tons of people suddenly gay/trans/not like me when it’s never existed in history before now'” and the answer is “They’ve always been here.”

I wish I’d know about the Sacred Band when I was trying to argue with homophobes.

Page numbers for Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle'”

Kenneth Burke’s 1939 essay, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” is brilliant. For reasons I don’t understand, however, Burke didn’t give page numbers on his quotes. I had a hard time finding the page numbers, since he’s using a different translation from the one generally considered authoritative (by Ralph Manheim).[1]

I spent way too much time today trying to find the quotes in the Manheim translation, in order to give them page numbers and cite them correctly (since I intend to use that translation). I thought it might be helpful for other rhetoric folks to have the correct pages—to save y’all some time.

Burke 192: “The geo-political importance of a center….a hand that represents this unity.” (Manheim 347)

Burke 193: “As a whole, and at all times…bitterness against the attackers.” (Manheim 118)

Burke 197: “The more I argued with them….began to hate them.” (Manheim 62)

Burke 198: “This was the time in which…fanatical anti-Semite.” (Manheim 64)

Burke 212: [His discussion of Hitler’s tendency to provoke communists.] (Manheim 483-485)

Burke 212n: “Here, too, one can learn….blind adherence.” (Manheim 458-9)

[1] The Manheim translation came out in 1943, so this isn’t a criticism of Burke.

Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

  1. It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
  2. It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
  3. And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
  4. There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”

Time management and scholars

I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, my first in twelve years, and I’ve long argued that we can get our jobs done averaging 40 hours a week. I over-committed myself. I agreed to writing or co-authoring six book chapters/articles, seven campus visits in the US, several days of talks in Czechia, and reviewing one article and two book manuscripts. I was still Director of the University Writing Center. I also kept track of my time (more or less). I thought it would be helpful to tell folks how it turned out, since I know that the first time I got a sabbatical I wished that someone had given me more advice about how to use my time. You don’t completely get away from teaching or service, but you can keep it reined in.

I counted my sabbatical as nineteen weeks, from just after New Year’s till the end of finals.

  1. I did pretty well at trying to average 40 hours a week (it was 40.5 average). That’s partially because I took about four weeks of vacation.
  2. The largest category was scholarship (which is where visits went), with 65% of my time.
  3. If I was at the Writing Center, I just clocked it as UWC–there’s no way I could have kept track of when I was teaching, when it was scholarship, when it was service. That was the second largest category, with around 13% of my time.
  4. I spent just over 8% of my time on “misc work” (email, planning, phone calls, organizing).
  5. Non-UWC service also took up just over 8%–some professional, some departmental, but mostly one university committee I didn’t realize would be such a time sink.
  6. The rest was really random–a few hours for dentist appointments or sick days, a few on things that mixed categories (such as writing undergraduate letters of rec–that always seems to me to be both teaching and service).

The reason I emphasize average is that I keep getting misunderstood on this point. Of course you don’t work 40 hours every week. If you take off the four weeks of vacation, then I was working around 50 hours a week for the weeks I was working.

There are also always things that are hard to figure. I didn’t count the time I spent cleaning up cat barf off my desk so I could work, setting up dog beds so they wouldn’t bug me, chasing down the shoes that Pearl stole, nor the time I spent walking a dog and thinking about my writing, or talking about my work. I did, however, count the time at the gym that I spent reading things for work (so not my Sunday gym visit when I’m usually reading apologetics or sermons or Jane Austen).

Scholars and racism

There is a controversy in one of my disciplines right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. And the nastiest part of this argument is nasty because people are arguing as though there is a shared definition of what it means to be racist. There isn’t, and that is the problem. There are at play at least four different ways of thinking about racism: aversive, unconscious, disparate impact, systemic.

Briefly, the controversy concerns the long and documented failure of the NCA Distinguished Scholars to include a significant number of POC in its membership. There are various ways of explaining that failure—off the top of my head, I can imagine someone arguing:

That POC don’t merit inclusion in the group because they are bad people (a racist argument).

    • Or, that the 70 Distinguished Scholars are knowingly engaged in aversive racism—the conventional notion of what racism is (conscious hostility toward and aversion of POC). In other words, the problem is that they are bad people.
    • Or, that unconscious racism means that the kinds of networks necessary to come to be seen as “distinguished” are unintentionally racially exclusive.
    • Or, that something is wrong in the process such that POC scholars have to meet a higher bar or that makes their kind of scholarship invisible in some way.
    • Or that systemic racism means that POC scholars haven’t had the kinds of advantages and breaks (including mentoring) necessary to meet the implicit criteria of the Distinguished Scholars.

[There are other issues in this controversy, including some procedural ones—as to how NCA has made and communicated decisions. I’m not going to talk about those issues because I don’t know enough to say anything, not because they’re unimportant.]

Notice that these can be divided up—the first argument is simply racist (and I think many people are reading some of the documents involved as making that argument—I have trouble imagining that it is, but that’s an issue worth clarifying).

