Save Breath to Cool Porridge
We have an idea – don’t we? – that discussion is always a good thing, that more of it will work things out, that if we discuss our differences long enough and throughly enough, sooner or later we’ll resolve them. But of course that’s not true, it can’t be true – not on this planet, with this species. Consider a thought experiment. The lamb and the lion can speak, and can speak the same language. They sit down to discuss their differences. Would that resolve them?
I once heard Amos Oz say much the same thing, chatting on a local radio station (then I went to the bookstore where he was appearing, and got a stack of books signed). Americans think if only Israelis and Palestinians would sit down over coffee and really talk, they would work it out. But Oz thought it would just never be that easy – and this was several years ago.
And even in less urgent matters than who eats and who is eaten or who gets this territory, discussion doesn’t always work – ‘work’ in the sense of getting anywhere, accomplishing anything, giving both sides a better clearer more grounded and fact-based understanding of each other’s views, or giving each side new ideas, or finding some common ground, or agreeing to differ but with a better grasp of each other’s premises. As a matter of fact discussion sometimes merely makes things worse. Phil Mole talks about this in his article on why it can be so frustrating to argue with religious believers, and it applies to other kinds of believers too. Often the parties just talk past each other; often they both talk past each other and irritate each other. Sometimes one party grapples and the other party refuses. One party does its best to talk about the central issues in clear precise language and avoiding non sequiturs, while the other party does nothing but evade and elude and wriggle away: changing the subject, translating what has been said into what has not been said, ignoring corrections and clarifications, obfuscating, introducing irrelevancies, non sequituring. If the party of evasion is possessed of brilliant rhetorical and linguistic poetic literary gifts, the conversation may be aesthetically rewarding, witty, a literary or dramatic pleasure, but it won’t be successful as a discussion of the ideas in question.
So it seems reasonable to admit that some discussions are just a waste of time and effort. Life is short, time is finite, there is much to do, the soup is about to burn, so unless one actually enjoys arguments that don’t go anywhere, there is not a lot of reason to engage in them.
“…the other party does nothing but evade and elude and wriggle away: changing the subject, translating what has been said into what has not been said, ignoring corrections and clarificatios, obfuscating, introducing irrelevancies, non sequituring.”
How does the use of such tactics have any more to do with someone’s claim to be a Christian (or a member of any other religious faith) than it does with someone’s claim to be, say, a gentleman, a vegetarian, an historian, or a philosopher? The simplest explanation would appear to be that someone uses such tactics for the most basic reason of all–he thinks he can get away with them.
As to why someone would think that–well, who knows? But H.L. Mencken is frequently misquoted as having said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” What he actually said, of course, was “taste”, not “intelligence.” Assuming that others are stupid is not a smart tactic, no matter what one claims to be.
“How does the use of such tactics have any more to do with someone’s claim to be a Christian (or a member of any other religious faith) than it does with someone’s claim to be, say, a gentleman, a vegetarian, an historian, or a philosopher?”
I didn’t say it did. That’s exactly why I talked about “one party” and “the other party” for example. I am talking about discussion in general, not religious discussion in particular. I cited the example of Phil Mole’s article, but that’s only one example.
I’m not sure you’re right about the thinking one can get away with it explanation, nor that that’s necessarily the simplest explanation. I think very often people don’t even recognize that that’s what they’re doing – which in fact makes discussion all the more difficult and frustrating.
“Assuming that others are stupid is not a smart tactic, no matter what one claims to be.”
No doubt, but what is the relevance of the observation? Do you take me to be doing that? If so, I disagree. But perhaps I’ve misread your point.
“The simplest explanation would appear to be that someone uses such tactics for the most basic reason of all–he thinks he can get away with them.”
I think there’s really more(or less, depending on how you look at it) than meet the eye to this. Most people are unable to identify these tactics as inadequate and fallacious. They really can’t see the flaws in their reasoning and most sincerely believe that they’re engaging in coherent and relevant arguments. Unfortunately, this is not underestimating anybody’s intellect.
Middle America is full of people like these (I had a hard time convincing myself that the absurd statements of my Christian right-wing in-laws were more the product of sincere backwardness, ignorance and lack of good reasoning skills than of cunning refusal to approach a subject with intellectual honesty). Not to say that there aren’t many brilliant individuals in this country, but it is undeniable that Phil Mole’s article pretty much describes situations that many of us rationalists have been in, sadly…
(Hi, Ophelia)
“Most people are unable to identify these tactics as inadequate and fallacious. They really can’t see the flaws in their reasoning and most sincerely believe that they’re engaging in coherent and relevant arguments. Unfortunately, this is not underestimating anybody’s intellect. “
Yeah, that’s an accurate assessment, I’d say. I point out near the end of the article that the rules of logic seem fairly obvious to people AFTER we point them, but people are not always able to recognize and apply them in their daily lives. In fact, they fail to apply them more often than not, even if they’re otherwise intelligent people. They’ve simply acquired rhetorical habits that make arguments seem valid when they’re not, or stumble into logical fallacies they don’t recognize as such.
