Self-help rhetoric has a pony, but there’s a lot of shit, and some of it is toxic

A little girl holding the reins of a pony


There’s a joke my family used to tell.

Two parents have twins who are each irritating in their own way. One is relentlessly pessimistic and griping, and the other irritatingly optimistic. Finally, fed up, the parents decide that they’ll give the pessimist gifts so wonderful he can’t possibly be unhappy, and the optimist a gift so awful he can’t possibly be positive about it. Birthday morning, they send the pessimist to a room filled with all the best and most desirable toys, and the optimist to a room filled with horse shit.

They wait a bit, and then go to the pessimist. He’s sitting, sulking, in the middle of the room. They say, “But, why are you so unhappy?” And he says, “Because you gave me all this crap, and not what I really wanted.” They’re discouraged, but they go on to the other room, thinking, “He can’t possibly like horse shit.” They get there, and find the optimist cheerfully shovelling the horse shit out of the room. They ask, “What are you doing?” And he says, “With all this shit, there has to be a pony someplace.”

I’ve read a lot of self-help (some of it from as far back as the 17th century), and there’s often a pony, and I like the ponies. But there’s also a lot of horse shit. As it happens, I don’t need horse shit, but other people might be looking for manure, so they might find it useful. Or they might find ponies I didn’t notice. I’m grateful for self-help rhetoric.

Some of that shit, however, is toxic.

Self-help rhetoric has a structure. It says you have this problem, you’ve tried to solve this problem in various ways, and none of them have worked. It proposes a solution to the problem (the plan), shows how the plan will solve the problem, shows it’s feasible, and, ideally, argues that there won’t be unintended consequences worse than the problem it’s solving. In other words, it relies on the stock issues of policy argumentation.

I like policy argumentation, so I don’t think self-help rhetoric using that structure is a problem. Like any other discourse, it can be a problem depending on how the stock issues in policy argumentation are used. When self-help rhetoric is damaging, it tends to engage in shaming and/or fear-mongering in the need part. Often, it relies on identifying the problem as at least partially that we are bad people, or members of a bad group. It often says that the cause of the problem is a personal failing on our part and/or the machinations of a malevolent out-group. Thus, even though it isn’t necessarily political, it has a lot of qualities of demagoguery.

The plan they propose is to join their group, buy their product, pay for their advice. An important part of the argument for their plan is that they and only they or their product can solve our problem. They say the plan is feasible (is this policy practical) because you can pay in installments, or you just have to buy this one thing, read this one book, watch these free videos. They deal with stock issue of solvency (how will this plan solve the ill) in two ways. First, they provide testimonials, sometimes by representatives of the five percent (or less) that have succeeded (so far), or, second, by simply asserting that their group/plan/product will solve the problem if you commit with enough will.

Many of these ways of arguing are shared with discourses outside of self-help, and sometimes we argue one of these ways because it’s true. If our car’s brakes are failing, someone insisting that we might die if we don’t deal with this issue is not fear-mongering, and it may be that our options are limited. But it’s fairly rare that there is only one possible solution. There are many places that can fix our brakes, we might be able to take the bus for a while instead of driving, we might be able to borrow a car, or even buy a new one. So, one of the things that makes some self-help rhetoric toxic is that it says there is only one solution, and it’s the one they’re advocating.

Second, it says that, if this solution doesn’t work (and, honestly, I think every solution fails from time to time), it is our fault—we did it wrong, usually because of our inadequate will. So, there is no way that their plan/policy/product can be proven wrong because it can never fail; only you can. That evasion of accountability moves this whole discourse out of the rational, or even reasonable, and into the realm of a religious—perhaps even cult-like—way of thinking about the world. Because we failed, we have to recommit with greater effort and resources; we need to pay for another workshop, buy more products, perhaps even spend more time with other consumers of this product/members of this ideology. When it gets really toxic is when it says that we shouldn’t listen to any information that might weaken our resolve or make us doubt what we are being told.[1]

Just to be clear: what I’m saying is that the toxic kinds of self-help set you up for failure. And they set you up so that your failure will make you more dependent on the group/product.

It does this partially through appealing to the binary paired terms of good is to bad as pure is to mixed.

Good               Pure            Pride              Determination

_____     ::       _____   ::    _____     ::      ____________

Bad                  Mixed         Shame            “Doubt”

That we have this problem (procrastination, debt, low income) means that we are in the category of bad (the shaming part). The solution is for us to become good. If we want to be good, we need to think in absolute terms, with absolute (i.e., pure) commitment, cleansing our thinking of nuance, uncertainty, doubt, purifying our world of bad influences who might encourage us to doubt. We need to commit to this one group or one policy, and stick with it regardless of whether it works because, if it didn’t work, it’s our fault for not believing in it enough. In toxic discourses, purity becomes about opting for commitment rather than consideration. They say that we need to believe rather than think.

Far too much of our public (and even private) discourse about policy issues is the toxic kind of self-help rhetoric.

[1] Thus, as far as what makes something a pony is self-help rhetoric that is clearly presented as one way of doing things, doesn’t frame the issue as Good v. Evil, doesn’t promise its solution as one that will always work, avoids shaming, sets out reasonable expectations, recommends practices/products from which it doesn’t profit (or even benefit), can often be combined with advice/practices from elsewhere, and doesn’t present deeper commitment (more purchases) as the only possible response to setbacks or failure.  








Finding the strongest opposition arguments

various headlines accusing someone of being a demagogue

I often say that we should try to find the best opposition arguments, and so, when I’m trying to do that, there are some sites I tend to use. I wanted to post something about my sources, and then found I needed a fairly long explanation as to why I use these when I’m looking for the strongest argument for a policy, practice, or claim I think is wrong. There are two things I’m not doing–I’m not looking for “objective” or “unbiased” sources; I’m not looking for a representative sample from places along a continuum of party affiliation.

As I’ve argued, I think the left-right binary/continuum is nonsense (to the extent that it isn’t demagogically self-fulfilling), as is the notion of a binary of “objectivity” or “bias.” People who use terms like “objective” or “biased” can’t define them in a way that fits with research on cognition, and those terms are usually just what Burke called “ultimate terms.” A source might be very “biased,” in the sense of only including data that supports its argument, and yet all that data might be “objectively” true (that is, accurate representations of good studies and so on). I don’t think there’s any point in trying to find better ways to define objectivity or bias–I think we should just walk away from trying to find objective or unbiased sources, in service of a different goal.

A lot of discussion about sources is in service of the aspiration of The One Source on which we can rely. We have to abandon the comfortable fantasy of a source on which we can rely, a prophet with direct relation to The Truth. We all want clarity; we all want a source, author, ideology, perspective, in-group that guarantees us that what we believe is absolutely true. We all want to be able to believe rather than think. We are all suckers.

The fantasy of an objective source is unfortunately favorable to toxic populism in that both posit that there is some one perspective from which we might look at an issue that is the purely true one. Both rely on the false notion that, when we’re faced with deep disagreement, we should try to identify the group that has the Truth. If we find and join that group, then we will always be right, and we don’t have to think, but believe. Down that road lies demagoguery. If we believe that belief is enough, that there is an in-group that has a direct line to Truth, then we look for that group. And then we believe that only that (our) in-group has a legitimate policy agenda, and everyone else is spit from the bowels of Satan. And we start thinking that authoritarianism is a pretty good idea.
We all want to believe that our beliefs and behaviors are not just right, but the only possible way to think or behave. We pant after certainty the way my dog pants after squirrels. The difference is that he knows he hasn’t caught the squirrel, and we think we have.

