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Our political discourse sucks because it’s gerfucked by the rational/irrational split

Books about demagoguery

Once again, people are bemoaning the morass that is our political discourse, and, once again, blame is placed on the lack of civility. Then the conversation follows a deeply-rutted path: what civility is, whether there’s less of it than there used to be, and “which side” is more incivil, or who is justified in their incivility. It’s a route that can’t get us out of the morass, let alone toward better political disagreements, because incivility is the consequence and not the cause of what is really the problem.

The problem is the extent to which people think and talk about politics in terms of the rational/irrational split—a binary that is wrong in so many ways. To explain some of these ways, I need to start at a place the civility road evades: what is political discourse supposed to do in a democracy?

One answer is that political disagreements don’t actually do much of anything—it’s just a right: democracy is supposed to allow people to express their beliefs, so the ideal public discourse is one in which everyone is allowed to express whatever they think with no constraints.[1] This is sometimes called the “expressive” model of democracy. Another, sometimes called the “marketplace” model, is that public discourse is a bunch of people selling their policies—just as the marketplace always inevitably rewards the best product, so a free-for-all of people making whatever arguments will persuade others always results in the best policies.[2]

What if we instead imagined political disagreement as policy disagreement? What if we saw the purpose of public discourse as enabling us to come to decisions that are the most reasonable, given our very different needs, values, perspectives, opportunities; policies that distribute the burdens and opportunities of our shared lives in a reasonable way?

If we think about the purpose of public disagreement that way, then what matters isn’t whether someone is particularly nice when they make their argument, but whether their argument is reasonable. An argument that is dishonest, misleading, and fallacious isn’t transmogrified into an honest, accurate, and reasonable argument if it’s presented politely. It’s still a bad argument, and probably in service of a bad policy—if you can’t advocate your policy with accurate information, a fair representation of the opposition, and reasonable connections among claims, then there are probably better policies out there.

The incivility of our public discourse isn’t the cause of being able to have productive disagreements—it’s the consequence of our tendency to characterize anyone who disagrees with us as “irrational,” and that tendency is the consequence of how we think (or don’t think very clearly) about what “rational” should mean.

After all, what does it mean to have a reasonable policy argument? We often use terms like “rational,” “reasonable,” and “logical” interchangeably (although there is a reasonable argument for making a distinction—I’ll get to that in another post), and all three of those tend to part of a binary: rational/irrational; reasonable/unreasonable, logical/illogical.[3]

Definitions tend to be circular, depend on negation (being “rational” means not being “irrational” and vice versa) and muddled. Webster’s, for instance, defines “rational” as “having a reason” or “reasonable.” Notice that those two are actually very different. If I say, “You should be opposed to nuclear power because my I have a bunny named Fluffy,” I’ve given a reason. But we wouldn’t say that’s a reasonable argument. My statement gives a reason—it has the form of “claim because reason”—but the reason isn’t logically connected to my claim.[4] Even were the “because clause” true (I do have a bunny, and it is named Fluffy), I doubt any of us would say that’s a reasonable argument.[5]

But if “rational” means “reasonable,” what does it mean for something to be “reasonable”? Webster’s again offers two definitions that are relevant: “being in accordance with reason” and “not extreme or excessive” (I’ll come back to the second). “Reason” is “a statement offered in explanation”—so back to a form definition (and, once again, the nuclear power argument is reasonable); or “a rational ground or motive.” We’ve come full circle.

This simultaneously contradictory and circular definitions of “rational” isn’t the consequence of some failure on the part of Webster’s. The point of a dictionary like Webster’s is to show common usage, and common usage of the term “rational” has those qualities. For instance, we tend to use the term rational to describe some very different things: an argument, a claim, a person, a way of arguing, a way of thinking. For some people, a “rational” argument is not necessarily true—it just has a particular form—but the term is also sometimes used to imply that the argument is true. Some people use the term “rational” to mean an amoral assessment of means and costs (so, the argument runs, Hitler invading the USSR was “rational” insofar as it was the only way to achieve his ends). The most common sense about rationality is that it is not its opposite—a rational argument is not irrational, and “irrationality” is associated with emotion. So, a rational argument is not emotional, a rational policy is not grounded in feelings. That’s how one gets to the argument that Hitler’s invasion of the USSR was “rational”—considering the devastation to peoples, the morality of the cause or means are all deflected as about “feelings,” and therefore “irrational.”

And, of course, Hitler’s desire to invade the USSR was all about feelings. That’s pretty typical of the attempt to characterize rationality as an amoral and unemotional determination of the most effective means—it’s all in service of deflecting, suppressing, or ignoring the very present feelings. I have had more than one person shout at me that we needed to be “rational” about this situation rather than emotional. Since I wasn’t particularly far away, and therefore would have no trouble hearing them if they spoke in a normal tone of voice, there was no reason to shout, other than that they were very, very emotional at the moment.

Sometimes rational/irrational is described as a binary, meaning that the slightest bit of emotion taints the argument, person, policy, and so a “rational” person (etc.) has no emotion. And, obviously, that’s never the case. We wouldn’t be arguing about the policy or issue unless we had feelings that it’s important.

Policy decisions involve feelings of honor, hope, care, compassion, fear, anger, and they should. So, let’s just set aside the muddled notion that a rational argument is one devoid of feeling. A person devoid of feeling wouldn’t be rational; they’d be dead. (Even sociopaths have feelings—they just don’t have feelings of compassion for others.) It wouldn’t be rational to ignore feelings completely; if I am miserable any time I’m near the beach, it would be rational to take those feelings into consideration before buying a house on the beach.

