I got interested in demagoguery, and panicky about democracy, in about 2000, when I acquired an acquaintance (call him Chester) who relied entirely on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the National Academy of Scholars. That acquaintance was helpful for me to understand how some people think about what it means to be informed and how to make political decisions. For instance, it surprised me that, when he would make a claim to me, and I would always prove him wrong, it never made him reconsider his sources. Also, he would later never remember that interaction. He never remembered being wrong. That was interesting.
He was also interesting for letting me know what the new politically correct line was for the GOP. Political correctness originally referred to the way that Stalin would announce a shift in position (Nazis are enemies, Nazis are allies, Nazis are enemies) and people who wanted to have the correct line immediately adopted it. He went from ranting about how terrible Democrats are because they want to invade privacy to enthusiastic support for the PATRIOT Act.
His way of arguing was interesting. Sometimes, what he said was simply wrong, but more often, what he did was to give a datum that was true (“2 + 2 = 4”), and use that datum to support a claim it didn’t actually logically support (which was always “Democrats are evil”). Early on in our acquaintance, he made some claim about nuclear power plants that was simply wrong, and I cited an article in The Economist that showed he was. He didn’t admit he was wrong; he was simply astonished I read The Economist.
He couldn’t imagine that someone like me would read sources with which I disagree. That was projection on his part. He engaged in a lot of that. He never read anything, unless it was required for work, that might trouble his very clear, and very angry, worldview.
He taught me two things. First, people like him–who thought he understood what is a logical argument–really don’t. That the datum is true doesn’t mean the argument is true. The datum might not be logically related to the argument. But that is how a lot of people reason. It’s confirmation bias masking itself as rational argument. He was a complete sucker for any “This Democrat is evil because cars have engines” arguments—that is, arguments about Democrats being terrible supported by data completely unrelated to the claim. But, and this is interesting: he would have seen how bad the logic was had exactly the same argument been made about Republicans.
He was a person thinking himself rational when he was just drowning in confirmation bias and outrage flavor-aid. Confirmation bias means that we scramble around looking for data that support our beliefs, and accept any data that supports our beliefs as objective and true while rejecting as “biased” anything that contradicts what we want to believe. We can’t cite a principle (other than in-group fanaticism) that would explain why we take this datum as proof that They are bad, and exactly similar datum as not relevant to whether We are bad.
That doesn’t make him any different from most of us. And that is the problem. He thought his beliefs were rational and true because he could find evidence to support them. But, even when the data was true, the inference wasn’t. He sucked at logic, but he was fine at facts. It isn’t about facts; it’s about logic.
Second, his commitment to his group was nonfalsifiable. I sometimes (rarely) tried to bring that up, and he deflected the issue of his beliefs being nonfalsifiable by saying “They are just as bad.” Again, that’s completely illogical. His binary of us (people with his pretty narrow political agenda) versus them was illogical, in that it was nonfalsifable, and relied on arguments he would have rejected if applied to him. It was an unprincipled argument.
He couldn’t find a logical principle that would support his judgments, but his judgments were all supported by the ideological principle that They are terrible.
And that “They are terrible” is persuasive in the media sphere in which he was cocooned because of the math of demagoguery.
Imagine that there are two parties: Rottweiler and Pitbull. You vote Rottweiler, and you hate Pitbulls. If you are irrational in your commitment to the Rottweiler party, you will start to engage in a weird kind of accounting. Any instance of Rottweiler misbehavior is erased if you can cite any instance of Pitbull misbehavior. So, if a Rottweiler Senator is caught openly taking bribes from the Squirrel Conspiracy, you will think that doesn’t count because the Assistant Associate Assistant to the Mayor of Peculiar, Missouri is Pitbull, and once let someone buy him a milkshake.
That’s the math of demagoguery. That was Chester’s math.
As lots of people point out, if you falsely categorize the world into us v. them, and you live in the careful cocoon of what your in-group media tells you what they believe, then you are saying that rottweilers are the best because there was this one pitbull that attacked people. You are in the bizarre math of “us v. them” reasoning.