If fyc, or any course, is to be a course in civics, then it means a course that teaches students how to recognize and resist that panting hope that, when we use this source, are a member of this group, (or whatever), we no longer have to worry that we might be wrong. We don’t need a course that tells us how to recognize when they are wrong, but when we are.

We shouldn’t worry that we might be wrong. That’s like worrying that water runs downhill. It does. We are. Just as, if we’re building a house, we have to take into account that water runs downhill, and plan for how we will manage rainwater, so we should acknowledge that we are always, if not actively wrong, then at least not seeing a situation from every possible point of view. We should also acknowledge that we, being human, think about the world through the lenses of cognitive biases. That water runs downhill doesn’t mean we have to lie on the ground and refuse to build a house; that we are all operating via cognitive biases doesn’t mean we have to lie on the ground and refuse to deliberate. There are ways that we can reduce the chances we’re wrong, and one of the most available and most straightforward, is to look at the best arguments that say we’re wrong.

If we believe that people disagree because we really disagree, (and not because everyone else is a benighted tool of a malevolent force) then we start looking for why people disagree. And it might be that some of the people who disagree with us are fools, stooges, psychopaths, or grifters–in fact, I think that it’s a given regardless of the issue and regardless of our position that some people on every point on the political spectrum are fools, tools, and so on (including us, from time to time)–but not everyone who disagrees with us is in one of those categories. And not everyone who agrees with us is an angel of enlightened and compassionate discernment. Because there are never just two sides to an issue.

And that’s why we need to find the best arguments that criticize our position, or argue for a policy we think is wrong-headed. Sometimes, we will find that even the best argument for some policy or candidate is incoherent, made in bad faith, profoundly dishonest, or not even good enough to be proven wrong. Not all arguments are equally good.

And this is where policy argumentation is a useful heuristic. If people are making a specific affirmative case for a policy we think is wrong-headed, and we read the best case for it, and it is wrong-headed, that doesn’t mean that our policy is right. Someone’s affirmative case (the plan for which they’re arguing) might be bad, and yet their negative case (what’s wrong with our plan) might be good. It also doesn’t mean that everyone who disagrees with us is wrong.

In my experience, we’ll often find that there are reasons and good enough arguments for positions, practices, ideologies, and groups other than ours. And, in my experience, we’ll often decide that, even though there are good enough arguments for a position, we still disagree. They’re good enough to be taken seriously, but not good enough to persuade us to change our mind.

What matters for the purpose of finding strong opposition arguments is: 1) if the source accurately represents the data (even if it is selective); and 2) if it is the best argument for that perspective.

I don’t think there is a two-dimensional way to represent our policy affiliations, so I talk about a spectrum. But even the metaphor of perspective is damagingly reductive. There are continua, but more than three, and some of those continua have more than one axis. I think it can be useful to talk about left v. right on some of those specific axes (e.g., social safety net), but not on all.

Here are what I think are some of the important axes in politics:
• Government regulation that promotes particular industries ( “pro-business government intervention”) v. free market [note that both of these positions would be considered “right-wing’]
• Government regulation that promotes safe, equitable, and ethical working conditions v. free market
• Government regulation that promotes safe, equitable, and ethical working conditions v. pro-business government intervention
• Interventionist foreign policy (intervention long before imminent existential threat) v. isolationism/pacifism (military action only for imminent existential threat)
• Interventionist foreign policy for purposes of promoting US businesses/economy v. interventionist foreign policy for ethical/moral goals (Wilsonian foreign policy)
• Support for a social safety net
• Epistemic libertarianism/authoritarianism: the extent to which someone believes that other points of view are legitimate points of view that should be heard; or, to put it another way, the extent to which people believe that there is an obviously good policy solution for every problem, and they know what it is
• Populism v. Pluralism: the extent to which one believes that there is one group that is real v. multiple legitimate points of view
• Populist Authoritarianism v. fairness: there is one group that is real, and all policies and practices should privilege that group v. procedural fairness
• Procedural fairness v. equity
• Regulations promoting reactionary v. progressive standards of “moral” behavior
• Naïve realist, reactionary, and demagogic hermeneutics of foundational texts (the US Constitution, Scripture, and so on) v. ….well, all others.

There are probably other important ways of thinking about various American policy preferences–this isn’t an exhaustive list. I just wanted to show that we really don’t have a binary of policy options or affiliations. I’m sure other folks could come up with lots of additional one (e.g., promoting environmental protection through nudges v. punitive regulation).

If we want, as teachers of argumentation, to get students to understand that our political world is not an existential and apocalyptic battle between Us and Them, then one way is to teach them how nuanced our policy commitments are—that they aren’t a binary or continuum. Just to be clear: there are people who want to destroy democracy and create a one-party state of people who have the pure ideological commitment. But those people are all over the political spectrum, and not everyone who disagrees with us is like that.

So, having said all that and given lots of caveats, here’s a list off the top of my head of sources I often use. I’ve given annotations on some, but not all. Again, my point is not to present this list as the definitive list that others should use, but to show what such a list might look like. Most teachers probably need to create their own, depending on their paper topics. For instance, if I had a lot of students writing about immigration, the list would be really different. A lot of sources on this list would be irrelevant, and I’d include some pro-union/anti-immigration sources, as well as some much more pro-immigration sources than anything I have on here. This list is intended to help others think about what lists they might give their students.

American Enterprise Institute. Reliably pro-GOP.
Cato Institute. Libertarian, reactionary.
Christianity Today. Conservative and moderate American Protestant Christian, conservative on social issues.
Council on Foreign Relations. Mixed.
The Economist. “Liberal” in the British sense.
Foreign Affairs. Interventionist, especially for business or military purposes, tends to be anti-Dem (but not always pro-GOP).
Foreign Policy. Interventionist for humanitarian purposes, tends to be pro-Dem (but not anti-GOP).
Guttmacher Institute. Reliable data on reproductive issues, generally pro-birth control, but not in ways that seem to bias the data.
Heritage Foundation. Almost always pro-GOP. Originalist on constitution. [Edited to add: I’m no longer recommending Heritage. They’re engaged in active dishonesty about CRT. If they’ll lie about that, they’ll lie about anything.]
Homeland Security. Government statistics on issues of immigration.
The Nation. Democratic socialist on economic issues, left on cultural/social issues, anti-interventionist on foreign policy, anti-GOP, often anti-DNC.
New York Times. Mixed economy on domestic, Wilsonian Foreign Policy, often anti-GOP and DNC (news articles strong, editorials problematic).
Pew Research Center. Reliable polling on various issues, transparent about methods.
Public Religion Research Institute. Reliable polling on issues of US religion.
Southern Poverty Law Center. Reliable information on hate groups of various political agenda, left on social/cultural issues.
Texas Observer. Specific to Texas, pro-immigration, social justice, equity, pluralist. (Texas Tribune is similar, but strives to be bi-partisan)
Wall Street Journal. Pro-government intervention for business/stock market in terms of both domestic and foreign policies; generally anti-Dem (news articles strong, editorials problematic).
Washington Post. Mixed economy on domestic, generally pro-Dem unless it bleeds, mixed on foreign policy (news articles strong, editorials problematic).