Another way of thinking about rationality is in terms of the form of the argument. Some people assume that a rational argument has data, and they may even have a strong desire to privilege some data over others (e.g., numbers). Defining a “rational” argument as “one that has statistics” has the same problems as the bunny named Fluffy—that it has a particular form (claim plus statistics) doesn’t necessarily mean the statistics are valid. They may be fabricated, misleading, or irrelevant. A lot of arguments in which people cite statistics have the correlation/causation problem—according to the wonderful website “Spurious Correlations,” automotive recalls for issues with the air bags strongly correlates to the popularity of the first name “Killian.” There is, by the way, no causal relationship between those two phenomena.

The idea that rationality is a trait that some people have is singularly pernicious and consistently anti-democratic. It’s often the consequence and cause of stereotypes about groups we don’t like: the dumbass “Southerner,” corrupt Irishman, skinflint Scot…and so on. In the 1830s it was common to argue that Catholics were incapable of independent reasoning (“rationality”) since they would just do whatever the Pope said, and so should be denied the vote. A similar argument was made about the Japanese Americans in 1942—that Shintoism meant they were incapable of independent thought and were therefore essentially traitors—an irrational argument on two grounds, including that not all Japanese Americans were Shintoist.

There have been moments when people assumed that “experts” are more rational about their own subject than non-experts (Walter Lippmann’s argument), a claim belied by “expert” witnesses whose testimony turned out to be tremendously biased and completely wrong (see especially Junk Science).

This isn’t to say that experts shouldn’t be treated with any credibility—this whole post is about rejecting a binary, and so I’m not arguing we should substitute another (there isn’t a binary between experts and non-experts, or reasonable v. unreasonable–both are more like a color wheel than a binary or continuum). It isn’t possible to reason without cognitive biases, but that isn’t to say all people (or all experts) are equally biased.

Because the rational/irrational binary is a…well…binary, if we value “rationality,” then we’ll attribute rationality to ourselves and our in-group (i.e., people like “us”), and “irrationality” to Them (people not like us).[6] We will consider it “irrational” to support an opposition candidate or policy, and therefore believe we shouldn’t listen to them. If They are irrational, then we should try to purify our media of Them; it’s even justified to silence them (since there is no merit to anything they have to say). We don’t have to take seriously anyone who disagrees with us.

Being “civil” about how completely irrational everyone is who disagrees with us doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got a public sphere in which we don’t listen to anyone who disagrees. It’s that assumption that every and anyone who disagrees with us is an irrational, immoral, doofus that causes the incivility.

The final way to think about rationality I want to mention is about rules. I’ll be clear: I’m on team rules. Sometimes. What matters is what the rules are—there are some ways of thinking about the rules that are just as harmful as any of the other problematic definitions above. For instance, rules of “civility” have often been used to silence important information, as when pro-slavery politicians voted for a gag rule about criticism of slavery–it was considered a violation of civility to criticize slavers. Neo-Aristotelians believed that a rational argument had to be derived syllogistically from a universally valid major premise; that was a kind of training not provided to women, so women were, by definition, incapable of a rational argument.

The “rules of logic” can be either usefully inclusive, or irrationally exclusive.

Scholars of argumentation still argue about what the rules should be (there’s an entire journal devoted to that topic), but there are a few points of agreement that will surprise the Logic Nazis out there.

Attacking someone’s character is not necessarily a fallacy, and attacking how they argue rarely is. Saying “You are lying” or “You are misrepresenting that source” is not ad hominem.[7] “You” statements do not constitute ad hominem. Ad hominem is a fallacy of relevance—it’s a way to change the subject. Saying that Trump is a bad candidate because he has a gold toilet is ad hominem (especially since he doesn’t and never has), but saying that he hasn’t put together a coherent healthcare plan in eight years is not. Saying that Harris is a bad candidate because she cackles is ad hominem; saying that she plans to reinstate a high capital gains tax is not.

Similarly, appeal to emotions (ad misericordiam) and appeal to expert opinion (ad verecundiam) are only fallacies if the appeals are irrelevant, such as that the cited person does not have relevant authority.

I’ll be clear: I’m on the side of thinking that we should not define rationality in terms of identity, affect, tone, kind of data, but on the relation of claims to one another and to the context of the disagreement. And I think those rules should be up for argument.

The set of rules I prefer isn’t particularly controversial—it’s pretty close to what anyone engaged in conflict resolution advocates. And, in my experience, it’s held up pretty well to historical cases (to my surprise). The shortest version of that set of rules is:
1) Whatever the standards of proof are (whether citation of religious texts, personal experience, myths, personal credibility, for instance, are allowed), they apply to all participants. That is, rules apply across groups. So, if I cite a relevant personal experience as evidence, then the relevant personal experiences of others are also evidence. If I condemn an out-group political figure or rhetor for shouting at babies, then I need to condemn in-group political figures and rhetors who shout at babies. I need to rely on evidence, and not signs.
2) People represent opposition arguments fairly and accurately, and people try to find the smartest opposition (no cherrypicking of outlier statements or rhetors, and no genus-species arguments about non in-group members).
3) Participants use data that can be falsified (not that they are falsified, but that it’s theoretically possible to imagine what data would contradict them, and therefore show the claims to be wrong).[8]
4) People are open to explaining their arguments and strive for reasonable relationships among claims, avoiding the major fallacies of form and relevance.

