Trish, Author at Patricia Roberts-Miller

Flinging claims for Trump

picture of trump — This image is from here: https://www.snowflakevictory.com/

There is a pro-Trump website telling Trump supporters “how to win an argument with your liberal relatives.” One of the main arguments for Trump was (and is) that he would get the best people to work for and with him. So, this is the argument that the best people make for Trump, or, in other words, the best argument for Trump. Does this “best arguments for Trump” webpage have good arguments?

Someone making a rational argument

makes claims supported with good evidence, and so presents sources for claims;
can identify the conditions under which they would change their mind;
has claims that are logically connected, avoids fallacies, and applies standards across groups (so, for instance, if you want to say that you are appalled at feeding squirrels, you are just as appalled at in-group squirrel-feeding as you are at out-group squirrel-feeding);
engages the best out-group arguments, or, engaging a specific set of claims that aren’t good arguments, then at least the out-group claims are being presented accurately.

Engaging in rational argumentation isn’t very hard, and it’s easy to do if you’ve actually got a good argument. Rational argumentation isn’t about what claims you make, and whether they seem true to people who already agree, nor whether people making the claims think they’re unemotional. Rational argumentation involves a fairly low bar; it’s just the list above. And that list isn’t controversial.

If you take it out the realm of politics (where people are especially tribal), then it’s clear that “rational argumentation” is actually “sensible ways to think about conflict.” Imagine that you have a boss who says that you should be fired because reasons. You’d be outraged (justifiably) if your boss couldn’t cite sources, was just operating from in-group bias, unfairly represented what you’d said, and wasn’t listening. That’s a shitty boss. And it’s reasonable for you to ask that your boss make a decision about firing you rationally.

That’s a shitty boss because it’s a person who is making decisions badly. And we’ve all had that boss. What would it be like if we extrapolated from that shitty boss, who made decisions badly, to our own tendency to make decisions badly? What if we’re all the shitty boss?

But back to the Trump page—does it present good arguments? It fails every one of the criteria for rational argumentation.

For instance, it not only fails to link to sources to support its claims but it never links to an opposition.

Why not? Why not link to data that would support the claims it’s making? Why not link to the opposition with their, supposedly, terrible arguments? Well, perhaps because it can’t because then it would be clear how false the page’s claims are. Take one example. On two of the links, the claim is that “the 2020 Democrats are the ones who want to strip you of your private, employer-provided health insurance!” (“Trump approach”) That’s a lie in two different ways. First, some of the main candidates argue for something, single-payer health care, that might cause people to choose not to get health insurance from their employment, but instead from the government-based insurance—that’s what the pro-Trump healthcare page goes on to argue. So, the Dems don’t “want” to strip people of their private insurance—some Dem candidates want to give people a choice. (Sanders is the only one who has unequivocally said he would get rid of private insurance, not something, by the way, that a President can do without Congress.) If, as the pro-Trump page claims, so many people leave private insurance that the rates become unmanageable that would be because the government-funded insurance program is better than the private. In other words, this argument is an admission that the current system is inadequate.

Second, many Democratic candidates have not endorsed any such plan, so the claim that “the Dems” are advocating it is simply a lie. If what you’re saying is true, you don’t have to lie.

There is only one place that the site gives a link—to Biden saying that he insisted that a Ukrainian prosecutor get fired. The page admits that this claim has been debunked, but without any explanation or argument¬, insists it’s true. That isn’t an argument: that’s just direct contradiction.

That argument about Biden and the Ukraine is fallacious in that it is tu quoque (or, “you did it too!”). Whether Biden asked that the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired in order to prevent an investigation of his son’s activities has no relevance to whether Trump told Ukraine that he would withhold foreign aid (which he did, in his version of the phone call). Whether Trump is now refusing to allow people to testify in a trial—that is, obstructing justice—has nothing to do with anything Biden did. Tu quoque is how little kids argue—when caught with a hand in the cookie jar, claiming that little Billy also stole cookies is irrelevant. You might both have stolen cookies. But that’s a fallacy that runs throughout the pages—Trump’s reducing environmental protections is good because China is bad. Trump’s healthcare plan is good because the Democrats’ is bad. They might both be bad.

The set of claims about Ukraine has another fallacy that runs throughout the site: it says that “under President Obama, Ukraine never received this kind of lethal military aid AT ALL. It is thanks to President Trump, that the Ukrainians are getting the aid in the first place.” That is an example of the fallacy of equivocation (also called the fallacy of ambiguity), of an argument that is technically correct, but deliberately misleading (much like Bill Clinton’s “it depends upon what is is”). It looks as though it’s saying that Ukraine never got military aid from Obama AT ALL, something that is false. Technically, it’s saying that Ukraine never got “this kind” or “the aid”—meaning the Javelin missiles. That’s technically true, just as it was technically true that Clinton was not, at the very moment, having sex with an intern. But it’s misleading.

It’s hard to argue with someone engaged in equivocation, since it necessitates getting into the technicalities—that’s why people who aren’t arguing in good faith (that is, whose minds are not open to persuasion) engage in it.

Another common strategy of this site is to give Trump credit for what Obama or other Presidents did. For instance, the page on the environment begins, “America’s environmental record is one of the strongest in the world and the U.S. has also been a world leader in reducing carbon emissions for over a decade. We have the cleanest air on record and remain a global leader for access to clean drinking water.” Notice that this claim is vague, and so hard to disprove (like an ad that says, “We have the best prices”—compared to whom?): what record? Not the world record. It’s seventh. It isn’t even clear to me that the US now has the cleanest air in its record. But we can’t know what the claim is because it gives no sources. Similarly, the claim that “President Trump has taken important steps to restore, preserve, and protect our land, air, and waters” is unsupported, unexplained, and unsourced.

To the extent that the air is cleaner, it’s because of what was done in the past, by other people, particularly Obama, but also the Congress that passed the Clean Air Act and the 1990 Amendments.

The final problem with the page that I’ll mention (I could go on) is one that contributes significantly to the demagoguery of the page (and it is demagoguery): the implication is that anyone who disagrees with Trump is a “liberal,” and that simply isn’t true. A large number of people who believe that Trump should be convicted are conservative.

In short, the page doesn’t engage in rational argumentation. It doesn’t even engage in argument. So, would someone following the script provided by this webpage win any argument with any “liberal”? No. Because they wouldn’t be arguing. They’d be making claims, claims that are sometimes false, often misleading, almost always unsourced, and always unsupported, but never argued.

A person who followed this script and claimed to have won the argument would be like someone who claimed to have won a chess game because they turned over the board and fed the pieces to the dog.

If Trump can’t be supported with rational argumentation, then maybe it isn’t rational to support him.

Why Republicans shout

gaetz shouting — Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html

Anyone watching the impeachment hearings has to notice that the Republicans shout. A lot. So do Fox News pundits. So did Kavanaugh. Had Christine Ford shouted, she would have been dismissed as irrational. Hillary Clinton got through extraordinary grilling without shouting; Obama never shouted. Shouting is the exclusive right of the Right.

How the GOP Loyalist media handles shouting is probably the single best example of how indefensibly irrational their rhetoric is. It isn’t rational; it’s just factional. Exactly the same behavior is condemned if out-group members engage in it, but admired if it’s GOP Loyalists.

It’s because the GOP Loyalist media is a media of fear, a media that promotes fear of immigrants, of Muslims, of Democrats. It’s all fear-mongering all the time. GOP Loyalists are so terrified that they can’t even be brave enough to take seriously any criticisms of their positions. People who sincerely believe that they’re right aren’t afraid of seeking out the best arguments saying we’re wrong. We believe that either we can take those arguments seriously and see they’re wrong, or modify our positions.