Liberalism and appeasing Hitler

Prime Minister Chamberlain announcing "peace for our time"
From here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SetNFqcayeA

I’m going back through a really smart book about why Liberals (in the British sense) supported appeasement of Hitler and Germany, and came across this really good description of Liberalism:

“Liberalism postulated the rational and ‘progressive’ nature of the historical process. Besides success, it upheld pragmatism, tolerance and compromise as the principal political virtues. At the core of the liberal outlook stood the ‘idea of limits.’ It abhorred excess and extremism; it believed that ‘absolutist’ thought of any sort assured at least failure if not perdition. All problems and conflicts were seen as soluble with the application of reason; and reason, Liberals believed, ultimately did prevail. Reason, in fact, suffused all and was identified with reality.” (3)

UK Liberals don’t correlate exactly to the Democratic or Republican Party in the US–they’re closer to centrist Democrats, Libertarians, or libertarian-oriented Republicans. And the point that the Morris book makes is that Liberals supported appeasing Hitler for very different reasons from Tories (the British conservative party). Like the Tories, they largely sympathized with the Germans regarding the punitive Versailles Treaty, disliked the French, and underestimated Hitler, but they did so for different reasons, especially regarding that last point.

They argued that Hitler had outgrown Mein Kampf, and dismissed the racism of Nazi ideology because, as Morris says, they “refused to believe that a ‘civilised’ nation of 70 millions could subscribe to it, let alone base domestic and foreign policies upon it” (7). They argued, over and over, the Nazism was really about economic issues and problems:

“Nazism was seen as the German version of Fascism, a socio-economic ideology of bankrupt capitalism. It served, and was subscribed to by, a coalition of economic ‘losers’–industrial and financial barons intent upon preserving their profits and economic empires, the unemployed and Lumpenproletariat seeking security and work, an the lower middle classes desirous of retaining their assets now imperilled by big business and political instability. Thus perceived, Nazism was an ideology of class war. [….] race doctrine was ignored or regarded as mere camouflage designed to conceal the ‘real’ (economic) motivations of the regime and its backers. ” (10-11)

Goebbels pt. IV: Argument v. argumentation

building blown up by weathermen

Basically, I’m saying that fyc teaches argument and not argumentation, and that fyc, as currently taught, often rewards demagoguery, unintentionally. It does so by encouraging students to assume there are two sides on every issue, and that those two sides are identities (“liberals” v. “conservatives,” or “pro-“ or “anti” whatever). If there is any discussion of fallacies (and most textbooks don’t mention), it appeals to modernist notions of fallacies,[1] and it encourages students to note the fallacies in out-group rhetoric. That’s useless. That just inflames demagoguery.

Teaching students how to identify what’s wrong with how some out-group of theirs argues doesn’t help our situation.

What’s wrong with our world is not that we have a war between people who are right and people whose arguments are stupid, villainous, fallacious, self-serving, and irrational. What’s wrong with our world is that far too many of us frame the vexed, nuanced, entangled, and uncertain world of policy choices as a choice between the obviously right option (advocated by people who are good, objective, compassionate, rational [aka, Us]) and all other options (advocated by people who are villainous, and the people who are stooges or tools of that villainous group [aka Them]).

What’s wrong with our world is that far too many people believe that our politics is a war of extermination in which “real” people are justified in abrogating all the norms of democratic discourse and constitutional restraints as pre-emptive self-defense against the group that is trying to destroy us. That is the argument of Trump supporters, and that is what makes their rhetorical and political agenda anti-democratic. Like Stalinists, they argue that they are justified in violating all norms because we are in an apocalyptic war of identity (people who are good v. people who are bad). Trump supporters are far from alone in making that argument–people all over the political spectrum do; some more than others.

People out to destroy democracy rarely see (or describe) themselves as doing that. They see themselves as instituting a real democracy, a democracy of the only group that has a legitimate understanding of political issues. They believe that, by destroying all democratic norms and legal procedures, they are purifying the nation of the people who prevent a real democracy. They destroy the village in order to save it.

The problem isn’t that they’re bad people; the problem is that they’re people who believe that no point of view other than theirs, and no policy agenda other than theirs, is worth considering. Thus, getting out of a culture of demagoguery doesn’t mean abrogating the norms and rules of demcracy in order to exterminate the group that is threatening democracy. That is exactly what people who destroy democracies argue.

Saving democracy means saving the norms and legal practices of democracy. But how do you do that when a large part of the population is drinking deep of the Flavor-Aid that our group is threatened with extermination by Them, and therefore we are justified in anything we do?

That’s where courses in argumentation can do good work.

One way to get out of that culture is to show that we are not in a zero-sum battle between two groups. This isn’t to say that all positions are equally valid; it is to say that there aren’t just two. We have many potentially reasonable disagreements about policy that are not accurately described as a binary. Of course, there are people and groups who will crush anyone who disagrees with them, who will violate all norms in order to get their way, and those people (and groups) should be condemned and constrained. But, that someone disagrees with us is not proof that they a member (or tool) of those authoritarian groups. Not everyone who disagrees with us is a tool or villain. Some are, but not everyone. There are also people who are mistaken, deluded, gullible, ignorant, constrained in our understanding, and we are that people.

Making fyc a class in civics doesn’t mean giving students tools that will enable them to argue that their or our out-group(s) is/are irrational and bad. It should be a course in which the teachers are committed to teaching students how to figure out when their in-group is mistaken, deluded, gullible, ignorant (which means modelling acknowledging when our in-group is mistaken and so on). It would mean showing that our policy options are never a binary. Achieving that goal would mean teaching students argumentation, and not argument.

Teaching argument means teaching students to perform the moves we associate with an argument, and it restricts the teaching of logic to the formal fallacies. From the perspective of civics, this approach is useless since an argument might be formally right and yet still fallacious. “All bunnies are fluffy. This animal is not fluffy; therefore it is not a bunny.” That argument is formally correct—the problem is not the form, but that the major premise is false.

In formal logic, truth doesn’t matter; in informal logic, it does. Goebbels’ arguments followed logically from his premises, and his major premises are untrue. They also are inconsistent with major premises of many of his other arguments, but that’s a different post (and it’s how we get out of the problem of “logical argument” simply being a synonym for “argument I think is true”).

Goebbels would get an ‘A’ in any class that only relied on the formal fallacies. Where Goebbels would fail is in regard to fallacies relevant to informal argumentation: 1) did he engage the best criticisms of his argument? 2) did he hold his interlocutors to the same standards of logic and evidence to which he held himself? 3) did he represent his opposition fairly?[2] 4) is his overall argument internally consistent? (5) could he cite non-in-group sources to support his claims about “facts”?

If we’re going to talk about fallacies, let’s do it well—in ways grounded in current scholarship in cognitive biases and argumentation. There are a lot of ways that a person could teach a class grounded in either set of scholarship, and I’ll get to them later, but, mostly, they involve students identifying their own tendency to reason fallaciously/rely on cognitive biases.

And there is one hard rule on which I’ll insist: that approach means “open” assignments are off the table if we’re claiming to teach argumentation and not argument. It isn’t ethical for a teacher to claim to teach argumentation and let each student write about whatever issue interests that student because the teacher can’t possibly assess the resulting papers in terms of argumentation. You can teach argument that way, and you can also teach lots of other wonderful things, but not argumentation.

And here we’re back to my claim that fyc doesn’t have to teach argumentation. It really doesn’t.