The second is saying that this is an issue of aversive racism, in which people see that someone is a POC and consciously deny them the honor.

The third is unconscious racism, such as if people are more likely to vote for people with whom they feel more comfortable, or (as will be discussed below), white discomfort with POC means that POC aren’t included on panels, in edited collections, or invited to lunches.

The fourth is what is legally called “disparate impact,” in which intent is irrelevant—if scholars’ implicit criteria is a kind of scholarship POC tend not to do (as happened with women when women started publishing more), then there is racially-valenced discrimination with neither intent nor aversion. The politics of respectability–the ways we define and enforce norms about respect and respectability–apply disparately to POC, whether they’re intended to or not.

The fifth is systemic or institutional racism, in which institutions and organizations were structured for the benefits of the dominant group at the time, and, while there is no longer necessarily a conscious intent, there is still the impact (such as previously male institutions that have inadequate women’s rest rooms).

At least one widely-distributed argument assumes that this controversy is all about identity—the identity of the Distinguished Scholars. There is one editorial being distributed that makes two occluding assumptions: first, that any claim that a process is racist is the same as accusing the people involved in the process of aversive racism. The criticism is, as this editorial says, “an attack on the association’s own Distinguished Scholars,” that the NCA is “implicitly accusing them [the Distinguished Scholars] of racism.” This editorial frames the changes in NCA procedure as an attack on the identity of the Distinguished Scholars—on their goodness, character, and judgment.

The second occluding assumption is that the only way to include more POC is to ignore merit in favor of decisions based purely on identity. That seems to be saying that there are no POC scholars who merit inclusion—what, then, are the reasons for their exclusion? Because they are excluded.

I don’t know what the NCA argument is, and I can imagine that there are legitimate complaints that the NCA Distinguished Scholars might have about how the NCA has handled this problem. But I’m concerned that there appears to be no acknowledging that there is a problem of exclusion.

This isn’t to say that you can look at the numbers and infer aversive racism on the part of the Distinguished Scholars—the assumption that many people seem to be making. I doubt it is aversive racism; it certainly isn’t about the feelings or character of the people involved. This shouldn’t be an argument about their identity.

If we move the stasis from the identities of the Distinguished Scholars, to the fact of exclusion, then we can talk about processes and institutions and systems. And, really, racism is generally about processes, about often completely unconscious biases built into those processes, even on the part of people who mean well. Racism is often about the sometimes unintended and too often unacknowledged consequences of the ways that powerful organizations and institutions function.

Take, for instance, the problem of racism in science grants. A 2016 study of NIH grants concluded that:

White women PhDs and MDs were as likely as white men to receive an R01 award. Compared with white women, Asian and black women PhDs and black women MDs were significantly less likely to receive funding. Women submitted fewer grant applications, and blacks and women who were new investigators were more likely to submit only one application between 2000 and 2006. (Ginther et al. “Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and National Institutes of Health R01 Research Awards: Is There Evidence of a Double Bind for Women of Color?”Academic Medicine Volume 91(8), August 2016, p 1098-1107)

Ginther et al. suggest that there was no conscious racism involved on the part of people reviewing applications—they noted that both women and men of color submitted fewer applications (implying problems with institutional support or mentoring).

An Economist discussion of the study points out that:

Another possible explanation is social networking. It is in the nature of groups of experts (which is precisely what peer-review panels are) to know both each other and each other’s most promising acolytes. Applicants outside this charmed circle might have less chance of favourable consideration. If the charmed circle itself were racially unrepresentative (if professors unconsciously preferred graduate students of their own race, for example), those excluded from the network because their racial group was under-represented in the first place would find it harder to break in.

If that is the case, this is not aversive racism, let alone conscious hostility.

But there is a problem with NIH grants. And, similarly, there is a problem with the processes by which the Distinguished Scholars group is constituted.

But, to solve that problem, we don’t have to talk about the identities or characters of the Distinguished Scholars.

This isn’t about them; it’s about our field, and its processes, organizations, and institutions. Let’s talk about them.

Banning abortion and the strong family

I long ago learned that, when someone makes a claim about how everyone thinks or acts, pay attention to the logical implication. Socrates would have liked the syllogism:

Everyone is just out for themselves.
The person saying this is included in the category of “everyone.”
Therefore, this person is out for zirself.

It’s generally turned out to be true: people who say that “everyone lies when it’s useful,” “everyone is good at heart,” “everyone will screw you if they can” may not be making a claim that is factually true of “everyone,” but it’s true of them.

That observation was particularly interesting when homophobic groups argued that allowing gay marriage would end the human species (by ending human reproduction) and destroy families because, presumably, once gay marriage is an option, everyone will opt for it. That’s interesting. It isn’t true of everyone, but I’ll believe it’s true of the people making the claim.