People who are too afraid to take seriously other arguments are secretly aware that their beliefs are too fragile to withstand reasonable interrogation.

People too afraid to listen to other points of view think they aren’t afraid since they’re standing strong and fierce and they’re shouting a lot. They’re like people standing in a dark bedroom with a shotgun pointed at the underside of the bed shouting about the hobgoblins they believe are under there. That’s what a coward does. A brave person would get a flashlight and look.

A coward blusters, shouts, and threatens violence against hobgoblins, and against anyone who gets a flashlight.

If the Republicans had good arguments against impeachment, they’d make them. They wouldn’t need to shout.

Arguing with GOP Loyalists

daily worker masthead I have a difficult time finding a good term to describe people who get all their information exclusively from what is sometimes called “the right-wing media sphere”—that is, Fox, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report. I don’t like calling it “right-wing” because I think one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are is the false binary (or no less false continuum) of right v. left. And, as is often remarked, it’s hard to look over Limbaugh or Fox and infer a coherent ideology that they’re promoting. They claim they’re against big government, debt, government spending, corruption in government, but they aren’t against those in principle—they defend big government when it comes to regulations they like, debt caused by wars and tax cuts, self-paying if it’s done by Republicans.

Those media and pundits aren’t consistently conservative—sometimes they’re very radical. They often reject basic principles of conservative ideology, such as promoting free trade, so it seems to me an important misnomer to call them “conservative.” What they are consistent about is promoting the election of Republican candidates, supporting the GOP in Congress, deflecting any criticism of GOP political figures (unless those are figures who dissent from or criticize the most extreme members of the GOP, in which case those figures are condemned as not true Scotsmen, oops, I mean not really Republican).

Unhappily, most research in political science relies on the binary or continuum, and I think it seriously confounds the results. A lot of the research relies on people identifying as “conservative,” but that doesn’t mean that they have a “conservative” ideology. A lot of research shows that people endorse “liberal” policies, so you have lefties insisting that they could win elections by promoting progressive policies, but that’s the wrong conclusion. Most people don’t vote on the basis of a policy agenda, but identity (and sometimes shark attacks), and there are two kinds of identities that a lot of voters like: some like the image of a “conservative” person; some vote for “the outsider who will go into Washington and kick some ass.” Thus, there are a lot of people who endorse progressive Democrat policies, but vote loyally Republican (see especially Rationalizing Voter, Stealth Democracy, Politics of Resentment, Ideology in America).

Sometimes I use the term “people who self-identify as conservative” since that’s really what much of that research shows. And here is where scholars of rhetoric could intervene usefully in the discourse of political science. It seems to me that a lot of political science assumes a coherent identity (I am a liberal); more recent work is usefully complicating that assumption (such as the work showing that people like the identity of independent, but who vote GOP consistently), but it’s no surprise to scholars of rhetoric. It’s consubstantiation.

I sometimes use the term “rabid factionalism,” since I sincerely think that’s accurate. There are various problems with that term, though, especially if you’re actually trying to reach people in that hyperfictional bubble. Benkler et al. call it a “propaganda feedback loop”—another accurate term. The problem, of course, is that people in a propaganda feedback loop never see themselves that way.

My first experience of recognizing that I was talking to people in a propaganda feedback loop was at Berkeley, and it was, if I remember correctly, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (Stalinists). There were four communist groups at Berkeley when I got there (maybe five), each of which had a very small number of members, and they mostly spent their time breaking up each other’s meetings. There were the Stalinists (they didn’t call themselves that—they might have called themselves Leninists) who handed out The Daily Worker (as far as I can tell, a Pravda-supported publication) and defended the USSR to the hilt. There were the Trotskyites, who spent most of their time fighting the Stalinists. There were Maoists, and the anarcho-communists (they worked at the Writing Center, and, interestingly enough, listened to a lot of New Age music).

A propaganda feedback loop, as Benkler et al. define it, is one in which
“media outlets, political elites, and publics form and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that progressively lowers the cost of telling lies that are consistent with a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that narrative in the name of truth.” (33)

What was interesting to me about the Stalinists is that their defenses of the USSR relied on two strategies: 1) having at their fingertips all sorts of accurate statistics and information about the wrongs of the US; 2) dismissing any criticism of the USSR as biased on the grounds that it was criticism.

Of course, many of the things for which the Stalinists were criticizing the US were things the USSR was also doing: pollution, oppression of minority groups, corruption, imperialism. More important, the logical problem with the first strategy is that the US being wrong doesn’t make the USSR right. But it was the second one that intrigued me—it seemed to me an open admission of irrational loyalty. It meant that they could never engage in good faith argumentation, or a rational assessment of their own positions.
They were in a propaganda feedback loop.

Nothing so reminds me of those Stalinists as talking to someone who gets all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop (Fox/Limbaugh/Breitbart and so on). They make those two moves—they have lots of information as to what’s wrong with Democrats, but it’s a logical fallacy to assume that (even if the information is right, and it often isn’t) the Democrats being bad means the GOP is good. Ethical behavior is not a zero-sum, in which bad behavior on one side necessarily means better behavior on the other.

It’s a rhetorical mistake (one I often make) to dispute about those claims. They don’t really matter—for the GOP Loyalist (which is what I’m now thinking is the right term), they’re just examples of how awful Democrats are. If you persuade them that that example (or information) is wrong, they won’t change their mind either about Democrats or about their sources of information. As with the Stalinists, it’s that second argumentative strategy that matters: they will reject any disconfirming information, criticism, or dissent on the grounds that it is criticism and therefore “biased.”

It’s an admission of deliberately irrational loyalty.

I’m not saying that that deliberate irrational choice to remain in a propaganda feedback loop is limited to one place on the political spectrum (see How Partisan Media Polarize America), or even limited to politics–one reason I dislike the “two sides” model is that it limits our ability to talk about that problem because it so quickly turns into “you do it too!” And, while it’s true that there are lots of propaganda feedback loops, it isn’t true that both sides are just as bad–people who self-identify as liberal (0r left) are more likely to believe in fact-checking, consume media that issues corrections and has norms of accountability, and get information from disconfirming sources.

A lot of people ask me about how to argue with relatives who get all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop, and one thing I would say is: don’t feel that you have to. If they say, “Trump is the most effective President ever” or “Clinton laughed about a rape” you can, if you want, show them the video (she wasn’t laughing that a woman was raped) or give the data about Trump’s failure. But you don’t have to. One response is to ask them, “Do you get your information from sources that would tell you if he isn’t?” And then you can shift the argument about Trump to a discussion about information and deliberation.

Or, just refuse to argue, on the grounds that they don’t know anything about politics; they just believe. As long as they stay in that feedback loop, as long as they refuse to take seriously sources that disagree with them, they aren’t capable of a rational argument about politics. You can argue with them if you want, but it’s also possible to find various kind ways of saying that you aren’t arguing with them because they’re in a propaganda feedback loop, and then invite them to have more pie. Everyone likes pie.

Batboy and democratic deliberation

image of batboy

[Image from here]

One of my several useless superpowers is picking the wrong line, especially at the grocery store. And it isn’t because the people ahead of me are jerks trying pay with pennies or something; it’s just that the moment I get in that line is the moment that bar codes are wrong, or the computer can’t handle some kind of payment reasonably, or toads start falling from the ceiling. Okay, not that last one, but close enough.