These are my preferences, largely the result of looking at train wrecks in public deliberation, but they’re open to argument. Whatever standards we have should enable judgment—they should help us identify the ways of arguing that tend to lead to train wrecks—while still being inclusive. There’s no point in setting standards only angels can meet, or restricting policy deliberation to a narrow set of experts. And the standards we set need to be based in the faith that there are often legitimate reasons for disagreement, that policy determination is complicated and uncertain, and that not every person who disagrees with us is a benighted irrational dupe.

[1] Actually, no one thinks that—it only takes a few examples before people start making exceptions. We all agree that some kinds of speech can be restricted in public and that private entities can greatly restrict speech; we just disagree about which restrictions should apply where. And we’re particularly protective of in-group speech.

[2] Yes, I’m being snarky.

[3] The rational/irrational binary is a relative newcomer to philosophy, running from Descartes and reaching its height among the logical positivists. Plato and Aristotle are often read as advocating it, as are various Enlightenment philosophers, but it’s worth remembering that Plato describes feelings—such as admiration of beauty or love—as ways of perceiving Truth. Aristotle’s logos v. alogos similarly doesn’t have the exclusion of affect or emotion that are part of our current rational/irrational binary.

[4] It’s theoretically possible that my overall argument is reasonable (there might be connections I could make if pressed, although none occur to me right now) but not in its current form.

[5] A lot of public arguments have exactly that form, and that logical flaw: “You should vote for Chester because 2 + 2 =4.” For reasons I’ve never entirely figured out, that sort of very unreasonable argument tends to be most persuasive when the “because clause” involves statistics. Even if the statistics are true—and sometimes they are—they’re often either irrelevant or only tangentially related to the main claim. As it happens, I don’t have a bunny, let alone one named Bunny.

[6] Sometimes people accept the idea of the binary, but flip the privilege, so they think “rationality” is bad, and “irrationality” is good—the Beats, Romanticists of various kinds. They tend to describe “rationality” as cold, number-driven, and passionless.

[7] Because I have a sick sense of humor, I think it’s hilarious when someone says, “You’re engaged in ad hominem because you’re attacking how I argue” since, by their definition, that statement is ad hominem. (It isn’t—neither is the original attack.) Or, sometimes they’ll say, “By engaging in ‘you’ statements, you’re engaged in ad hominem.” Notice the pronouns.

[8] And here the language needs to get a little precise. Many of my policy commitments come from my religious faith, and religious faith is, by definition, not falsifiable. So, my religious faith is not rational. My policy commitment to school lunches is grounded in Jesus’ commandment to care for the children, but the claims I make about free school lunches should be falsifiable—how many are provided, how many children need them, the consequences of providing lunches.

Another way to think about this “rule” is: are there any conditions under which you would change your mind about this? So, it’s whether there is any point in having a disagreement on that issue.





Primary v. Secondary Sources

image of down escalator with "Deliberating War" Patricia Roberts-Miller

Early in my career as a writing teacher, I had a confusing conversation with a student about sources—it taught me a lot about how people think about evidence and fairness. Imagine that the student was writing about whether little dogs are involved in squirrel conspiracy to get the red ball. This situation was a hypothetical example I used in order to help students think about structure, logic, and argumentation without triggering hot cognition by using a more controversial issue. The basic premise was that the squirrels were conspiring to get to my dogs’ red ball, something on which my two Great Danes agreed, but they disagreed as to whether little dogs were involved in the conspiracy (one of my dogs loved little dogs, and the other was afraid of them—which is pretty hilarious for a Great Dane).[1] So, call one group Hubertians and the other Chesterians.

The student was making an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, and cited a rabidly (so to speak) pro-Chester source. I was trying to explain that the assignment required that students use primary sources—if he wanted to make an argument about what Hubert supporters believed, he needed to cite a pro-Hubert source. He kept saying he was, because the article by a rabidly pro-Chester author in a rabidly pro-pro-Chester media outlet had a direct quote. Why would he need any other source? It was a quote, he kept saying.

It took me a long time to understand the misunderstanding. It’s a complicated one, on both our parts, and has a lot to do with how people think about evidence and proof. But here I want to pursue one part of the misunderstanding—about fairness.

Even if there is a quote, it isn’t necessarily what Hubert said, let alone meant. And here’s it’s necessary to say something about partisan sources.

As I’ve said many times, and in many places, the tendency to take our rich and nuanced world of policy options and divide them into a binary (or continuum) of identities is false, fallacious, proto-demagogic, and guarantees we can’t discuss policies reasonably. There are self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to the death penalty and abortion, self-identified “conservative” Christians who object to one but not the other, self-identified “progressive” Christians who object to both, others who object to one but not the other. Thinking in terms of identity means we end up arguing about who is really Christian, or really conservative, or really whatever. Thinking in terms of policy raises the possibility of a coalition on one issue even though we disagree about others. And that doesn’t require anyone converting to a new identity.

So, thinking about politics this way means trying to find different points of view on policies in order to understand the arguments. This is a long way of saying that looking at politics as policies means trying to get information from a variety of perspectives on a policy disagreement, not just two.[2]

And what I learned by doing that myself was that Hubert might or might not have actually said what the pro-Chester article quoted. If you read sources from multiple perspectives, you learn that misrepresenting the out-group happens in all sorts of ways in all sorts of sources.

Imagine that the quote in question is, “Bunnies are fluffy.” Hubert might not have said anything like that—it might have been something a pro-Hubert pundit said, or something a pro-Chester pundit simply invented. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies are not fluffy,” and the article edited the quote without even showing ellipses. Hubert might have said, “Bunnies have fur” which someone badly paraphrased, and that paraphrase got turned into a quote. Hubert might himself have been quoting someone before he went on to show he didn’t agree with it. He might have been engaged in a “some say” argument. He might have said it sarcastically. In context, it might have meant something completely different from what the pro-Chester article was representing. He might have said it when he was a puppy, and he’s since retracted it and advocated a different position.