He never listened to anyone who disagreed; everything he knew about what “They” believe came from his in-group sources. He and I once had a conversation about a book that he’d never read, and yet which he was convinced was indefensibly bad. I tried to point out that maybe he should read it, but that went nowhere. That was how he reasoned–his in-group sources told him it was bad because it made [this argument], and even though I told him (and I’d actually read it) that it hadn’t made argument, he wasn’t willing to listen. And he also told me, on two occasions, that all leftists (including Chomsky and Orwell) don’t believe in any kind of realist notion about epistemology or language (they do—he admitted he’d never read either author).
Sometimes he said things that were actively false, and I’d send him links, and he would find ways to dismiss any evidence that his sources were bad. He is the angriest person I know, and the most misinformed.
If you thought this blog post was about how terrible Republicans are, then you’re reasoning like Chester.
I don’t think there are two sides, but I think there is demagoguery, and I think demagoguery is all over the political spectrum (but not equally so).
Demagoguery isn’t a rhetoric that powerful people use to seduce the clueless and powerless objects of persuasion. Demagoguery is how far too many people reason, and how far too much media frames issues.
In a culture of demagoguery, rhetors promoting demagoguery (all over the political spectrum, and in venues from political debates to neighborhood mailing lists):
• insist (and sincerely believe) that our political options are divided between the obviously right option and the one advocated by people with actively bad motives (and the dupes who are seduced into supporting the obviously bad choice) because they only consume media that tells them that is the case;
• argue deductively from in-group premises. So they say that, for instance, “high taxes decrease incentive, so they decrease innovation, so they hurt an economy” or “supporting a centrist candidate is wrong, so if we want a progressive political agenda, we should refuse to support centrists.” Neither of those claims is either falsifiable or empirically defensible.
• argue that they are right because they can find data to support their claims, even if the data is material out of context, actively false, or irrelevant.
• express outrage, pretending that their outrage is principled, when it’s really just outrage about out-group behavior, and not principled outrage about the action.
We are not in a post-fact world. Saying that we are is exactly what got us here. It’s suggesting that a good argument has true facts. Terrible arguments can have true facts.
Engaging in effective and reasonable political deliberation isn’t about whether you have facts. We all have facts.
It’s about whether your facts are relevant to the claim you’re making, whether they prove the point you’re making (as opposed to simply being an illustrative example), whether they mean what you say they mean in context, and whether that “fact” would be just as meaningful if it supported a claim you don’t like.
We aren’t in a post-fact world; we’re in a post-logic one.
So hypothetically how would “Chester” reply to this little article? Just by huffy denial?
How have people in general responded to this critique of their entrenched clinging to quixotic heroic last stands? You see it as a style of thought rather than a maliciously motivated mistake?
He wouldn’t even read it!
There are issues in current political discourse, issues of established science, where the evidence for a phenomenon has been collected, observation, and experiment have been consistently replicated, peer-reviewed, and never falsified—that is to say, no observation or experimental outcome has ever shown them to be conclusively false. Expert scientific opinion has reached an international consensus over a period of hundreds of years, millions of data points, or consistently replicated experiment (e.g., evolution by natural selection; the scientific theory of gravity; causative links between childhood vaccines and the development of autism spectrum disorder; anthropogenic climate change). A phenomenon exists or it does not—the answer to whether the phenomenon exists or not is either yes or no, and science has provided that answer in its usual testable, falsifiable, and probabilistic manner. Yet a public, and often political, controversy still surrounds those issues, even to the point of denying their existence as a phenomenon (Pew Research Center—PRC, 2013, 2015; Merino, Jha, Loder, & Abbasi, 2017). Your article would seem to indicate that it is necessary to take on-board all sides of an argument, yet some arguments really do only have one, factually correct perspective. Admittedly, to decide whether that is the case, one should research all aspects of the issue, yet is it really necessary for all future discourse to rehash the why’s of why the Earth isn’t flat before its’ global nature is covered? And if not, at what point does it become acceptable to reject opposing arguments as just too outrageously baseless to be considered?
