(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids
Many years ago, I was in a conversation with someone who was defending the police violence against Rodney King. He said, “After all, King had broken the law, so he was guilty.” I pointed out that, in the first place, by US conceptions of law he was innocent until he’d been through a trial, and second, that, even were he guilty, the punishment for what he’d done was not being physically beaten. He wasn’t bothered by the first one at all, and only a little bothered by the second.
He was a self-identified Libertarian. A “Libertarian” who believed that a police officer could not only determine guilt or innocence on the stop, but enact whatever levels of punishment felt right. That is very much not what a “Libertarian” should not believe. It’s authoritarianism. It’s believing that judgment should be giving to authorities.
That conversation was another datapoint that led to my belief that it’s really, really important that we stop thinking our political world in terms of a binary or continuum of “left v. right.” The data for the left/right continuum is from polls about self-identification, or a circular argument about support for X policy meaning that you have Y identity.
What matters for a thriving democracy isn’t who people are, nor where people are on some fantastical binary or continuum. Among the thing that do matter is that we believe that “the law”—whatever it is—applies equally to in- and out-group. The Libertarian didn’t believe that; he wanted complete liberty for his in-group, but didn’t mind if the police violated the supposed principle of Libertarianism, since it was against an out-group member.
Briefly, what I’ve come to understand—by spending a lot of time arguing with people all over the political spectrum—is that there are several ways of thinking about what “the law” is supposed to do.
In this post, I want to mention two that have a shared premise: that “the law” is supposed to enable communities to get along in a reasonably ordered way.
One way that people imagine the law doing that is to see law as a series of compromises and conventions that are, at best, striving to help everyone get along while holding everyone to the same standards. Some of them are purely arbitrary, and yet necessary–we all have to agree as to whether we’ll drive on the left or right side of the road (and the fact that right side is more common probably should figure into our deliberations), but there’s nothing inherently better about one or the other. If most of the world drove on the left side, after all, then that should figure in our deliberations.
And the law can change. For instance, there was in the 19th century a general sense that the law shouldn’t interfere in private contracts. But, after a while, people started to think that child labor was appalling, but passing laws about it would violate that principle about contracts, so they decided they had to reconsider that principle. So, “the law” works as a series of decisions and arguments in which we’re trying to get a community of diverse people to function effectively within the constraints of principles about rights.
The second way of thinking about the law, an authoritarian one, assumes that the law should maintain order by holding in- and out-group to different standards—it should maintain order by letting good people (the in-group) do pretty much whatever they want, and controlling bad people (the out-group) through punishment.[1] Ann Coulter, ends her book Treason with this argument:
“Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position to to be for treason.” (202)
It’s an astonishing argument, even for Coulter. That rights are human rights–that is, granted to all people simply by virtue of their being human–is a principle of American law. So, yes, pornographers have rights; that isn’t treason–that’s how the law is supposed to work. But, for Coulter, bad people shouldn’t have rights.
In my experience, people who imagine the law functioning this way are also prone to claiming that their condemnation of out-group figures is grounded in principle, but it isn’t.
I recently had an argument with someone who claimed that he was opposed to Biden because Biden lies. He supports Trump. That Biden lies is, unfortunately, a fact, and I will be angry af if he’s the Dem candidate for President in 2024. But Trump also lies, and he lies even more than Biden, yet that Trump lies was not a reason for that person to oppose Trump. That person was engaged in strategic appeals to principle. His opposition to Biden wasn’t grounded in some principle about lying—his support of Trump showed that he doesn’t care about lying on principle. He was engaged in cultish levels of support for Trump, while pretending to himself that his opposition to Biden was principled.
Trump supporters are authoritarian to the extent that they refuse to hold him (or themselves) to the standards they hold others.
For instance, Trump supporters frequently condemn BLM protests, many of which got violent. If those protests should be condemned, then so should January 6. That is, a person who was, on principle, opposed to violent protests would condemn both. Like the Trump cultist member who only objected to Biden’s lies but justified or refused to consider Trump’s lies, Trump supporters who defend January 6 and condemn BLM protests are not, actually, reasoning from a principle they value. They’re just people who hold their in-group to lower standards (or no standards at all).
And yet they do believe in “the law.”
MLK argued that there is a higher law than the laws supporting segregation, and he appealed to the higher law of people being treated equally regardless of in- or out-group. He advocated that everyone be held to the same standards. I’ll say he had Jesus on his side.
Trump appeals to a different understanding of a “higher law.” His supporters don’t hold in- and out-groups to the same standards. They believe that order is about domination and submission.
They believe that they are justified in violence if they don’t get their way. That is, if they can’t dominate. And Trump believes the same. And that is not democracy. And it isn’t Christian.
[1] There’s a quote going around describing this principle as being the central tenet of “conservativism,” and, while I think it’s true that a lot of people who self-identify as conservative do believe this, I’ve also heard the same principle expressed by self-identified leftists. I think authoritarianism is more usefully seen as another axis in a political map rather than a point on a single-axis continuum of political affiliation.
As often happens with big controversies, the version that gets tossed around is a stark binary with absurdly un-subtle positions, and that’s what’s happened with the new versions of many of Roald Dahl’s books. No one is talking about burning every copy of the “original” version (which, keep in mind, went through a process of editing—that is, an editor telling Dahl to make changes, some of them having to do with racism).
People (some of whom are authors, and really should know better) are saying that you can’t change an author’s words, or that you never should. That’s what editors get paid to do. Sometimes editors suggest changes to make a book more appropriate to an audience (cite more, cite less, make the language less/more formal); sometimes the changes come about because a person is using language that will probably get a reaction the author doesn’t intend (for instance, when I was told by an editor not to use the word “taint” in a book that college students would read).
When an author is alive, they can object to the changes, and say they’d rather not have the piece published at all, or get a different publisher, or say they’re fine with any controversy or misreadings that might happen. It’s a different situation when the author is dead, and can’t authorize a new edition, and that’s the situation here. So, just to be clear: it isn’t as though we’re suddenly in a new world in which <clutch pearls> authors are, for the first time ever, having work edited.
And it’s the job of publishers to make money; if they believe that out-dated language is hurting sales, you can bet they’ll update it. There are and have been for years more accessible versions of Shakespeare (wth do people think West Side Story is?)—in the 19th century, it was de rigueur to have what was called “the water scene” in Hamlet (where Hamlet jumped into the water—sometimes on a horse—in order to keep Ophelia from drowning). I don’t think there’s been a single movie version of any Shakespeare that has the entire “unchanged” script from the original play (including the Macbeth of Coen or Welles ).
I mention Coen and Welles because I think both of them tried particularly hard to stay with Shakespeare’s intention, and believed—correctly, I think—that the changes they made were necessary for the play to have the impact for a current audience that Shakespeare originally intended. That’s one way of updating–through editing (or “changing”) a text–try to keep the author’s intention and change the text.
Some ways involve ignoring intention. There are plenty of versions of Merchant of Venice that make Shylock sympathetic—was that Shakespeare’s intention? Maybe, but quite possibly not, and directors don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the issue. Taming of a Shrew, similarly, is often performed with an interpretation that may or may not have been what Shakespeare intended. And, if, for instance, we found some document that made absolutely clear that Shakespeare intended for Shylock to be a greedy, Christian-hating villain, and intended him to represent all Jews, people would either stop performing the play, or they’d ignore his intention.