In-group rhetors often misrepresent what out-group members have said, and what out-group members believe.[3] They don’t necessarily intend to do so—sometimes it’s just that they’re writing in a rush, and sometimes they themselves didn’t read the whole article, and sometimes they think it’s “more or less true.”

It isn’t just related to politics. I’ve seen article on non-political technical issues that made the same mistake—I’ve seen scholarly articles that misrepresent an argument I’ve made by taking it out of context; I’ve later discovered I did it to others.

And all of us have had it happen in personal situations—people take something we’ve said out of context, and thereby mislead others about us. And we don’t like it when it happens to us.

We’d like people to represent what we’ve said accurately, and we’d like others to check with us about what we’ve said or believed.

So, it’s a question of fairness. If we’d like others to ensure that we and our in-group are being accurately quoted, then we should make sure we’re doing that to others. It’s useful if we try to get outside of our informational bubble.


[1] The student wasn’t actually writing about this topic, but I think it’s useful for purposes of my argument here to stay away from hot cognition topics.

[2] Which is a basic flaw in my basic hypothetical scenario, but we tended to complicate it as time went on.

[3] “In-group” is not the group “in” power; it’s the group we’re in. So, for Chester supporters, Chesterians are the “in-group” and Hubertians are the “out-group.” “Hubertians” are the in-group for Hubert supporters, and Chesterians

What’s wrong with calls for “civility”

A dozen or so 19th century books on etiquette

Our current political and public discourse is in a bad way, and a lot of people are proposing that the solution is a re-embrace of “civility” as a cultural norm. The problem with these arguments is that its advocates use civility as a “God” term—meaning it isn’t very precisely defined, but is always good. That vague understanding combined with a passionate commitment means we can’t talk usefully about the times that civility was used to exclude, dismiss, and even criminalize valid criticism of people and institutions.

Civility, like its evil twin demagoguery, is sometimes defined in terms of intention, sometimes word choice, the feelings of the critic, the feelings of the rhetor, imagined norms, or whatever happens to be useful to condemn out-group rhetoric and praise in-group rhetoric. The shifting definition means that there is no such thing as out-group civility or in-group incivility (or if in-group incivility is admitted, it’s justified in some way).

I’m really tired of well-intentioned calls for “civility” that are most likely to have no impact other than increasing in-group self-righteousness.

Too many calls for civility don’t actually define civility (or they define it through a double negative—it’s not incivility); they never give examples of a civil argument with which they disagree, so “civility” and “incivility” are just terms to describe in- v. out-group rhetoric; their narratives of when politics became uncivil are unintentional exposures that they don’t really know much about the history of rhetoric or public discourse; they don’t acknowledge that a speech they insist was civil was, in its reception, seen as incivil; their notion of civility muddles reception (incivility hurts feelings), word choice (incivil rhetoric uses prohibited words, boosters), and argumentation (incivility misrepresents the situation, relies heavily on fallacies of relevance and deflection).

If you have an incoherent description of the ill, then it’s unlikely you’re going to find a good plan to solve that ill. If central to both your ill and your plan is a term you can’t define, you’re gerfucked.

Slavers whined about the incivility of their critics, and, in fact, passed a gag rule in an attempt to silence criticism of slavery in Congress. Critics of slavery in many states might be expelled, lynched, fined, their businesses ruined–southern civility did not extend to allowing criticism of slavery. As William Chafe long ago showed, civility worked against civil rights and in favor of segregation. When people argue for censoring textbooks, prohibiting discussions of genocide, slavery, segregation, and racism, they do so on the grounds of “civility.” We have to decide what we want to civility to do—strengthen or undermine current hierarchies? Enable genuine disagreement or make it more difficult?

There are a lot of ways of thinking about civility. Two are particularly important for our current situation: civility as rules of deference that vary depending on where the rhetor is in a hierarchy; or, civility as equal treatment regardless of any hierarchy of power or position. The hierarchical way of thinking about civility assumes that civility is deference (especially verbal), and that the civility rules should always be stricter for the person/group lower in the hierarchy. A professor calls students by their first name, but the students use title and last name for the professor. A boss can shout at an employee, but the employee can’t shout at the boss. There are rules of civility for the person higher in the hierarchy, but there are fewer of them, and the penalties are minor if they are violated.

Another way of thinking about civility is egalitarian. The rules of civility apply equally to all—it is just as much a violation of civility for a manager to shout at an employee as vice versa. Whatever exceptions are made for rules about shouting apply to all equally.

So, how should we define civility? I’d suggest it’s useful to think of civility as “politeness rules about who can say what to whom in what circumstances.” If we define it that way, then it isn’t necessarily good. It can be used for silencing dissent, justifying injustice, enabling violence. If we think of it that way, then it isn’t even something absent from our current situation. The problem isn’t that civility is absent; the problem is the implicit model of civility people are using: doubly hierarchical.

What we’re experiencing right now is a doubly hierarchical model of civility. In-group rules of civility are weaker than they used to be, but there are still hierarchies (and the more SDO a group is, the more the group has an internal hierarchical approach to civility). But the main hierarchy is in- v. out-group. The out-group is held to higher standards of civility than the in-group. Rhetoric with which we agree is held to lower standards of civility than rhetoric with which we disagree.

