As I’ve said elsewhere, demagoguery breaks a complicated issue with an array of policy options and explanations into two: one is narrowly defined, and everything else is the other. So, for the pro-GOP demagogic sphere, if you don’t support the current GOP, then you’re “liberal” which is, incoherently enough, the same as communist. (When I’m grumpy, I try to get the people who think democratic socialist, progressive, communist, and liberal are the same to explain Weimar Germany. They never do.) There are other demagogic enclaves out there, in which people insist you either completely endorse their agenda or you’re [whatever the extreme Other is], and they irritate me just as much, but they aren’t relevant to this post. So, I’ll stick with listing articles from non-“liberal” sources on the issue of Biden’s responsibility.
I have to admit that I didn’t find a smart, sourced argument that it’s all Biden’s fault. The best argument I found for blaming Biden was neither smart nor sourced, but it was better than a lot of others that were just argle bargle. And, really, that would be a hard argument to make. It’s useful to point out that gas prices have risen worldwide, and Biden is not actually President of the world. So, there’s no reasonable narrative that says it’s him alone. How would he make prices rise in Europe? There must be something else…it’ll come to me. Starts with a U, maybe, or supply issues?
Anyway, I’ve put these together so that, if you find yourself arguing with someone who says it’s all Biden, you can provide sources they’ll have a harder time deflecting.
So, let’s start with the notoriously liberal Journal of Petroleum Technology. It’s a complicated argument, and it’s really about natural gas. I will quote this (it’s important for something later): “A year ago, President Joe Biden and others were focused on priorities such as ending drilling on federally owned land. Now, the federal government is planning a lease sale for onshore drilling rights.”
There are several in Wall Street Journal. “Energy markets were already tight as the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and gasoline prices have climbed recently as traders, shippers and financiers have shunned supplies of oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency.” There’s also this article of theirs (well worth a read) : Pull quotes:
“Oil prices, already turbocharged by a rebounding economy after a pandemic-induced slowdown, were pushed even higher when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulled some three million barrels of Russian oil a day from global supplies.” “Gasoline prices have hit records as petroleum refiners that had cut back output as the economy slowed still haven’t ramped back up to pre-pandemic levels. The market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day. Events in Ukraine caused oil prices to skyrocket, pouring gasoline on what was already a smoldering fire. Brent crude topped $130 a barrel in early March, and gasoline prices recently hit a record $4.331 a gallon, putting them up more than 15% from where they stood a month earlier, according to AAA. Prices have fallen slightly from that record, hitting $4.215 a gallon on Friday, despite the continuing loss of Russian oil.”
And what has Biden done? According to the notoriously liberal WSJ:
“President Biden has said his administration would release millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of 727 million barrels. However, experts say that is unlikely to move the needle very much on the price of gasoline. Some state and federal officials are also weighing state and federal gas-tax decreases to ease consumers’ pain at the pump. Business groups are pushing back on such moves, saying they could jeopardize infrastructure improvements. The Biden administration also has held talks, or said it plans to do so, with major oil producing countries about potentially boosting production. Talks with Venezuela, the oil industry of which the U.S. sanctioned in 2019, met opposition from Republicans, as well as some Democrats. Some Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax, which amounts to 18 cents a gallon, for the rest of 2022.”
The free-market Economist doesn’t mention Biden. There’s one article from September that predicts problems, even without the war. More recent articles focus on Russia, such as this one.
The only one that tried to argue it is Biden is Heritage , which, seriously, has gone downhill. Not because I disagree with them (I disagree with all the sources I list) but because they stopped providing sources, and are dipping deep into just lying. This page, for instance, doesn’t cite any source for its claim. Its argument is that Biden is responsible for the high prices because he won’t “use all the energy sources we have”—in other words, there are high prices that even they say aren’t his fault. He’s to blame because he isn’t doing what would lower the prices he didn’t cause.
What should he do? Something that won’t immediately lower prices, and is unwise on other grounds.
This is argument by counter-factual, not necessarily a bad argument. But in this case, it is a bad argument, but bad faith. It engages in straw man, motivism, binary thinking, and non sequitur. The argument is: “Even now, with Americans struggling, they want to make it more expensive and difficult to explore for and produce oil, construct and operate pipelines, and access financing and investment. And that means they have to manipulate customer demand by discouraging gasoline use in the long run.”
