Everyone wants to ban books

various books that are often challenged

I used to teach a class on the rhetoric of free speech, since what you would think would be very different issues (would the ideal city-state allow citizens to watch dramas, should Milton be allowed to advocate divorce, should people be allowed to criticize a war, should we ban video games) end up argued using the same rhetoric. Everyone is in favor of banning something, and everyone is prone to moral outrage that others want to ban something. The Right Wing Outrage Media went into a frenzy about people trying to pull To Kill a Mockingbird from K-12 curricula, and “cancel culture” as though they were, on principle, opposed to censorship. Those same pundits are now engaged in a disinformation campaign about CRT, which they are trying to ban (or, in other words, “cancel”), as well as books that teach students their rights, mention LGBTQ, talk about systemic racism. And the biggest call for pulling books from curriculum, school, and public libraries is on the part of the GOP, which continues to fling itself around about cancel culture. Of course, those examples could be flipped: people who defended removing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird are now outraged at Maus being removed.

They aren’t the first or only group to claim to be outraged, on principle, about “censorship” at the same moment they’re advancing exactly the policy they’re claiming they are, on principle, outraged that others advocate. Everyone wants some book removed from K-12 curricula, school libraries, public libraries. We are all in favor of banning books.

I’m not saying that everyone is a hypocrite, that there’s not really a controversy, we’re all equally bad, or it’s all about who has the power. I’m saying that this disagreement too often falls into the rhetorical trap that so much public discourse does. We talk as though our actions are grounded in a principle to which we are completely and purely committed when, in fact, we violate it on a regular and strategic basis. It would be useful if we stopped doing that. We should argue about whether these books should be banned, and not about banning books in the abstract.

There are several problems with how we argue about “censorship.” One is that we often conflate boycotting and banning, and they’re different. If you choose not to listen to music that offends you, give money to businesses or individuals who promote values or advocate actions that you believe endanger others, refuse to spend Thanksgiving dinner with a relative who is abusive, that isn’t “cancel culture.” It’s making choices about what you hear, read, or give your money to. Let’s call that boycotting. This post is not about boycotting, but about banning, about restricting what others can hear, read, watch, or learn. For sake of ease, I’ll call that “banning books.”

We’re shouting slogans at one another because we aren’t arguing on the stasis (that is, place) of disagreement. It’s as though we were room-mates and you wanted me to do my dishes immediately, and I wanted to do them once a day, and we tried to settle that disagreement by arguing about whether Kant or Burke had a better understanding of the sublime. We’ll never settle the disagreement if we stay on that stasis. We’ll never settle the issue about whether Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books should be banned from high school libraries if we’re pretending that this is an issue about whether book banning is right or wrong on principle.

The issue of banning books that we’re talking about right now actually has a lot of places of agreement. Everyone agrees that it is appropriate to limit what is taught in K-12, and what public and school libraries make available (especially to children). Everyone agrees that the public should have input on those limits and that availability. Everyone also agrees that it’s appropriate to limit access to material that is likely to mislead children, especially if it is in such a way that they might harm themselves or others. We also agree that mandatory schooling is necessary for a well-functioning democracy.

We disagree about when, how, and why to ban books because we really disagree about deeper issues regarding how democracy functions, what reading does, what constitutes truth, and how people perceive truth. We are not having a political crisis, as much as rhetorical one that is the consequence of an epistemic one.

It makes sense to start my argument with our disagreements about democracy, although the disagreements about democracy aren’t really separable from the disagreements about truth. Briefly, there are many different views as to democracy is supposed to function. I’ll mention only five of the many views: “stealth democracy” (see especially page two; this model is extremely close to what is called “populism” in political science), technocracy, neo-Hobbesianism, relativism, pluralism. And here is my most important point: none of these is peculiar to any place on the political spectrum. Our world is demagogically described as left v. right, just because that sells papers, gets clicks, and mobilizes voters. Our political world is, in fact, much more complicated, and the competing models of democracy exemplify how we aren’t in some false binary of left v. right. Every one of these models has its advocates everywhere on the political spectrum–not evenly distributed, I’ll grant, but they’re there. As long as we try to think about our political issues in terms of whether “the left” or “the right” has it right, we’ll never have useful disagreements on issues like book banning. So, back to the models.