In a demagogic culture, standards of “civility” are determined by in- or out-group membership. Anything any in-group rhetor or group does is civil, and exactly the same rhetoric on the part of out-group rhetors is incivil. Rarely is that disparate standard acknowledged. When it is, people try to justify it on the grounds that we are in an existential war, a way of framing policy disagreements that is disastrous for democracy (the argument made here: the only book of which I am unashamably proud).

Unless we can separate standards of civility from in-group membership, then even if we do somehow manage to increase “civility,” it will simply make our current situation worse.









Mission Statements and War

red scare ad for Dewey

I’m reading Donald Stoker’s hilariously (and justifiably) grumpy Why America Loses Wars (2019). One of the points he makes is that American politicians and pundits have been enamored with “limited war” since Korea, without any precise definition of that term (or even of war more generally). He argues that “limited war” is defined (to the extent that it’s defined at all) by military means rather than political objective. Political objectives enable the determination of “win” conditions (e.g., we are fighting in order to gain control of this territory), whereas defining a war by military means (e.g., we will rely purely on bombing) doesn’t.

He says that no President since FDR who has advocated going to war has laid out clear “win” conditions, and that, without those conditions (without knowing the political objective), the military can’t determine effective strategies.

That’s an argument similar to one I make in Deliberating War—that the rhetoric for the war matters, since a necessary war should be rhetorically defensible, as far as need and objectives. If political figures and pundits can’t name a specific political objective, then they’re effectively advocating endless war. My interest is in public deliberation about policy, whereas Stoker’s is military deliberation about strategies, tactics, logistics, operations, and so on. But, what’s shared is the argument that vague objectives (or, more precisely, vague rhetoric about objectives) constrain deliberation.

Stoker argues that political figures from Truman to Obama have advocated war (which Stoker defines as combatants using violence to achieve a political aim, 15) while denying that it’s war and describing the objectives in vague terms or not describing them at all.

Stoker is arguing against the post-war fascination with “limited war”—a fascination that continues to trouble public discourse about military actions.

To be fair, LBJ was clear that the goal was a non-communist South Vietnam, and Truman was clear that the goal was getting North Korean troops out of the area below the 38th parallel. Granted, those are negative goals, and it took Truman a minute to decide that was the goal, but the pro-war rhetoric of Truman and LBJ doesn’t seem to me much vaguer than what Wilson set out as goals for WWI. So, I’m not convinced that the problem Stoker identifies is entirely new. But, I agree it’s a problem, and I agree it’s now the norm. With the exception of the First Iraq War (the Persian Gulf War), military actions have been advocated with arguments no more complicated than what can be a slogan on a bumper sticker. FDR had a lot of bumper sticker moments, but he also had specific goals—there were win identifiable conditions.[1] But, what is victory in a “war on terror”? What does it mean to “destroy” a non-state entity like IS? How do you know you’ve won? How do you know whether you’re winning?

So, here’s something I’ve been wondering about: Stoker’s quotes from various Presidents and what they’ve said in favor of war sound like mission statements. I’m not opposed to mission statements on principle (it isn’t my mission to reject mission statements) but they’re often sententious platitudes oriented toward signalling in-group loyalty. For years, there have been sites that generate a mission statements, and they don’t seem that different from the ones for which institutions paid consulting firms millions.[2] So, I’m not convinced that mission statements do much of anything. The process of deliberating a mission statement can be, but, since mission statements are often determined by websites or consulting firms, I’m not sure what they do other than signal. They don’t imply objectives (which are often equally vague and sententious), let alone policies.

But they have a rhetorical impact. In addition to signalling in-group loyalty, they’re just vague enough that it’s difficult to disagree with them. And, really, that’s how so many wars in the 21st century have been advocated. If a war is for “freedom,” how can you be against it? If it’s a war on drugs, how can you be in favor of drugs?

I found myself wondering: is there a relationship between the obsession with sententious mission statements and wars advocated via sententious mission statements?

I know there is no monocausal narrative that would be accurate, so I’m not wondering if the tendency toward mission statements is the cause for vague and vapid military mission statements. But I’m wondering if there’s something that has created a trend for sententious mission statements, and it’s affected all institutions equally (business, non-profits, academia, politics), or if there is some complicated causal relationship?

[1] I’m not certain this vagueness about win conditions is entirely new, but I can’t think of a war when they were as vague as they were with the Second or Third Iraq War, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, or the “wars” that Trump has asserted are already declared on the US, such as the trade war with China.

[2] I’m not dismissing or even criticizing the practice that Covey advocated—of taking some time every once in a while to ask yourself questions like: “WTF am I trying to do?” “What do I want to achieve?” I think that some corporate mission statements are meaningful, and the process of developing one can be useful.

People need to stop worrying about cursive

handwritten notes in cursive

When we have taken time and trouble to learn something, we tend to value it—simply because it was a PITA to learn. So, when something gets taken out of the K-12 curriculum, people of a certain generation can have a gleeful “kids these days” moment. When I was young, memorizing the state capitols was dropped from the curriculum in a lot of places, and I remember hearing people bemoan the debacle that had come to be known as education. As it happens, when I’m bored, I will sometimes try to write the states in alphabetical order. If I’m really bored, I’ll then try to identify each state’s capitol. I usually fail. My life would be no worse had I not been taught to memorize the capitols.

[ETA, since, apparently, I was unclear on this point: I don’t remember the state capitols because, between fourth grade and until I was an adult in boring meetings, it was never a skill I needed. Something that you’re forced to learn that you then never or rarely learn is something you forget. That some people in some very specific fields might find that knowledge useful doesn’t mean that it should be a required part of K-12 curriculum.]