For one thing, as mentioned above, Biden has eased up on drilling on public lands. What Biden has done is clearly explained in the WSJ article linked above and here. More important, allowing the exploration and production of oil on public lands, forcing people to accept pipelines, and…I don’t even know what the financing argument is—the article doesn’t say…will not result in an increase in oil for several years. So, this isn’t a solution for gas prices now. The whole drill now, drill everywhere argument is the equivalent of saying that we should spend every penny we have if someone in the family loses a job, which is risky at best. In any case, the point is that even the most anti-Biden argument implicitly admits it isn’t Biden, and he can’t solve it immediately. And that’s the best they’ve got. [1]
[1] They also like a heavily-edited Fox interview. Since they cut off what Granholm thinks is hilarious, I’m going to go with she made a reasonable argument.
This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.
One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.
My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.
Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).
I was enraged.
At the author.
Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.
I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.
What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.
Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.
What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.
My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.
This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.
We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.
Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.
But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.
Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war. In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.
And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.
I mentioned in another post my discomfort with a professor who was engaged in classic in-group/out-group deflection about Catholic actions. A Catholic, he was trying to show that Catholicism isn’t that bad, isn’t actually responsible for all sorts of actions in which Catholics engaged, and is better than Protestantism. When Catholic secular leaders behaved badly, then they didn’t really count; only official doctrine mattered. When doctrine wasn’t great, and it was Catholic officials who were behaving badly, then only the statements of the Pope counted. When the Pope was the problem, then individuals were the ones who really represented Catholicism. We all do that.
We are drawn to believe that in-group membership both guarantees and signifies our goodness because, no matter how bad we are, we are better than That Out-group. We do so because we like to believe that we’re good people, and we also like the certainty that comes with believing that our in-group membership guarantees that we’re good. Unfortunately, that desire for certainty about our goodness often means we end up giving ourselves and our in-group moral license.
When we are committed to believing that we are good because we are in-group, then we engage in all sorts of “no true Scotsman” and dissociation in order to deflect in-group behavior we don’t want to acknowledge. And this often applies to our own history. But, if we lie about our own history, we can’t learn from it.
Americans lie a lot about slavery, and especially American Protestants. We don’t like to hear that people like us found themselves fully committed to terrible things, like slavery, segregation, genocide, and so on. We tell ourselves that they fully and completely committed to the wrong in-group. But they fully and completely committed to our in-group.
And, in fact, some Catholics still believe the lie (I recently ran across a person commenting that Jews try to steal consecrated hosts).
When we find the nuances, uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities of policy argumentation paralyzing, we resort to believing that all we have to do is belong to the good group. We believe that, were everyone in this good group, we would never have injustice, cruelty, bad policies, crime, genocide.
That is so very, very comforting. It’s also a lie.
There is no group that is and has always been right. And so, when confronted with times that members of our good group (our in-group) have done extraordinarily terrible things, we find reasons they weren’t really in-group.
But, if we really want to make good decisions, we need to acknowledge that our group has done terrible things, and then we would have to acknowledge that making good decisions isn’t a question of being in the right group. We can’t be guaranteed that we’re making just decisions just because we’re endorsing the policy of our in-group. We actually have to deliberate those policies, and that means treating the arguments of other groups as we want them to treat our arguments.
So, for Christians, it means that being Christian—even being fully committed to a personal relationship with Christ–doesn’t guarantee we’re endorsing the right policies and doing the right things. But treating others as we want to be treated—that is, refusing to give ourselves and our in-group members moral license–just might get us pretty far in terms of following Christ.
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html
Imagine that someone was going around talking trash about you, claiming that you’d said all sorts of repellent things, and that you were part of a despicable group with villainous goals. Imagine that they persuaded people you were awful by claiming you’d said things you’d never said, rarely quoting you directly (and if they did, it was completely misrepresenting what you’d said, out of context or worse), and generally making a set of accusations people could know were wrong if they just talked to you, and listened to what you had to say. But they persuaded people, who were now going around repeating all those things without ever talking to you directly. And they were persuading people who weren’t bothering to listen to you.
You’d be furious at being treated that way. Everyone would.
Here’s the important point. If you’re a Christian, and you’d be furious if you were treated that way, then you’d feel obligated not to do that to others. Jesus said, very clearly, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Wanting people to listen to you directly before condemning you means Christians should listen to others directly before condemning them. To do otherwise is to reject what Jesus very clearly said.