References
Pew Research Center (PRC). (2013, November 1). GOP deeply divided over climate change. Pew research center for the people & the press survey report. Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/11-1-13%20Global%20Warming%20Release.pdf
Pew Research Center (PRC). (2015, January 20). Public and scientists’ views on science and society: Both the public and scientists value the contributions of science, but there are large differences in how each perceives science issues. Both groups agree that K–12 STEM education falls behind other nations. Pew research center for the people & the press survey report. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2015/01/PI_ScienceandSociety_Report_012915.pdf
Merino, J., Jha, A., Loder, E., and Abbasi, K. (2017). Standing up for science in the era of Trump. British Medical Journal, 356, j775. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j775
I’m saying we need to know the best opposition arguments and the strongest criticisms of our own arguments instead of relying on in-group (and usually straw man) representations of them. The best arguments for some positions (e.g., vaccines cause autism) are incompetent, irrational, and incoherent, and that’s important to point out. We don’t have to keep rehashing them–we can point to something that has done that work and ask the interlocutor if they’re willing to look at that something. When the answer is no, we can say that they aren’t willing to engage in rational (or good faith, if you prefer that term) argumentation and leave it at that. But we can only make that argument in good faith if we have looked at the best arguments on their side, or if we are referring them to something that has.
There are very few questions where the arguments about them are either yes or no (I can’t think of one–that rhetorical outcome is usually achieved through the fallacy of the false dilemma), and none I can think of where there is *one* factually correct perspective. Yes, gravity exists, but there are arguments within the scientific community about its precise nature (I’m thinking of some of the advocates of string theory).
Too much public discourse assumes that you’re either in favor of there being an obviously right answer that is obvious to the people who are obviously right or you think all views are equally valid. Neither of those is a rationally defensible position.
I have a longer answer here: https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2017/09/30/sciencing-in-public/
“The epistemology underlying science is a skeptical one, and scientists know that. When they’re arguing in public, they need to stop acting as though there is either naive realism or postmodern relativism. Scientists are skeptics who argue passionately for their point of view.”
This is a great post, thank you, and it cuts very closely to my own research into the nature of science which can seem controversial in the public sphere, but amongst scientists, is almost universally accpted.
I am in fervent agreement with a great deal of your post, but just can’t resist commenting on a few points.
So often in my own work, I encounter the scientific opinions of medical doctors, neuroscientists, or particle physicists, on the evolution of, for example, the bacterial flagellum. As if any one of them would necessarily have any better idea of the suggested evolutionary processes involved, than, say, the lady who installed my satellite dish. The argument from authority strikes again.
Shoot me now—if science is indisputable, that would kind of make being falsifiable a bit of a problem. I have had that argument. Science is only as right as it can be given the state of current evidence, so it should always be a bit wrong, and at it’s best might give you a probability value for how likely that might be. BUT, there are some phenomena that are so well served by evidence of a vast array (e.g., the occurrence if not the processes of evolution; biological change over time), that make the probability of it not being an existential phenomenon so small, that they may practicably be considered inconsequential.
That is itself a false binary. No scientist will simply ask anyone to believe that science tells us anything is obviously 100% factual. As accepting of the evidence of certain phenomena as I might be, and as equally dismissive of others, I would not ask that anybody else just accept my position, without first hearing my evidence. As you have said, scientists are enthusiastic skeptics, and I encourage everybody to be the same. Don’t accept my statement, evaluate my evidence.
Absolutely right, and I know of no scientist (and I’m sure you and I know a few), who would say such a thing; this is a bit of a straw-man don’t you think?
Straw-man again…
Yes: “A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence” (Hume, 2000, p. 84), a bit sexist, but Hume first said that in the 18th century, so I’m, going to let him off as a product of his times. The extraordinary claim for the change of populations of organisms over time according to environmental pressures (amongst other variables), was first theorized by Charles Darwin in 1888 but has since been supported by sufficient evidence to withstand multiple legal challenges as a valid field of knowledge and education (Godden, 2014). Science asks for evidence to support a given claim, and provides such evidence accordingly; some other fields of evidence simply do not provide such evidence for their claims (e.g., interpretation of religious scripture).
No: No arguments are any truer than the evidence which supports them, and I would invite any and all to evaluate that evidence. Carl Sagan encapsulated Hume (2000), for the 20th century with “[e]extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (Sagan, 2006, p. 47).
Absolutely! But I would add that the continuum should probably begin with the category so incredibly unlikely that this can almost certainly be rejected as the ravings of a complete lunatic in a MAGA hat.