As it happens, I write in cursive a lot. It is useful for taking notes quickly, although nowhere near as useful as shorthand—which I was never taught. If we’re concerned about people being able to write quickly, then we should teach shorthand.

When I was teaching, I had some students who wrote exams in cursive, but very few It’s faster to write an exam in cursive, but not necessarily a good choice. Even I think cursive is harder to read, and rhetorically it’s a poor choice to irritate a grader by writing in a way that takes extra time to decipher.

A lot of students wrote in what amounts to italics, and that made a lot of sense (sloped and somewhat looped, but without special characters for letters like capital Q). It’s as fast as cursive, but doesn’t take any particular training to write or read.

The other argument I hear for taking class time to teach cursive is that people won’t be able to read historical documents. This argument puzzles me. Printed documents tended to be in block letters from the beginning of the 19th century. Books were in block letters long before that. Some documents are in cursive (especially proclamations), but not always the same cursive.

I read a fair number of historical documents, and I do get a thrill when I’m looking at an original version of something like the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. But it’s that it’s the thing, not that it’s in cursive. I’m not sure that a person understands the document any better if they read it in cursive rather than block letters.

And, in fact, what makes reading those documents difficult isn’t the cursive, but first and foremost the content. The historical context, references, genre. The language is often archaic, and usually invokes legal or philosophical concepts that are unfamiliar. To the extent that deciphering them is hard, it isn’t because they’re in cursive, but usually that the font is serif, and the kerning is confusing. And they aren’t always in cursive. For instance, knowing cursive doesn’t help someone read the Rhode Island charter.

Rhode Island Charter in very difficult font
The Rhode Island Royal Charter



So, really, people need to stop worrying about not teaching cursive. What we should really be getting upset about is that students aren’t being taught geology, sex ed, history, argumentation. I don’t care if it’s in cursive or not.

Deliberating War is published!

image of down escalator with "Deliberating War" Patricia Roberts-Miller

The e-book version of Deliberating War is available from Springer!

“Drawing on a rich collection of examples from ancient Greece to the present day, Patricia Roberts-Miller ably demonstrates the failure of political leaders to engage in deliberation when choosing to undertake, continue, or escalate war. Instead, they reframe the situation, deflect the real issues, demonize the enemy, and make themselves the victim, all to convince themselves that war already has been forced upon them and they have no choice. Sometimes wars are justified, but political leaders, specialists, and citizens will all benefit from this accessible work that shows what can happen when deliberation is an essential feature of the rhetoric of war.” (David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, Author of “Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and the Presidency: The Speech of March 31, 1968”)

“Deliberating War is a thorough, insightful, and well-written discussion of how people in the Western tradition deliberate about war and treat deliberation as war. In discussing various kinds of war, and various kinds of deliberating about war, Roberts-Miller illuminates how and why some of these are more dangerous than others. This book is a must-read for scholars in history, political science, and communication who care about war, democracy, and the relationships between them.” (Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University)

“Deliberating War takes rhetoric’s relationship to war out of the realm of meaningless metaphor and into the realm of real, critical, potentially cataclysmic importance. For millennia, debates about war have translated to the battlefield and events on the battlefield have translated into debates about who we are, what we value, and how we should act towards one another. Given how high the stakes are, Roberts-Miller demands that readers grapple with how politicians use rhetoric to drag people to war. But politicians don’t act alone, so she also demands that everyone learn to choose their words more wisely in matters of war, politics, and life.” (Ryan Skinnell, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, San José State University)

“Patricia Roberts-Miller’s Deliberating War is a probing study of the rhetorical dynamics that feed on political factionalism to displace deliberation and transform the trope of “politics as war” into real war. It is a sustained and close study of multiple cases of armed conflict that cross historical periods and involve an assortment of adversaries. Various rhetorical practices are insightfully analyzed for how they obstruct democratic deliberation, including how the call to arms is strategically framed, which fallacies typically are deployed, which issues are obscured and left unaddressed, and how the dynamics of the discourse can even carry adversaries into a war they wanted to avoid. Her critique of appeasement rhetoric is particularly acute, as is the point she makes about the militarization of politics in general, which reduces the spectrum of normal policy disagreements to political combat. This is an important work of scholarship on the consequences of literalizing the metaphor of war.” (Robert L. Ivie, Professor Emeritus in English (Rhetoric) & American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington)

“In this incisive and necessary book, Patricia Roberts-Miller skillfully interrogates the political factors in the decisions made by nations to go to war and the critical lack of deliberation when making those decisions. Her analysis captures the enormity and the tragedy of governments choosing war without losing the humanity of those who must carry out those decisions. In addition to political rhetoric scholars, this book should be required reading within the halls of the U.S. Congress, inside the walls of the Pentagon, and in the classrooms of military academies and war colleges.” (Derek G. Handley, Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (CDR, U.S. Navy Retired))

[RSA talk III] Under which conditions is democratic speech (im)possible?

books

We were asked to do an epideictic speech, and one kind of epideictic is psogos: the blaming or condemnatory speech. And I want to condemn the biased/objective binary on the grounds it is necessarily and inherently authoritarian, and thereby makes democratic speech impossible.

The term “authoritarian” is vexed, so I’m going to use an old-school definition: an authoritarian system aspires to univocality, uniformity, asymmetric communication, and reified social policies, values, and relations. It assumes that the nation as a whole should be a rigid and ontologically grounded hierarchy of power and privilege, in which the people at the top decide for those below them; and all institutions within that nation are similarly constructed—the police, families, governments.