The publisher of Dahl’s books—who has announced they have the old and new versions available (and, by the way, used books are always an option)—made several kinds of changes. You can see them here. They’ve made an effort to remove language that is ableist, racist, sexist, fat-shaming (which, apparently, particularly has some readers clutching their pearls), in order to make the books more accessible. From the article:
“Scott Evans has been a primary school teacher for eight years and works at a school in South Wales, near Cardiff, where Dahl grew up. He runs a website, The Reader Teacher, and has worked as a sensitivity reader. “I understand the arguments some say about censorship and diminishing the author’s voice,” he says. “However, after recently re-reading some children’s books by Dahl, some language stood out as offensive while other terms have become outdated over time. Here, sensitivity readers can make suggested adaptations to make them more accessible to children.”
Personally, I don’t think the editors did a great job of the project, and I think it’s completely worth arguing about the specific changes, what they do, don’t do, and what changes would be better. That’s an argument worth having.
But, the fact is that Dahl was writing at a point when no one cared about shaming kids who were different, stigmatizing mental illness, and so on. I doubt it was Dahl’s intention to be hurtful—I suspect he just didn’t think about it–but the books are hurtful. To assume that removing some of the hurt necessarily violates his intention is saying he intended to promote racism, ableism, and so on, that he intended to hurt children. That doesn’t seem like much of a defense to me.
In a previous post about Thucydides’ description of the “Debate at Sparta,” I pointed out that the Corinthian speaker is in a vexed rhetorical situation. Corinth was at war with its former colony Corcyra, and they were fairly evenly matched. If Corinth could get Sparta to take its side, it could win. But there’s no real reason for Sparta to take Corinth’s side—Corcyra isn’t a threat, and it’s all about yet a third city-state (Potidea) in which Sparta has no compelling economic or political interest.
In addition to unnecessary, intervening would be risky. It would be a clear violation of a treaty with the other major power in the Hellenic region—Athens—and it would start war. The outcome of that war was far from obvious, and potentially disastrous. As Archidamus—the Spartan King, and an experienced general—says, it could be a war they would hand on to their children. (They did.)
What makes this debate interesting for us now is that the Corinthian, who has a specific kind of weak case, uses four rhetorical strategies that speakers in that situation often use—a set of strategies that’s usefully called a “politics of identity.” And, while those strategies are often effective, they really shouldn’t be. If the Corinthian actually had a reasonable case, he could have made it in a reasonable way. He couldn’t because he didn’t. Instead, he deflected away from the weakness of his case in the four ways that others with weak cases do—recognizing those strategies can help us make better decisions. Instead of finding a politics of identity compelling, we should recognize it as someone with a weak case.
First, he presented Athens as an existential and inevitable threat. He framed the conflict between them as outside of the realm of pragmatic, contextual, and negotiable policy issues, instead claiming the specific conflicts came from the essentially aggressive and expansionist nature of Athens, and, therefore, it was just a question of time till Athens took over all of Hellas, including Sparta. (That outcome was improbable, at best.)
Since war was inevitable, according to the Corinthian, it was a question of Sparta choosing the most opportune moment to start that war (or allow Athens to start it). He claimed urgency, with no evidence at all. That is, his second move was to make the argument that is now called the “closing window of opportunity” frame for going to war immediately. If we go to war right now, we win; if we let them get stronger we lose.
Third, he tried to shut down all deliberation about the war by saying that the situation was obvious, and there was only one possible solution—his. That is, he argued as though acknowledging the need (Athens’ expansionist nature) necessarily meant agreeing with his plan (joining the Corinth/Corcyra conflict right now on the side of Corinth).
Fourth, he tried to shut down all deliberation through what’s now often called “motivism”—a kind of ad hominem that is surprisingly effective. Motivism follows from the claim that there is only one possible solution. If there is no choice other than the plan he is adopting, why are there people who disagree? And the answer is: because they’re bad people. When rhetors make this move—prohibiting reasonable deliberation by dismissing (rather than engaging) every dissenting voice—they generally do so either through motivism or asserting out-group membership (they’re only disagreeing because they’re cowards, or they’re only disagreeing because they aren’t really in-group). [1]
If each of those moves were effective, then Sparta would go to war immediately, goaded by the Corinthian’s calling them ditherers and cowards.
And I want to emphasize: part of what makes the Corinthian case likely to be simultaneously rhetorically effective and completely unreasonable is that he’s muddled the need and plan. Even were Athens an existential threat, that doesn’t mean that intervening in this conflict right now is a good plan. And, really, how do you show that Athens is essentially and implacably committed to exterminating Sparta? Even assuming that Athens has done everything he says it has (it hadn’t), that doesn’t mean it’s going to be marching on the gates of Sparta (especially since it was a naval power).
But, to the extent that he’s been successful, anyone who stands up and disagrees with him about any point he makes is framed, even before speaking, as a dithering coward blind to the obvious facts.
How does someone get an assembly back on the deliberative track? How can someone redirect from a politics of identity?
One of those ways is through what’s sometimes called identity politics. Archidamus, who was dubious about the Corinthian’s plan, began his speech by refuting the foundational part of the argument—that doing anything other than intervening in Corinth’s squabble was motivated by dilatory slow-footed stupidity if not cowardice. And he does so by pointing out that he’s an experienced general, and that others who share that lived experience probably agree with him.[2] He says it’s important to take your time to deliberate carefully before you get into war, or you might find yourself in one it’s hard to get out of. He says that acting without thinking now means you’ll be able to repent at your leisure (I.84). The Penguin translation puts it: “If you take something on before you are ready for it, hurry at the beginning will mean delay at the end.” He reframes the behavior that the Corinthian tries to frame as dithering (that is, not getting easily provoked) as sophrosyne; that is, temperance, reasonableness, and self-control.
He goes on to propose a counterplan—Sparta should object to Athenian violations of the treaty, build up a war chest, make allies, and prepare for war while trying to make war unnecessary.
One of many serious problems that comes from our tendency to turn every disagreement into “two sides” is that arguments like Archidamus’ are easily dismissed, especially if we talk about disagreements regarding war policies as “pro-“ or “anti-“ war. Archidamus’ position is not “anti-war,” nor was he. His lived experience is a logical refutation of one of the claims the Corinthian was making—that everyone who disagreed with him was a dithering procrastinating coward.
Archidamus’ appealing to his lived experience—his appealing to his own identity—doesn’t end the argument. It’s an attempt to open the argument back up, to bring the community back to deliberation. Appeals to lived experience are datapoints.
It wouldn’t have been a reasonable argument had Archidamus said, “I’m a general, and anyone who disagrees with me knows nothing about war and should be ignored.” Arguments from identity reasonably add to deliberation, and they can refute “all” or “no” statements, but a single lived experience doesn’t reasonably support an “all” or “no” statement. That Archidamus is an experienced military leader doesn’t prove that all experienced military leaders have one position.
The Corinthian speaker tried to hide the extent to which it was a war of choice by deflecting from the pragmatic policy issues (could compromises be reached with Athens, or Corcyra, what would a war with Athens be like) by pretending that this war of choice was a war of self-defense.
That’s a common move. And it’s common to do it the way that the Corinthian speaker did—claim that issue is not a pragmatic issue open to compromise, negotiation, deliberation because there is an Other (in this case Athens) always already at war with Sparta. Pro-slavery rhetors, the Weather Underground, John Muir in the Hetch Hetchy debate, Hitler, Earl Warren about Japanese Americans, Planned Parenthood, and all current GOP rhetors engage(d) in that rhetoric to some degree. In other words, no matter what your policy affiliation or your hall of heroes, you admire someone who deflected from pragmatic policy deliberation by claiming that an enemy determined on our extermination has already declared war, and so we need to stop deliberating. There isn’t an Other who argues badly; there is an Us who reasons badly.