And, because of this really sucky superpower, I have spent a lot of time looking at, and sometimes reading, magazines in the checkout line. And The National Enquirer had a kind of bad car crash fascination for me. It seemed to me the Etch-a-Sketch of news sources. The Etch-a-Sketch, if you don’t know, was a really fun device on which you could create various drawings (within limits) and then shake it and the previous drawing would disappear.

That, it seemed to me, perfectly described The National Enquirer. Every issue wiped clean the slate of a previous one. And, yet, every issue presented its information as obviously true. I remember—even read—the issue when a major star died of cancer. The previous week had the headline that he had been completely cured of cancer through a miracle treatment! The issue announcing his death didn’t mention that previous error.

That failure to admit error is important because admitting error is at the heart of effective decision-making—whether you’re thinking about what car to buy, what media you consume, how you behave at work, what kind of relationship you want, what movie reviewers you should believe, how you treat others, and how you should vote. You can’t get better unless you admit you were wrong. If you never admit you have made a mistake, then you’ll keep making that mistake.

If you’re willing to admit you’ve made a mistake, that’s great. But if you treat that mistake as a one-off, and not really relevant, then you’re still not learning from your mistake.

The point is not just that The National Enquirer was wrong about that actor, but that it was wrong to present its information as certain. Learning from mistakes doesn’t just mean that we learn that this claim was wrong (that actor had not been miraculously cured) but that our source is imperfect and its information is not certainly true.

When I mention this to students, about various sources (all over the political spectrum), some of them will say something along the lines of, “Well, yeah, but they got this right.” When I argue with people (again, all over the political spectrum) who are citing completely false information (claims on which their source has been shown to be completely wrong), I can sometimes get them to admit that error, but they still intend to rely on that source. They still refuse to admit their source is unreliable because, they say, “they got this other thing right.”

And that’s assuming I can even get them to admit that their source was wrong. Too often, they’ll refuse to look at any source that says their favored source is wrong simply on the grounds that it disagrees with them. That’s kind of shocking if you think about it.

Here is a person claiming something is true, and they refuse to consider any evidence that they might be wrong, on the grounds that the source is biased because it says they might be wrong. It’s a perfect circle of ignorance.

Good decision-making isn’t about getting some things right; it’s about being willing to admit to being wrong. No matter what your profession, if you go through that profession refusing to consider any criticism of you, your actions, and/or your policies on the grounds that only “biased” people would criticize you, you’re running your business into the ground.

Imagine, for instance, being a doctor. You were trained to believe that infections are the consequence of miasma. Would it be reasonable for you to refuse to read any studies that said that you were wrong about infections? Would you be a good doctor if you refused to pay attention to anything that complicated or contradicted your understanding of infection?

You’d be a lousy doctor.

You’d be a lousy doctor not because you’re a bad person, or because you mean to hurt people, or even because you’re stupid, but because being right means being willing to be wrong. Far too many people reason on the basis of in-group loyalty (I’m right because this seems right to me, and everyone like me agrees about this), and won’t admit that they’ve ever been wrong, let alone that they rely on sources that have been wrong. There are major media sources that regularly engage in the equivalent of “this actor is cured and whoops, now he’s dead but we’re still a reliable source!” And the consumers of those sources never conclude that the persistent inaccuracy of a source is a reason to doubt its reliability.

And that is what is wrong with our current state of public discourse. Too many people aren’t willing to admit to being wrong, and if they do grant a fact or two here and there, they aren’t willing to give up on sources.

It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum your sources are; what matters is
1) Are you getting your information from a source that links to opposition sources (that is, is the source so confident in its representation of the opposition that it gives you direct access to their arguments, instead of their mediated version);
2) Do your sources admit when they’re wrong, and admit corrections clearly and unequivocally, without scapegoating? A source that never admits error is not a more reliable source—it’s bigoted propaganda;
3) Does your source make falsifiable claims? That is, does your source spend all its time ranting about evil the other side is rather than making falsifiable claims about what your side will do?

Again, imagine that you’re a doctor, or that you’re a patient seeing a doctor, and you’re trying to decide whether to get surgery, try medications, or perhaps make major lifestyle changes. Would you think that the way that the pundits on Fox or Rachel Maddow or various tremendously popular people on youtube argue would be a good way to make a decision about your health?

They all argue different things, but they all argue the same way: the correct course of action is obvious, and everyone who disagrees is spit from the bowels of Satan, and if you’re a good [in-group] member, you’ll make this choice and refuse to listen to anyone who says it’s the wrong choice.

Refusing to listen to out-group sources, dismissing as biased anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, believing that the only problem is that we have to commit more purely to the in-group—those are terrible ways to make decisions, in every aspect of a life.

Imagine that you’re in a hospital bed, and you’re presented with a variety of options, or you’re a surgeon, and you’re trying to decide what to do, and a doctor comes to you and says, “I support Trump [or Warren, or Biden, or whoever], so this the right kind of surgery for you.” Or, perhaps, “I’m a Republican, so I’m going to choose this surgery.” As a patient or surgeon, you’d recognize that’s a terrible way to make decisions. A good surgeon would assess the choices regardless of politics; no even remotely competent surgeon would make a decision about a surgical practice on the basis of the political affiliation of the people advocating this practice versus that.

Since we recognize that loyalty to party would be a terrible way to make decisions about policies regarding our bodies, why not admit it’s equally terrible when it comes to policies about our body politic?

The deficit model of education and unintentional racism

If you stop someone on the street, and ask them about what it means for something to be racist, it’s pretty likely that they’ll tell you that racism is what racist people do, and that racist people are people who consciously hate everyone of some race, or, perhaps, everyone of every other race. Racists are evil, deliberately evil, intentionally evil. Racist acts are acts that are done by people who intend to be racist.

If you’re reasoning from within this (inadequate) understanding of racism, as long as you do not consciously hate every single member of some race, or if you don’t intend to do them harm, or you do not intend to be racist, you aren’t racist. And, therefore, you didn’t do anything racist. You are not evil. So, whatever you did that someone is saying is racist is now off the table of consideration, since the real issue is whether you’re a mustache-twirling racist who gets up in the morning and thinks about how to harm people of other races. You aren’t. You don’t even have a mustache.

Therefore, anyone calling you racist is engaging in defamation of character, since they’re saying you’re deliberately evil, and, if someone calls you racist, your losing your temper is justified, since what they did to you is so offensive.

That’s a little muddled, but it’s how far too many arguments about racism play out:

Chester: “You did a racist thing.”
Hubert: “You’re calling me a racist. And here are all the ways I’m a good person (and therefore not racist). You’re the real racist here for making it an issue of race.”

I’ve seen this flawed understanding of racism, and then the same domino effect of fallacious reasoning (I didn’t do anything racist because I’m not a racist because I sometimes do non- or anti-racist things) all over the political spectrum, and on scholarly mailing lists, at meetings of scholars, at faculty meetings—so, this problem isn’t just something They do.

This common notion of racism is wrong because the issue of a racist world is not usefully reduced to the problem of individuals who consciously feel hostility to members of other races or intend to be racist (nor is racism bad just because racist words “offend” people). There isn’t some binary between racist and non-racist, and, therefore, that a person has done something non-racist doesn’t mean they can never do anything racist. That you hate racism doesn’t mean you are magically immune from doing anything racist. In fact, you can be trying to do something you think is anti-racist, and unintentionally be making things worse.

Take, for instance, the deficit model of education. The deficit model of education says that some students struggle because they lack things that good teachers should pour into their heads. Rather than presenting students as people who are bringing a lot of knowledge and skills, it describes them as little jars of absence.