Authoritarianism presumes that the hierarchy is legitimate if and only if the people in positions of power are ones who either have direct and unmediated access to the truth (i.e., they are not “biased”), or who are following the dicta of those who do. Because of that direct access, good leaders can invent or enact the correct policy agenda in all realms. So, hidden is the presumption that there is no such thing as significant legitimate disagreement, and that, in every disagreement, there is a single “right” answer that good people can perceive.

A hierarchy’s use of violence, coercion, propaganda, exclusion, and extermination is seen as legitimate as long those actions are in service of preserving the purity of the community, rewarding and empowering good people (i.e., in-group), coercion or extermination of bad people (i.e., out-group); and all in service of forcing people to do and believe the narrow range of actions and beliefs that are “right.”

And it’s that phrase—narrow range of actions and beliefs that are right–that makes it clear how this hierarchy is not just one of power; it is epistemological, and the solution to every problem is to give unlimited power to who know what is “right”—that is, those who are not biased.

“Biased” sources and people are presumed to be ones that view the world from a narrow perspective; so, necessarily associated with the biased/objective false binary is the equally false binary of particular/universal.

As many others have pointed out, we don’t undermine authoritarianism by saying that we’re all biased, since that doesn’t end the hierarchy; it just makes it one of open and unconstrained violence. We end up with some version of Social Darwinism. The mistake is the term “biased.” It’s more useful to think in terms of “biases” (that is, cognitive biases) and perspectives, and to try to correct for the former and celebrate the latter.

[RSA talk] “Obscured Ends and Amoral Means: The Flickering Moralism of Machiavellian Approaches to Rhetoric”

chart showing four RVN governments between November of 1963 and September of 1964

This paper came out of my being puzzled by a paradox I kept running across in the various deliberative train wrecks I study—the intermittent moralism of Machiavellian approaches to public policy disagreements. “Machiavellianism,” only orthogonally related to what Machiavelli actually said, claims to treat means as morally neutral, often in service of some version of power politics or neo-Social Darwinism. But this amoralizing of means is both rhetorical and flickering—American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, was advocated on the grounds of moral necessity and amoral power politics, sometimes in the same document.

What I’ll pursue in this paper are some of the somewhat paradoxical rhetorical consequences of this disingenuous framing of means as amoral.

I’ll focus on US decision-making regarding Vietnam in August of 1964. August of 1964 is one of several moments of escalation, with attention generally on LBJ’s decision to lie in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed on August 7. But I’m more interested in the chaotic debacle that was General Nguyễn Khánh’s not-quite month as Chief of State. I’ll start by discussing the objectives (ends) at the time, the necessary conditions for success, the actual conditions (as described by US decision-makers), the means they chose, and finish with how Machiavellianism played into it.

Ends In an August 10 “situation report,” Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently appointed US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam said that the “Communist strategy” was not
“To attempt to defeat the superior Republic of Vietnam military forces in the field or to seize and conquer territory by military means. Instead, it is their announced intention to harass, erode and terrorize the population into a state of such demoralization that a political settlement favorable to the Communists will ensue.” (#306, 657).
Robert McNamara would later identify policies in 1964 as oriented toward “the objective of destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and its ability to continue to supply the Vietcong” (In Retrospect 152). In an important –strategy setting—document in August of 1964, McGeorge Bundy said we must “make it clear both to the Communists and to South Vietnam that military pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives [….] leaving no doubts in South Vietnam of our resolve” (#313, 675). By persuading “the Communists” that the US would not give up Vietnam, it was hoped that “the Communists” could be persuaded that a divided Vietnam—much like Korea—was the best deal they could get, and therefore take it.

Necessary Conditions To achieve those ends—a Hanoi willing to agree to a divided Vietnam—certain conditions had to exist. RVN had to be an effective and largely victorious force, capable of exterminating the insurgency without alienating the populace. The “pacification” program was crucial for achieving several of the conditions—denying communist support for the Viet Cong, maintaining the morale of the populace, achieving military victories—and it depended on “clearing” certain areas of Viet Cong agents and supporters. South Vietnam had to have a competent, trusted, and stable government. The South Vietnamese people needed to support that government, and support the war (which could only happen were the first condition met). The US had to signal willingness to throw limitless resources at the conflict. These various conditions tended to be characterized as issues of “morale” (or its opposite—“defeatism”) in official documents, documents that admitted none of those conditions were present.

Actual Conditions In that August 10 “situation report,” Taylor acknowledged that the South Vietnamese military was weak, while trying to put a positive spin on it: “In the view of US advisors, more than 90 percent of the battalions of the army are at least marginally effective.” (#306; 661). The pacification program was “proving to be a most difficult one primarily because of the inefficiency of the ministries, their ineptitude in planning and their general lack of spirit of team play” (Taylor 659). In a memo ten days later, Taylor said, “that the present in-country pacification plan is not enough in itself to maintain national morale or to offer reasonable hope of eventual success.” But the worst was the government. The US had endorsed the November 1963 coup on the grounds that Diem was corrupt, incompetent, and tremendously unpopular. He had collaborated with the Japanese (unlike Ho Chi Minh, who fought them), was brutally persecuting Buddhists, and may have been considering a peace treaty with Ho. The hope was that replacing Diem would increase Vietnamese commitment to the war by putting in place a more popular, competent, and bellicose government. It didn’t work (as can be seen in the chart at the top.