Absolutely! I’m in complete agreement… except for some of the details
References
Godden, P. (2014). An analysis of the arguments for intelligent design creationism to be taught in science classes, in the public education system of the United States (Masters thesis). Retrieved from https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/12409/3/
Godden_Paul_D_201408_MED.PDF.
Hume, D. (2000). Section X: Of Miracles. In: T. L. Beauchamp (Ed.) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Edition, pp. 83–99. Gloucestershire, England: Clarendon Press. (Reprinted from 1748 edition, London, UK: A. Millar. Retrieved from https://books.google.bg/books?id=LB4VAAAAQAAJ&dq=inauthor:”David+
Hume”&pg=PR6&hl=bg#v=onepage&q&f=true).
Sagan, C. (2006). Second view: Sagan on encounters. In Conversations with Carl Sagan, T. Head (Ed.). Mississippi, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
I said, “Scientists need to reject the false binary of “you either believe that science tells us things that are obviously true” or “you are postmodernist literary critic who believes that all claims are equally true.”
And you said, “That is itself a false binary. No scientist will simply ask anyone to believe that science tells us anything is obviously 100% factual.” Well, there is Tyson’s quote: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” And I’d say this is pretty close: “Yet some arguments really do only have one, factually correct perspective.”
So, no, not a straw man. When scientists argue in public, they too often talk like naive realists. Dawkins is a great example of that. There are people who consistently avoid it–Bill Nye is a good example.
OK, a less than careful phrase on my part. Rather than “one, factually correct perspective.” How about I refine that to, some issues really do have only one perspective that can be justified by the available evidence, and that is probable enough to justify rejecting almost all other outcomes. For example, if I leap unaided from my second-floor office window, in all probability I will fall downward rather than up. I believe, if pressed, that this would be the sort of thing Tyson had in mind. The problem with public speaking (and enjoying a blog debate), as many will attest, is that you don’t always sit back back and craft a perfectly considered sentence, with all gotchas acceptably covered. You definitely gotcha’d me there, but I would still say that, when asked to carefully consider their stance, most scientists would not adhere to your proposed false binary. Even for a Tyson-like memeable quotation.
But then, maybe a few might, I have met some pretty awful publicity-hounds in my time. In addition, the notion of all scientists simply changing their minds after sufficient evidence is also a bit optimistic. Even (especially?) scientists have a significant slice of ego invested in their favorite theories, such as to require more convincing than they sometimes should.
Yeah, I didn’t expressly quote Dawkins, but rather J. B. S. Haldane cited by Dawkins (it’s difficult to find the source of that exact Haldane quotation anywhere — if you have it, or find it, please let me know — so Haldane in Dawkins was easier; my apologies. I’m not the Dawkins fan I was in my youth, nor Tyson and some of the other public faces of science either. #MeToo has made me re-think the public face of many, and attending a few of their lectures and events many more.
I still think a bit of an unfair charge, if not the most egregious straw-man that has flailed in the winds.
Well, I think we’re vehemently agreeing. When scientists argue with one another, they often speak/write in black/white terms (this is definitely the case, no reasonable person could think that). It’s the language of academic agonism. I’m saying that language doesn’t play well in the public sphere, so it’s good to be careful about it. Often (but not always) when it’s pointed out, a person will respond as you are, with a kind of, “You know what I meant.” And I did, because I too speak academic agonism. But it’s useful to try to be as careful as, say, Nye is when you’ve got that level of fame (as do Tyson and Dawkins). Tyson and Dawkins, instead of backing down, tend toward a version of “no true Scotsman,” refusing to admit that a science has ever been wrong by saying it wasn’t science. That’s a nonfalsifiable definition of science (it’s science when it turns out to be true, and any body of research that turns out to be wrong–even if it was the best of its day–wasn’t science [helllooooooo, economists!]) that means the argument they’re making (You should trust science) isn’t logically supported.
I’m afraid I must vehemently agree! I have no place in my heart (or my students’ assignments) for black and white absolutists… what if I leapt out of that second-floor window and there was a huge wind-machine below me? Improbable, but…
Science can only be the best of its day, and only ever hope to be good enough for tomorrow.
Darwin got lucky 🙂