Thus, if people who claimed to be Christian treated the “CRT” controversy the way they want to be treated, they wouldn’t repeat the anti-CRT rhetoric without first reading CRT, the material people are quoting that is supposedly CRT, arguments that the anti-CRT rhetoric is wrong and misleading. They wouldn’t rely on second- or third-hand versions of the what K-12 teachers are doing, what anti-racist pedagogy is, or even what CRT is.
When I point this out to people who say they’re Christian, I tend to get one of four reactions. I’ll talk about two.
Sometimes people say that they don’t need to read CRT, or its defenses—they know it’s bad because they read descriptions of it that make it clear that it’s terrible. They know it’s bad because trusted sources (i.e., “in-group”) tell them it is. Is that how they’d want to be treated—do they think it’s fine if people believed terrible things about them just because “trusted” sources say they’re terrible? Of course not.
Do Christians think it’s fine if critics of Christianity mis-quote Christians, misrepresent Christianity, nut-pick, cherry-pick, lump all Christians into one group as represented by the most marginal versions, engage in argument by association? If we think it’s wrong for others to do that to us, then it’s wrong for us to do that to others.
Do we think it’s fine if people repeat the arguments in articles, books, videos, speeches, and so on that engage in all those dodgy and fallacious attacks on Christianity? In other words, are we fine with what Richard Dawkins and his loyal repeaters do? They’re relying on “trusted” (i.e. “in-group”) sources. If that’s wrong when it’s done to us, then it’s wrong when we do it to others.
This post is only partly about Hitler; it’s really about Putin, and it’s mostly about us.[1]
I write about train wrecks in public deliberation, so it was just a question of time till I got around to the question of appeasing Hitler. That UK politicians chose to appease Hitler (and the US decided to do nothing) is not just a famously bad decision, but a consequential one. Jeffrey Record says it nicely:
No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of World War II. The great lesson drawn from appeasement—namely, that capitulating to the demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships simply makes inevitable a later, larger war on less favorable terms—has informed most major U.S. uses of force since the surrender of Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. From the Truman’s Administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea to the George W. Bush’s administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, presidents repeatedly have relied on the Munich analogy to determine what to do in a perceived security crisis. They have also employed that analogy as a tool for mobilizing public opinion for military action. (1)
When I started researching the issue, I approached it with the popular story about what happened. That is, Hitler was obviously a genocidal aggressor who couldn’t possibly be prevented from trying to be hegemon of all Europe—he had laid all that out in Mein Kampf, after all. Leaders who chose to appease him were wishful thinkers who deluded themselves; other countries should have responded aggressively much earlier, at the remilitarization of the Rhineland, ideally, or, at least, when he was threatening war with Czechoslovakia over what he called “the Sudetenland.”
Turns out it’s way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. To be clear, I still think various countries made terrible decisions regarding Hitler and Germany, but the leaders were constrained by voters. It was voters who got it wrong. I’ll get to that at the end.
Hitler took over from the Weimar democracy, which had its problems. It also had its critics. It liberalized laws about sexuality and gender identity, reduced the presence of religious proselytizing in public schools, opened up opportunities for women, included a lot of a demonized group in its power (Jews), relied on democratic processes that included Marxists and democratic socialists, had a reduced military, encouraged avant garde art.
Here’s what is generally left out of popular narratives about WWII. Conservatives in all the countries that went to war against Nazis hated everything the Weimar Republic had done, including its tolerance of Jews, and so many didn’t think the Nazis were all that wrong–better than the USSR, and better than Weimar. Popular between-the-wars UK literature is filled with anti-semitic and anti-Slav rhetoric. Even during the war, a US anti-Nazi pamphlet that condemned Nazi racial ideology was severely criticized because it was attacking the “science” used to defend US segregation. As late as 1967 (in the lower court rulings on Loving v. Virginia) theories of race integral to Nazism were cited as authorities.
Hitler had a lot of apologists among conservatives, including the owner of the very popular Daily Mail in the UK. And, as George Orwell describes in the book that conservatives who quote him never read (haha, they never read anything he wrote–they just quote him), many UK media were knee-jerk anti-communist in their coverage of events—so knee-jerk anti-communist that they failed to distinguish between various kinds of leftist movements. So, a lot of UK media liked what Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were doing.