That isn’t to say that every person who makes that argument is living in a plexiglass closet, in which they’re the only person from whom the truth is hidden, and that they are all barely resisting from gay relationships. But it is a silly argument—that isn’t what has happened anywhere gay marriage was legalized—and it is saying something really interesting about them. What it’s saying is that they believe that everyone is only, with great will, keeping themselves from SIN, and that all sins are the same. So, if they slip up and stop engaging in rigid self-control, it’s just a question of time till they’re giving a blowjob, while shooting up, gambling, aborting babies, molesting children, and voting Dem. They believe that sin is the consequence of lack of self-control, and if you loosen up on self-control, then you have no control at all. And you do ALL THE SINS.

I don’t think the kind of people who make that are argument are gay, but I do think they believe that they have to be incredibly rigid about their values, commitments, and policies, or else all hell breaks loose. They believe they could commit all the sins. That’s interesting.

That some people believe that, if the government allowed any sinful action they consider sinful, then everyone (including them) would instantly stop everything for some kind of very lame porny bacchanal is not actually minimally good policy argumentation. It’s a reason for them to get therapy. They don’t have political issues, but personal ones.

But, we’re in a world in which people like them believe that they should take their personal issues about sin to the larger political sphere.

They believe that something they consider a sin should be prohibited by the government.

And, to be blunt, everyone thinks that.

That’s how democracy works. It works when the things that we all think are sins get to be argued—when we engage in policy argumentation. A system that divides every issue into a zero-sum contest isn’t a culture engaged in democratic deliberation.

That is our world. We all think we are completely and obviously right, and that anyone who disagrees with us is either a dupe or a villain. That’s good. We should care about our politics.

Good political deliberation isn’t about being emotional or not; it isn’t about whether you do or don’t have evidence to support your claims; democratic deliberation is and should be about policy argumentation. And the ban abortion argument fails to make its case in terms of policy argumentation.

If you want to reduce abortions, and you have a rational argument, then you could make your case pretty clearly. Here is the ban abortion case (as far as I can figure):

There is a need:

It’s bad (women are killing babies)
It’s not going away (women have been legally allowed to kill babies since Roe v. Wade) [note the slippage between pre- and post Roe v . Wade]

Narrative of causality:
I have to admit that I can’t figure this one out. If you want to reduce abortion, the narrative of causality is empirically clear: increase access to accurate information about birth control.

So, what, exactly, is the “reduce abortion by enacting polices that don’t reduce abortion” argument?

Just to be clear: were the “reduce abortion” actually the most important value for people who want to ban abortion, then they would do anything that would reduce abortion. But they don’t.

There isn’t a zero-sum contest between people who think abortion is awful (and should therefore be banned) and people who think abortion should be legal. A lot of people who think abortion is awful think it shouldn’t be banned. They think banning is the wrong policy.

And that is the argument over which ban abortion people find themselves doing everything to avoid policy argumentation. Were abortion argued in terms of policy, the “ban abortion now” forces would lose. They can’t defend their position through policy argumentation.

Despite what “ban abortion now” rhetors say, no one is pro-abortion. Everyone wants to make sure that women rarely are even presented with the decision of abortion. The “abortion” argument isn’t about abortion: it’s about how you prevent women getting to the point of even thinking about getting an abortion.

And there are, loosely, two stances on that: one is grounded in empirical data about what actually reduces women finding themselves in a situation in which they might want an abortion; and the other rejects everything about policy argumentation in favor of a belief that if people beleeeeeve strongly enough then good things will happen.

The abortion argument isn’t about policies and outcome and data (nor is the climate change argument, or bathrooms bills).

Relatively recently, the topos  of “banning abortion strengthens the family” popped up. That was new. Once I fell down the rabbit hole of the “strengthening the family” argument, what I found was that there are two different ways that people try to make that connection—that banning abortions strengthens the family. One is the very old argument that [this policy] is good because we believe it is the policy God wants us to advocate. It doesn’t matter if the policy is practical—what matters is that we are enacting God’s will, and therefore God will reward us. Since strong families are good, then banning abortion will result in strong families.

The second one is that banning abortion will strengthen families because they believe that the only strong family is one that is controlled by a male who controls himself rigidly. One of the most important things for him to control is the sexuality of the females in the family. Legal access to abortion not only gives women autonomy regarding reproduction, but separates sex from the consequence of pregnancy. And, of course, the solution that actually reduces abortion—access to effective birth control—also increases women’s sexual autonomy. So, for people who believe that strong families require male control of women’s sexuality, this solution is just as bad as abortion.

It’s very clear what banning abortion does: it doesn’t reduce pregnancies that are the consequence of rape, that endanger women’s lives, that involve teens. It certainly doesn’t end abortions. When abortion was illegal in most states, rich women could always get an abortion by going to a state or country in which it was legal (and they did), and women without enough money could try back alley abortions.

My rabidly GOP father (if a person drove badly, he’d say, “Probably a Democrat”) had one point on which he rejected the Reagan and post-Reagan policy agenda: abortion. He was a pathologist, and, after the second autopsy of a woman who had died from a botched amateur abortion, he could not support making abortion illegal.

The people who want to ban abortion call the other side pro-abortion, but, if you oppose effective birth control and accurate sex education, you are pro-abortion—you are supporting the policies that contribute to abortion.