Often, that absence is described as a consequence of their coming from a deficient culture. Their cultural (racial) background is inferior to the dominant culture, and so we need to pour into their brains (or drill them on) the things they don’t know, the habits they don’t have. This model means that teachers work with their students from an assumption that they need to pull some students up to the mean, and, too often, that assumption is racist, even when the teacher is trying to do the right thing. I’ve seen teachers respond with so much enthusiasm to the contribution of a student of color that I wanted to crawl under a table and hide.

Basically, the “deficit model” appears to be anti-racist insofar as it’s saying that students of color who are underperforming (or not—they might be performing just fine) need extra care from a white teacher because they lack certain things the (white) teacher can pour into them. The white teacher is trying to save them, so isn’t racist (racists hate people of other races). The white teacher feels compassion for these students and is trying to save them.

But it is racist in so many ways. For instance, it reinforces the racist cultural narrative that all important stories about reducing racism are about how white people use their agency to save POC, and POC are (or should be) grateful subjects of how good white people use their agency. A narrative about people of color who succeed is about the white people who helped them.

A racist act is one that reinforces the racist hierarchies of a culture or society; and racist hierarchies are hierarchies that are socially constructed categories that claim to be essential and inherent in groups.

As the Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology(Vol. 1. ) says,
[T]he deficit model asserts that racial/ethnic minority groups do not achieve as well as their White majority peers in school and life because their family culture is dysfunctional and lacking important characteristics compared to the White American culture. […]

Criticisms of the deficit model are numerous. First, the deficit model is unfair to minority children and their families, focusing the blame on their culture. The deficit model is also inaccurate because it deemphasizes the powerful effects of poverty on the families, schools, and neighborhoods, which synergistically affect academic achievement and occupational attainment. It also strongly implied that White middle-class values are superior. Fourth, the deficit model became equated with pathology in which a group’s cultural values, families, or lifestyles transmit the pathology. Finally, the deficit model has limitations for scholarship because it is too narrow as an explanatory model (i.e., rigidly blames the family) for the academic underachievement of poor minority children. In short, the deficit model’s negative effects are that children were narrowly viewed as “deprived” and their families became “disadvantaged,” “dysfunctional,” and “pathological.”

The deficit model is racist in impact, and not intent. It implies that good teachers would identify students whom they think are deficient (likely to be POC) and try to save them by pouring into their heads the things they lack. Those teachers would mean well, and still be engaging in actions that reinforce our racist culture. Does that mean they’re racist? Yes. Does that mean they wear a hood and burn crosses and intend to be racist? No. Is it useful to identify the problem as their being racist people? No. Does it matter that they’re (unintentionally) promoting a racist narrative about students? Yes.

Are some students lacking important skills important for success in college? Yes.

In fact, students should be lacking the skills we intend to teach in our class—otherwise, why are they in the class? Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom deficient. A good class makes everyone in that room better. Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom with an excess of gifts, skills, and knowledge. Assuming that the deficiencies map onto (or are explained by) race or culture is inevitably going to put white students at an advantage. But teachers with the deficit model are likely to pay more attention to “grammar” errors on the part of students of color (or multi-lingual students) than white students; they’ll over-identify errors (noticing ones they wouldn’t notice in a white student’s paper, identifying as “grammar” errors things that are orthographic, stylistic, or rhetorical). They’ll also explain the errors differently, as the consequence of gaps in knowledge (whereas they’re likely to explain white students’ errors as typos). By conveying the expectation that POC students will perform badly, and need saving, they deny students something all students need: confidence.

Racism isn’t about intent, or whether people have their feelings hurt. Racism is about actions, policies, structures, practices, systems, institutions that reinforce the racial hierarchies of a culture. A narrative that students from certain cultures are deficient reinforces the very narratives and tropes central to our current racist world.

This is no time for compromise

When confronted with a world in which decisions that seemed certainly and obviously right (think of the arguments for invading Iraq as a policy option we should feel certain is correct) that turn out to be wrong, things get a little vexed for the people who insisted what they’d been saying was obviously true. Turns out they were not so obviously true after all. In fact, they were false.

Fox and various other media relentlessly promoted the WMD argument, as well as the argument that even Bush said was false (that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11), and when media and pundits were now faced with the problem that even the lowest bar of journalistic responsibility would involve their admitting they were either fools or liars, they either stopped talking about it, or claimed that Bush was responsible.

Their argument was often a little odd, though. They sometimes said that they couldn’t be blamed for being loyal to a person who had turned out to lie. I think that’s interesting. They were admitting that they saw their job as supporting the Republican Party, and not promoting the truth. The traditional distinction between a medium of party propaganda and a medium that is at least trying to be above faction is the willingness to investigate and report on information that hurts its preferred party.

Fox not only didn’t investigate the WMD claims, but it slammed anyone who said what turned out to be true. It promoted, relentlessly, a claim that was obviously a lie (that Iraq was behind 9/11)—even Bush said so–, and another set of claims that were deeply problematic (such as the WMD accusation, or various arguments Colin Powell made before the UN). Fox didn’t do that investigation, or if it did, it gleefully promoted what it knew to be a lie. (At this point, people who are deeply immersed in the tragic narrative that our complicated and vexed political options are reduced to the fallacious question of whether Dems or Republicans are better will say, but the Dems do it too! Maybe, but the Dems lying doesn’t mean that what Fox said was true. Fox was either irresponsible or dishonest, and any behavior on the part of the Dems doesn’t change that. If I rob a bank, that someone else did it too doesn’t magically change my robbing a bank from anything other than what it was.)

The failure to investigate was spread all over the political spectrum of media. For instance, Colin Powell’s speech before the UN was deeply problematic, but, instead of doing responsible investigation, or even reporting accurately (such as saying “Powell showed” when the accurate report would have been “Powell claimed”), media endorsed his problematic argument. His argument was so problematic that even the conservative–and pro-invasion–British periodical The Economist noted his case was thin in some places. But, in most media, his argument wasn’t reported as wobbly (and, again, not on any one place on the political spectrum).

Fox and various other media outlets were, from the perspective of someone who studies demagoguery, pretty extreme. It wasn’t just that they promoted various false claims–again, even ones Bush said were false–, but that they promoted those false claims as the only thing a reasonable person could believe. The amount of propaganda—that is, the factional promotion of false claims—is one reason that 40% of the American public believed that it should be legal to prohibit dissenting from the invasion.

What that means is that 40% of the American public were fine with silencing the point of view that turned out to be right. And that is really worrisome for democracy.

Even more worrisome is that the people I know who were part of that 40% have yet to admit that they were wrong to want to silence the people who turned out to be right. And their having been completely wrong about Iraq didn’t caused them to question the sources that led them astray, nor, more important, the underlying (and false) narrative that the correct course of action is so obvious to good people that dissent should be dismissed as biased or duped.

And that’s my experience with people all over the political spectrum–that people who believe that it is obvious that we should do this thing now, and that everyone who disagrees should be dismissed (as biased, ignorant, duped, dishonest) never admit that their having been wrong in the past is any reason to reconsider their narrative about political decision making.

When people are frightened, faced with uncertainty, or have failed, in-group entitativity increases. Group entitativity is what social psychologists call the sense a person has 1) that their mental categories of kinds of people (Christians, liberals, Texans) are Real; and 2) that their loyalty and commitment to their in-group is essential and unarguable. (Scholars in rhetoric would say that their sense of group identification is constitutive.)