Hitler’s first move after being granted dictatorship powers in 1933 (which he did with no particular outrage on the part of major media in other countries, including the US) was to criminalize membership in unions, the democratic socialist party, the communist party, or any other party that advocated democratic deliberation. His second act was to kill all the socialists in the Nazis, which, weirdly enough, was used by his defenders as proof that he was more moderate than they. And from that point on it’s hard to get things in chronological order. The important point, thought, is that by 1939, when there were still major media and figures defending him, he had criminalized not just dissent but any criticism of him, begun engaging in mass killing, criminalized various identities, begun a process of fleecing emigrants, openly reduced Jews to constant humiliation and abuse, put into law the racialization of Germany. He had also remilitarized the Rhineland, incorporated the Saar, violently appropriated Austria, and then appropriated the “German” part of Czechoslovakia. He then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, and he still had defenders.
Then, when he invaded Poland, some (not all) said, oh, wait, he’s a bad guy. So, why didn’t they do anything earlier? Because his rhetoric was pretty clever.
He had two kinds of rhetoric. For his internal audience, it was exactly what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke described in 1939. Unification through a common enemy, scapegoating/projection, rebirth, bastardization of religious forms of thought, toxic masculinity (not Burke’s term, of course—he talks about the feminization of the masses). All of this was about the rebirth of Germany into a “strong” nation set on domination of weak groups. But he also always made a point of the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, especially the guilt clause.
His external rhetoric had a lot of overlap with that. For instance, a lot of UK media—specifically “conservative”—endorsed and openly admired Hitler’s ‘strong man’ crushing of liberal democratic practices and leftist policies, since they hated those policies and practices. They were also anti-Semitic, anti-Slav, and believed in the Aryan bullshit behind Nazi policies, as were many people in the US. In both the UK and US, many major political figures were sympathetic to thinking of Jews as “a problem” who should be denied immigration.
To go back to the UK, these “conservative” media were thereby writing approvingly of very new practices, ones that traditional conservative voices (such as Edmund Burke) would have found horrifying. “Conservatives” were now writing approvingly of what had until recently been seen as the enemy of the UK. In other words, people often claim to be “conservative” when all they’re conserving in their loyalty to their party, and it has nothing to do with conserving principles.
Here’s the part I didn’t know about appeasement. Many people, all over the political spectrum, were willing to say that the Versailles Treaty was unjust. Hitler’s foreign policy was defended through the rhetoric of the Versailles Treaty, which emphasized self-determination. He didn’t believe in self-determination, of course, but he could use that rhetoric. And he did.
And, as scholars have argued, his use of that rhetoric made it hard for advocates of the treaty to say he was wrong in what he was doing. They certainly couldn’t go to war over it, since the Great War, as it was called, was almost unanimously understood everywhere other than Germany as a colossal mistake. To go to war over the remilitarization of the Rhineland would have seemed to most UK voters a bizarre compulsion to repeat the errors of 1914, when a minor political issue could have been resolved without war.
Hitler adopted the rhetoric that his enemies had recently used—the rhetoric of self-determination—to scoop up territories. He claimed that “the people” of a region wanted Germany to invade because they were being oppressed by [Jews/liberals/Slavs], and so his appropriation was actually liberation. When it came to Poland, he couldn’t plausibly argue that, so he shifted his rhetoric to self-defense—Poland, France, and the UK were intent on attacking Germany (he claimed they had), and so all Germany was doing was justifiable self-defense.
And that’s what Putin did. He adopted the rhetoric his enemies had used, which made it hard for them to call him out.
The rhetoric for a preventive war against Iraq—an unprecedented kind of war for the US—was that it was preventive self-defense. In fact, it was motivated by the desire to make Iraq a reliable ally in US foreign policy.
The rhetoric was that Iraq was supporting a global war against the US in the form of Al Qaida (Bush later admitted they knew it wasn’t), the site of anti-American terrorism, and various other lies. The Bush Administration, and its fanatically supportive media, told a lot of lies, that they knew were lies, because they wanted to put in place a government that would be an supportive of US policy or because they loyally and irrationally supported whatever a GOP President did. I happen to think Bush meant well. I think he believed a very simplistic version of the extremely controversial (and circular) “democratic peace” model, one he didn’t think most Americans would find compelling enough for war, and he so he lied to get what he thought was a good outcome.