The abortion argument is a great example to show how public discourse about policies evades policy argumentation. If you think abortion is bad, and you want to reduce it, then you think abortion is an ill, and you should be willing to support policies that demonstrably reduce abortion. If you aren’t, then this all really isn’t about abortion. And this isn’t. It’s about women’s sexuality.

[Normally, I try to provide links, but I’m really uncomfortable giving these groups any clicks.]

Trump supporters/critics and policy argumentation

I spend a lot of time in public and expert realms of political dispute. And, one thing I’ve noticed in the last two years is that, in the public areas, supporters of Trump have stopped engaging in rational argumentation about him, but they used to. They’re not even engaging in argumentation at all. They’ll sometimes do a kind of argumentative driveby, popping into a thread that’s critical of Trump in order to drop in some talking point about how he’s a great President, and then leaving. Sometimes they give a reason for refusing to engage in argumentation, and it’s an odd reason (critics of him are biased). This is worrisome.

We’re in such a demagogic culture—in which people assume that the world is divided into fanatics of left v. right—that I have to say what should be unnecessary: not everyone who supports Trump is just repeating talking points. In fact, I can imagine lots of arguments for Trump’s policies that follow the rules of rational argumentation (and I’ve seen them, but not in the public realm).  I think Trump’s policies can be defended rationally. Apparently, his supporters don’t.

And that is what worries me.

What I’m saying is that there are people who do just repeat talking points (all over the rich and varied place that is the public sphere) and the kind of people who have always just repeated pro-Trump talking points used to be  following advice on how to engage in argumentation, and now they’re not. That kind of Trump supporter has stopped engaging in argumentation at all.

Just to be clear: I mean something fairly specific by the term “rational argumentation” (not how “rational” is used in popular culture, and argumentation, not argument—this will be explained below). While I’m not a supporter of Trump, I do think his policies can be defended through rational argumentation—that is, a person could argue for them while remaining within the rules described below. That means, oddly enough, that I don’t think Trump’s policies are indefensible, but his followers seem to think they are.

That’s worrisome.

I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the digital public sphere, and thinking a lot about politics. And I’ve come to think that we are in a culture of demagoguery, in which every policy question is reduced (or shifted) to a zero-sum battle between “us” and “them.” That reduction is false and damaging. There are not two sides to any policy issue—there are far more. And our political culture is not a binary.

Personally, I think a useful map of our political culture would be, at least, three-dimensional, and even then you’d have to have different maps for different issues. But that’s a different post.

In my wandering, I’ve noticed that you can see talking points created by a powerful medium that are then repeated by people for whom that medium is an in-group authority. This isn’t a left v. right thing. (No issue is.)  The talking points on “get rich fast” shifted when James Arthur Ray killed some people; the same thing happened on the “get laid quick” sites after the Elliot Rodger shooting. The talking points on dog sites changed after a study about taurine came out. I know what Rachel Maddow said on her show without watching her show; the same is true of Rush Limbaugh.

The pro-Trump (like the pro-HRC or pro-Sanders or pro-Stein) talking points used to be a mix of what amounted to tips on what to say if you’re engaged in policy argumentation and what amount to statements of personal loyalty (“s/he is a good person because s/he did this good thing”).

And you could tell what the talking points were by what your loyal pro-Trump or pro-Stein (or pro-raw dog food) Facebook friend (or Facebook group) asserted.

What worries me about the driveby dropping of a pro-Trump talking point and refusal to engage policy argumentation is that it suggests that the pro-Trump sources of argumentative points have abandoned policy argumentation. These people aren’t even trying. That’s puzzling.

What makes arguing in some digital spaces interesting is that people are now often arguing with known entities—I’m watching someone make arguments about Trump whom I watched make arguments about Clinton or Obama.

What I’m seeing, in places that used to have rational-critical argumentation in favor of Trump, is that people aren’t even trying. (So, just to be clear, anyone saying that my argument can be dismissed because I’m not pro-Trump is showing that I’m right.)

What I want to use as the standard for a “rational” argument is van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s ten rules for a rational-critical argument. They are:

    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.
      These are rules for rational-critical argumentation, so these rules aren’t ways that people have to engage in every conversation.

For instance, I’m not saying that people involved in a discussion can never say that some arguments are off the table, or that people can never refuse to engage with another party (although both of those moves would be violations of Rule 1). I’m saying that, when that rule is violated, the person whose views were dismissed and the person doing the dismissing are not engaged in rational argumentation with each other. They might still have a really good and interesting conversation, or a really fun fight, but it isn’t rational argumentation.

And what I’m saying is that in various places I hang out, supporters of Trump used to engage in argumentation to support their claims, but they’re doing it much less—in fact, not very often. If they don’t do a driveby (one post and out), they say that they won’t argue with anyone who disagrees with them because that person is biased.