And, even were the Corinthian’s need argument true—even were Athens determined on exterminating Sparta—that doesn’t mean that intervening in the Corinthian/Corcyra conflict at that moment was the only possible response. I’m perfectly willing to grant that both Stalinism and Maoism were disastrously bad, but—even if that’s true—that doesn’t mean that our Vietnam policy was correct. That there is a legitimate, and even urgent, need doesn’t mean that we can’t usefully disagree about the plan.
Identity politics is an approach to policy deliberation that says that who we are—what our identity has meant we’ve experienced—has given us a perspective important for reasonable and ethical deliberation. A politics of identity—what the Corinthian advocated—is profoundly authoritarian. Identity politics—what Archidamus enacted—is profoundly democratic.
Whether he was successful or not is a complicated question, and not really relevant to my point. My point is that a politics of identity says that we are never facing pragmatic questions about how to assess our various policy options in a world of uncertainty. It says that politics is really a zero-sum conflict between identities, and that policy argumentation, let alone the normal practices of democratic policy determination (compromise, mediation, bargaining) are cowardly and/or corrupt submissions to evil. It’s always authoritarian, regardless of where it is on the political spectrum. Identity politics says that who we are matters, and the experiences related to our various identities must be taken into consideration if we are going to come to good decisions. Identity politics is an approach to deliberation that insists on inclusion. It is profoundly democratic.
Who we are, and what we have experienced, and how we see things—what our identity means in terms of our perspective—all of that is crucial to reasonable democratic deliberation. Policy deliberation can’t be either reasonable or democratic if it isn’t informed by the perspectives of the people—perspectives that are different.
Policy deliberation can’t be either reasonable or democratic if we assume that it’s all just a zero-sum battle between two groups.
[1] English is weird. When I say that motivism means we dismiss every single person who disagrees us without engaging their argument, I’m often heard as saying that we have to engage the argument of every single person who disagrees with us. And I’m not saying that. I’m saying that it’s extremely unlikely that there really is only one possible course of action, and so there are almost certainly some good arguments out there that we would do well, as a community, to consider.
[2] Aristotle would probably have characterized it as an appeal to ethos. Since he also said that one of the ways we can argue is appeal to logos, many people—including argument textbooks and teachers of argument—assume that an appeal to ethos is not a logical argument, but that isn’t what Aristotle meant at all. It certainly isn’t how any scholars of argumentation think about the issue. Ethos is a datapoint, and there are more and less reasonable ways of appealing to ethos.
The University Writing Center in the main library at the University of Texas
[This is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave for the 30th Anniversary of the University Writing Center]
Thank you for this celebration, and thank UT for supporting such an extraordinary place as this Writing Center for thirty years—this is it, at the center of the campus, in the midst of one of the best university libraries in the nation, and part of the prestigious Department of Rhetoric and Writing. There are several reasons that this place exists, and that it’s as vibrant and successful as it is.
In no particular order:
The determination on the part of some Writing Center and some University Library staff to make it exist—they worked for at least sixteen years to have a Writing Center in a Learning Commons in the Library, just pushing and pushing, just a continuous force.
Peg Syverson, who hired well, retained well, trained well, created a community of caring and professionalism, who also went around campus generating goodwill, respect, and enthusiasm for what the Writing Center was doing.
The staff she retained and hired, who are kind, collaborative, creative, problem solvers, who nourished everyone they worked with.
lorraine haricombe, who (like me) had the advantage of taking over a position from an effective and respected predecessor, whose very position as a Vice-Provost shows that UT sees the Library as central to the mission of the University. Her support for the Writing Center has been invaluable, but in line with how effective she is.
The DRW has supported the Writing Center in pragmatic and important ways, having the position of Director a tenured faculty member, providing releases for the Director, including it as crucial for long-term planning, but also in day-to-day assistance in crises and brain-storming.
The College of Liberal Arts also supported in pragmatic ways—such as over half a million dollars—and, when I was Director, I knew that, when problems or questions arose, I could get good advice and support from both COLA and the DRW. What makes this Writing Center so special is the way it is pragmatically, institutionally, financially, and genuinely supported.
Here’s a contrast.
In 1977, when I was a sophomore in college, I applied for a job to work at the Berkeley Writing Center. It was here, in what were called “Temporary Buildings.” They had been built in World War II. A few years after I left, in the late 1980s, Berkeley built a really lovely Writing Center in a central part of campus.
The first UT Writing Center was called a “Writing Lab,” and it was in the basement of Parlin. It went away. When the Division of Rhetoric and Composition was formed, Lester Faigley created the Undergraduate Writing Center, which moved to the Undergraduate Library, and then in 2014 it became the University Writing Center, and moved to spectacular digs in the center of campus and the main floor of the library. That shared narrative of changes in architecture and geography is kind of a metaphor for how people thought about Writing Centers (or Writing Labs as they were also called)—something that was supposed to be a quick fix for a temporary problem came to be seen as central to the mission of the university.
Some of that shift is the consequence of new ways of understanding how universities function, who should attend them, and the relative importance of assessing v. teaching (to put it in simple, if not simplistic, terms, whether we should approach teaching with a fixed or growth mindset). But, I want to suggest something in this talk—that shift also has to do with how we have changed in our thinking about writing, changes that, I’ll suggest, are provocatively similar to changes in how some people argue we should think about democratic deliberation and democracy itself. And both those sets of changes are epitomized in practices in this Writing Centers.
The Berkeley Writing Center, as I was told, originated to serve students who were designated “affirmative action”—that is, students who had been admitted although they did not meet what were supposed to be the minimum GPA or standardized test score critera. When I was there, athletes and affirmative action students (often the same group, for not very good reasons) had priority, but other students could also sign up for tutoring.
Just to hit the point home, the foundational assumption was that there was at that moment a new kind of student who was lacking in something most college students had (or had had up to this point); this was the same time that a new course was created that in credits, name, numbering, staffing, and even department, was very explicitly marked as not really a college course (called Subject A—all other courses had numbers).
The UT Writing Lab, if I understand things correctly, had its origin in a similarly deficiency-based model. The idea was that some students lacked basic “grammar” skills, and so should be drilled in them. The foundational assumption was that methods commonly used to teach English to foreign language speakers would be equally useful for native speakers of English, whose understanding of “grammar” was presumed to be deficient, and that’s why they were “bad” writers.
In other words, there are people who are “Good Writers” and they produce “Good Writing” which uses “Good English,” so, we can transform “Bad” Writers into “Good” ones by drilling them in “the rules of grammar.” But what does that mean?
Look, for instance, at this half-page from a nineteenth century handbook on grammar, when they had that same (false) narrative about “grammar” and “good writing” and college. The dominant pedagogy presumed that people couldn’t produce good writing unless they knew the rules of good grammar, and so students were taught to memorize the rules, through drilling and punishment. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect agreement about what those rules were or are.
There was agreement, however, that people who had “bad” grammar should be shunned and shamed and bemoaned. Doug Hesse directed me to these quotes:
“Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old. –Adams S. Hill, Harvard 1878
“It is obviously absurd that the college—the institution of higher education—should be called upon to turn aside from its proper functions and devote its means and the time of its instructors to the task of importing elementary instruction. —Report of the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric, to the Harvard College Board of Overseers, 1892
I also like this passage, from a 19th century book on correct speaking:
Here’s one more example from another 19th century grammar book.
What you may notice is that most of these sentences seem fine. To the extent that there are errors, they are very minor, and don’t interfere with our ability to understand the sentence—except for the “or” rather than “nor” in the first one, it seems to me that most are about what preposition one should use in an idiomatic expression.