The problem is that rhetoric has its own consequences, regardless of intention. By arguing that the US was justified in invading Iraq and putting in a new leader because 1) that state was fostering terrorism, 2) part of an anti-US conspiracy, and 3) presented an existential threat to the US, Bush legitimated a certain set of arguments (what rhetoricians call “topoi”). Just as the Versailles Treaty was grounded in topoi of self-determination, the Iraq invasion was grounded in topoi about terrorism and existential threat. There was a long history of that kind of rhetoric in the Cold War, especially about crushing any kind of political movements in the areas that the US considered its sphere of influence, such as Nicaragua, that might threaten US control. Throughout the Cold War, the US persistently crushed local popular movements of self-determination on the grounds of “sphere of influence”–we would not let any government exist in those areas if it wasn’t loyal to the US.
Putin used US Cold War rhetoric to justify his scooping up of areas, such as Chechnya. It would have been rhetorically and politically impossible for the US and NATO to go to war over that region, given how factionalized US politics is. Look at how the GOP—which had far less power in those days—was critical of US intervention in Serbia. Had Clinton advocated going to war, or even threatening war, over Chechnya, the GOP would have gone to town, and very few Dems would have supported it.
When it came to Ukraine, Putin adopted a rhetoric that cleverly blended Hitler’s rhetoric about Poland, US Cold War rhetoric, and Bush’s rhetoric about Iraq. It was a gamble, but not an unreasonable one (a different post) given the rhetorical conditions of US politics. You could take Hitler’s speech about invading Poland and just do a few “find and replace” to get his speech, and blend it with a speech of Bush’s advocating invading Iraq.[1]
My point is that adopting a rhetoric to get what you want—Cold War rhetoric to justify propping up corrupt and vicious regimes in Central and South American, lying about terrorism to get a war desired for other reasons—has consequences. Rhetoric has consequences in terms of legitimating certain kinds of arguments.
And here is the point about appeasing Hitler. I’m writing a book with a chapter about the rhetoric of appeasement. My argument is that it was a bad choice in terms of what was in the long-term interest of the UK (and the world). However, and this is what most people don’t know, or won’t acknowledge, politicians made the choices they did because appeasing Hitler was the obvious choice to make for any political figure (or party) who wanted to get (or remain) elected. If they advocated responding aggressively to Hitler they would have been excoriated by the most powerful media. Had Clinton advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s treatment of Chechnya, it would have gone nowhere. Had a GOP President advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s expansionism, the Dems would have thrown fits.
I’m not saying that we should have responded aggressively when Putin took over Austria, I mean Chechnya, but that we should have deliberated what Putin was doing. And we couldn’t. Because we are in a culture that demonized deliberation. We are in a culture in which engaging in politics means standing in a stadium chanting, having no political opinion more complicated than what can be put on a bumper sticker, loyally repeating, retweeting, or sharing whatever is the latest in-group talking point, and hating the other side is proof of objectivity.
And here I’ll go back to appeasing Hitler. I don’t really blame the politicians for appeasing Hitler, but that’s largely for the same reason I don’t blame my dog Delbert for eating cat shit. Delbert will do whatever he can to get to cat shit, and politicians will do whatever they can to get elected.
Politicians appeased Hitler because the voters wanted Hitler appeased. We need to stop asking why politicians did what they did in regard to Hitler and instead ask why voters voted the way that they did. FDR and Chamberlain don’t bear the blame for why the US and UK responded as we did to Hitler; voters do. The lesson of appeasement, and the lesson of Putin, is not that leaders make bad decisions, but that voters make bad decisions, and then blame leaders.
After the tremendously popular Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, the very people who had voted for it claimed that they had been misled, and politicians were at fault.
They voted for it.
George Lakoff pointed out that “liberals” and “conservatives” both adopt the metaphor of family for government in that the government is a parent to the citizens who are children. What if, instead of imagining voters as tools in the hands of political leaders, we acknowledge what Socrates says: even tyrants are tools in the hands of citizens.
So, how do we counter Putin’s kind of rhetoric?
We accept the responsibility of voters, citizens, commenters, sharers, likers. We are all rhetors, and we try to behave responsibly, whether it’s about how awful cyclists are or whether Putin is right.
We stop remaining within our informational enclave. And we feel no shame about pointing out how unfair and irresponsible people are being.
We read the best arguments against our positions; we hold others to the same rhetorical standards as ourselves; we stop engaging in rhetorical Machiavellianism; we argue, well and fairly and vehemently. And we shame others who argue badly. We might do so vehemently, kindly, gently, or harshly, but we do so because we want others to do that to us.