“Stealth democracy” presumes that “the people” really consists of a group with homogeneous views, values, needs, and policy preferences. There isn’t really any disagreement among them as to what should be done; common sense is all one needs to recognize what the right decisions are in any situation, whether judicial, domestic or foreign policy, economic, military, and so on. Expert advice is reliable to the extent that it confirms or helps the perceptions of these “real” people, who rely on “common sense.” This kind of common sense privileges “direct” experience, claiming that “you can just see” what’s true, and what should be done. Experts, in this view, have a tendency to complicate issues unnecessarily and introduce ambiguity and uncertainty to a clear and certain situation.

So, how do advocates of stealth democracy explain disagreement, compromise, bargaining, and the slow processes of policy change? They believe that politicians delay and dither and avoid the obviously correct courses of action in order to protect their jobs, because they’re getting paid by “special interests,” and/or because they’ve spent too much time away from “real” people. They deflect that other citizens disagree with them by characterizing those others as not “real” people, dupes of the politicians, or part of the “special interests.”

In short, there are people who are truly people (us) who have unmediated perception of Truth and whose policies are truly right. We rely on facts, not opinions. In this world, there is no point in listening to other points of view, since those are just opinions, if not outright lies. Just repeat the FACTS (using all caps if necessary) spoken by the pundits who are speaking the truth (and you know it’s the truth without checking their sources, not because you’re gullible, but because true statements fit with other things you believe). Bargaining or negotiating means weakening, corrupting, or damaging the truly right course of action. What we should do is put real people in office who will simply get things done without all the bullshit created by dithering and corrupt others. Dissent from the in-group is not just disloyalty, but dangerous. Stealth democracy valorizes leaders who are “decisive,” confident, anti-intellectual, successful, not particularly well-spoken, impulsive, and passionately (even fanatically) loyal to real people.

People who believe in stealth democracy believe that educating citizens to be good citizens means teaching them to believe that the in-group (the real people) is entirely good, whose judgment is to be trusted.

Technocracy is exactly the same, but with a different sense of who are the people with access to the Truth—in this case, it’s “experts” who have unmediated perception, know the “facts,” whereas everyone else is relying on muddled and biased “opinion.” Believers in technocracy valorize leaders who can speak the specialized language (which might be eugenics, bizspeak, Aristotelian physics, econometrics, neo-realism, Marxism, or so many other discourses), are decisive, and certain of themselves. And technocracy has, oddly enough, exactly the same consequences for thinking about disagreement, public discourse, dissent, and school that stealth democracy does.

In both cases, there is some group that has the truth, and truth can simply be poured into the brains of others—if they haven’t been muddled or corrupted by “special interests.” They agree that taking into consideration various points of view weakens deliberation and taints policies—the right policy is the one that the right group advocates, and it should be enacted in its purest form. They just disagree about what group is right. (In one survey, about the same number of people thought that decisions should be left up to experts as thought decisions should be left up to business leaders, and I think that’s interesting.)

Both models agree that school can make people good citizens by instilling in students the Truths that group knows, while also teaching them either to become members of that group, or to defer to it. Because students should learn to admire, trust, and aspire to be a member of that group, there is no reason to teach students multiple points of view (since all but one would be “opinion” rather than “fact”), skills of argumentation (although teaching students how to shout down wrong-headed people is useful), or any information that makes the right group look bad (such as history about times that group had been wrong, mistaken, unjust, unsuccessful). Education is indoctrination, in an almost literal sense—putting correct doctrine into the students.

I have to repeat that there are advocates of these models all over the political spectrum (although there are very few technocrats these days, they seem to me evenly distributed, and there are many followers of stealth democracy everywhere). In addition, it’s interesting that both of these approaches are, ultimately, authoritarian, although advocates of them don’t see them that way—they think authoritarianism is a system that forces people to do what is not the obviously correct course of action. They both think authoritarianism is when they don’t get their way.

Hobbesianism comes and goes in various forms (Social Darwinism, might makes right, objectivism, “neo-realism,” some forms of Calvinism, what’s often called Machiavellianism). It posits that the world is an amoral place of struggle, and winning is all that matters. If you can break the law and get away with it, good for you. Everyone is trying to screw everyone else over, so the best approach is to get them first—it is a world of struggle, conflict, warfare, and domination. Democracy is just another form of war, in which we can and should use any strategies to enable our faction to win, and, when we win, we should grab all the spoils possible, and use our power to exterminate all other factions. Schooling is, therefore, training for this kind of dog-eat-dog world, either by training students to be fighters for one faction, or by allowing and encouraging bullying and domination among students. The curriculum and so on are designed to promote the power and prestige of whatever faction has the political control to force their views on others. There is no Truth other than what power enables a group to insist is true. As with the other models, taking other points of view seriously just muddies the water, weakens the will, and, with various other metaphors, worsens the outcome. People who ascribe to this model like to quote Goering: “History is written by the victors.”