I think a major problem in our field, and one reason we get into unproductive and uninteresting argybargies, is that there is an underlying assumption that all fyc programs should have the same goal—that there is this thing, an eidos fyc, and we are all trying to achieve it. I think we should walk away from the notion that all fyc programs should have the same goals, and consider fyc to be strategic and local. The goals of any fyc program should be determined, not on the basis of what “the field” says should happen, but on the basis of what is most useful for the first year students of that institution. I think that decision should be informed by scholarship in rhetoric and composition, but I also think that scholarship in rhetoric and composition doesn’t support the claim that all programs should have the same goals.

But, back to assuming that the goal is teaching students to engage responsibly in civic discourse. If an instructor is going to claim to teach argumentation (and not just argument), then we have to know whether a student has accurately represented opposition arguments, is engaging the smartest opposition arguments, and is not relying on a binary. There is no way a person can know that about every issue on which any student might write. We can only think we know the best opposition on every issue if we apply modernist notions of fallacies (and react to things like tone), assume that one source always has the best argument (usually in-group), or if we ourselves think in terms of a binary (and so ask that students engage the “liberal” and “conservative” or “pro-“ and “anti-“ on every issue). As I used to say to my son when I advised him not to do something, “Guess how I know this.”[3]

I’m not saying we have to have “closed” assignments, in which students write only about a text or small set of texts picked by the instructor. Down that road lies not only boredom but actually loathing the most important part of our job: responding to students’ papers in a way that models how they should respond to arguments they read.

There are a lot of ways that teachers can constrain paper topics so that there are papers on a variety of topics, and yet a teacher can notice if the opposition has been misrepresented. I’ll explain a representative sample of them later. Here I’ll simply note that many of those teachers (like me) didn’t figure out how to do it while teaching fyc. (Or even for some time after.) I’m not, just to be clear, saying that the field of rhetoric and composition fails to teach argumentation; there are lots of people, and lots of texts, that do great jobs at it. I’m saying fyc doesn’t, but it claims to. And that is the problem.

There are lots of strategies, including not teaching argumentation. But, and this is the important point of this post, if we’re going to say that, as teachers, we can grade something as a good or bad argument without knowing the controversy well enough to know whether a student has accurately represented the smartest opposition, even though we haven’t read the sources about which the student is writing, we are modelling how disagreement works on the internet, when people believe they can assess the quality an argument without actually reading it.

We’re thereby making things worse.





[1] I mean “modernist” in almost the technical sense—late nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American rejections of Anglo-American Enlightenment models of the mind. What I’m calling “modernist” is often called “Enlightenment,” but that’s inaccurate. The Anglo-American Enlightenment didn’t accept the Cartesian mind/body rational/irrational split. For the Anglo-American Enlightenment philosophers, there wasn’t a binary. So, for instance, sentiment assisted deliberation, but passion didn’t. So, they didn’t believe that “emotions” were irrational. It seems to me that it wasn’t until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that Anglo-American philosophy assumed the rational/irrational split (when, by the way, a lot of classical texts were translated into English, so they show that bias).

[2] I’ve come to think this and the second are the most important. When people are engaged in demagoguery, they homogenize all non- in-group members into one, and then pick the most useful—even if completely an outlier—quote or individual to represent all non-in-group members.

[3] He once asked, “Is there anything you didn’t learn the hard way?”






What grade would Goebbels get in first-year composition (pt. III): rejecting Aristotelian physics

revisionist history books

It is generally very easy for people to rationalize (in both senses of that word) marginalization, disenfranchisement, deliberate oppression, enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of out-groups by having systems and rhetoric that claims to be rational. Nazi Germany had a functioning judicial system throughout its tenure, as did the USSR, after all, as well as the US throughout segregation and slavery. People defending these systems and policies argued that they were necessary, just, and realistic, and therefore “rational.” [1]

Thus, many people think that working toward a world without genocide, slavery, deliberate oppression, expulsion, and so on requires that we abandon rationality. And, I think that’s sort of right. We need to abandon several specific ways of defining rationality, but we don’t need to abandon rational argumentation.

If you stop someone on the street, and ask them to explain various physical phenomena, they’ll give you an Aristotelian explanation. They’re wrong. Saying that we need to stop teaching rationality because modernist [2] notions of rationality are oppressive (and they are) is like saying that we need to stop teaching physics because Aristotelian physics is wrong. Physics is fine; Aristotelian physics isn’t. Rationality is fine; modernist notions of rationality aren’t.

The problem isn’t with rationality, but with how argumentation textbooks are grounded in modernist models of the mind that are slightly less defensible than Aristotelian physics.

Imagine that introductory physics courses were staffed by hiring people who were smart and skilled at writing about literature, who might never have taken a physics course since high school, and they were given a one- or two-day workshop (that also included Title IX training, a presentation from the writing center, information about digital resources, information about how to get keys, a presentation from the library, and so on) before being thrown into an autonomously taught course in physics. What would they teach? They’d teach Aristotelian physics.

And imagine that, instead of teaching those people other models of physics, the introductory physics courses and textbooks were designed so that those people could teach “successfully.” Introductory physics textbooks would be Aristotelian physics.

That’s what we do in staffing fyc argumentation courses, and that’s why the most popular textbooks are the way they are.

Just to be clear: I don’t think fyc has to teach argumentation. There are lots of other valuable things it can do. I’m open to the argument that argumentation should be a more advanced course taught (and supervised) by people who actually have some understanding of the scholarship in argumentation. A college course in argumentation would be, after all, a college course. It shouldn’t be a controversial claim for me to say that it should be grounded in recent scholarship and taught by people familiar with that scholarship.

My analogy of Aristotelian physics being like modernist notions of rationality falls apart because, while Aristotelian physics is intuitive, modernist notions of rationality are not. People are taught modernist notions of rationality–they’re counter-intuitive. If we’re going to ignore current scholarship in argumentation, why not rely on intuition? While there are reasons for thinking about all this more systematically (and there are a lot of possible systems), I think even common sense is a good basis. I think we can get to a pretty good standard of argumentation by starting with out intuitions about good disagreements.

If you ask students, “What makes for a really good disagreement?,” you end up with a list like this. Interlocutors:

  • are open to persuasion, or, at least, hearing other positions;
  • stay on topic;
  • accurately represent one another’s positions, claims, and so on;
  • give evidence for their claims;
  • present claims that are consistent with each other;
  • if we’re talking about an argument on social media, then they provide sources;
  • avoid the blazingly obvious fallacies.

The last is where modernist notions again trip us up, and I’ll get to that in the next few posts. But, there too we can generate a list of particularly irritating fallacies even if we don’t know the names. We don’t like when people attribute an argument to us we didn’t make, ask us to defend a position we never claimed, say our argument can be dismissed because it makes them feel bad or because we’re emotional or are bad people, insist that we say they’re right because they feel certain or can cite some youtube video by Rando McRando.

There’s a long and somewhat pedantic post about a more complicated way to think about fallacies here. I intend to do a more accessible version in this series, but, really, the fairness rule tends to work pretty well. Would we feel that’s a fair way to argue were someone to use it against us?

Do you think it’s okay if people don’t listen to you, and represent your position on the basis of what a third party who hates you has said? Do you think it’s okay if someone takes quotes out of context to condemn you, or attributes to you the views of the most extreme member of your in-group? Do you think it’s okay when people deflect?

Then don’t do it to others.

A lot of people believe that, because their group is right, anything they do is right, and any claim that supports their position is true and proof that they are right (regardless of whether it’s logically connected to their conclusion, accurate, sourced in a way they would accept as valid if it made a claim they don’t like). When we ask people to think about the way they’re arguing, and ask them whether they think that’s a good way to argue when others do it to them, we’re asking that they do two things: first, engage in meta-cognition, and two, hold themselves to the same standards they hold others. I think those are good things to teach.