Fear, uncertainty, and failure all increase the belief that The In-Group is Real, and thereby paradoxically encourage people to feel that the solution to our current problem is to purify the in-group. Politically, this means that a failure encourages people to believe that the solution is for the political group not to be a coalition of various interests, but for every member of the in-group, who is Really in-group, to commit more purely to a more pure vision of the in-group.

The train wrecks in public deliberation that I study all have calls for purer commitment to the pure in-group. But, at times, a group’s decision to stop disagreeing, and just work together has been effective. So, how do you disagree between the irrational response that what we need now is purity (because the in-group has failed) and what we need now is to stop disagreeing?

You don’t do it through deductive reasoning. You don’t do it through the circular reasoning process of deciding that only commitment to your narrative is right, and so only people who agree to that narrative can be right. You reconsider the narrative.

Or you don’t. Instead, you engage in Machiavellian unifying strategies.

The problem is that no political party can win an election without gathering together people with wildly different narratives. So, a party needs what rhetoricians call “a unifying device.” There are a lot (Kenneth Burke listed them pretty effectively in 1939).

The easiest strategy is to unify by opposition to a common enemy. Burke says that Hitler unified Germans (who were a very disparate group) by opposition to the Jews, and, while that was true in Mein Kampf (and Hitler’s ideology generally), when it came to the Nazis’ best electoral successes, it was by unifying voters against “Bolsheviks”—he included any form of socialism in that category (and his base knew he meant Jews). Hitler argued for purifying the community of dissenters.

William Lloyd Garrison made a similar argument in the era before the Civil War. Abolitionists couldn’t count on the government to help them, and they suffered a lot of failures. And so Garrison decided there was one right way to think about the vexed question of whether the Constitution allowed slavery, and he thereby alienated Frederick Douglass.

Hitler was evil; Garrison was not. In other words, the notion that the solution to our problem is to insist on one narrative and crush all dissent is something that both good and bad people share.

Good decision-making requires that, at some point, people stop arguing, and commit to the plan. If my unit has decided that we’re going to issue red balls to all dogs, then we need to get full-in on issuing red balls. But there needs to be an opportunity for the people who think the issuing red balls is a dumb plan. In other words, every good plan makes falsifiable claims.

In the decisions I’ve studied, when communities have decided to make disastrous decisions, or even made good decisions that ended badly, they have gotten feedback that their decisions were bad, and they decided that the response to that setback was increased in-group purity.

Responding to failure by believing that our problem is that our in-group was not pure enough, and that therefore the solution is to be more pure in our ideological commitment, is a natural human bias.

But it isn’t a useful way to deliberate.

Can dogs eat…. your head?

The whole process whereby we got Clarence remains a little unclear to me. We had had three dogs for a while, and Duke died. Jim got in touch with a group that did mastiff rescue, and then had his heart stolen by Louis, so we had three dogs. And then the mastiff rescue people got in touch with us. They had a four-year old mastiff. And so we ended up with four dogs.

So, we took the pack—Ella, Louis, Marquis—up to a neutral place where they could all meet (basically a barn). And they all wandered around and sniffed each other and things, and Clarence came up and put his head in my lap, and, well, that was that. We would later find out this was odd—Clarence didn’t like strange dogs, and really didn’t want to be approached by them. He wasn’t always okay with strangers. But he was fine with this pack, and he was fine with us.

Having passed the adoption test (they have to be careful about people who are getting dogs because of dog fighting), Jim and I went up and got him.

Louis was dubious about Clarence, but Louis was pretty much dubious about everyone (and kind of the fun police). And Louis ended up getting along fine with Clarence, basically because Ella was actually in charge of the pack.

When we adopt a new dog, we set up a bed on the floor in some room in such a way that I and the pack are all sleeping together. For Clarence, we set that up in the living room, but it happened to be a night with a major thunderstorm, something that always agitates dogs. And that’s when I discovered that Clarence’s previous owner had, for reasons that remain obscure to me, decided it would be a great idea to teach a 160 lb. dog to jump on people and nom their arms. So, I found myself with a 160 lb. (or maybe 170 since he’s thinner now than he was then, and we’re pretty sure he’s now around 165) dog who was leaping around, especially leaping on me, and trying to hold my arm in his mouth.

I threw the other dogs out of the room and was, for the first time in my life, edging on intimidated by one of my dogs. But it was so clearly high spirits, and—and this continued to be the case—although he was grabbing my arm in his massive mouth and holding it tight, I didn’t feel any teeth. I still don’t know how he did that. He spent the first night across the room from me. The next night he was closer. The third night he was spooning with me.

The storm passed, in both senses.

I’m calling him Clarence, but we hadn’t decided on his name. We were considering various big guys, such as Charlie Mingus, but also guys with wrinkled faces, like Willie Nelson or Levon Helm. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was a small, wiry guy, so no resemblance, but Clarence felt like a Clarence (and I do love me some Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown). Also, Brown had, as far as I know, a good and long life, and we wished that for him. He came to us with the clear signs of having been fed the wrong food for four years, but no real signs of abuse (except for, in the backyard, a male carrying something).

He was a momma’s boy from the beginning. We discovered that it was cheaper to buy twin mattresses (he required two, on top of each other) than dog beds. We discovered that he got cold at night, so we took to putting a blanket over him when he went to bed. He often created a doggy burrito. It was hilarious.

We discovered that he got lonely at around 5 am, and wanted me to roll off my bed onto his. If he had a bad dream in the night, he would insist that I move over and give him room to get in bed with us. We have a ritual of waking up and cuddling with all the dogs and whatever cats choose to show up first thing in the morning. Clarence would wake us up, and then pretend to be asleep. He would, and I’m not kidding, fake snore.

We often joked, or perhaps it wasn’t entirely a joke, that he would wait till we were asleep, and then unzip his dog suit and emerge as a really empathic and mildly neurotic human.

He loved walks. He hated strange dogs approaching him. He loved stuffed animals, and would cuddle with them. He was intimidated by the cats. If a cat lay on his bed, he would come and get one of us and look sad. Or just lie on the floor and hope the cat would move. He would, if they wanted, let them boop him, but he was always at least a little worried that they would kick his ass.

In other words, he was intimidated by a being that weighed .06 of him. Our cats weigh less than his head. He could have eaten either of our cats in one gulp. But, instead, he was sad and hoped he could get his bed back.

The whole “no strange dogs” thing was fraught. It’s really common for dogs who are totally comfortable with other dogs off-leash to get freaky on-leash. The problem is: if you have a dog who weighs 165 lbs, who can swallow some dogs whole, you can’t risk that he’s got an on- or off-leash distinction. So, after someone lost control of their dog, and it charged Clarence, and he alpha rolled it, Clarence (and Jim and I) spent a day every week with a really good dog trainer, who got him to be okay with other dogs. As long as I wasn’t holding the leash.

As I said, Clarence was a momma’s boy. So, for years, I was the one who held his leash. And, when we saw a strange dog, I got nervous because I was afraid that Clarence would get agitated, and then Clarence sensed my agitation, and he thought he needed to protect me. It was a nasty spiral of anxiety about the anxiety of each other. The solution was for Jim to hold the leash, but still, when things got twitchy, Clarence attached himself to me. So, for Clarence’s sake, I had to learn to manage my anxiety more effectively than the method on which I’d relied for 40+ years–pretending I wasn’t anxious. He needed me to recognize when I was anxious, even when I “thought” I wasn’t. I did that for Clarence, but it turns out that it applied in all sorts of other areas. Clarence demanded that I learn something about myself. Clarence made me a better person.