I’m including relativism simply because it’s a hobgoblin. I’ve known about five actual relativists in my life, or maybe zero, depending on how you define it. “Relativist” is the term people commonly use for others (only one of the people I knew called themselves relativists) who say that there is no truth, all positions are equally valid, and we should never judge others. In fact, relativists are very judgmental about people who are not relativist (I have more than once heard some version of, “Being judgmental is WRONG!”), and they generally stop being relativist very fast when confronted with someone who believes that people like them should be exterminated or harmed.

Stealth democrats and Hobbesians are often effectively sloppy moral relativists, in that they believe that the morality of an action depends on whether it’s done by an in-group member (stealth democracy) or is successful (Hobbesians). But they also, in my experience, both condemn relativism, because they don’t see themselves as relativists, as much as people who are so good in one way that they have moral license to behave in ways that they fling themselves around like a bad ballet dancer if engaged in by an out-group. On Moral Grounds.

Pluralism assumes that any nation is constituted by people with genuinely different needs, values, priorities, policy preferences, experiences. Therefore, there is no one obviously correct policy, about which all sensible people agree. Since sensible and informed people disagree, we should look for an optimal policy, a goal that will involve deliberation and negotiation. The optimal policy isn’t one that everyone likes—in fact, it’s probably no one’s preferred policy—but neither is it an amalgamation of what every individual wanted. It’s a good enough policy. Considering various points of view improves policy deliberation, but not because all points of view are equally valid, or there is no truth, or we are hopelessly lost in a world of opinion. Some advocates of pluralism believe that there is a truth, but that compromise is part of being an adult; some believe in a long arc of justice, and that compromises are necessary; some believe that truth is not something any one human or group has a monopoly on; some believe that the truth is that we disagree; some people believe that, for now, we see as through a glass darkly, but we can still strive to see as much and as clearly as possible, and that requires including others who, because they’re different, are part of a larger us. The foot is not a hand, the eye is not an ear, but they are all equally important parts of the body. We thrive as a body because the parts are different.

So, how does pluralism keep from slipping into relativism? It doesn’t say that all beliefs are equally valid, but that all people, actions, and policies are held to the same standards of validity—the ones to which we hold ourselves. We treat others as we want to be treated. We don’t give ourselves moral license.

And, now, finally, back to the question of book banning.

We all want to restrict books from schools and libraries. We disagree about which books because we disagree about which democracy we want to have. Do we believe that giving students accurate information about slavery, segregation, the GI Bill, housing practices and laws will make them better citizens, or do we believe that patriotism requires lying to them about those facts? Or, at least, pretending they didn’t happen? Do we imagine that a book transmits its message to readers, so that a het student reading a book that describes a gay relationship in a positive way might be turned gay?[1] Do we believe that citizens should be trained to believe that only one point of view is correct, to manage disagreement productively, to listen to others, to refuse to judge, to value triumph over everything, or any of the many other options? When we say books will harm students, what harm are we imagining? Are we worried about normalizing racism because that violates the pluralist model, normalizing queer sexualities because that violates the stealth democracy model, having students hear about events like the Ludlow Massacre since that troubles the Hobbesian model?

We don’t have a disagreement about books. We have a disagreement about democracy.



[1] One of the contributing factors to my being denied tenure was that I taught a book that enraged someone on the tenure and promotion committee. I didn’t actually like the book, and was using it to show how a bad argument works. He assumed you only taught books that had arguments you wanted your students to adopt. In other words, he and I were operating from different models of reading. One topic I haven’t been able to cover in this already too long post is about lay theories of reading in book banning. My colleague Paul Corrigan is working on this issue, and I hope he publishes something soon.
 











“A little less talk, a little more action….”

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


I know that I spend so much time talking about paired terms that people are probably tired of it. But, once you learn to recognize when someone is arguing used binary paired terms, then suddenly so many otherwise inexplicable jumps in disagreements make sense.