[1] There’s an interesting polysemy in the word “rational” that leads to some nasty and politically toxic equivocation. “Rational” is sometimes used as a synonym for “realist” which is itself used to mean ruthless pursuit of individual or factional goals. Sometimes it is used to mean a supposedly “amoral” pursuit of the best means to achieve a goal set elsewhere. Thus, as people like Albrecht Speer and Wernher von Braun argued, they were just technocrats who didn’t think about the ends and just worried about the mean. That was a lie. They were fine with the ends.

[2] I’m calling it “modernist,” although there are arguments to be made that it’s more accurately called Cartesian. I think it’s useful to call it “modernist,” though, because various groups that are anti-post-modernism are openly advocating a return to modernist understandings of rationality. They are doing so by positioning themselves against one non-modernist position (which they call post-modernist) which is actually pretty marginal, and which they completely misrepresent. If you have to lie to make your case, you have a bad case. And if you’re lying about your critics in order to go back to an ideology that was explicitly supportive of colonialism and genocide, you have serious problems.

What grade would Goebbels get in fyc? Pt. II

Teacher in front of chalkboard

What grade does Goebbels get, pt. II

In an earlier post, I argued that a common way of thinking about first-year composition courses that claim to teach argument means that Goebbels could easily write an essay that would fit the criteria implicit in what remains a tremendously popular prompt. I said that the prompt forces teachers into a false dilemma of either giving Goebbels a good grade, or suddenly introducing a new criterion. The problem is the prompt.

I have a lot of crank theories, but this isn’t one of them.

In fact, what I’m saying is pretty much mainstream for scholars of argumentation, informal logic, cognitive psychology, policy argumentation, or political psychology. Just as what apparently controversial scholars in our field say about “grammar” is old news to anyone familiar with sociolinguistics, so anyone familiar with research in any of those fields would know I’m saying anything particularly insightful or new.[1]

And, because what I’m saying isn’t particularly controversial to anyone who is reading the relevant research, there are lots of ways of teaching fyc that don’t get teachers into that false dilemma. One solution is not to claim to teach argumentation, and to do any of the many valuable things that non-argumentation fyc can do.[2]

But, if we’re going to claim to teach argumentation, let’s do it. And there are lots of ways of doing it. That’s the next several posts.

Here, though, I need to argue why we should teach argumentation.

The problem is that fyc has long been dominated by a uselessly formalist presentation of argument, strongly connected to self-serving (and incoherent) definitions of rationality, teaching generations of people that having a “good” argument means having a “rational” tone, giving evidence from a “good” source, and giving reasons from “good” sources.

We do so because of staffing. FYC arose in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century when the notion was that there was a mental faculty, judgment, which could be trained through study of literature, music, or art. A person taught to have good taste would necessarily have good ethics because both were questions of good judgment. Similarly, writing “correct” English meant that they were thinking correctly, and communicating clearly (thesis first, list reasons) meant having a clear understanding of the situation. Interpretation was a universally valid skill, so teaching someone to read a poem was the same as teaching them to read a scientific study. College was seen as training someone to join a community of like-minded people with good judgment, good taste, and “good English.”[3]

Thus, teaching students to appreciate literature, and to write “well” about that literature made students better citizens. With that model of citizenship, it made sense to assume that graduate students who had been excellent literature undergraduates, highly skilled in meeting standards of “correct” grammar—even with no training in argumentation or linguistics—could teach first-year composition classes that would help students as citizens and students. That’s the staffing model we still have.

And, just to be clear, I think college students should study literature, although not for the reasons above. Reading literature cultivates empathy , can help people become more comfortable with uncertainty, fosters perspective-shifting. Literature courses can be tremendously important for an inclusive democracy.

But literature courses do not teach argumentation, and people skilled in literature are not magically capable of teaching argumentation.

This whole set of posts began because, in a comment thread about how our problem (meaning why do so many people think Trump’s open refusal to follow legal or cultural norms is okay) is that students don’t have civics classes,[4] I threw out the comment that fyc could be that class, but it would require a different staffing model, and someone asked me to explain. This set of posts is the explanation.

I meant something like, fyc could be a pretty effective civics course, but not a magic wand. And, of course, the very notion of a civics course that would make people reject toxic populist authoritarianism means a course that is grounded in a particular notion of democracy. It assumes seeing the democratic ideal as a community of people who value disagreement, who strive for a pluralistic world not about your group triumphing, but about a one in which we are all fairly represented, included, and accountable, and held to standards of fairness in terms of benefit and burden.

Depending on your model of education, there are lots of courses that could do this work–history, government, sociology, psychology, and first-year composition. Whatever class it is, it is not a course that relies on the transmission model of education; it has to be a course that persuades people to do the hard work of democratic deliberation. Telling students how to think about politics doesn’t work. I’ll come back to this.

Democracy is counter-intuitive. When we are making decisions, we are tempted to rely on what cognitive psychologists call System 1 thinking : we let our cognitive biases (especially in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associational thinking, naïve realism) drive the bus. Democracy requires that we step out of our world and engage in perspective-shifting, value fairness across groups (do unto others), are willing to lose, and can make our arguments rationally.[5] Ida Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors, Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam,” or Hans Morgenthau’s criticisms of Vietnam were all rational, offensive (condemned as violating norms of civility in their era), and deeply committed—perhaps even vehement—texts.[5] They are fair to their opposition not in terms of niceness, or attributing good motives to them, but in terms of accurately representing their arguments. Their arguments are internally coherent, applying standards across all groups.

In the previous post, I asked what grade Josef would get with a standard paper prompt, and I pointed out that, given that prompt, he would either get a good grade, or we would introduce a new criterion. That’s a dilemma created by how bad that assignment is. It’s also a dilemma created by how bad fyc argument textbooks are on the issue of “logic,” and how gleefully free they are from any influence by the various scholarly fields that should be influencing them: argumentation theory, cognitive psychology, political psychology. And that’s what this post is about.

We are faced with the dilemma about grading Josef because how fyc textbooks conflate “logic” with Aristotle’s term “logos.” (This recent article does a great job explaining that.) And can we start with: why in the world are fyc textbooks arranged around an anachronistic reading of Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos? If we’re going to rely on Aristotle, why not the enthymeme, which is what he actually cared about? Or, clutch your pearls, why not recent scholarship in argumentation, cognitive biases, reasoning, or any actually relevant field?

When we teach that “appeal to logos,” “logical appeal,” and “logical argument” are the same, we are conflating two very different meanings of the word “logic.” One is descriptive, and one is evaluative. The first is simply saying that the move is trying to look as though it’s logical (and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t), and the second is saying that it is logical (it fits the standards of logic). I don’t think Aristotle meant either of those, but, if anything, something closer to the first.

Whatever Aristotle meant, he did not mean what argument texts say is an appeal to logic, since they emphasize what are surface features of a text (if anything, what he would have put in the ethos category): facts, statistics, and various other concepts that wouldn’t even have been in Aristotle’s world.

So, what I’m saying in this post is that, while teaching students to read literature is a tremendously important task, people who are deeply trained in reading and writing about literature are not a priori any more capable of teaching argumentation in a way that enhances inclusive democratic deliberation than graduate students in any other discipline. But, since that’s who’s teaching fyc courses, textbooks have to be ones that people with no training in argumentation can teach. And that is our problem.