So why did this book make such a big deal about idiomatic expressions? One of the important functions of grammar books in the nineteenth century was to reify and justify the stigmatizing of certain dialects, thereby strengthening and rationalizing various existing hierarchies, especially class, ethnicity, region, and race. That approach to teaching grammar and composition enabled a caste system to pretend it was a meritocracy. Insistence on “grammatical correctness” can be profoundly unethical.
When I was in Kansas, there was a controversy over a notification sent out by a water company, informing its users that there were harmful chemicals in the water. The notice was grammatically correct, but deliberately incomprehensible, so that water users wouldn’t panic and demand changes. Grammatical correctness doesn’t guarantee clear communication.
It often, however, signals in-group membership, as in grammatically correct but meaningless mission statements about leveraging synergy.
Trump’s 2020 January 6th speech is grammatically pretty good—I was surprised by that—but only makes sense to people who already agreed with him. It signalled–and inflamed—in-group membership. Grammatical correctness doesn’t prevent demagoguery.
Here’s my point: there is far more disagreement about the conventions of “correct” English than many people realize, and using “correct” English doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the writing is clear or ethical.
When people in my and related fields make this argument, we’re often heard as arguing that we should abandon all conventions, but that isn’t possible. What we’re advocating is that we not assume that there is a thing—“good English”–, let alone that using that “good” English has necessary and necessarily good consequences. What we’re saying is that it has to be up for argument. A lot of people don’t like that attitude because it means that uncertainty is inevitable when it comes to writing, and teaching writing, even about very specific sentence-level choices.
Take, for instance, citation conventions. In some fields, the convention is to list authors in order of prestige rather than degree of contribution; that convention means that the “First Author et al.” convention obscures the contributions of junior scholars, who are often already underrepresented in academia. That convention makes them invisible, which is not necessarily the intention of the individual who writes “et al.”—they’re just trying to stay within a word limit, or finish the damn bibliography. The convention itself has consequences.
So it’s interesting that the rules of citation in many fields have changed—some journals and citation methods require that all authors be listed by name. That’s a rule that changed for ethical reasons. There is debate right now about the convention of citing authors by first initial and last name, and what it does for people with common last names. That’s a good argument to have. We need citation conventions, and we need to argue about them.
The history of any language, including English, is a history of people disagreeing about what the conventions are and should be—and that’s fine. I don’t think we can abandon prescriptivism; calling for banning all forms of prescriptivism is itself a kind of prescriptivism—prescribing and proscribing certain language. But we can argue about what we want to prescribe and proscribe, and stop talking in terms of proper and good. Conventions have consequences, and so they have to be up for argument.
We can, and really should, argue about these questions at conferences, in journals, at Faculty Council meetings, at workshops on teaching writing, but it’s a question a writing consultant faces every time they see a paper that uses a double negative.
In other words: what this Writing Center teaches is that while there are conventions, they are far more variable than people think—by discipline, genre, region, context, era—they have consequences, they must be up for argument, and we should argue about them in terms of whether their consequences are ethical. And authors can make choices about those conventions.
There are two other points I want to make about what happens in a writing center.
I think the most common thing I hear a writing center consultant say is something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what you’re saying here. What do you mean?” At that point, typically, the consultee says something pretty clear, and the consultant says, “Write that down.”
I think that’s interesting.
A friend and colleague refers to “the narcissistic pleasures of the first draft,” and sometimes that’s what happens. But not always. Here’s an early version of a Robert Caro manuscript.
I don’t think he felt a lot of narcissistic pleasure. Sometimes writing the first draft feels like pulling one’s own teeth with rusty pliers. I’ve often heard writers say that first draft is just trying to get our ideas outside of our own brain; the second is when we try to make it say what we mean; the third is when we think about it from the perspective of a reader. Note that that isn’t the “outline, draft, polish” chain that is often taught as “the writing process.” And I think, for most writers, it isn’t necessarily a linear process, or only involving one draft at each stage. I tend to have a draft, critique, redraft, critique, revise process that loops back on itself.
For instance, here’s a page from a book that was eventually published, and what you can see is that I spent a lot of time fiddling around at the sentence level before realizing my problem was the argument was wrong. The solution to the sentence-level problems was to go back to “higher order concerns” and rethink my argument.
In other words, just as the “rules” for “grammar” are much more context-dependent than many people seem to think, or “grammar” books say, and in many cases there really aren’t rules, but preferences, guidelines, hacks, and canards, it’s the same with writing processes. There aren’t rules, but practices, and we write better when we’re faced with difference.
An idea for a piece of writing can seem so clear while in the shower, or walking a dog, and then we try to put it into words, and it starts to get mucky. Our ideas, when we look at them in writing, often don’t seem quite as brilliant as they sounded in our head, often depending on whether we’re writing for ourselves or imagining an audience. What we say to someone else is often different from what we say to ourselves.
But, sometimes we do fall in love with our own writing, or at least think it’s clear, and then someone says, “I’m not sure what you mean here.” In a way, what Writing Centers provide is what every writer needs—a well-meaning reader who isn’t us, someone who doesn’t already agree with us, but who also isn’t particularly invested in what we’re writing. A well-meaning, but not invested, other person won’t necessarily make the logical jumps or associative slides that we don’t even notice in our beliefs, and so they draw attention to those jumps and slides.
At its best, difference makes us think better because it makes us think about what we take for granted.
This is going on a bit, so I’ll just mention one more aspect of Writing Center practice that’s important. People often want a Writing Center to be a proofreading service, and the good Lord knows I’d love if there were a place I could drop a piece of writing and have someone correct it for me, but that isn’t an educational practice. And, as I said at the beginning, UT is committed in institutional, financial, and geographic ways to a Writing Center that serves the educational mission of the University.
What consultants do is ask questions—that is, instead of telling a consultee about their paper, they’re curious. When asked a question, they’d google the information, show students how to use the library chat function to get help from a reference librarian, get up and check a resource, ask another consultant, get me or Alice—they didn’t present themselves as knowers, but as seekers. They model curiosity.
So, how have Writing Centers changed? They started in geographically marginalized spaces, and at their worst, were seen as temporary fixes oriented toward assimilating deficient people into the good practices of the in-group by teaching and enforcing strict and timeless rules. And they are, and this one is, now central to the University mission, geographically, bureaucratically, institutionally, and financially.
What they teach is that there are conventions, and those conventions have consequences, and they change over time, and we have to think, and argue, about what they do; the uncertainty is inevitable, that difference is not a necessary evil, but an active good—that, as one former director of this writing center likes to say, we think better when we think together–, especially if we think differently. And they teach that curiosity is a virtue, and a skill, that should be nurtured.
My area of specialization is train wrecks in deliberation; what is more formally called “pathologies of deliberation.” And sometimes people have expressed surprise that I would direct a Writing Center, since that seems unrelated to my scholarly interests. But what I believe, and have tried to suggest in this talk, is that the culture and practices of a writing center are the ones that enhance democratic deliberation. Scholars of democracy, and I’m thinking here especially of Jan-Werner Muller, emphasize that “Democratic Rules” as he calls them in his latest book are cultural—they’re practices rather than timeless legal dicta. And crucial for democratic hope are several that I’ve said are part of Writing Center culture: comfort with uncertainty, diversity and pluralism as valued and nurtured qualities, open-ness to new practices and conventions. He favorably quotes Claude LeFort who said that democracy is “founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate—a debate which is necessarily without any guarantee and without any end” (184). And I’m saying that’s what Writing Centers do. Muller says that “democracy dwells in possibility.”
According to the Greek historian Thucydides, during the “Debate at Sparta” (431 BCE), an un-named Corinthian tried to persuade the city-state of Sparta to get involved in a fight Corinth was having with another city-state, Corcyra.
Why?