Just to recap, binary paired terms are sets of binaries (Christian/atheist, capitalist/communist) that are assumed to be logically equivalent—the preferred term in each pair is equivalent (and necessarily chained to) all the other good terms; and all of them are opposed to other terms that are equivalent (and chained to) all the other bad terms. Christian is to communist as capitalist is to communist—all communists are atheists, all Christians are capitalists.

Paired terms showing that people assumed that integration was communist because they believed segregation was Christian

When someone (or a culture) is looking at the world through binary paired terms, then it seems reasonable to make an inference about an opposition’s affirmative case or identity simply because they’ve made a negative case. It’s fallacious. It’s assuming that, if you say A is bad, you must be saying B is good, as though the world of policy options is reduced to A and B.

For instance, segregationists who believed that segregation was mandated by Scripture (an affirmative case: A [segregation] is good) thought they were being reasonable when they assumed that critics of segregation (negative case: A is bad) were making an affirmative case for communism (B is good)—segregation is Christian; communists are the opposite of Christian; therefore, critics of segregation are communists. The important point is that people who believed that particular set of binary paired terms believed that it wasn’t possible to be Christian and critical of segregation.

Thinking in binary paired terms isn’t limited to one spot on the political spectrum, nor to any spot on the spectrum of educational achievement/experience. Nor are the binary paired terms the same for everyone, and they can change over time. For instance, now many conservative Christians (exactly the point on the religious spectrum that advocated slavery and then segregation) claim that Christians were opposed to segregation because MLK was Christian, thereby ignoring that the major advocates of segregation were white Christian churches and leaders, and even universities, like Bob Jones. They are ignoring that there were Christians on all sides of that argument.

Consider these sets of paired terms. For some people, being proud is the opposite of being critical; for some, it’s the opposite of being ashamed. Thus, for the first set of people, if you’re proud of the US, or proud of being an American, then you must think everything the US did is good; therefore, you think slavery was okay, and you must be racist. So, they assume that, if you say you’re proud of the US, or you fly a flag, then you’re a defender of slavery. Their set of terms is something like this:

paired terms about slavery
Paired terms following from the proud/critical false binary


For the other group, the terms are something like this:

false binary proud/ashamed
Paired terms following from the proud/ashamed false binary

So, while we might put those two arguments in opposition to each other (anti- v. pro-CRT, for instance), it’s interesting that they are both positions from within a world that assumes similarly binary paired terms. The whole controversy ends if we imagine that being proud and critical are possible at the same time—that is, if we dismantle the binary paired terms.

When I criticize, for instance, some practice of GOP politicians as authoritarian (or a GOP pundit for advocating authoritarianism), a supporter of the GOP will surprisingly often answer, “It’s the Dems who are authoritarian,” as though that’s a refutation. (The same happens when I criticize Dems, Libertarians, Evangelicals, or just about any other group.) That response doesn’t make any sense, unless you are working from within binary paired terms.

If Dems are the opposite of the GOP, and Dems are authoritarian at all, then they occupy the slot for authoritarian, and GOP must be anti-authoritarian.

Of course, that’s entirely false. Both parties might be authoritarian, they might be different degrees of authoritarian, neither party might be authoritarian per se but either party might, at this moment, be advocating an authoritarian policy. Instead of arguing which party is authoritarian (as though that gives a “get out of authoritarianism free” card to “the” other), we should argue about whether specific policies or rhetoric are authoritarian, but you can’t do that if you approach all issues through binary paired terms.

Another important and damaging set of paired terms begins with the false binary of talk v. action. It’s both profoundly anti-deliberative, but anti-democratic. And it’s so pervasive that we don’t even realize when we’re assuming it.

I got a really smart and thoughtful email about Rhetoric and Demagoguery, and the person raised the question of whether the desire for deliberation can be destructive, citing the instance of appeasing Hitler. And a common understanding of the appeasement issue is that people tried to deliberate with and about Hitler rather than take action, when action was what was necessary.

For reasons I’ll mention toward the end of this post, I am writing a chapter about the rhetoric of appeasement for the current book project, so I can answer that question. The answer is actually pretty complicated, but the short answer is that the British leaders never deliberated with Hitler, and the British public had severely constrained public discourse about Nazism and Hitler—so constrained that I’m not sure it counts as deliberation.