Taylor said
The most important and most intractable internal problem of South Vietnam in meeting the Viet Cong threat is the political structure at the national level. The best thing that can be said about the present Khanh government is that it has lasted six months and has about a 50-50 chance of lasting out the year [….] It is an ineffective government beset by inexperienced ministers who are also jealous and suspicious of each other [….] However, there is no one in sight who could do better than Khanh in the face of the many difficulties which would face any head of government [….] The attitude of the people toward the Khanh government, mostly confused and apathetic since its inception, is only slightly more favorable than a few months ago. Despite considerable efforts, Khanh has not succeeded in building any substantial body of popular support. (657-658).

August 13, 1964, McGeorge Bundy presented a plan called “Next Steps in Southeast Asia, “a highly important document” (Logevall 217). McNamara would later say that “the memo and its derivatives became the focus of our attention and acrimonious debate for the next five months” (In Retrospect 151). The first sentence of the section, “Essential Elements in the Situation” is “South Vietnam is not going well” (#313, 674).

Taylor responded to Bundy’s “Next Courses of Action” (which he endorsed that one assumption behind Bundy’s proposal (which he believed to be correct) is:
The first and most important objective is to gain time for the Khanh Government to develop a certain stability and to give some firm evidence of viability [….] A second objective in this period is the maintenance of morale in South Viet Nam, particularly within the Khanh Government [….] he must stabilize his government and make some progress in cleaning up his own operational backyard. (690)

The Course of Action that Bundy’s memo advocates, and Taylor endorses, “relies heavily upon the durability of the Khanh Government. It assumes that there is little danger of its collapse without notice or of its replacement by a weaker or more unreliable successor” (692). Ten days later, worried about a coup, Khanh himself would resign and skedaddle to Dalat. He had to be coerced to come back and form a triumvirate. There were no illusions about the instability and unpopularity of the government, and yet the US was pursuing a plan that, as was repeatedly insisted, depended upon a stable and popular government, which US officials knew they didn’t have. They did, however, have one that wouldn’t negotiate with Hanoi.

The Means
One of the “means” necessary for success was preventing peace talks: “We must continue to oppose any Vietnam conference” (#313). After listing the various means the US should take, Bundy says,
These actions are not in themselves a truly coherent program of strong enough pressure either to bring Hanoi around or to sustain a pressure posture into some kind of discussion. Hence, we should continue absolutely opposed to any conference. (#313; 678).

That this was the means was not publicly admitted. But the conservative and “realist” political scientist Hans Morgenthau had figured that out, snarkily noting in an article in New Leader in June of 1964:
Our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Viet Cong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon. What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh’s government and of its military forces (44).
Thus, American Vietnam policy in 1964 was to prevent negotiations with Hanoi until the morale, bellicosity, and military effectiveness of the South Vietnamese was such that Hanoi (and China) would believe that a divided nation was the best they could possibly get: “We need to apply “a combination of military pressure and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out” (#313). The “Next Course” also advocated dropping leaflets, increased training of RVN forces, mining of the Haiphong harbor, “tit-for-tat” actions, only acknowledging successful military actions. Taylor said, “The US Mission has recognized in its information and psychological programs the need to present the Khanh government in its most favorable light at home and abroad, particularly in the United States” (# 306 660).

What I hope is striking to you is that the means were profoundly rhetorical; they were about persuasion—persuading the North Vietnamese they couldn’t win, and the South Vietnamese that they could. South Vietnamese needed to be persuaded to support the war, and both the South Vietnamese and Americans needed to be persuaded to have faith in the Khanh government—its stability, competence, and resolve. But even the American officials themselves weren’t persuaded of any of those things. So, the Machiavellianism came to be the approach to public deliberations—critics of American policy in Vietnam had to be smeared, discredited, and deflected. Preventing reasonable discussion of Vietnam policy itself became a means necessary for the ends.

Machiavellianism
I mentioned earlier that McNamara said the US objective was destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and ability to support the Vietcong. He said, “Neither then nor later did the chiefs fully assess the probability of achieving these objectives, how long it might take, or what it would cost in lives lost, resources expended, and risks incurred” (152).

The amoralizing of means didn’t mean they were actually neutral—there is nothing morally neutral about napalm—it just meant that people could deflect or even demonize public discourse that criticized the ends or means. The ends (and therefore the morality of the means) are themselves outside the realm of argument—they’re simultaneously obscured and circular (since the postulated morality of the ends or intentions justifies being dishonest about what the ends or intentions actually are). We can’t argue reasonably about the ends—because they’re postulated as moral—and we can’t argue at all about the morality of the means. Thus, amoralizing policies (the means) necessarily results in the demoralizing and depoliticizing of public discourse. The point I’m makingis that US officials (like many others) were Machiavellian not just in terms of their use of napalm, but their approach to public discourse. And my crank theory is that one necessarily leads to the other.

Laws of history

"A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue."

A lot of people are sharing this post, and it’s wrong. Students were tremendously supportive of Nazis. (I think they were also supportive of Mussolini and Franco, but I haven’t read much about them, so I might be wrong.)

More important, this post appeals to the fantasy that complicated political situations are actually simple. It says they’re really a binary between a group with perfect insight and the right understanding, and a ruling class that is a Disney villain. That way of thinking about politics shuts down our ability to argue with one another reasonably about policy options. As it is intended to do.

There are evil groups and evil policies, but, if I were going to say that there is a good law of history it would be: no framing of any major policy conflict as binary of two groups (one right and the other evil) has ever been just, accurate, useful, or helpful.

I’m open to counter-examples, but, since thinking about this framing of politics has been something I’ve been studying for forty years, I’m pretty confident that there isn’t one.

So, if you think you know of a time when a major policy issue was a binary between two sides–of two groups (one right and the other evil) –I’d love to hear about it.