Both of those moves—one post and out, and refusing to engage with counter-arguments because the very fact of their being counter-arguments makes them “biased”—is a violation of Rule 1. While they assert that criticizing Trump means a person is so biased that their views can be dismissed, that’s a thoroughly entangled and irrational argument (it’s even weirder when the accusation is “Trump Derangement Syndrome”–it’s weird because many of the people who fling around the accusation of Trump Derangement syndrome still suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome).

That’s a misunderstanding of what “bias” means and how it functions in argumentation. Of course people are biased—that’s how cognition works—but, if a person is so biased that it’s distorting their argument, then their arguments will violate one of the ten rules. Dismissing a position because the person is biased is a violation of Rule 1. It’s a refusal to engage in rational argumentation.

More important, this move is a rejection of argumentation, and democracy. Rejecting criticism of Trump on the grounds that criticizing Trump shows that the critic is biased is not just an amazingly good example of a circular argument, but a move that makes it clear that the person doesn’t want to listen to anyone who disagrees. Argumentation and democracy share the premise that we benefit from taking seriously the viewpoints of people with whom we disagree.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, in which far too much public discourse, all over the political spectrum, is about how you shouldn’t listen to that person because s/he is biased. And the proof that they’re biased? That they disagree.

If a person is biased, and we are all biased, but their arguments can be defended in rational-critical argumentation, then their arguments are worth taking seriously, regardless of the bias of the person making the argument.

Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, identified the problem with dismissing an argument because you don’t like the person making it. Sometimes it’s called the genetic fallacy, and sometimes it’s motivism.

In any case, any person who supports Trump refusing to engage anyone who criticizes Trump on the grounds that that person is “biased” is engaged in the fallacy of motivism (so a violation of Rule 8), and violating Rule 1. (And, so is anyone refusing to engage a Trump supporter if it’s purely on the grounds of their being a Trump supporter.)

Dismissing a person’s position as irrational because they do or don’t support Trump is the admission of an inability to have a rational argument with that person. If I refuse to engage in argumentation with any Trump supporter, purely on the grounds that they support Trump, then we have to start wondering about whether my criticism of Trump can be rationally defended. And, while I see many people who make exactly that move—dismiss the person, not the claims, from even the possibility of rational arguments, because the person supports Trump—I do often see people trying to engage in argumentation with Trump supporters.

I’m not seeing Trump supporters willing to engage in argumentation. I see them willing to make claims, but not engage their opposition rationally. And, as I said, that’s new.

One of the ways of not engaging the other side that I see a lot of people (all over the political spectrum) use is to violate the third rule. That is, imagine that Chester says he really likes Trump’s 2018 missile strikes against Syria, and thinks those were an appropriate response, it’s unhappily likely that Hubert will respond by saying, “Oh, so you think children should be thrown into concentration camps?” Chester didn’t say he liked all of Trump’s policies, let alone his policies regarding families trying to enter the US.

There are two very different arguments that Chester might be making: “Trump is a good President as is shown by his good judgment regarding the Syrian missile strikes” or “Trump’s missile strikes against Syria were wise policy.” Trump’s immigration policy might be relevant for the first argument, but not the second. An even more troubling way of violating the third rule is for Hubert to decide that all Trump supporters are the same, and, therefore, since some Trump supporters deny evolution, and Chester is supporting a particular policy of Trump’s, to attribute evolution denial to Chester. Interlocutors make that (fallacious) move because they believe that the world is divided into two groups, and that the opposition is a homogeneous group—you can condemn any individual out-group member by pointing out a bad argument made by any other out-group member.

[This is another move that people all over the political spectrum make, and it makes me want to scream.]

Right now, one of the pro-Trump talking points is that the economy is strong, and that shows Trump is a great President. People drop this into arguments about issues that have nothing to do with the economy. Even more troubling is that it seems to me that the people making the argument don’t defend it—it’s often one of the argumentative drivebys—but, more important, it’s often irrelevant.

Most recently, I saw it in a thread where someone had made a comparison between Hitler and Trump, about the comparable chaos in the two administrations. And dropping into that argument was a kind of horrible example of why that move—criticism of Trump on X point is false because the economy is good– was a perfect example of violating the fourth rule (about relevance). Whether Trump has improved the economy doesn’t invalidate the claims about how the chaotic administrations are comparable.

That argument also violated Rule 5, in that the unexpressed premise of that argument is that a political leader who improves the economy is good. And Hitler greatly improved Germany’s economy—for a while. So it was a particularly bungled attempt to disprove a point.

I’m seeing that talking point a lot, made by people who would not give Obama credit for improving the economy—saying that Obama simply benefitted from what the Bush Administration had done. So, when the economy is strong, and it’s a President they like, they attribute the economy to the President; when they don’t like the President, they don’t (this, too, is far from unique to Trump supporters).

That’s a violation of the eighth rule—the argument that “Trump is a good President because the economy is strong” has the unexpressed premise of a strong economy meaning that the current President is good. The people who make that argument for Trump but not Obama (or vice versa) reject the validity of their own premise.