When we think in binary paired terms, one of the pair is narrowly defined (often implicitly rather than explicitly), and the other is everything else. When it comes to the issue of appeasing Hitler, “action” is implicitly narrowly defined as military action, and everything else is seen as “talk.” But talk is not necessarily deliberation. British leaders didn’t deliberate with Hitler; they bargained with him. Hitler didn’t bargain with British leaders; he deflected and delayed. I don’t think more talking with Hitler would have prevented war, and he wasn’t capable of deliberation (his discussions with his generals show that to be the case). But that doesn’t mean that military action would have prevented war. I used to think that going to war over Czechoslovakia would have been the right choice, but it turns out that course of action had serious weaknesses, as would sending troops in to prevent the militarization of the Rhineland (for more on the various alternatives to appeasement, see especially this book). The short version is that many of the military actions are advocated on the grounds that they would have deterred Hitler, a problematic assumption.

There were other actions that I’ve come to think probably had a higher likelihood of preventing war, such as Britain and the US refusing to agree to such a punitive treaty in 1919, insisting that the Kaiser explicitly agree to a treaty (i.e., not letting him and Ludendorff throw it onto the democracy), enacting something like the Dawes plan long before they did, either explicitly renegotiating the Versailles Treaty or enforcing it. In other words, preventing the rise of Nazism would have been the better course of action.

There are other counterfactuals people advocate: a mutual protection pact with the USSR, preventing France and Belgium from occupying the Ruhr, a different outcome for the Evian Conference, the US joining the League of Nations, a more vigorous response to the aggressions of Japan and Italy, the UK rearming long before it did, intervention in the Spanish Civil War. But, for various reasons, almost all of those options were rhetorical third rails–it was career-ending for a political leader to advocate any of them. The problem wasn’t that the UK engaged in talk rather than action, but that it didn’t talk about all the possible actions it might take, while the US didn’t deliberate about the issue at all.

The British public discourse about Hitler and the Nazis was severely constrained by the isolationism of the US, political complications in France, an unwillingness to deliberate about basic assumptions regarding what caused the Great War or what Hitler wanted, demonizing of the USSR, shared narratives about Aryanism, racism about Jews, Slavs, and immigrants generally.

But, many people ignore all those complexities, and imagine the situation this way:

Paired terms about appeasement resulting from false binary of talk/action

All the various actions that weren’t appeasement, but that weren’t military response, disappear from this way of thinking. And, to be blunt, that’s how the popular discourse about appeasement works.

So, why did I decide to write a chapter about appeasement?

Because I believed that the UK had ignored the obvious evidence that Hitler was obviously not appeasable and it was obvious that they should have responded more aggressively. In other words, I accepted the reductive binary paired terms about the situation. I was wrong.

Binary paired terms are pervasive and seductive, and we all fall for them. Obviously.

On planning (especially for dissertation writers)

calendar showing highlights for different kinds of work

A while ago (probably several months), someone said they hated planning, and I’ve been meaning since then to write a blog post about it. It’s even been on my to-do list since then. To some people, that might look ironic–here I am giving advice about planning when I have been planning to do something for months and not getting to it.

That only seems ironic if we imagine planning to do something as making an iron-clad commitment we are ethically obligated to fulfill immediately. Thinking about planning that way works for some people, but for most people, it seems to me, it’s terrifying and shaming.

Planning isn’t necessarily a process that guarantees you’ll achieve everything you ever imagine yourself doing, let alone as soon as you first imagine it. Nor does planning require that you make a commitment to yourself that you must fulfill or you’re a failure. It’s about thinking about what must v. what should v. what would be nice to get done, somehow imagined within the parameters of time, cognitive style, resources, energy, support, and various other constraints. Sometimes things you’d like to get done remain in your planning for a long time.

There are people who are really good at setting specific objectives and knocking them off the list, who believe that you shouldn’t set an objective you won’t achieve, and who are very rigid about planning. They often get a lot done, and that’s great. I’m glad it works for them. Unfortunately, some of them are self-righteous and shaming because they assume that this system–because it works for them–can work for everyone. That it clearly doesn’t is not a sign that the method is not a universally valid solution, but a sign of the weakness on the part of people for whom it doesn’t work. They insist that this (sometimes very elaborate) system will work if you apply yourself, not acknowledging different constraints, and so they end up shaming others. They seem to write a lot of the books on planning, as well as blog posts.

And that’s the main point of this post. There is a lot of great advice out there about planning, but an awful lot of it is clickbait self-help rhetoric. There’s a lot of shit out there. There are some ponies. But there is so much shaming.