Corinth was fighting with Corcyra about yet another city-state, Potidea. Athens and Sparta were the dominant city-states in the Hellenic region. So, both Corinth and Corcyra were trying to get one of the big players to intervene, and the “Debate at Sparta” includes a speech by a Corinthian speaker trying to get Sparta to takes its side. But, if either Sparta or Athens got involved, it would not remain a proxy war–they’d go to war with each other. That war was unnecessary and would be unpredictable–while Sparta was far superior in land troops, the troops couldn’t be gone too long (they feared a slave rebellion), and they were far inferior in terms of naval strength.
The Corinthian speech is important for people now because it exemplifies how a rhetor can use demagoguery to persuade a community to opt for an unnecessary and highly destructive war.
We are in a culture of demagoguery, when normal policy disagreements are treated as battles in an existential war, and we’re in that situation because it’s profitable for media to give rhetors like the Corinthian air time. And ambitious rhetors can get air time by using that kind of demagoguery.
But, back to the debate.
Presumably, here’s the plan: If the Corinthian could get Sparta and Athens to go to war, then Athens would be too busy to take Corcyra’s side (which Athens was seriously considering) if Corinth and Corcyra went to war. It’s as though I wanted to get in a fight with Chester, but I’m afraid that you’ll take Chester’s side and the two of you will kick my ass. If I could get Hubert to start a fight with you, then you won’t be able to get involved in my fight with Chester.
But, here’s the Corinthian’s rhetorical problem. He has a really weak case, so weak that the standard moves of policy argument (what Aristotle would later call “deliberative” rhetoric) wouldn’t work. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is largely a book about rhetoric and decision-making. And the admirable leaders, generals, and rhetors in the book all make a similar argument about argument: when we are arguing about policy, we shouldn’t make the issue about the character of our opponent (what Aristotle calls “epideictic”), or the justice or injustice of the situation (appropriate for a courtroom).[1] Deliberation should be about expediency—what are our goals, and what policy(ies) are most likely to enable success?
Here I’m going to get into the weeds a bit, but the important point is that the Corinthian can’t make a reasonable argument claiming that Sparta is faced with an imminent threat from Corcyra, Athens, or Corinth losing its conflict with Corcyra.
Here’s the weeds. It isn’t expedient for Sparta to take Corinth’s side. There’s no particular gain for Sparta, and neither Corcyra nor Athens present an imminent threat to Sparta. Corcyra could win the conflict with Corinth, and it would make no difference for Spartan security. Athens is quite some distance away, not threatening to invade Sparta (which would be improbable). The two were useful allies during the most recent Persian invasion, and they’re oddly balanced—Sparta has a better infantry, and Athens has a better navy. Most important, the Hellenes (what we call the Greeks) only repelled Persia because Athens and Sparta allied against them. Were Athens and Sparta to go to war, Persia would benefit, as it would improve the likelihood that Persia would succeed with its next invasion.
So, since the Corinthian can’t make the argument in reasonable policy terms, he shifts the stasis[2]—that is, he tries to reframe the issue in a way that might enable him to persuade Sparta to make a decision both unnecessary and very risky. What the Corinthian does is make it an issue of implacably opposed identities, an existential battle, rather than a pragmatic question about savvy policy.
He says that the real conflict is not Corinth’s entirely self-serving goal of getting Sparta and Athens to go to war so Corinth can beat Corcyra, but a grand, existential, and inevitable battle between Sparta and Athens. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ actions present an imminent threat (he couldn’t, since they didn’t), but that its identity does. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ policy of expanding threatens Sparta (since it didn’t), but that Athens’ identity as an expansionist city-state did. So, in both cases, he shifts the stasis from actions to identity.
This shift from actions (expanding) to identity (expansionist) is a relatively common rhetorical strategy. It’s a particularly common move when rhetors would have trouble persuading an audience of their case through deliberation. We can deliberate about actions, since we can have evidence about what someone did or didn’t do, and we can use those actions as evidence about what they might do in the future. We can talk usefully about goals (especially if a person or party has said what they are), since stated goals are evidence about what someone will do.
But neither previous actions nor stated goals are proof of what someone or some group will do. People and groups don’t always behave in the same way, and so we often have to figure out which of the past actions and statements are relevant to what they will do now. There are a lot of ways that people try to make that determination, and I’ll mention two.
One is what my father (an expert on arteriosclerosis) called “hardening of the categories.” By that, he meant people who believed that every aspect of the world can be put into a Linneaus-like (or Ramistic, if you know your rhetoric) tree of discrete and binary categories. A person (or group, or nation) is either pacific or aggressive, rational or irrational. If you think of individuals or groups this way, then you look at what they’ve done and try to put them into the pacific or aggressive box, and then make your policy decisions. You’ve decided that they’re really aggressive or passive or whatever, and all the disconfirming data can be dismissed. This strategy of prediction doesn’t make the situation any less uncertain, but it can give people the feeling of certainty because it makes the situation more stark. It deflects or hides the inherent uncertainty to any political act.
The other method I want to mention says that people have tendencies, but context matters. They tend to be aggressive under these circumstances, not under those. This way of predicting behavior is more complicated than the first, and it includes rather than deflects uncertainty–that the relationship between Athens and Sparta is a conflict of essential identity.
The Corinthian makes the first kind of argument. The Athenians are, he says, aggressive, brave, risk-takers. Like many demagogues, he includes a little shaming. Spartans have declined to get involved in Hellenic issues (probably because of the problem their version of slavery brought them), and he says they procrastinate. It’s a politics of identity, in which city-states make decisions not because of advantages, disadvantages, policy options, contextual constraints, compromises, but because behavior is determined by identity.
If you know anything about policy argumentation, then you know that rational policy argumentation first means identifying the “ill.” What is the problem we’re trying to solve? So, what is the problem for the Corinthian?
It’s the war with Corcyra. That isn’t a compelling problem for Sparta, so the shift to identity enables the Corinthian to redefine the problem. It also redefines the solution. If the problem is the identity of the Athenians, and it’s their essential identity, then the Corinthian is advocating a war of extermination.
This is a politics of identity. This is always a politics of extermination.
[1] This point is a major part of the speech Diodotus gives in a debate about genocide. Diodotus is almost certainly a fabrication of Thucydides.
[2] “Stasis” means place or hinge. What some people now call “stasis theory” is a modification of something Cicero said, and it’s one way to categorize stases. It’s much less useful and accurate than it might appear. It isn’t what I mean.
I often say that dogs are a lesson in unconditional love, and cats are a lesson in very conditional love.
Having pets in your household can mean a lot of things, and it does not necessarily mean having pets in your family. It can mean having beings who make you feel good about who you are because they love you so much.
Then there are Siamese cats.
My first and second cats were Siamese, and I loved them. They were just cats. One of them was very talkative, and had a particular way of telling me that he wanted a glass of water. (There was lots of water available, but he liked me pouring him a glass of water. That seemed reasonable to me. When I went off to college, my mother was not happy about his expectations.)
When we moved into this house we’d lost a couple of cats because of asshole neighbors in Cedar Park who let their dogs run free—those dogs killed cats and small dogs. Those dogs killed two of our cats. If St. Peter really is a gatekeeper to heaven, and really does ask that we explain why we deserve to go to heaven, I will point out that I did not take a baseball bat to the owner of those dogs.
We moved to a house on a busy street, and one of our cats was one-eyed, so we wanted to keep them inside. Jim built a catio (we didn’t know that was a thing)—a way for the cats to go outside and yet be in an enclosed space. (If memory serves, he initially used a structure he built so that I could try to grow kale and keep it from squirrels.)