Sometimes, in fact, the intelligent people are the most oblivious of all to the rules of logic. Michael Shermer has talked about that in an article called “Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things,” and I’ve addressed the issue in an article called “Cognitive Catastrophes: How Smart People Sabotage Their Thinking.” BECAUSE people are smart, they often think they know better than anyone else, and don’t subject their own thought to any real scrutiny. Look at the evidence: Deepak Chopra is an MD, so he’s not stupid in any conventional sense, but he says stupid things all the while. Same with Rupert Sheldrake (PhD in biology), holocaust revisionists (many have advanced history degrees) and so on. Sadly, proficiency in a specific field of thought usually does not translate into general critical thinking abilities.
Phil
Very interesting that you mention Michael Shermer along with those self-confirming biases, because I just (a couple of hours ago) linked to an article of his on various cognitive biases.
One study said that only 1% of people surveyed said they were below average in their ability to get along with people. I find that staggering! I would certainly admit to that myself, and I certainly know a lot of people who ought to…(Well maybe that’s why – everyone assumes the average is extremely low. I hadn’t thought of that…)
Ah, ‘below average’ is a tricky term.
Suppose I have an IQ of 85, and all the other 99 commentors on B&W each have an IQ of 150. Oh dear; I’m the 1% that’s below average (the mean, which is what most folks usually mean…) So, throw that one psychopath into the mix, and, well…
Take-home lesson: not all distributions are normal. All the children in Lake Wobegon might not be above average but all of the children except for 1 could well be.
-BJK, part-time digressionist and part-time discussor of statistical and accounting measures of Amtrak’s performance whereby one acquires lots of different techniques of using data in discussions…
OB:
Well, I’d never read Cliopatria before they launched their bimbo-eruption on your site. Jonathan Dresner is apparantly a left-of-center observant Jew who teaches Asian history in Hawaii; it doesn’t seem like he’d exactly have a horse in this race. It was the feminist/Mennonite (?) Hugo, who was posting the aberrant comments on “Christian” historiography, but the argument seemed to be with Ralph Luker, apparently a practicing Christian historian of the civil rights struggle. I don’t know of the prior history of the dispute with Ralph Luker, but none of these people strikes me as entirely unreasonable, nor malicious, even if my political preferences would be to the left of theirs. (I have no investment in respectability to maintain.)
If Hugo’s position struck me as odd and errant, what Ralph Luker was saying was somewhat garbled, but readily interpretable as making reasonable sense. His citation of “Old Testament” eschatology, which took hold especially after the Alexandrian conquest and formed the matrix from which Christianity itself emerged, as the ultimate root of “linear” history is not an instance of a genetic fallacy, even if he may be suspected of motives of special pleading. The Western cultural sense of futurally directed time horizons, which is at the root of the Western historical sense and thus of the discipline of historiography, does, in fact, originate in the eschatological cast of (Judeo)-Christian theology, which became secularized in the course of the Enlightenment as the notion of historical progress and this notion of progress,- or obversely, decline,- remains ingredient in historigraphical projects. The philosopher Karl Loewith wrote a nice little book, tracing the doctrinal sources of the Western philosophy of history from Augustine on thru Nietzsche and beyond after the war. Most other cultures, though maintaining some organized sense of their past, view time in cyclical terms. This would be true of classical Greco-Roman culture, which viewed the world as perpetual and cyclical, and the histories it produced, though often a response to troubled times, were primarily rhetorical works, with exemplary, if often negative, import, basically from a patrician or aristocratic perspective. Empirical historiography, as opposed to chronicles, emerged in the course of the 18th century with the likes of Hume and Voltaire, distinctly in reaction against providential accounts such as Bishop Bossuet’s. (Non-coincidentally, natural history began at the same time and from something of the same motive.) This development had been prepared by the Baroque Enlightenment with the rise of “natural philosophy” and, specifically, the “higher criticism” of the Bible begun by Spinoza. By the end of the century, Kant was already formulating the notion of a universal, progressive history for all humanity, (a notion with distinctly Christian residues.) So Ralph Luker was simply stating something that is common knowledge.
Secondly, historiographical accounts involve an intersection of continuity and discontinuity, and in a double sense. They typically concern some process of change undergone by a historiographical unit of account, (a group, a society, a set of nations, etc.), that results in a change in its living arrangements and conceptions, the advent and establishment of something new, whether it is to be welcomed or deplored. On the other hand, any historiographical project involves an intersection and mediation of concerns with the present, which take place under the pressure of decision with respect to future possibilities, with those of the past. And the past intersects with the present both by way of its accomplishments and injustices exercizing a formative influence and causal ingredience in the present and by way of the contrast of historical otherness with present conceptions. If the present historian, in principle, possesses more information than historical actors, equally it is the constraints and limitations of the past- and its continued hold on the present- that bend her to the task. (Yes, I’m belaboring the obvious, but the contrast case is with post-modernist notions of rupture, sheer discontinuity, mutation as an arational shifting of structures or paradigms, endless schismatism, the invention of precedence for the unprecedented.) The extent to which past meanings can be recuperated in and for the present is an open question, but clearly this is what Ralph Luker was talking about in terms of a return or recurrance of the past.