Clarence did that with Pearl too. She came to us a dog who didn’t like to eat, who didn’t like people, but who loved Clarence. And Pearl, on walks, checked in with Clarence (and Jim—she’s a daddy’s girl) in order to be a little bit more brave. And she is. Because of him.

Clarence tolerated Louis, but he loved Ella and Pearl. He was the gruff older brother who was sweetly grumpy about their getting up in his face. On walks, when Pearl was upset (by airsocks, people with yellow vests, really scary leaves, that asshole Labradoodle) she checked in with him, and he had this move that always gave me a catch in my throat. It was a kind of shoulder bump, and it calmed her down. We all need that shoulder bump. I miss that shoulder bump.

Clarence loved rolling in the grass, and his method made me laugh every time. His roll started from his nose. He rolled in various places along busy streets, and it was fun to watch drivers laugh. He had a few favorite spots—we really don’t know why. Sometimes he wouldn’t roll on a favorite spot, and we never figured out the criteria.

Clarence’s previous owner probably paid a lot of money for him (since he appeared to be a purebred bull mastiff, and they’re pricey) and then fed him the wrong food (as is clear from his paws), taught him to jump on people, nom arms, mistrust males holding things while in the yard, and yet gave him enough love that he came into our home expecting to be loved. So they did something very important very right.

Mastiffs have a lifespan of 8-10 years. Given that he had clear signs of having been fed the wrong food, we figured he’d be on the short side. About a month after we got him, I gave him a corncob (something we used to do—the dogs nom on it for a while, and then cheerfully lose interest). He swallowed it whole. It was an obstruction. We ended up at the emergency vet. They stapled down his stomach (thereby preventing bloat—what kills a lot of big dogs), so I’ll admit I had hopes that he might live longer. But last summer was hot and long.

We used to walk the dogs for two miles every day. And Clarence had three places that he stopped to roll. Near the coffee place, where he got a treat, in front of an auto repair place (where people driving by would laugh), and on a particular lawn (sometimes two). In summer, Jim would wear a pack that had water and water bowls, and we’d stop halfway through and give them water. But, even so, Clarence was panting way too much (we all were—it was a long summer), so we took to taking a one-mile walk with him—up to the coffee place, where he got a treat—and then back home where we dropped him off, and then took the girls for another mile. He was always thrilled, to his last day, to go on a walk, but also quite happy to be dropped off.

He was stoical. In the four years we had him, he never yelped. He once flinched (this last week, when I touched a sensitive spot). But, he stopped eating, and seemed to be holding himself as though he was in pain, and so we took him to the vet, discovered he had cancer that had metastasized, and we were in the realm of palliative care. So we were. And we got lots of great advice from friends who had been through the same thing, some very recently, even the same time (take lots of photos and videos, offer scrambled eggs, indulge). We gave him lots of pain meds, and were getting up twice during the night in order to ensure he was always medicated. And then it was time. Pearl and Ella saw him after he died, but we put them away while they took his body away, and I watched them track the path of his body.

And so, here we are, without him, but blessed and better because of him.

Winston and Louis

cat and dog cuddling

[I posted this originally in January of 2018, but took it down when it became part of a book. Since the book has been out a while, I’m putting it back up.]

Today we lost a 14 year old cat and a 2 year old dog.

We got Winston Churchill and Emma Goldman on the same day around 14 or 15 years ago because someone in the Cedar Park neighborhood we were then living in (big mistake) was influenced by the “Secret Life of Dogs” (I assume) and so let his dogs out at night. They killed little dogs and cats, among them a neighbor’s dog two cats of ours. One of many reasons I’m glad we moved out of Cedar Park.

We got the two kittens from different rescue groups, and they bonded instantly. Winston was (we found out quickly) ill, but before we figured that out, he was waking us up around 4 am to harangue us, so we named him Winston Churchill (who was famous for the same behavior). It turns out Winston had a virus, which he passed to Emma Goldman (named that because she was clearly a total anarchist), and so I had to pill him multiple times a day. One of my secret superpowers is pilling animals (I also include fixing wonky toilets, getting total strangers to tell me their life stories, and losing things), so I was pilling this poor kitten all the effing time. I can do it, but I can’t do it in a way that animals like.

Yet, he forgave me.

We took to calling him Winston, and not Winston Churchill, because in many ways he was closer to Winston Smith. He disappeared whenever strangers appeared (there are people who’ve been over to our house many times who’ve never seen him), and we had to start working with an in-home vet because if we got out the cat carrier, he simply evaporated.

On the other hand, he could be incredibly brave. When we got him, we had a Great Dane and two mutts. Winston loved Emma, but he loved the dogs more. He spent his whole life sincerely believing he was a dog. He had complicated medical issues—he couldn’t eat fish, or eat anything from plastic. Because the Marquis de Lafayette was his best bud, he ate from the Marquis dish, and so the Marquis had to eat out of non-plastic containers and we couldn’t add fish to Marquis’ bowl. And Winston, at all of 12 pounds at most, snuggled with Hubert (120 lbs) and Duke (100 lbs).

For cats, head-rubbing is submission. Cats are not pack animals, and so normally the whole pack configuration isn’t really something to which it’s worth paying attention when you’re talking about cats. But it was interesting with Winston. Winston, after a while, took to beating up on Emma, so she dumped him, but he was entirely submissive to the dogs—to all the dogs. Most of the dogs tolerated him, but Hubert, George, Marquis, and Louis were actively sweet with him and allowed him to rub heads (which doesn’t mean the same thing in dog language).

After a while, the three cats each claimed domains, and Winston claimed the bedroom. He always slept with us on the bed, exerting the cat gravity power so that a 12 pound cat is actually an immovable force. He was probably the single most affection-loving cat I’ve ever had. For a while, he allowed Emma to sleep in the bedroom, but at some point that ended, and he allowed Sapphira to come in and get morning snuggles (Louis put an end to that, oddly enough). So, morning snuggles was Winston and the dogs. When we fed the dogs, he would head into the study, and eat out of Marquis’ bowl. Winston LOVED dogs. He especially loved licking their faces and ears. Hubert and Duke kind of liked it, and Ella and Clarence barely tolerated it, but Louis loved Winston. When we knew we were putting Winston down, I worried about how Louis would react.

Winston was always an indoor cat (with the exception of the catio), and he was until recently a beefy guy (and ended up being kind of a bully with Emma). The last year has been vexed in that we knew he was losing weight and something was going on, but he remained his dog-loving cuddle all night self. When definitive tests were done, he had major intestinal tumors and cancer that had metastasized to his paws. And so, today, we had an appointment with a vet to come and put him down. He was still, even with the damn cone on his head, cuddling with the dogs, and sleeping with us at night, but he was clearly unhappy. And he died, in the lap of someone who loves him, purring. He died about 90 minutes after Louis.

Louis was really sweet with Winston. Winston had a cancer that metastasized quickly, and gave him bloody tumors in his paws. He continued to sleep on the bed, and Louis (who always slept on the bed) accommodated him endlessly.

When Duke (a 100 lb Great Dane) died, we put in for rescuing a Mastiff. We’re good with big dogs, and they’re often hard to place. That mastiff rescue process wasn’t working well, and Jim knew I was a wreck about having lost Duke, and one day he said we should look at dogs. I assumed Jim was being sweet with me. We went to where APA was showing a few dogs, including what they said was a rottie mix (they marked him as large or extra large). I thought he was adorable, but I also thought Jim was looking at dogs for my sake, and so I took his enthusiasm for that dog as being supportive of my grief. I said we needed to look other places, and we did. And he kept saying, what about that rottie-mix, and I kept thinking he was just being kind to me, and so, when, after having looked at dogs at various other places, I said, “Yeah, I think that rottie mix is the best choice,” he rushed me to the car and drove like a maniac back to the place we’d seen him. He actually jumped a curb. That was the dog that would be named Louis.