There are a lot of good reasons that some people are averse to planning—reasons about which they shouldn’t be ashamed. People who’ve spent too much time around compulsive critics or committed shamesters have trouble planning because they know that they will not perfectly enact their plan, and so even beginning to plan means imagining how they will fail. And then failure to be perfect will seem to prove the compulsive critic or committed shamester right. Thus, for people like that, making a plan is an existential terrordome. Personally, I think compulsive critics and committed shamesters are all just engaged in projection and deflection about how much they hate themselves, but that’s just one of many crank theories I have. Of course we will fail to enact our plan—nothing works out as planned—because we cannot actually perfectly and completely control our world. In my experience, compulsive critics and committed shamesters are people mostly concerned about protecting their fantasy that the world is under (their) control.

People who have trouble letting go of details find big-picture planning overwhelming; people who loathe drudgery find it boring; people trying to plan something they’ve never before done (a dissertation, wedding, trip to Europe, long-term budget) just get a kind of blank cloud of unknowing when they think about making a plan for it. People who are inductive thinkers (they begin with details and work up) have trouble planning big projects because it requires an opposite way of thinking. People who are deductive thinkers can have trouble imagining first steps. People who use planning to manage anxiety can get paralyzed when a situation requires making multiple plans.

I think planning of some kind is useful. I think it’s really helpful, in fact, and I think—if people can find the right approach to planning—it can reduce anxiety. But it is never to going to erase anxiety about a high-stakes project. And a method of planning shouldn’t increase anxiety.

Because there are different reasons that people are averse to planning, and people get anxious in different ways and moments, there is no process that will work for everyone. If a process doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or you’ll never be able to plan; it just means you need to find a process that works for you. And, to be blunt, that process might involve therapy (to be even more blunt, it almost always does).

Here are some books that people trying to write dissertations have found helpful. Anyone who wants to recommend something in the comments is welcome to do so, and it’s especially helpful if people say why it worked for them. Some of these are getting out of date, and yet people still like them.

Choosing Your Power, Wayne Pernell (self-help generally)
Destination Dissertation, Sonja Foss and William Waters
Getting Things Done, David Allen (the basic principle is good, but it’s getting very aged in terms of technology)
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (another one that is getting long in the tooth)
I haven’t done much with this website, but the research is strong: https://woopmylife.org/

There are some things that can help. If you don’t like planning because it’s drudgery, then make it fun. Buy a new kind of planner every year. Use colors to code your goals. If planning paralyzes you because of fear of failure, then set low “must” goals that you can definitely achieve, and have a continuum of what should get done. Get into some kind of group that will encourage you. If you feel that you’re facing a white wall of uncertainty, work with someone who has done what you’re trying to do (e.g., your diss director) to create a reasonable plan. This strategy works best if they see part of their job as reducing anxiety, and if they have a way of planning that works with yours.

One of the toxically seductive things about being a student is that you don’t have to have a plan through most of undergraduate and even graduate school. You have to pick a major, but it’s possible to pick one not because of any specific plan–it’s the one in which we succeed (a completely reasonable way to pick a major, I think), and then we might go to graduate school in that thing at which we’re succeeding (it makes sense), and in graduate school we’re given a set of courses we have to take. The “plan,” so to speak, might be nothing more than “complete the assignments with deadlines set by faculty.” Those deadlines are all within a fifteen week period, and it’s relatively straightforward to meet them through sheer panic and caffeine. Then, suddenly (for many people), we are supposed to have a plan for finishing your dissertation, with deadlines that are years apart, for things we’ve never done—a prospectus, a dissertation. We have to know how to plan something long-term, with contingencies.

In my experience, planning in academia means being able to engage in a multiple timeline plan. Having one plan that requires that you get a paper accepted by this time, a job by that time, a course release by then increases anxiety. It seems to me that people tend to do better with an approach that enables a distinction between hard deadlines (if this doesn’t happen by that date, funding will run our) and various degrees of aspirational achievements.

I think this challenge is present in lots of fields: you can’t determine to hit a certain milestone, as much as hope to do so, and try to figure out what things you can do between now and then to make that outcome likely. Thus, there are approaches out there helpful for that kind of contingent planning. But, just to be clear, there are a lot that really aren’t.