[1] Normally, I link to citations, but that would have delayed this post by a week, since there are a lot of links. If folks want links and cites, let me know. [2] For the people who have trouble with logic, and reason associatively, I’m not saying Bush was Hitler. I’m saying we shouldn’t judge rhetoric by whether we like its outcome or its advocates—it has its own consequences. Bad rhetoric in favor of a cause we like is, I’m saying, still bad rhetoric in that it legitimates what others might do with it.
In Deliberate Conflict I ridiculed a particular kind of assignment as not teaching argumentation. Since I’m retired, I can make the stronger argument: this kind of assignment teaches students to think they know what good argumentation is, when it it isn’t teaching argumentation at all. It’s like telling students you’re teaching them how to play chess, when you give good grades to students who tip over the board. It does so because it puts teachers into a false dilemma when it comes to grading terrible arguments.
Here’s the assignment prompt:
Write a well-organized five page argument for a policy about which you care, and use four credible sources to support your claims. Use [MLA, APA, Ancient Sumerian] method of citation, and [this font that I happen to like], have a summary or funnel introduction, put your thesis at the end of your introduction, and use correct English.
Having directed a Writing Center for six years, I can say that this is the fallback writing assignment for people all over the university. Sometimes the last three criteria aren’t mentioned, but are simply assumed as included in the “well-organized” criterion.
You get this paper from your student Josef. The introduction is:
Since the dawn of time there has been a problem with Jews. Now, more than ever, Germans are faced with the question of what to do with Jews. Making Germany great again requires expelling Jews because Jewish leftists agreed to the Versailles Treaty, leftist revolts made the major political figures believe they had to surrender, and Marx was a Jew.
The paper has three body paragraphs showing that each of those minor premises (his data) are true. They are, so he has no problem citing credible sources to support those claims. There are no grammar errors, and his citation is faultless.
What grade does this paper get?
On a rubric model, assuming the prompt implies the rubric, he could easily get a good grade. He cares about this issue, he has four credible sources, he uses the correct method of citation, the right font, his thesis is right there, he could easily have the kind of “organization” that student writing is supposed to have (which is specific to student writing, but that’s a different post), and he meets whatever idiosyncratic grammar rules the teacher has.
Josef might have worked a long time on this paper—should he get a good grade on the labor contract model?
If a teacher abides by the criteria implied by that assignment, they seem to be faced with giving him a bad grade because of his argument being awful (and it is)—which is a criterion not mentioned in the prompt–, or giving him a good grade because he met the criteria.
If we give him a bad grade because his argument is awful, we’ve introduced a new criterion, and one that only applies to him. Since Josef’s (false) narrative about him and his group is that they are persecuted by “leftists,” we seem to have given him evidence to support that claim of persecution. He would definitely get invited to go on Tucker Carlson’s show.
If we give him a good grade, we’re saying this is a good argument, and it isn’t.
So, what do we do with Josef’s paper?
This will take me several posts, but the short answer is: the problem is the prompt. It doesn’t ask that students engage in argumentation. We don’t do anything about Josef’s paper because we don’t give that prompt.
It’s fine if we choose to have an fyc program that doesn’t have the goal of teaching argumentation. FYC is overloaded with things it’s supposed to do, and it’s great if programs choose to do one or two things well rather than a lot of things badly. And those one or two things aren’t necessarily argumentation. What’s not fine is claiming that we’re teaching argumentation when we aren’t.
It’s also not fine to set teachers up for the false dilemma of how to deal with Josef’s argument, but that’s what we’re doing. There are many ways that we can write prompts that don’t put us (or teachers of fyc) in that false dilemma, and even many ways that do so while actually teaching argumentation.
Last week was the week of TribFest, which is great. It’s just heaven for policy wonks. Normally, of course, it’s in person, and, since the Texas Tribune tries to be non-partisan, it means that there are often panels with people on “both sides” (Lawdamighty I hate that metaphor). But, this whole last week I was thinking about a panel from a few weeks ago.
I should begin by saying that I think that conservativism is a legitimate political philosophy (although it’s one with which I disagree). And, as a legitimate political philosophy, it can be defended through rational argumentation.
The GOP, on the other hand, is not conservative, nor does it engage in rational argumentation to defend its policies, because it can’t. And a speaker from a couple of years ago seems to me to exemplify how GOP rhetoric works. It’s all about irrational fear-mongering, with some shameless exploitation of children as a kind of rhetorical shield thrown in.