For instance, I’m now seeing people who believed any horrible thing about Obama, who worked themselves into frenzies about Michelle Obama’s sleeveless dress, Obama’s golfing, his vacations, the cost to the US of his vacations, the Clinton’s possibly having financially benefitted from their time in the White House, Bill Clinton’s groping, HRC’s problematic security practices regarding classified information defend a President who has done worse on every single count.

They are not reasoning about what makes a good President grounded in claims that apply across all groups.

This is rabid factionalism. This is being foaming-at-the-mouth loyal to your in-group, and then finding reasons to support that loyalty (such as the one free grope argument).

People who are loyal to their in-group engage in motivated reasoning. And, let’s be honest, we all want to be loyal to our in-group. In motivated reasoning, there is a conclusion the person wants to protect, and they scramble around and find evidence to support it—they are motivated to use reason to support something they really want to believe. That isn’t rational, and it leads to arguments that can’t be rationally defended because a person trying to make a case that way has unexpressed premises in one set of claims that are contradicted by the unexpressed premises in another set of claims.

When it’s pointed out to someone that they can’t rationally defend their claims about Trump, I often see them respond, “Well, [example of a Democrat being irrational or having made an irrational argument].”

This is a fairly common kind of response, as though any bad behavior on the part of anyone on “the other side” cleans the slate of any in-group behavior. This fallacious move (a violation of Rule 7) relies on the false premise that any political issue is really a zero-sum contest of goodness between the “two sides.” Since it’s a zero-sum (as though there is a balloon of goodness, and if you squeeze one side, then there is more on the other), then any showing “badness” on the “other” side squeezes more air into yours.

A Trump critic making an irrational argument doesn’t magically transform an irrational pro-Trump argument into a rational one. Now they’re both irrational. It isn’t as though there is a zero-sum of rationality between the “two sides.” (For one thing, there aren’t two sides.)

This is really concerning in a democracy. Ideally, people should be arguing for policies rationally–which isn’t to say unemotionally—notice that none of these ten rules prohibits emotional appeals. The eighth rule, about logical validity, and fourth, about relevance, imply prohibition of argumentum ad misercordiam—which is not the fallacy of an emotional appeal, but the fallacy of irrelevant emotional appeal.

I’m not concerned that there are people who support Trump; I’m not concerned that there are Trump supporters who are clearly repeating talking points from their media; I’m concerned that those talking points are clearly not intended to be used in policy argumentation; I’m concerned that support of Trump is not even trying to fall within the realm of rational argumentation.
Unhappily, critics of Trump, it seems to me, are also arguing about his identity, and not the rationality of his policies.

Trump has policies. If they’re good policies, they can be defended through rational argumentation. If they can’t, they’re bad policies.

One of the most troubling aspects of the now dominant pro-Trump rhetoric is that it depends on an argument about his “success” as a businessman that is similar to the argument made about the “success” of his proposals. As it has come out that his businesses lost money hand over fist, people are arguing that he was a successful businessman because he personally succeeded financially. This isn’t an unusual argument—I was surprised when I saw it for a motivational speaker whose claims of personal wealth were exposed as completely false. The argument was, if you can rack up that much debt, that’s a kind of success. In other words, it’s saying that, as long as the method is working, it’s a good method.

That’s a little bit like describing falling out of a plane as successful flying—right up to the moment of contact with pavement.

That we are now getting a good outcome is not rational policy argumentation. Nor is that Trump is or is not a good person.

Trump shouldn’t be defended or attacked as a person, and his policies should be attacked or defended regardless of his person. Neither defending nor attacking his policies should be a reason to dismiss the argument being made. We need to argue policies.

Plagiarism-Detection Software and Slow Children at Play

Because I direct the University Writing Center, and teach and write about the teaching of writing, people assume, correctly, that I care a lot about plagiarism. Because I care a lot about plagiarism, a lot of people assume that I advocate the use of plagiarism-detection software. I don’t.

Plagiarism-detection software is so attractive because it appeals to several misconceptions about plagiarism, what it is, why students engage in it, and how to prevent it. Plagiarism is the consequence of incorrect citation, but not all instances of incorrect citation are plagiarism. There are a lot of ways of citing that, at least by some disciplines, are incorrect, including submitting work that

    • appropriates someone else’s citations;
    • was entirely written by someone else;
    • has large uncited portions from another source in which words are changed here and there;
    • paraphrases source material but doesn’t cite it;
    • has a substantial portion verbatim from an uncited source;
    • cites the sources of material, but not in the correct format;
    • uses ideas, but not language, from an un-cited source;
    • fails to punctuate correctly (so that quoted material is presented as though it’s paraphrased).

These examples are incorrect (although not in all disciplines—in some fields, such as law, appropriating a set of citations is common), but not everyone would call all of them plagiarism (and that third one is often taught as not plagiarism, although most colleges consider it so).

Since there are disciplinary differences, and since it’s not useful to collapse very different practices into one term, teachers need to tell their students what plagiarism is, and what the penalties are. Those penalties vary from class to class, as they should.

Thus, one problem with plagiarism-detection software is that it is often marketed as though it makes the determination of plagiarism for the teacher. It shouldn’t. It can’t.