If we want to teach argumentation, then we have to hire people who are trained in argumentation.




[1] At one point, I started trying to write a post that had all those references, and I got overwhelmed. These two articles are good starting points, with good citations.

[2] Notice that this solution is good as far as argumentation, but it still means that there are people who are teaching “grammar” without adequate training in sociolinguistics. I’ll come back to that.

[3] As a former Director of a Writing Center, and someone who argues on the internet a lot, I will also say that people who are most rigid about “grammar” are particularly likely to be wrong, even about prescriptive grammar. I have seen papers in which students were wrongly “corrected” for having said something like “The ball was thrown to Chester and me.” The number of faculty who believe in the breath rule for commas leaves me breathless.

[4] This argument is often represented as our needing to go back to some time when we had civics courses and people rejected open abuses of power oriented toward disenfranchising groups and violating democratic norms. Um, when would that be? When disenfranchising black voters was openly advocated? Granted, Trump supporters are very open that they want to go back to the early fifties, except without the taxes, because they believe (correctly) that then they could have political and cultural hegemony. In the fifties, when there were civics courses.

[5] As, I hope, will become clear in these posts, I don’t mean that out-dated, but still popular, understanding of “rationality” promoted by fyc textbooks and popular culture—the one grounded in 19th century logical positivism. All of those false models assume a binary of rational/irrational—a model of the mind falsified by research in cognition for the last thirty years, and also based in myth. Turns out the Phineas Gage story is probably wrong. Since I’ve cited that story more than a few times, my previous scholarship is part of the problem.

I think there are a lot of models of “rationality” that are more useful than the rational/irrational split, and more grounded in recent research on cognition. This research on cognition is usefully and cogently summarized in Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Superforecasting, and Thinking Fast and Slow.

[6] Notice that I’m picking examples that are vehement, upsetting, decorum-violating, and controversial. Also, I’m not being precise about the distinctions among reason, rationality, and logic because I think that’s sort of inside baseball.



What if Josef Goebbels took first year composition (fyc)?

books about Hitler and Nazis

In Deliberate Conflict I ridiculed a particular kind of assignment as not teaching argumentation. Since I’m retired, I can make the stronger argument: this kind of assignment teaches students to think they know what good argumentation is, when it it isn’t teaching argumentation at all. It’s like telling students you’re teaching them how to play chess, when you give good grades to students who tip over the board. It does so because it puts teachers into a false dilemma when it comes to grading terrible arguments.

Here’s the assignment prompt:

Write a well-organized five page argument for a policy about which you care, and use four credible sources to support your claims. Use [MLA, APA, Ancient Sumerian] method of citation, and [this font that I happen to like], have a summary or funnel introduction, put your thesis at the end of your introduction, and use correct English.

Having directed a Writing Center for six years, I can say that this is the fallback writing assignment for people all over the university. Sometimes the last three criteria aren’t mentioned, but are simply assumed as included in the “well-organized” criterion.

You get this paper from your student Josef. The introduction is:

Since the dawn of time there has been a problem with Jews. Now, more than ever, Germans are faced with the question of what to do with Jews. Making Germany great again requires expelling Jews because Jewish leftists agreed to the Versailles Treaty, leftist revolts made the major political figures believe they had to surrender, and Marx was a Jew.

The paper has three body paragraphs showing that each of those minor premises (his data) are true. They are, so he has no problem citing credible sources to support those claims. There are no grammar errors, and his citation is faultless.

What grade does this paper get?

On a rubric model, assuming the prompt implies the rubric, he could easily get a good grade. He cares about this issue, he has four credible sources, he uses the correct method of citation, the right font, his thesis is right there, he could easily have the kind of “organization” that student writing is supposed to have (which is specific to student writing, but that’s a different post), and he meets whatever idiosyncratic grammar rules the teacher has.

Josef might have worked a long time on this paper—should he get a good grade on the labor contract model?

If a teacher abides by the criteria implied by that assignment, they seem to be faced with giving him a bad grade because of his argument being awful (and it is)—which is a criterion not mentioned in the prompt–, or giving him a good grade because he met the criteria.

If we give him a bad grade because his argument is awful, we’ve introduced a new criterion, and one that only applies to him. Since Josef’s (false) narrative about him and his group is that they are persecuted by “leftists,” we seem to have given him evidence to support that claim of persecution. He would definitely get invited to go on Tucker Carlson’s show.

If we give him a good grade, we’re saying this is a good argument, and it isn’t.

So, what do we do with Josef’s paper?

This will take me several posts, but the short answer is: the problem is the prompt. It doesn’t ask that students engage in argumentation. We don’t do anything about Josef’s paper because we don’t give that prompt.

It’s fine if we choose to have an fyc program that doesn’t have the goal of teaching argumentation. FYC is overloaded with things it’s supposed to do, and it’s great if programs choose to do one or two things well rather than a lot of things badly. And those one or two things aren’t necessarily argumentation. What’s not fine is claiming that we’re teaching argumentation when we aren’t.

It’s also not fine to set teachers up for the false dilemma of how to deal with Josef’s argument, but that’s what we’re doing. There are many ways that we can write prompts that don’t put us (or teachers of fyc) in that false dilemma, and even many ways that do so while actually teaching argumentation.







“Conservatives” need to stop whining about Facebook “censorship”

Once I hit 61, I started getting a huge number of ads and posts from pro-Trump groups of various kinds (stop calling them conservative—they aren’t ). And, dang, they whine. I see so many posts in which pro-Trump groups ask that I sign a petition about how they’re being silenced by Facebook.

Think about that for a moment.

Clearly, their supporters don’t take that moment.

But, people often ask me about social media censoring, so the strategic talking point that social media censoring is a major issue for democracy and demagoguery is getting adherents—adherents who don’t realize how strategic and irrational that talking point is.

A lot of people repeat the very muddled talking point that democracy relies on all claims being put forward as equally valid. Since Big Tech censors some claims, they say, it is a danger to democracy.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the issue of whether that is what democracy requires (it doesn’t), and just worry about the minor premise. If Big Tech threatens democracy because it doesn’t give all points of view complete freedom, why aren’t we worried about Fox News? If democracy requires that all points of view be put forward as equally valid on Facebook, why shouldn’t that be the case with Fox News? Fox censors relentlessly. It doesn’t give equal time to all points of view. Prager U whines relentlessly about getting censored—does it give equal time to all points of view? No. If Big Tech is a threat to democracy because it censors, then so is Big Media. And Fox is as big as it gets.

If democracy requires that the sources of information on which people rely be open to all points of view, then Fox, Prager U, the Leadership Institute, and every single medium whining about being censored on Facebook are threats to democracy.

The whole “Facebook censors” is not about Facebook censoring being wrong—where were these people when Facebook was censoring photos of breastfeeding?—it’s that propagandistic media and institutions (who don’t treat all points of view as equally valid) aren’t allowed to promote misinformation, incite riots, libel, or engage in other actions that put Facebook in danger of getting sued.

The whiners don’t want to be held to those standards. (And, really, if you can’t make your argument without lying, maybe you have a bad argument.)

How Facebook censors is bad, and automated, and I’ve been Facebook jailed many times for stupid reasons. But I am on Facebook a lot, and Facebook has allowed me to post a lot. On the other hand, I’ve never been invited to be on Fox News. Fox has censored me far more, and far more effectively, than Facebook has.