Thirdly, any historigraphical project involves a sets of organizing ideas and assumptions, of “ideological” coordinates beyond the methodical sifting of facts. The usual assumption is that such projects have an indirect, but broadly political relevance to the concerns of the present. When von Ranke famously said that history should be recounted “wie es eigentlich war”, as it really was, he was not making a naive assumption about the ready availability of historical facts. “Eigentlich” could just as well be translated as “authentically” and he was making a reference (against Hegel) to a Lutheran/Leibnizian conception of “spirit”, which supposedly was the animating force behind the actions of historical actors, in other words, to a religious/aesthetic panoramic view of history. Granted such hypostasis of historical forces or agencies is a critical issue, to be treated with care. But no matter how discretely the events and actions of an historical situation are pinned down, it is their overall collective effects that are the ultimate object of consideration. And the terms of its interpretation can not be simply reduced to a linear sequence of cause and effect. (In fact, since history is a product in some degree of human agency, the terms of analysis should rather be constraints and consequences.) In this respect, an historian who operates from committed religious beliefs is in no different a position than one who operates from Marxist, feminist, or liberal premisses. A religious commitment might effect the choice of topics for research or it might influence something of the terms of account in which it is treated, for example, emphasizing “super-structural” elements or, alternatively, “organic” social wholes. But a religiously committed person exercizing the responsibilities of a secular historiographical scholar is subject to the same methodical constraints of evidence and rational accountability as any other such scholar. (The difference from a religious evolutionary biologist, such as the head of the U.S. gov. human genome project, is only the difference between the two scholarly disciplines.) But, on the other hand, historians are in the business of quite literally resurrecting the dead, if only to save them from, as E.P. Thompson put it, from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. And the discipline of secular historiography takes place precisely in the absence of supposed divine providence. (A rigorous Calvinist might say it is necessarily the story of the unfolding of human corruption.) But ironically, precisely in its deviation from it, the residue of the old theology remains ingredient in it, by its negation, if only as the containing space of the theater of this world in which the drama of human destiny takes place. Ralph Luker already said this: “Heilesgeschichte is horsegeschichte.”
Now you are under no obligation to concern yourself with religious beliefs. And an allergy to religious cant is more than understandable, (though whether it is a minor irritant or a major offence is a matter of specific cases, on pain of missing out on fruitful exchanges and alliances.) But such matters can not reasonably be disposed of by appealing to canons of formal logic and the catalogue of fallacies as sure guides to reasoning. Fallacies, false or defective modes of argumentative inference, are themselves matters of application and interpretation. Ad hominem arguments can be a legitimate procedure, when tied to some broader truth, to obviate impediments to understanding. This is the case when religious beliefs are criticized as compensatory illusions and substitute gratifications, though such an approach can only eliminate the more obviously self-serving or self-deluding aspects of religious belief and thoughtful believers already avail themselves of such considerations. (The tack is most dispositive when tied to an extrinsic ideological functionalization of such beliefs, beyond their claims to an intrinsic freedom of choice.) Petitio principi involves the matter of explicit and implicit presuppositions, but surely it would be a travesty to claim that a deductive argument was thereby fallacious. So-and-so marries the boss’ daughter and gets a promotion: is this a case of post hoc, prompter hoc? Further investigation is required. Non sequiturs, parataxes, or paralogisms may or may not be irrelevant. That is a question of interpretation of what is attempted to be gotten at. Paralogisms are a particularly acute case: why does someone think that such a conclusion can be drawn from such ill-fitting premisses? Could it be that the premisses have been drawn so tightly, as to constrict and occlude an actually better insight? (The history of philosophy contains many such instances.) But if questions of interpretation are excluded from the outset, the risk courted is precisely the fallacy of straw-man argument. This is Gadamer’s point about the principle of hermeneutic “charity”, about interpretation requiring an extention of “good will”, (citing Plato and not Kant.) One must always admit the possibility that one might be wrong, which is not the same thing as confessing to the crime, in order the give the fullest possible account of the other’s position, to gain the best understanding of and from it. To be sure, lots of situations don’t present any prospect for any such gains. One seeks out discussions, like books to read, on the basis of the prospect that they might be informative or enlarge or deepen one’s understanding of a matter. But the finitude of time is precisely to the point. It is precisely such human finitude, which is always already delivered up to the inheritance of a past in its situation and to the futural pressure of decision, that necessitates the task of interpretation, in the rooted impossibility of omniscience and certainty. This is what Gadamer termed “effective history”.
John,
Very true.