After we moved here, our munchkin and I wanted a third cat. Around this time of the year in 2006 (or 2007?), we went to various cat rescue places to get a cat. Turns out that this is not a time of year when there are a lot of kittens up for adoption, but there was a Siamese of indeterminate age. (Definitely not more than a year, but how far under that was unclear.) She was affectionate, and just absolutely beautiful. I was puzzled as to why anyone would give her up. Our munchkin had been reading the Eregon series, and so she was named after a blue-eyed dragon.
And she was a Siamese, the kind I’d never had. She hated being picked up. She liked being around people, while in her own space. She would, at her will, come over to someone and get petted, perhaps even climbing onto a lap. Then, she was incredibly affectionate, as long there was no move made to hold her. When she wanted affection, she asked for it. Otherwise, she was not to be touched. As the catio got more elaborate (it now has three stages), she was clear about what part of it was hers.
When we moved to this house, we decided our cats would be purely indoor. We live on a busy street, a short distance from a creek that is a coyote highway—it’s just too dangerous. Every once in a while—because our house is built on clay that’s on limestone—the house shifts in such a way that doors don’t really close. That happened after we got back after seeing a play one evening, so it was late (for us). We realized she’d gotten outside. We caught glimpses of her behind the ac unit, and then in some bushes, and spent over 45 minutes crawling in bushes, trying to chivvy her to an open door. At some point, while crawling around, one of us looked up and saw her sitting in a window watching us, mildly interested. She was on the inside of the window. She’d long since taken advantage of one of the open doors.
Her space was the porch. A friend gave us a beautiful Morris chair, and we put it on the porch. She claimed it. When we went onto the porch (which we do a lot), she’d come and get scritches, and then go back to her chair, once she’d gotten what she wanted. She went blind about two years ago, and she stopped joining us for morning cuddles, but otherwise behaved no differently. She still went into her catio, made her way to the litterbox, checked in with us (as though she was granting us the pleasure of petting her) when we were on the porch, chivvied dogs off of any space she wanted, and was just the cat she wanted to be.
Shortly after we got her, I felt bad, and thought maybe we were the wrong family for her. I imagined that maybe her ideal home was a little old lady who had her as their only cat, and that we were failing her because there were other animals. I eventually came to think we were the perfect family for her. No one fucked with her. She got affection when she wanted it, hung out on the catio watching birds and squirrels when she wanted, claimed the most comfortable chair in the house.
I came to admire her clear sense of boundaries, her ability to ask for what she wanted, her clear sense of dignity, and her treating blindness as a minor issue. She really was a blue-eyed dragon.
Scholar of pathologies of deliberation—that is, how communities persuade themselves to make decisions they later regret, although they had all the information necessary to make better decisions (e.g., demagoguery, propaganda, racism).
Education: University of California at Berkeley, Rhetoric PhD (1987), MA (1983), AB (1981)
Selected Books: Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring US Together (2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery (2019), Demagoguery and Democracy (2017, First Year Book University of Maryland), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (1999).
Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy With Rhetoric is a Good Guy With Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Guns. Eds. Nathan Kreuter, Ryan Skinnell, Lydia Wilkes. University Press of Colorado. 2022. 19-31.
“Afterword.” The Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. University of Alabama Press. 2022. 241-245.
“Who Says What Is…Always Tells a Story”: White Supremacist Rhetoric, Then and Now” Nineteenth-Century Activist Rhetorics. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli. MLA. 2021. 279-289.
“Charisma Isn’t Leadership” Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Ed. Ryan Skinnell. Societas, 2018.
Forthcoming/In Press
“Interchapter.” Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Eds: Michael-John DePalma, Paul Lynch, and Jeff Ringer. Southern Illinois University Press.
“Democratic Deliberation, Identity, and Information.” Lippmann/Dewey and the Problematic Public in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Kristian Bjorkdahl. Pennsylvania State University Press.
“The Mask of War and War of Masks.” Javnost—The Public
Referee/Reviewer (presses and journals): Canadian Journal of Political Science, CCC, College English, Composition Studies, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Journal of the History of Rhetoric (formerly Advances in the History of Rhetoric), Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, Penn State University Press, Political Studies, Praxis, Profession, Review of Politics, Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Routledge, Southern Illinois University Press, Texas A&M University Press, University of Alabama Press, University of Pittsburgh Press
Reviewer (promotion and tenure): Arizona State University, Cal State Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, Florida State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Simon Fraser University, Syracuse University, Temple University, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, University of Illinois, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, University of Texas San Antonio, Wayne State University
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI
The GOP has been setting fire to democratic norms since the 80s. That isn’t a hyperbolic insult I’m throwing at them. It’s what Gingrich said he wanted to do. He said, quite openly (and still says), that he wanted to make government dysfunctional so that people would vote for the anti-government party, which would be the GOP. The GOP persuaded its base that they should abandon democratic norms and treat politics as war.
Let’s stop there for a second.
In the 80s, there was an internal GOP conflict among three kinds of elites. There were (and still are a few) Eisenhower-style conservatives who wanted a prosperous and stable nation, containment as a foreign policy, a moderate social safety net, and a reasonably protected working class (essentially the 1956 GOP platform), an end to de jure segregation. Then there was the group that had long dragged the Democratic party into the muck: a kind of toxic white evangelical populism that was rabidly racist, in favor of a social safety net only as long as didn’t threaten segregation, and committed to theocracy (that is, they believed that the government should promote and fund their very narrow notion of “Christianity”). The third group was neoliberal, Randroid, and selectively libertarian.
Two of those groups were Machiavellian.
Machiavellianism is often misunderstood. Psychologists use it to mean what used to be called sociopaths—that is, people who have no empathy, are amoral, and only look out for themselves—but that isn’t what Machiavelli advocated. He didn’t advocate a world free of ethical considerations, or amorality. He was deeply concerned with moral leadership, but morality, he and others argued, has two parts. There are means and ends. It is moral, he argued, to engage in actions we would normally consider immoral if those actions enable us to achieve a moral end.
He argued that the ends justify the means. That is, if you’re trying to do a right thing, there are no constraints on how you get there. (In other words, an important plot point of every action movie.) Thus, the only ethical consideration is whether your “ends” (your intention) are good. You can still think of yourself as an ethical person, even if you do or endorse actions that violate the ethical norms you claim to value, because you’re doing so for a good cause.
The easiest way to get people to behave like Machiavellians is to persuade them that they are threatened with extinction—there is an Out-Group that is trying to destroy Us. Then, they (we) will give ourselves moral license all the time feeling that we are the moral ones.
And that is the turn that pro-GOP rhetoric and pro-GOP demagogues (like Rush Limbaugh) took in the 80s. They weren’t the only rhetors who made that rhetorical choice. The claim that there is some “they” who is at war with “us” is a tiresomely popular rhetorical move. The argument that we must now abandon rhetorical, legal, ethical, and constitutional norms because we are faced with Evil is always present, and it’s always a bad argument.
And what’s happening with the GOP speakership shows why.
The choice that many pro-GOP politicians made in the 80s—and again, Gingrich is open about this—is that government itself was the Evil. So, the GOP made the government dysfunctional because they believed that it would gain power for them. I can’t say they’re wrong. It’s long been amazing to me how many GOP voters I’ve known who say, “Why should I pay taxes? There’s a pothole on my commute. We should cut taxes even more.”
In other words, cut resources to something (such as public schools or infrastructure), then, when those schools and infrastructure are crappier, mobilize the anger that people feel about the now crappier schools or infrastructure to argue for cutting taxes even more—because, clearly, the government can’t do a good job.