Fox News is not a platform that allows everyone on who wants a chance to speak. Nor does Prager U, the Liberty Institute, or any of the other places whining about Facebook rules. Biden is not on Fox News as often as Trump was (or is). When Fox has someone who is not towing the party line, it’s usually not the best proponent of that point of view, and that person gets cut off.

So, were the people fomenting outrage about Facebook censoring operating from a place of principle, they would be starting with Fox News. They aren’t. They don’t. When it comes to Fox News, Prager U, or bakeries, then the very same people argue that, as a private enterprise, they have the right to promote or silence whoever they want only discover the principle of free speech when they want to be irresponsible; otherwise, they’re in favor of private enterprises censoring.

In other words, they don’t have a principled position; they have a set of talking points that are intended to deflect attention from their behavior and foment outrage about groups that thwart them.

This is strategic fear-mongering. Strategic fear-mongering is when people pretend to be outraged that an important principle is being violated, when, in fact, they don’t care about that principle at all—they violate it all the time.

Were those people—Fox News, Prager U—actually committed to democracy requiring the unfettered expression of all points of view in all media, then they would demonstrate that commitment by themselves being media that engage in no censorship.

In short, various groups are engaged in strategic moral panic about censorship on Facebook–groups that themselves censor far more than Facebook. And GOP-supporters are falling for that demagoguery without noticing how incoherent the whole argument is. Really, that Trump supporters feel sorry for themselves that people make fun of them for being being stupid, and then they fall for this kind of demagoguery, and never make the connection….



The two sides myth: preformationism v. epigenesis

Great Feuds in Science describes a feud you don’t hear about much. If you do hear about it, you hear a strategically vexed version.[1] For years, there was a debate about the origin of life—what makes something come alive? It’s conventional to say that there were “two sides” on this issue—that’s how it was described in its era, and how it’s generally narrated.

What I want to do is use that example to show that describing a situation as having two (and just two) sides leads to a misunderstanding of the issue(s) even when everyone agrees that there are only two sides. That something can be mapped as two sides doesn’t mean that’s an accurate way to think about it. If we reduce complicated issues to two sides, then we ask: which group is right? And, since that’s the wrong question, we’ll get a wrong answer.

Because positions with important differences get blended into one, people end up engaging in the fallacies like straw man and nutpicking without realizing it.

In the 18th century, it was conventional to believe that there were two camps on the issue of the origin of life: preformationism and epigenesis. Hellman summarizes preformationism: “all embryos existed, preformed though infinitesimally tiny, in either the egg or the sperm” while “plants were thought to arise from preexisting miniature organisms hidden in the seed” (68). In other words, if two humans have sex, there was in either the sperm or the egg (there was some disagreement on this point) a teeny, tiny person, a humonculus. That being just gets bigger as they grow. Preformationism was wrong.

Beliefs are not autonomous mobiles floating in space. They are entangled with other beliefs—as proof, conclusion, or (most commonly) both at the same time. Preformationism was both the evidence for and conclusion of the belief that God created all of creation at one moment. That argument runs like this: preformation is right because it supports the notion of a static creation and the notion of a static creation is right because preformation supports it. It’s a mobius strip of reasoning.

Hellman doesn’t give a precise definition of epigenesis, nor do various other sources, because it was defined through opposition—not preformationism. One version, advocated by Needham among others, was spontaneous generation , basically the idea that life springs from dead matter.

Needham boiled mutton gravy, put it in a container sealed with cork, and heated it to a point that people believed was enough to kill any living thing. And there was life that sprang up (worms). He was clear that he had proof. (He didn’t—part of my point in this post is that data is not proof.)

According to Hellman, atheists used Needham’s experiment to support their case. That’s the mirror image of the logical mistake that preformationists made. The atheist argument accepts the associations preformationists insisted were necessary–that preformation proves God’s static creation. Since they were wrong about preformation—which was supposed to be proof of God–, they were wrong about how creation happened, and therefore wrong about God. Notice that this is a valid argument only to the extent that the entire world of possible scientific, religious, and political beliefs is really a world of only two possible positions, and that preformationists were right in associating religious belief with preformationism. They were wrong. So were the atheists. Not because being an atheist is wrong, but because those associations were wrong, and Needham’s experiments were bad.

Voltaire argued that Needham was wrong (he was), but he did so with arguments no more rational than Needham’s. And, that Needham was wrong in arguing for spontaneous generation doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in arguing against preformationism, let alone wrong about creation or God. (As it happens, he was, but so was Voltaire.)

If you treat a complicated issue as two sides, then you can believe that showing any person (or specific claim) on “the other side” is wrong means you’ve shown that whole side is wrong about everything. You haven’t. You’ve misunderstood and misrepresented the issue. Both Needham and Voltaire were right that the other was wrong, but they were wrong in thinking they were right.

Here’s what I mean. An old, but I’ve come to think very useful, concept in argumentation is that affirmative and negative cases are different. We tend to conflate them. Or, more precisely, we tend to treat a solid negative case as though it’s a solid affirmative case.

An affirmative case is one in which I say that my policy, claim, or party is right. A negative case is one in which I say that your policy, claim, or party is wrong. An effective negative case is not a rational argument for an affirmative. If I believe that bunnies are communists, and you believe that they are Zoroastrians, we each have an affirmative case we need to make. (Bunnies are communists; bunnies are Zoroastrians.) If I make an effective negative case (you have not shown that bunnies are communists), I have not just shown that my affirmative case is true (bunnies are Zoroastrians). That’s the mistake that Voltaire made.

But, so very, very much of our public discourse makes Voltaire’s mistake. Both Needham and Voltaire had strong negative cases; neither had affirmative cases stronger than a weak sneeze.

If we ask the wrong question, we will always get a wrong answer. If we ask, which of these two groups is right?, we’re asking the wrong question.

If we assume that all of our policy options are defined in terms of two identities, or a continuum between them, then we are arguing policy no more rationally than Needham and Voltaire. We might be right that they are wrong, but that doesn’t mean that we are right that we are right. Their being wrong doesn’t make us right.

[1] You read about how Pasteur showed spontaneous generation was wrong. Various people, including Voltaire, had also shown it was wrong, but they did so in favor of a grand narrative that was just as wrong. People who want to have a narrative of science that is about truth-tellers opposed to religious bigots don’t like to talk about people like Voltaire. There are a lot of things they don’t like to talk about, like eugenics. Another binary we need to abandon is scientists v. bigots. If we could step away from talking about social groups, we might be able to talk about ways of reasoning and arguing in favor of policies/claims. I’d like that.





Another persistently irrational case: fear-mongering about trans people and bathrooms

Last week was the week of TribFest, which is great. It’s just heaven for policy wonks. Normally, of course, it’s in person, and, since the Texas Tribune tries to be non-partisan, it means that there are often panels with people on “both sides” (Lawdamighty I hate that metaphor). But, this whole last week I was thinking about a panel from a few weeks ago.

I should begin by saying that I think that conservativism is a legitimate political philosophy (although it’s one with which I disagree). And, as a legitimate political philosophy, it can be defended through rational argumentation.

The GOP, on the other hand, is not conservative, nor does it engage in rational argumentation to defend its policies, because it can’t. And a speaker from a couple of years ago seems to me to exemplify how GOP rhetoric works. It’s all about irrational fear-mongering, with some shameless exploitation of children as a kind of rhetorical shield thrown in.