A lot of faculty assume that college students know what plagiarism is, and they therefore assume that plagiarism is always deliberate. But not all students do know what plagiarism is, because, for instance, not all college teachers use the term to mean the same thing. Some only use plagiarism for instances in which there is no citation at all, whereas some include bungled citation. Unfortunately, there are still many students who have been told (perhaps by teachers, perhaps by parents or friends) that changing every third word makes it not plagiarism. College faculty often assume that this myth was dispelled in college first year composition classes, but many students don’t take first-year composition in a college.

Loosely, there are four different ways that students end up with material that fits the highest standards of plagiarism. There are students who know that they are plagiarizing and choose to do it in ways that they believe will be hard to trace—such as by buying a paper from a paper mill, paying someone else to write an original paper, or turning in a paper that another student has given them. There are students who deliberately cut and paste material from sources, spending their time tweaking the material to make it passable. They know they are plagiarizing, and hope to make it undetectable. These two kinds of plagiarists are deliberate and, let’s be blunt, malevolent. They think that the rules about plagiarism don’t apply to them. They are narcissistic jerks.

There are students who have poor research strategies, such as cutting and pasting into their paper file material from the sources they want to use. Under such circumstances, it’s easy to lose track of what was direct quotation, so these students may not realize they’ve plagiarized. They may think they haven’t. The fourth is what Rebecca Moore Howard calls “patchwriting,” in which authors take phrases from various sources, perhaps even following the original syntax. Patchwriting happens for various reasons, ranging from bad time management (not enough time to digest the source material) to unfamiliarity with the content (if we are writing about a topic we don’t understand, we might not be able to find synonyms, and so take phrases from the original), or even thinking that changing a word here and there is sufficient (that is, the myth of changing every third word).

As a teacher, I am most interested in what students’ plagiarism means for my teaching. If I’m doing a good job of writing assignments, students shouldn’t be able to get a passing grade doing that first kind of plagiarism. If I have students who are doing the second, I need to give them a poor grade, make them rewrite the paper, or otherwise recognize the problem. If they’re doing the third, I need to work on teaching writing processes. If they’re doing the fourth, I’ve done a lousy job teaching content, or a lousy job teaching about citation practices.

Does plagiarism-detection software help me learn from students’ plagiarism?

There is a world in which it might—I’ll get to that at the end—but this is not that world. Instead, it is a world in which plagiarism-detection software helps malevolent plagiarism. It does so because it tells teachers that plagiarism-detection software can teach students how to keep from plagiarizing. It tells teachers they won’t have to teach about plagiarism or think about it as they grade papers. We still have to do both, even with the best plagiarism-detection software.

Students who are plagiarizing, and know they are, find plagiarism-detection software very helpful. They can submit and resubmit a paper, tweaking their language, until they can find a version that makes the software happy. Plagiarism-detection software is a kind gift to students who are deliberately plagiarizing.

Plagiarism-detection software sometimes does (but usually doesn’t) catch the third and fourth kind of plagiarism, the kind that is an opportunity for a useful intervention on my part. I can only notice those sorts of plagiarism if I know the source material the students are using for their papers, and I’m familiar with the content. (This is one of many reasons I avoid “open” assignments.)

Plagiarism-detection software marketing claims that teachers can essentially delegate the question of plagiarism to them. It can’t. It’s best at that third sort of plagiarism, and second best (but not great) at the fourth.

The problem is that it not only helps students who are deliberately engaged in plagiarism, but that the marketing is that teachers can rely on plagiarism to make teaching decisions for them, when it actually can’t.

I lived in a neighborhood that had no sidewalks, and was a relatively recent development, so there were a lot of people walking on the road with dogs and strollers, and jerks who drove much too fast. We needed to get people to drive more carefully and more slowly. We had a community meeting with some police officers at which a lot of residents argued that we should put up “Slow Children At Play” signs.

They thought that telling people they should do something was the same as making them do it.

[This is the dominant model of communication—with disastrous effects in terms of political deliberation and education reforms, but that’s a subject for different posts.]

Guess what. People who drive too fast do not, in fact, suddenly drive more carefully when they are informed there are children. The worst drivers in our neighborhood lived there. They had children. They could see children on the road. They thought they were such good drivers that they could drive as fast as they wanted and still be responsible drivers. They were narcissist jerks who thought the rules didn’t apply to them.

So, putting up those signs didn’t change those actually irresponsible drivers who slid into the bike line, drove too fast, multi-tasked. It didn’t make them any more responsible. They continued to drive like narcissist jerks to whom rules didn’t really apply.

But, as the police officers said, when there were “Slow Children At Play” signs in a neighborhood, then parents assumed that people would drive well, and therefore weren’t as careful as they needed to be given the narcissist jerks in the neighborhood. “Slow Children At Play” signage makes parents less careful, while not changing the behavior of dangerous drivers.

My main problem with plagiarism-detection software is that it is like putting up “Slow Children At Play” signs. It doesn’t really stop the troubling behavior, but it makes teachers think it has. Narcissist jerks can plagiarize even better, and teachers teach less well.