I also think it’s helpful to find a way of planning that is productive given our particular habits, anxieties, ways of thinking. People who are drawn to closure seem to thrive with a method that is panic-inducing for people who are averse to it, for instance. So, it might take some time to find a method (it took me till well into my first job, but that was before the internet).

Writing a dissertation is hard; there is nothing that will make it easy. There are things that will make it harder, and doing it without a way of planning that works fits personality, situation, and so on is one. But there is no method of planning that will work for everyone, and there is no shame if some particular method isn’t working.




On finding my notes and files from my dissertation

heavily edited writing

I recently found my notes and files from when I was writing my dissertation. I’ll start with saying that I’ve had a respectable publishing career, but hooyah, that dissertation was a hot steaming mess. So was my process of writing it. So, if you’re trying to write a dissertation, and you’re in the midst of a chaotic writing process and you think that what you’re writing is awful, it can’t be worse than either my process or product. You’ll be fine.

There’s a longer version of this, but here I’ll list a few ways that things went wrong. First, I was trying to use a technology that lots of people used (a notecard system), but it really didn’t work for me. I didn’t know that, and I couldn’t have known it till I tried it. It got me too caught up in details, and I’m an inductive thinker (and writer), and it worsened all the flaws of inductive writing (assuming that if you give enough details people will infer your argument).

There are lots of technologies that people now use—zotero, commenting on pdf—and they work for some people and not for others. If one that other people are using doesn’t work for you, then committing to it with more will won’t make it work. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure; it means there’s a bad match between that technology and you, and the technology needs to go.

Second, I was working with faculty who were not in the conversation I was trying to enter. That was simply a function of my topic and department. My committee was really good, but they couldn’t tell me what to read or what conferences to attend. Make sure someone on your committee knows the conversation, or change the conversation.

Third, I was modelling my argument on books I admired that were written by advanced scholars. Your dissertation, in terms of scope and structure, should be modelled on books written by junior scholars or other dissertations in your department.

Fourth, people writing their dissertations should be prohibited from making any major decisions regarding things like marriage.

Fifth, I was in a highly competitive department in which something like a writing group would probably not have been helpful, but I wish I had found one. It’s hard, though, since people outside your field will often give advice that isn’t appropriate for yours.

How things went right.

First through fifth: my dissertation director was a smart, insightful, and kind person. He was a student of Thomas Kuhn’s, and so stepped back and saw processes. When you’re writing a dissertation, there are moments you are completely paralyzed. It’s because we’ve often gotten through undergrad and coursework without thinking about structure very much. So, you go from thinking about how to structure a 20-page paper (or not, you just make it a list) to how to structure something that is 200 pages. You have to decide what’s background, where to explain that background, how to position yourself in regard to other scholarship, how much of that scholarship to discuss, where to start…so many things that just don’t come up in a seminar paper.

My director, Arthur Quinn, taught a course about 18th century rhetoric that was entirely histories of the 18th century that happened to emphasize rhetoric, and we spend the semester talking about their methods, structures, assumptions, rhetoric. It was one of four classes I had in that program that were historiography (maybe five), but I didn’t know that at the time. What I did know is that he was asking us to step up a ladder, from just thinking about our data, or our argument, to the various ways we might make that argument. That course influenced every single grad course I taught.

At one point, completely paralyzed in my writing, I was in a grad student office, rearranging the Gumby-like figures my office-mate had into a baseball game. His office was next door, and he stopped, looked in, and then went to his office. A while later, he came into my office and said, “Here’s what you’re arguing.” He gave me an outline for my dissertation. I started writing again.

My dissertation did not end up with that outline. But his giving me that direction got me writing. He was generally a hands-off director, but he knew the moment he had to step in.

Now that I’ve seen a lot of grad students, and a lot of directors, I appreciate him so much. A lot of scholars rely on panic to motivate themselves, and so they sincerely believe they are helping their students when they deliberately work their students into a panic. Many rely on shaming themselves in order to write, and so they think that shaming students is helpful. Some forget how hard it is to write a dissertation, and so they dismiss or minimize the concerns of their students. Some believe that they benefitted from how isolating writing a dissertation is, and so they believe that refusing to give directive advice is helping their students. Some have writing processes in which you have to have the entire argument determined before you start, and so they insist their students do. Some drift around in data and so encourage their students to do so. All of these processes work for someone—that’s why people adopt them—but none of them work for all students, and none of them work for any one student all the time.

And that is what Art Quinn taught me.

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.