Just to be clear: I think being fearful can be rational. And I think it’s possible to make a rational argument for being fearful. The GOP use of transphobia is not a rational fear, and, in fact, the rhetoric works to keep people from thinking rationally about the issue. Instead, the whole rhetorical strategy consists of teaching people (especially vulnerable people) to memorize and repeat certain talking points verbatim, even when those points are contradictory, incoherent, and often outright lies.
A teenager on the panel (call her Chester), who was representing an anti-trans organization, talked about how she went home to her daddy (I’m not kidding, that’s what she said), saying that she was frightened at the idea of boys in her bathroom. Her spiel (since all she could do when asked a question or pushed was to repeat that spiel or part of it verbatim in the discussion, I feel it’s fair to call it a spiel, rather than an argument) emphasized how terrible it was that she should feel frightened going to the bathroom. She also talked about how Obama was forcing this down her throat. (Another metaphor I think people have not thought through) because he enacted an Executive Order after a particular event (I don’t remember the event).
What I do remember is that someone pointed out that she had her chain of events wrong, and that she was putting Obama’s Executive Order after something that was actually before it, which she admitted. Yet she continued to repeat the spiel with that false narrative–the one she admitted was false.
But the whole argument was hateful. Her argument–this policy is bad because it frightens students–has the major premise that teens (all teens, even ones not like her) should not be afraid to use the restroom in their high school.
Except she didn’t believe that major premise.
Someone asked her, “So, you think that teenagers should be able to go to the bathroom without being afraid that they’ll get assaulted?” and she said, “Yes, absolutely.” I think I kind of momentarily blacked out from how hard her in-group entitlement hit me, but I think someone pointed out that trans students are far more likely to get beaten up in bathrooms that she is likely to get….what? Assaulted by a male who thinks his best strategy for assaulting women is to pretend to be trans in an American high school?
She didn’t care about whether students might be assaulted in a bathroom. She didn’t care whether students are afraid in a bathroom. She only cared about whether she was frightened. What she was appealing to was not a premise about students feeling safe in bathrooms, but a premise about what the ideal society is: a world in which policies protect people like her from being made uncomfortable. It’s all about politics as providing safe spaces for easily-triggered in-group members. It’s toxic populism.
Also, it isn’t within several football fields of a rational argument. Rape is a major problem among American teens, and I take it very seriously, but it isn’t possible to make a rational argument that the most common kind of rape—the kind about which Chester should be worried—was the kind about which she complained to “Daddy.” (Her word, seriously.) A girl in an American high school isn’t suddenly presented with the threat of rape if a trans girl can use the girl’s bathroom.
Her argument was not grounded in a rational assessment of relative threats to her physical safety.
I really wish that we still taught people about syllogisms. As Aristotle said, in public disagreements (as opposed to how philosophers in his day argued), we rely on enthymemes (A is B because A is C). In common conversation, I might say to you, “Hubert is a jerk because he kicked my shins for no reason.” I would not have to engage in a long and complicated argument to show that my major premise—kicking someone in the shins for no reason is bad (C is B)—is true.
But, let’s imagine that I made that argument, and then I told you a story about how much I admire Ruth because she goes around and kicks shins for no reason. In that case, I don’t actually believe my own major premise is a principle. So much of our political discourse works this way–people make arguments with major premises they don’t believe.
Appealing to the premise that kicking shins is just something useful for me in the moment. For instance, if I say, “You are a terrible room-mate because you leave dishes in the sink,” I am making an argument with the major premise that “people who leave dishes in the sink are terrible room-mates.” If you point out that I also leave dishes in the sink, and I don’t acknowledge that means, by my argument, I’m a bad room-mate, then I’m throwing claims to deflect from my behavior the way a monkey throws poo.
Chester was, obviously, throwing poo. Her whole argument was deflecting from how trans students are treated to how she felt. She didn’t actually care about whether people feel threatened or might get assaulted in bathrooms. She only cared about whether she felt scared.
She hadn’t thought it through at all, as was made clear by the fact that she couldn’t do anything other than repeat the script she’d been given. And that’s another appalling aspect of this whole argument. There are, and always have been, Machiavellians who so believe in their case that they throw children like her out to make insensible arguments. I think she was shocked at getting challenged in what she said, and she was probably traumatized. The organization that put her out there knew the argument they were telling her to make would be treated with outrage and scorn. They exploited her. They put her out there making an incoherent and irrational argument that was actively offensive and hurtful to trans students, and let her take the heat.