Universities are, and should be, about teaching people to write in complicated ways about complicated situations. That isn’t done on the cheap. It’s done by having students interact directly, and personally, with a content-knowledgeable person who reads and thinks about their work. Plagiarism-detection software could be used by teachers as one way of alerting them to two kinds of citation issues, but it can’t replace careful grading. Plagiarism software-detection software is attractive because it appears to take a time-intensive aspect of teaching writing—determining if students are using their sources responsibly—and solving it technologically.

It doesn’t.

How People Think About Voting (Hint: a centrist v. progressive model won’t help Dems)

A lot of people who don’t want to see Trump reelected are arguing about what we should do, and that’s great. It’s a complicated situation, and we should argue.

There are, however, three big problems with how those arguments are going right now. First, there is the assumption that the answer is, and always has been, obvious, and the Dems have been ignoring the obvious answer out of a combination of cupidity and stupidity. Second, there is the entirely false dominant model of politics being a zero-sum between two points on a continuum (extreme left v. extreme right), so that any move is toward the center (and away from an extreme) or vice versa. We need to stop talking and thinking about politics that way.

The third problem is, I think, that many (most?) of the arguments aren’t grounded in the really interesting empirical research out there about voting practices—people have a tendency to assume that everyone thinks about citizenship in the same way they do. So, for instance, if they tend to vote on the basis of policy, they think that everyone else does too. But, what if not everyone does vote on the basis of policy? Then we can’t get people to vote differently by putting forward different policies.

Many people do vote on the basis of policy. But not everyone; in fact, not most people. There is no one way that people vote, and so there is no one obvious solution. Figuring out what to do to get people to vote differently means being as accurate as possible as to how people decide to vote. And they don’t vote in a way that is easily mapped onto the left/right binary (or continuum).

The problem is that people don’t just vote for different people or parties—people think about how to vote in wildly different ways. There are, loosely, eight factors in how people vote, with those factors mattering more or less for different people, different elections, and different candidates. The factors are:

  • sheer in-group loyalty;
  • charismatic leadership (identification–they believe a political leader is like them or really gets them);
  • their immediate well-being (so they vote against the President if things are going badly for them and with the President if things are going well);
  • last minute information;
  • a “throw the bums out” mentality (aka “protest” vote);
  • voting against the out-group;
  • policy.

The empirical research doesn’t show a neat and simple picture, and so I can’t give a short summary of it or a simple statement of what our true solution is. I’d just be repeating the first error above.

Here are some things I’ve been reading that have deeply changed my understanding of voting habits in the US—that caused me to stop thinking that our problems could be solved through nominating fewer or more people anywhere on the false continuum (we need to stop arguing about whether to elect progressives or centrists—that assumes that people care about policies, and not enough people do) or that we need to have a more coherent policy agenda (same problem as the previous). I think that arguments about what to do should be more informed by readings like these (I’ve tried to find short summaries of each of the arguments—hence the links):

Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Jamieson cites studies, Mueller’s indictments, and a multitude of sources to show that the Russians did engage in considerable hacking, trolling, sock-puppeting, and generally gaming of social media in order to mislead, misinform, and distract voters with the ultimate goal of ensuring that last-minute voters and potential Dem voters mistrusted HRC.

Extremism, J.M. Berger

This non-partisan book builds on notions of in- and out-group mobilization to distinguish between normal and extreme versions of a political philosophy. I intend to use it in my rhetoric and racism class.

How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Two political scientists argue that Trump is following the playbook for how authoritarians displace democracy.

How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky

This book is an empirical study of partisan media, comparing Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, showing that both rely on fear- and hate-mongering about the out-group more than they promote in-group policies (or even political figures). While not a “both sides are just as bad” argument, it does have good data and analysis that makes it non-partisan. This is the book, I think, that shows how the vexed and entangled political lives that people actually live get reduced into us v. them.

Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson

Like the Mason book (below), it argues that policy arguments get trumped by identification. It points out how very rich and complicated our actual political beliefs are, with emphasis on the behavior of voters who cut across conventional groupings. They show various things that are important, such as that people who are unhappy with how “the government” behaves vote GOP, even if the policies they dislike were promoted and voted in by the GOP.

The Rationalizing Voter, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber

This is the book with all the data about how people actually reason about politics (at least in the short term). They show that it isn’t emotional v. logical (the conventional understanding of rational/irrational) but what other people in cognitive science call System I (intuition) versus System II (metacognition). They are fatalistic about political reasoning of voters, but I think their data doesn’t merit that fatalism.

Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse

They are completely persuasive that many Americans reject the basic premises of democracy–that finding the correct solution is complicated, that people have legitimately different interests, that good solutions are never ideal–that people hold the President responsible for things like weather, sharks, and the current situation of the economy. They’re pretty fatalistic about voting, moreso than I think their data merits.

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason

Another empirically-grounded description of how the mosaic of political beliefs became a false binary of identity.