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