We had had a dog, Duke Ellington, who was a wonderful dog, but a little bit staid. And then we got a puppy who adored him (and whom he adored) and who made him a little bit more playful, so we named her Ella Fitzgerald. And Duke died.

And then this rottie mix (he wasn’t) came home and bonded so thoroughly with Ella Fitzgerald that he was obviously Louis Armstrong.

And he was the most hilarious dog we have ever had. Austin is so good at getting dogs adopted that Austin now takes dogs from the shelters of other cities (and even counties), and Louis came from Bastrop. He had abrasions on his leg and neck suggesting he’d been thrown from a car (which is what people around here do to get rid of unwanted puppies—don’t get me started), and they thought he was going to get to be a large or extra-large dog. He thought he did. He got to be fifty pounds.

He was hilarious.

He hated mornings. He loved morning walks, but he never wanted to get up. He was the most talkative dog I’ve ever had. We’ve had dogs with strong opinions (Marquis is very clear that he thinks we should build a fire, nap, give him Dasequin, rearrange the dog beds), but Louis gave six-part Greek orations. We’ve had dogs with whom you could have conversations, but never a dog, but he had a lot to say. You could have a long conversation with him. Even I thought he could out-argue me.

We took him through all the Petsmart training, and he was a gem. My plan was, when I retired, that he and Ella would be our nursing home dogs.

He would have been great. He worried about other beings. If I sneezed, he would put his paws on me. He worried about Winston (especially once Winston got sick), and he worried about whether Clarence was going to get upset at seeing another dog (he sometimes does), and he worried about whether Ella was going to jump on me (she shouldn’t, and she does).

And he ate everything. He was the “can dogs eat…” dog. He ate the bark off our firewood, and he once ate a large part of an organic firestarting log. He ate arugula, watercress, lettuce, and all the things no other dog (even Clarence, who wouldn’t eat arugula) would eat.

And he cuddled. I have a high tolerance for sleeping surfaces, so our practice is that, when we get a new dog or cat, I sleep on some dog beds on the floor with them, and then we transition into the bedroom, and then into their finding their own space. The first night with Louis, he slept across my neck. Literally. The next night he slept across my chest, then legs, and then we were in the bedroom. And every night after that he slept cuddled in either my arms or Jim’s. And the night before he died, he crawled under the blankets, and had to be rescued because he got so hot he was panting. He was, without a doubt, the single most affection-loving dog I’ve ever had.

He and Ella were terrors—they were total siblings (although not littermates), with a hilarious game. Louis would dig a little bit in the ground, and this his job was to keep Ella from taking that little spot, and the two of them were tear around the yard with him keeping her from home. They jumped on each other at certain marked point on the morning walk (why those points, neither Jim nor I ever figured out).

We really worried about Louis because, although he was terrified of tires, he had NO sense about traffic. And he had a tendency to slip out behind someone who opened the front door. And we live somewhere that, if it’s raining or not, the front door might or might not entirely close. More than once we realized he had slipped out and we had to chase him down. It was our nightmare that he would get out and get into traffic. And our nightmare came true. He ran half a mile in order to get on a fucking freeway.
We had come to the difficult decision that we would put down Winston today, and therefore would spending all our time cuddling with him, and thinking about him. Louis slipped out, and we didn’t notice. This breaks my heart.

And, for reasons we don’t understand, he ended up half a mile away on a major freeway. A vet saw him just after he’d gotten hit, and tried to save him. And that vet (whose name we never got) took him to an emergency vet, but Louis was DOA. And someone called Jim, and he called me, and so the vet, Jim, and I all stood in a room and sobbed together over this hilarious dog who was now dead.

And so, today, we sent along their way a hilarious and young dog and the old cat he loved. I don’t believe in Hell (the scriptural basis for it is weak), but I believe in heaven, and I believe that these two are frolicking together. And the grief is for those of us who are left to mourn for them.

You’re the one with epistemic crisis

cicular reasoning works because circular reasoning works

For many years, I had a narrative about what makes a good relationship, and I had a lot of relationships that ended in exactly the same kind of car crash. I decided, each time, not that my narrative about relationships was wrong, but that I was wrong to think this guy was the protagonist in that narrative. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t wrong about the narrative; I was just wrong about the guy.

In fact, I was wrong about the narrative. When I changed the narrative, I found the guy.

We all have narratives, we have explanations as to how things happen, how to get what you want, how political figures operate, how dogs make decisions. And, as it was with me, it’s really easy to operate within a narrative without question, perhaps without even knowing that we have a narrative. I didn’t see my narrative about relationships as one of several possible ones, but as The True Narrative.

Relationship counselors often talk about how narratives constrain problem solving. Some people believe that people come to a relationship with stable identities—you get into a box (the marriage), and perhaps it works and perhaps it doesn’t. Some people have a narrative of a relationship being at its height when you marry, and it goes downhill from there. Some people believe that a relationship is a series of concessions you make with each other. Some people think that marriages are an authoritarian system in which the patriarch needs to control the family. Some people see a relationship as an invitation to go on a journey that neither of you can predict but during which each of will try to honor one another. There are others; there are lots of others. But I think it’s clear that people in each of those narratives would handle conflict in wildly different ways. People with the “people in a box” narrative would believe that you either put up with the other person, or you leave. People with the “concessions” narrative would believe that you try to negotiate conditions, like lawyers writing a contract. Patriarchs would believe that the solution is more control. Our narratives limit what we imagine to be our possible responses to problems.

If you ask people committed to any of those narratives if those narratives are true, they’ll say yes, and they’ll provide lots of evidence that the narrative is true. That evidence might be cultural (how it plays out in movies and TV), it might be arguments from authority (advice counselors, pundits, movie and TV plots). Or they might, as I would have, simply insist I was right by reasoning deductively from various premises—all relationships have a lot of conflict, for instance. That this relationship has a lot of conflict is not, therefore, a problem—in fact, it’s a good thing! (Think about the number of movies, plays, or novels that are the story of a couple with a lot of conflict who “really” belong together, from Oklahoma to When Harry Met Sally.)

If I thought of myself as someone who had relationships that ended badly because I got involved with the wrong person, I didn’t have to face the really difficult work of rethinking my narrative. And I was kind of free of blame, or only to blame for things that aren’t really flaws—being naïve, trusting, loyal. I could blame them for misleading me, or take high road, and say that we were mismatched.

If, however, I looked back and saw that I kept getting involved with someone with whom it could not possibly work because I kept trying to make an impossible narrative work, then the blame is on me. And it was. And it is.

I don’t really want to say what my personal narrative was, although I’ll admit that Jane Eyre might have been involved, but it was the moment that I stopped reasoning from within the world of that narrative and started to question the narrative itself that I was able to move to a better place. I had to question the narrative—otherwise I was going to keep getting “duped.” (That is, I would keep making only slightly varied iterations of the same mistakes which I would blame on having been misled by a person I thought would save me.)