In the 80s and 90s, the GOP discovered that demagoguery worked to mobilize voters and support. As I’ve argued elsewhere, demagoguery isn’t specific to any place on the political spectrum, but it isn’t equally distributed. Demagoguery depends on the actively false notion that our complicated, nuanced, contextual, and uncertain realm of policy options can be reduced to a binary (or continuum) of two groups.
When a group (it’s never just an individual) decides that they will engage in demagoguery to gain or maintain power, they always do so by imagining an in-group, and then declaring that that in-group is already at war. This war is one already declared by The Out-Group (which is a fantastical nut-picked monstrosity of a villainous straw man) , and if you don’t realize it, you’re not really in-group.
Because The Out-Group is determined on our destruction, we are justified in anything we do, and breaking any norms. We can do the things we condemn The Out-Group for doing, while still claiming the moral high ground, because we have good intentions. We become Machiavellian.
Here’s one rhetorical problem. Imagine that you’re a media personality, ambitious political figure, Machiavellian with a lot of money, or person or industry that wants a specific policy. If you know that you couldn’t possibly succeed at getting your policy passed if you had to advocate in a realm of reasonable disagreement, then what you would do would be to demonize reasonable disagreement. You would say, “THEY are at war with us, so you should stop asking for reasonable disagreement and instead commit yourself to the policies that purify our community of Them.”
That’s what authoritarians do.
That’s what authoritarians with shitty policies do.
Deflecting the question of whether this policy is a good one (does it solve the need as reasonably narrated, is it the most reasonable in light of other options) to whether it means a win or loss for The Out-Group is always authoritarian.
If “conservatives” (who claim to be the “real Americans”) are threatened with extinction—the narrative of the GOP for forty years—then the correct response is to stand firm and reject all the democratic norms. That’s been the GOP rhetoric for forty years. The problem they’re now facing is that their rhetoric was persuasive. In other words, the GOP is now facing the logical and rhetorical consequences of its own rhetoric.
What is happening with the election of the Speaker of the House is a fight about exactly how to abandon democracy. And the fight is between two ways of thinking about authoritarianism: competitive authoritarianism (what McCarthy advocates) or a sloppy out-right authoritarianism (what Boebert advocates).
GOP candidates and pro-GOP media have spent years saying that Democrats/liberals/socialists (aka, anyone not purely committed to whatever the GOP happens to be advocating at that moment) are determined on the extermination of the in-group. Therefore, there is no such thing as a legitimate policy disagreement—every question, from whether you wear a mask to whether you are opposed to Russian hegemony of Europe, is not a policy question, open to policy argumentation, but an opportunity to demonstrate your determination to exterminate the “liberals” who want to exterminate Us.
As much as it may be pleasurable to watch Republicans in disarray, this is not a good situation. This is various levels of terrible. They are in disarray only because they disagree about what, exactly, constitutes the people of purity, and what, exactly, they should do to exterminate the unpure—that is, anyone who disagrees, in or out of the party.
Various powerful people in various times have thrown fuel onto the fire of a demagoguery they thought would benefit them.
That kind of demagoguery is never a controlled burn.
From here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SetNFqcayeA
The first mistake that people make about politics (and people all over the political spectrum make this mistake, albeit not equally) is to think that our world of policy disagreement is actually a fight between two identities: people who are good, and people who are various degrees of evil.
In the previous post, I criticized Chomsky (and I will in this one too). But, Chomsky has made some good arguments—and, as a scholar of rhetoric, I want to be clear that there is a difference between a “good argument” and “an argument with which I agree.” Democracy requires that we make that distinction. Not all arguments with which we agree are good arguments, and we should have a world of arguments that are good enough[1], many of which we think are wrong.
They’re also arguments that can’t be supported by history. They’re both claims that the example of appeasing Hitler shows are deeply flawed.
A lot of people like to quote Santayana who said, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” Ironically enough, they thereby show they don’t know the history of that quote. He wasn’t talking about global, but personal history. He didn’t think that history was a set of facts that anyone could know, but that’s a different post. In fact, in the section of that same book where he talks about history, he doesn’t present it as something easy to know.
It’s common to say that the political figures who appeased Hitler were fools, and should have responded more aggressively. They posit counter-factuals: he would have backed down [if people had responded aggressively here or there], or there would have been a military coup [at this or that moment].
One of the important counter-factuals is the remilitarization of the Rhine. People argue that an aggressive response then would have forced Hitler to back down, and…at this point the counterfactuals get a little vexed. Some people argue that there would have been a military coup. I think those counterfactuals are all contradicted by what happened when France and Belgium responded aggressively to Germany’s defaulting on reparation payments. They occupied the Ruhr.
The French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr radicalized many Germans (it comes up a lot in narratives about why people became Nazis, in both Abel and Merkl); had France, Belgium, and the UK responded aggressively to the remilitarization of the Rhine, that action might well have had the same consequence as the occupation of the Ruhr. It might well have radicalized even more Germans. Hitler thought France might respond aggressively, and he was prepared for that outcome. It’s therefore dubious that a coup would have been successful.
It definitely wouldn’t have kept him from his goal of another world war—nothing would.
But, had the UK or French governments responded aggressively to the remilitarization of the Rhine, they would have been condemned, not just as war mongers, but as people repeating what was seen as the error of WWI—responding with excessive aggression to an incident that didn’t directly threaten any nation. Any government that did so would have lost the next election.
Neither the UK nor France could have gone to war to prevent the annexation of German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia without losing the next election. Going to war over the invasion of Czechoslovakia would have been both politically and militarily implausible. Given the difficulties of getting supportive troops there, it’s hard to imagine it would have worked any better than the invasion of France. It might have—my whole point is that counter-factuals are various degrees of guesses–but from a rhetorical perspective, it’s clear that it would have been a difficult case to make. Even Churchill had to persuade his cabinet not to make a treaty with Hitler. It would have been much, much harder in 1939 to get support for a war. Should people have supported going to war over Czechoslovakia? Yes. Absolutely. Should people have supported more aggressive responses to Hitler? Yes. Absolutely. But they didn’t, and had Britain effectively stopped Hitler through aggressive action, the political figures would have been condemned as warmongers.
This post isn’t about military consequences, but rhetorical. Had they prevented Hitler from invading other nations, then their aggression would have seemed unnecessary.
Is Putin trying to get back the USSR boundaries because of security concerns? Maybe. He probably thinks so. But that doesn’t mean his concerns are reasonable, nor that they should be honored by other nations. Everyone striving for regional or world hegemony does so out of “security concerns.” Hitler was trying to get Nazi hegemony for all of central and eastern Europe, and exterminate or subjugate various “races,” out of sincerely held security concerns. The US invaded Iraq and got into Vietnam out of sincerely held security concerns. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor out of security concerns. Britain refused to capitulate to Hitler out of security concerns, and the US declared war on Germany for the same reasons. Ukraine is at war with Russia because of security concerns.
Having security concerns—whether or not sincerely held—doesn’t guarantee that what a nation does is right, necessary, or rational. Sometimes it is, but not always. That a country or leader is acting out of security concerns doesn’t necessarily mean they can be appeased, that they were provoked, or that their concerns should be assumed, without argument, to be reasonable positions in policy negotiation.
Had any President responded more aggressively to Russian violations of sovereignty, such as in 2014, voters would have punished him, just as voters would have responded (and, in the case of France, did respond) to aggressive attempts to constrain Hitler.[2] Am I saying that Putin is Hitler? No, arguments that situations are analogous in specific ways are not claims that the situations are identical in every way. [3]
I’m making three claims: first, that appeasing Putin means granting that Russia can have all the territory the USSR had (exactly what appeasing Hitler meant in terms of “German” lands); second, that a more aggressive response earlier might have been ineffective, but would definitely have been politically disastrous; third, that the argument that Putin was provoked is non-falsifiable because it’s grounded in a post hoc ergo propter hocmotivism.