Just to be clear: I think being fearful can be rational. And I think it’s possible to make a rational argument for being fearful. The GOP use of transphobia is not a rational fear, and, in fact, the rhetoric works to keep people from thinking rationally about the issue. Instead, the whole rhetorical strategy consists of teaching people (especially vulnerable people) to memorize and repeat certain talking points verbatim, even when those points are contradictory, incoherent, and often outright lies.

A teenager on the panel (call her Chester), who was representing an anti-trans organization, talked about how she went home to her daddy (I’m not kidding, that’s what she said), saying that she was frightened at the idea of boys in her bathroom. Her spiel (since all she could do when asked a question or pushed was to repeat that spiel or part of it verbatim in the discussion, I feel it’s fair to call it a spiel, rather than an argument) emphasized how terrible it was that she should feel frightened going to the bathroom. She also talked about how Obama was forcing this down her throat. (Another metaphor I think people have not thought through) because he enacted an Executive Order after a particular event (I don’t remember the event).

What I do remember is that someone pointed out that she had her chain of events wrong, and that she was putting Obama’s Executive Order after something that was actually before it, which she admitted. Yet she continued to repeat the spiel with that false narrative–the one she admitted was false.

But the whole argument was hateful. Her argument–this policy is bad because it frightens students–has the major premise that teens (all teens, even ones not like her) should not be afraid to use the restroom in their high school.

Except she didn’t believe that major premise.

Someone asked her, “So, you think that teenagers should be able to go to the bathroom without being afraid that they’ll get assaulted?” and she said, “Yes, absolutely.” I think I kind of momentarily blacked out from how hard her in-group entitlement hit me, but I think someone pointed out that trans students are far more likely to get beaten up in bathrooms that she is likely to get….what? Assaulted by a male who thinks his best strategy for assaulting women is to pretend to be trans in an American high school?

She didn’t care about whether students might be assaulted in a bathroom. She didn’t care whether students are afraid in a bathroom. She only cared about whether she was frightened. What she was appealing to was not a premise about students feeling safe in bathrooms, but a premise about what the ideal society is: a world in which policies protect people like her from being made uncomfortable. It’s all about politics as providing safe spaces for easily-triggered in-group members. It’s toxic populism.

Also, it isn’t within several football fields of a rational argument. Rape is a major problem among American teens, and I take it very seriously, but it isn’t possible to make a rational argument that the most common kind of rape—the kind about which Chester should be worried—was the kind about which she complained to “Daddy.” (Her word, seriously.) A girl in an American high school isn’t suddenly presented with the threat of rape if a trans girl can use the girl’s bathroom.

Her argument was not grounded in a rational assessment of relative threats to her physical safety.

I really wish that we still taught people about syllogisms. As Aristotle said, in public disagreements (as opposed to how philosophers in his day argued), we rely on enthymemes (A is B because A is C). In common conversation, I might say to you, “Hubert is a jerk because he kicked my shins for no reason.” I would not have to engage in a long and complicated argument to show that my major premise—kicking someone in the shins for no reason is bad (C is B)—is true.

But, let’s imagine that I made that argument, and then I told you a story about how much I admire Ruth because she goes around and kicks shins for no reason. In that case, I don’t actually believe my own major premise is a principle. So much of our political discourse works this way–people make arguments with major premises they don’t believe.

Appealing to the premise that kicking shins is just something useful for me in the moment. For instance, if I say, “You are a terrible room-mate because you leave dishes in the sink,” I am making an argument with the major premise that “people who leave dishes in the sink are terrible room-mates.” If you point out that I also leave dishes in the sink, and I don’t acknowledge that means, by my argument, I’m a bad room-mate, then I’m throwing claims to deflect from my behavior the way a monkey throws poo.

Chester was, obviously, throwing poo. Her whole argument was deflecting from how trans students are treated to how she felt. She didn’t actually care about whether people feel threatened or might get assaulted in bathrooms. She only cared about whether she felt scared.

She hadn’t thought it through at all, as was made clear by the fact that she couldn’t do anything other than repeat the script she’d been given. And that’s another appalling aspect of this whole argument. There are, and always have been, Machiavellians who so believe in their case that they throw children like her out to make insensible arguments. I think she was shocked at getting challenged in what she said, and she was probably traumatized. The organization that put her out there knew the argument they were telling her to make would be treated with outrage and scorn. They exploited her. They put her out there making an incoherent and irrational argument that was actively offensive and hurtful to trans students, and let her take the heat.

That’s unconscionable. And it shows that they don’t actually care about her, or the feelings of high school students. So, let’s do the math. She made an argument that made it clear she didn’t care about anyone other than her in service of a group that didn’t care about her. There’s a theme here.

And in service of what argument? There is no rational argument that can be made that trans students are more of a threat to other students than cishet students; when transphobics try to make an argument that gender is perfectly correlated to biology, they get into a set of claims that only MC Escher could map.

Clearly, GOP fear mongering about bathrooms is just another instance of what is often called the Southern Strategy. But, the author of that strategy wasn’t just talking about the South. What he said is that people prone to voting GOP are more likely to respond out of fear of the Other, and he was right. People drawn to closure, people who get anxious in situations of ambiguity or hybridity manifest that anxiety as anger.

Years ago, Mary Douglas showed that we want to live in a world that is a taxonomy of hard categories. We want things to be purely their thing—fish don’t have shells; we don’t eat the same things our enemies eat; birds fly. Fish that have shells, birds that don’t fly—those are dangerous. Arie Kruglanski showed that many people are drawn to closure (aka, certainty). For some people, that sense that the world can be easily and with certainty categorized is tremendously comfortable. They need to believe that their cognitive categories are ontological ones—their neat mental categories are how the world is—because that means they know the world.

Presenting someone who believes that there is a clean binary of gender/sexuality with the fact of trans people is like giving a Sun Ra album to someone who is obsessed with a music collection that has rigid categories of genre.

They get mad. Irrationally mad. Because their categories are gerfucked. Because they’re being presented with a world that is not a rigid taxonomy of discrete categories, one in which we can be certain that our internal imagination and the world outside of that imagination are definitely the same.

If you noticed, I shifted from they to we. We are all drawn to a world in which we make quick judgments, on the basis of categorizing people, places, groups, experiences. We have to be in that world; otherwise we would go mad. We all have taxonomies, and we all get flustered when we come across something that blurs the categories of our taxonomy. It’s fine that we have categories and taxonomies. What matters is what happens when we come across data, an experience, or a person that presents us with a transgression of our taxonomy. That transgression is threatening only insofar as it proves to us that our taxonomy does not guarantee certainty.

The more frightened we are by uncertainty and ambiguity, the more we are frightened by transgressions of our taxonomy. That we are afraid does not mean we are in danger. That someone threatens our taxonomy does not mean that they threaten our safety.

That Chester experienced trans girls as violating her taxonomy is understandable, that this transgression made her uncomfortable is also understandable, but that she went from her feeling uncomfortable to characterizing them as a threat is externalizing and exaggerating her discomfort. What made them seem dangerous for Chester is that they complicated her sense of how identity works, that they transgressed the lines of her taxonomy. The leap from “This person is a serious threat to my way of thinking about people” to “these people are a threat” is the real danger.

The position she was given to memorize and repeat is not rational. Nor is it Christian. She wants to be able to go home and tell Daddy that she is frightened of people, and they should therefore be banned from her space. If students find her presence in a high school restroom frightening, should they be able to get her banned from that space? Is she willing to be treated the way that wants to treat others?

Nope.