Our current cultural narrative about politics is just as vexed as my Jane Eyre based narrative about relationships. We are in a world in which, paradoxically, far too many people all over the political spectrum share the same—destructive—narrative about what’s wrong with our current political situation. That narrative is that there is an obviously correct set of policies (or actions), and it is not being enacted because there are too many people who are beholden to special interests (or dupes of those special interests). If we just cut the bullshit, and enacted those obviously right policies, everything would be fine. Therefore, we need to elect people who will refuse to compromise, who will cut through the bullshit, and who will simply get shit done.

This way of thinking about politics—there is a clear course of action, and people who want to enact it are hampered by stupid rules and regulations–is thoroughly supported in cultural narratives (most action movies, especially any that involve the government setting rules; every episode of Law and Order; political commentary all over the political spectrum; comment threads; Twitter). It’s also supported deductively (if you close your eyes to the fallacies): This policy is obviously good to me; I have good judgment; therefore, this policy is obviously good.

It’s more complicated than that, of course. Staying within our narrative doesn’t look like it’s limiting options. It feels rational. The narrative gives us premises about behavior–if you think someone is a good man, then you can make a relationship work; the way to stop people from violating norms is to punish them; high taxes make people not really want to succeed–and we can reason deductively from those premises to a policy. If the narrative is false, or even inaccurately narrow, then we’ll deliberate badly about our policy options.

But what if that narrative—there is a correct course of action, and it’s obvious to good people—is wrong?

And it is. It obviously is. There is no group on any place on the political spectrum that has always been right. Democrats supported segregation; Republicans fought the notion that employers should be responsible if people died on the job because the working conditions were so unsafe. Libertarians don’t like to acknowledge that libertarianism would never have ended slavery, and there is that whole massive famine in Ireland thing. Theocrats have trouble pointing to reliable sources saying that theocracy has ever resulted in anything other than religicide and the suppression of science (Stalinists have the same problem). The narrative that there is a single right choice in regard to our political situation, and every reasonable person can see it is a really comfortable narrative, but it’s either false (there never has been a perfect policy, let alone a perfect group) or non-falsifiable (through no true Scotsman reasoning).

This narrative—the correct course of action is obvious to all good people—is, as I said, comfortable, at least in part because it means that we don’t have to listen to anyone who disagrees. In fact, we can create a kind of informational circle: because our point of view is obviously right, we can dismiss as “biased” anyone who disagrees with us, and, we thereby never hear or read anything that might point out to us that we’re wrong.

If we’re in that informational circle, we’re in a world in which “everyone” agrees on some point, and we can find lots of evidence to support our claims. We can then say, and many people I know who live in such self-constructed bubbles do say, “I’m right because no one disagrees with me because I’ve never seen anyone who disagrees with me.” And they really haven’t—because they refused to look. When we’re in that informational circle, we’re in a world of in-group reasoning. We don’t think we are; we think we’re reasoning from the position of truth.

But, since we’re only listening to information that confirms our sense that we’re right, we’re in an in-group enclave.

It’s become conventional in some circles to say that we’re in an epistemic crisis, and we are. But, it’s often represented as we’re in an epistemic crisis because they refuse to listen to reason—meaning they refuse to agree with us. We aren’t in an epistemic crisis because they are ignoring data. We are in an epistemic crisis because people—all over the political spectrum– reason from in-group loyalty, and no one is teaching them to do otherwise. We live in different informational worlds, and taking some time to inhabit some other worlds would be useful.

More useful is the simple set of questions:
• What evidence would cause me to change my mind?
• Are my arguments internally consistent?
• Am I holding myself and out-groups to the same standards?

Our epistemic crisis is not caused by how they reason, but how we do.

Windsocks and the epistemological/ontological distinction

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could graduate from high school without being able to explain the difference between causation and correlation, and no one could graduate from college without being able to distinguish between an epistemological and ontological claim. (I have moments when I think that people should also understand the difference between eschatology and soteriology, but that’s a different post.)

Here, I just want to talk about the difference between an epistemological and ontological claim. That distinction is more important than you think. [1]

Earl Warren argued for the race-based mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and he provided evidence to support his claim that “the Japanese” must be engaged in nefarious activities. Among his evidence was a collection of letters from various police, sheriff, and other peace officer groups saying that they believed “the Japanese” to be dangerous.

An ontological claim is a claim about Reality. It’s a claim about the fabric of the universe, about what is Really True. Warren was making an ontological claim—that “the Japanese” were essentially and Really dangerous.

And he supported that claim with statements on the part of various (racist) people as to their beliefs. Epistemological claims are claims about belief. So, he was trying to support an ontological claim (“the Japanese are dangerous”) with an epistemological claim (“various (racist) people believe the Japanese to be dangerous”).

It’s like my saying that squirrels are evil (ontological claim) because my dogs agree that squirrels are evil (epistemological claim). They really do agree that squirrels are evil—that’s true. There is complete consensus on that point. They also agree that windsocks, plastic bags blowing down the street, that asshole labradoodle, and possums are all evil. Like Warren, my dogs make an ontological argument (windsocks are evil) on the basis of an epistemological claim (I am afraid of windsocks).

The difference, of course, is that the various people Warren polled had more prestige than my dogs, but did they have better judgement? Many people assume that if “good” people agree on a claim—if they all make the same epistemological claim, that’s an indication that the epistemological claim is also ontologically true. So, if everyone you value agrees on some claim–squirrels are evil–you think that claim has been proven. It hasn’t. All that’s been proven is that you’re loyal to your in-group.

My point is that the way that people decide who is “good” is just in-group reasoning, as in the case of Warren’s testimonies about “the Japanese” being dangerous. “The Japanese” also had beliefs—they had epistemological claims. But Warren didn’t worry about them. He took the claims of the police as reliable, and the claims of opponents as not worth considering. And how Warren assessed claims is the dominant way of assessing claims in our current culture–decide whether a claim is true on the basis of whether the person making it (or the media reporting it) is someone we think is “good.” In other words, whether they’re in-group.

That’s a bad way to think about reliability–it just pushes the question back one step. If everyone in my family agrees on something, every pastor I’ve known, everyone with whom I interact on a regular basis, the talk radio host or pundit I like, my group of like-minded friends, in other words, if my in-group agrees on a claim, then I take that agreement to be a sign the claim is a claim about Reality. And the–my claim is true because my in-group has perfect agreement on this point–isn’t something restricted to any point on the political spectrum, or even restricted to politics. I’ve had colleagues tell me that, although their claims are either non-falsifiable or actually falsified, they’re true because everyone in their discipline or sub-field (i.e., in-group) agrees that they’re true, and I must be wrong because they are an expert in that field (and, yes, I’m thinking especially of various economists, anglo-American analytic philosophers, and neo-conservative political scientists with whom I’ve been on committees).

We are in a world in which media–all over the political, cultural, and religious spectrum–hammer home to their audiences that we are fighting for our very ability to exist. We are about to lose it all right now. We are, therefore, in a state of exception when all concerns about the rule of law, fairness, accuracy. That’s an epistemological claim.

That everyone in the in-group agrees on a claim doesn’t mean it’s true. That the in-group feels threatened, that all the in-group media say we are threatened with extinction doesn’t mean we are.

The reason people should understand the difference between an ontological claim (about Reality) and an epistemological one (I am certain this is true) is that, as long as we uncritically take epistemological claims as proof about the world, we’re only deliberating within in-group beliefs. We’re Warren, who only took the epistemological claims of people like him as relevant to ontological conclusions.

We’re people banning windsocks because my dogs don’t like them.

[1] For the pedants in the audience, I’m not saying that epistemology and ontology are, so to speak, ontologically different. I’m say that epistemological and ontological claims are rhetorically different–they have different standards of proof in an argument because they imply different rhetorical burdens.