Here’s what I mean about the third. One could argue, just as plausibly, that Clinton moved to include more nations in NATO because he knew Putin was planning on annexation. Both arguments appeal to similar levels of speculation, deflection, and motivism.
It’s interesting that even this defense of Putin assumes him to be trigger-happy and irrational. That’s hardly a defense. And it certainly doesn’t excuse his invasion of Crimea, let alone war crimes.
But, and this is the point of this post. Had Clinton done nothing, or had Obama responded more aggressively, anti-Dem media—and Chomsky and followers, as well as Republicans, are in that category—would have flung themselves around in outrage. It’s failing to learn from history–from our own personal history–if we condemn a political figure for taking the course of action we advocated at the time, but now think was a mistake.
That’s the problem with anyone who condemns Obama for not having responded more aggressively. It’s the problem with anyone who condemns a political figure for behaving as we wanted them to at the time.
People argued for appeasing Hitler because aerial warfare would be, they believed, unbelievably destructive. Let him have Czechoslovakia. Many said, let him have Poland. But he was always going to take France, all of central Europe, and do his best to take the world. Aerial warfare was unbelievably destructive. For Germany.
[1] This is going to get technical, but the short version is: rhetors cite sources, admit when they’re wrong, and do unto others as they would have done unto them—that is hold others to the same standards by which they’re willing to be judged. Here’s the slightly more technical explanation. Rhetors implicitly and explicitly apply criteria that are externally and internally consistent (i.e., if we think that kind of evidence or way of arguing proves our point, then that kind of evidence or way of arguing can also disprove our point—if being able to cite Scripture proves I’m right, then an out-group member being able to cite Scripture proves I’m wrong); if challenged, rhetors cite their sources; if we are proven to have said something false, we take responsibility for having made a bad argument. In other words, behaving responsibly in public discourse means holding everyone to the same standards, and being able to engage in metacognition.
As many folks know, I often say that I have spent a non-trivial amount of time drifting around the internet (and before that, Usenet) arguing with assholes. An editor said that would be a good title for a book, and I’ve often tried to write that book. But I can’t, because that title exemplifies what I keep saying is wrong with how we approach politics–that we make issues about who people are, rather than what or how they’re arguing. So, it isn’t that they’re an asshole (we’re all assholes to various degrees under various conditions), but that they’re arguing like one.
The second problem is that I think maybe writing about arguing like an asshole is better as an intermittent topic in blog posts rather than a book. So, here’s one of those posts. This one talks about two related mistakes that people make in argument: thinking that having data means one’s claims are true (that data is proof), and that confirmation bias means we treat the same data differently by attributing motives to actors in non-falsifiable ways.
I often taught Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, including in first-year composition classes. It’s a really good book for that course because my goal was to get students to understand what it means to do research in service of testing a hypothesis (which is very different from finding evidence to support an argument–their normal experience). The book lays out the various filters in such specificity that their argument can be falsified. I asked that students look at media coverage of various events—ones I picked. I gave students a list of topics to choose from that included political and cultural events, ones that a student could write about without divulging their political commitments. I also picked ones that I knew had been covered in media to which students had access, and which would oblige students to look at media from a relatively short period of time (a few days at most). Finally, I wanted ones that were open to interpretation—an ‘A’ paper could argue that the media coverage confirmed, contradicted, or complicated Chomsky and Herman’s hypothesis. There was no right answer.[1]
Chomsky, as everyone knows, has gone on to make claims about foreign policy, and he has his followers. He can support his claims. He can make a claim, and make other claims (many of which have data) that can be taken as confirming his argument. Just to be clear: Chomsky isn’t an asshole, and he doesn’t always argue like one, but he has his moments. He has been, for some time, arguing that American foreign policy caused/forced Putin to invade Ukraine because the prospect of expanding NATO threatened Putin. This is an argument about motive—Putin was motivated by the behavior of the US.
But, of course, Manufacturing Consent has a chapter arguing that reports of Cambodian genocide were fabricated, and he had data to support that argument. Providing supporting data is not the same as proving that your argument is true. (Even argument textbooks make this mistake.)
People who make the mistake of thinking data is proof get suckered all the time. There was a genocide–probably around 1.7 million people (about 20% of the population), and there were credible reports of it almost immediately. Chomsky dismissed the reports because he decided that the sources were biased–in fact, that’s the whole point of the chapter, that reports should be dismissed as biased.
Noting that people have motives, and that motives cause people to filter information is sensible. That observation is precisely what makes Manufacturing Consent such a useful book to use.
But, ironically enough, Chomsky’s dismissal of the Cambodian genocide shows just how prevalent those filters are. With his dismissal of Cambodian genocide, Chomsky proved himself prey to the error he condemns in others—that we filter information through ideological frames. Chomsky dismissed disconfirming evidence because, like the anti-communists he accurately criticizes, his position was non-falsifiable.
But, his data wasn’t proof.
Ironically enough, his defenders rarely mention Manufacturing Consent. They instead engage After the Cataclysm, which is itself problematic, and even their defenses argue that Chomsky dismissed the witnesses to atrocity (what his defenders call “atrocity stories”) because he believed they had bad motives–in other words, their defense admits that the problem is that Chomsky, too, is susceptible to filtering out information that disconfirms his beliefs, and that he does so through attributing bad motives to people who provide the disconfirming information. His defenders try to find all sorts of reasons that wasn’t a bad thing for him to do, and that argument too comes down to motive (but, in this case, good ones).
Having data to support a claim doesn’t mean the argument is logical, rational, or true, especially if the data is as vexed (and generally non-falsifiable) as assertions of motive. Chomsky’s argument about Cambodia was not logical, rational, or true.
Nor is his argument about Russia and Ukraine.
Chomsky can argue that Putin was motivated by the expansion of NATO, and he can give data to support it, mostly claims about motive. His argument isn’t falsifiable, and neither he nor his supporters are willing to acknowledge their own motives and biases. They seem to think that only other people have biases.
Acknowledging motives, like acknowledging other cognitive biases, doesn’t mean we’re landed in a morass of random attachments to beliefs.
It also doesn’t mean that we ask ourselves whether our perception is filtered by our motives (we never think it is), nor that we try to find some source of information who seems motive-free. That isn’t possible. Motives are the consequence of attachments, goals, aspirations, values. We all have motives. We all have biases. But we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them.
Chomsky says that Putin invaded Ukraine because of something Clinton did. Okay. There are two ways to think about this: Are people who make that argument making a falsifiable (aka “rational”) claim? What evidence would prove them wrong? And I think the answer is: nothing.
Second, so fucking what? If Clinton screwed up (and I loathe the man, so I’m willing to say he screwed up a lot), does that mean that Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Are we supposed to say, “Oh well, this is all our fault, so we’ll stand by and weep”? It’s plausible that the Khmer Rouge benefitted from the US bombing of Cambodia, but that doesn’t make what they did right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, that it’s being conducted through torture, kidnapping, mass killings just makes it worse.
Motivism is a fallacy that depoliticizes political issues. It takes problems out of the realm of “what policy should we follow” into questions about the relative morality of political actors. Whether Putin has good or bad motives, or was motivated by what Clinton did, doesn’t change that Russia is engaged, as was Cambodia, in mass killing. And that’s bad, no matter who does it. Chomsky bungled this kind of issue once; he’s bungling it again.
[1] This confused some students, who’d say, “but this paper that you’re showing us is really good is making the same argument I did, and I didn’t get a good grade.” That led to a really useful conversation.