That’s unconscionable. And it shows that they don’t actually care about her, or the feelings of high school students. So, let’s do the math. She made an argument that made it clear she didn’t care about anyone other than her in service of a group that didn’t care about her. There’s a theme here.
And in service of what argument? There is no rational argument that can be made that trans students are more of a threat to other students than cishet students; when transphobics try to make an argument that gender is perfectly correlated to biology, they get into a set of claims that only MC Escher could map.
Clearly, GOP fear mongering about bathrooms is just another instance of what is often called the Southern Strategy. But, the author of that strategy wasn’t just talking about the South. What he said is that people prone to voting GOP are more likely to respond out of fear of the Other, and he was right. People drawn to closure, people who get anxious in situations of ambiguity or hybridity manifest that anxiety as anger.
Years ago, Mary Douglas showed that we want to live in a world that is a taxonomy of hard categories. We want things to be purely their thing—fish don’t have shells; we don’t eat the same things our enemies eat; birds fly. Fish that have shells, birds that don’t fly—those are dangerous. Arie Kruglanski showed that many people are drawn to closure (aka, certainty). For some people, that sense that the world can be easily and with certainty categorized is tremendously comfortable. They need to believe that their cognitive categories are ontological ones—their neat mental categories are how the world is—because that means they know the world.
Presenting someone who believes that there is a clean binary of gender/sexuality with the fact of trans people is like giving a Sun Ra album to someone who is obsessed with a music collection that has rigid categories of genre.
They get mad. Irrationally mad. Because their categories are gerfucked. Because they’re being presented with a world that is not a rigid taxonomy of discrete categories, one in which we can be certain that our internal imagination and the world outside of that imagination are definitely the same.
If you noticed, I shifted from they to we. We are all drawn to a world in which we make quick judgments, on the basis of categorizing people, places, groups, experiences. We have to be in that world; otherwise we would go mad. We all have taxonomies, and we all get flustered when we come across something that blurs the categories of our taxonomy. It’s fine that we have categories and taxonomies. What matters is what happens when we come across data, an experience, or a person that presents us with a transgression of our taxonomy. That transgression is threatening only insofar as it proves to us that our taxonomy does not guarantee certainty.
The more frightened we are by uncertainty and ambiguity, the more we are frightened by transgressions of our taxonomy. That we are afraid does not mean we are in danger. That someone threatens our taxonomy does not mean that they threaten our safety.
That Chester experienced trans girls as violating her taxonomy is understandable, that this transgression made her uncomfortable is also understandable, but that she went from her feeling uncomfortable to characterizing them as a threat is externalizing and exaggerating her discomfort. What made them seem dangerous for Chester is that they complicated her sense of how identity works, that they transgressed the lines of her taxonomy. The leap from “This person is a serious threat to my way of thinking about people” to “these people are a threat” is the real danger.
The position she was given to memorize and repeat is not rational. Nor is it Christian. She wants to be able to go home and tell Daddy that she is frightened of people, and they should therefore be banned from her space. If students find her presence in a high school restroom frightening, should they be able to get her banned from that space? Is she willing to be treated the way that wants to treat others?
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html
The fact that no pro-GOP person appalled at CRT will read this post shows they know their beliefs are too fragile to be subjected to disproof.
The anti-CRT rhetoric makes six arguments: 1. People in K-12 are teaching CRT 2. Because they are talking about racism as an institutional and structural problem, 3. And CRT talked about racism that way, and some CRT authors were Marxist (or said things that could be characterized as Marxist) 4. Therefore, anyone who talks about racism as institutional or structural is Marxist, 5. And they are violating the principles of Christianity, 6. And promoting an ideology MLK would have rejected.
The first thing I want to say is a lot of people repeating these anti-CRT talking points are doing so because they are genuinely concerned about reducing racism, and especially racial conflict, and they sincerely want a world in which racism is just not an issue.
I argue with these people a lot. And I’ll say that they aren’t all bad people, and they aren’t necessarily stupid people. They are often people tremendously successful in careers that require considerable training. But they refuse to read anything that disagrees with them, and that makes them gullible. They believe that the truth is pretty obvious to reasonable people, that you should get your information from trustworthy sources, and that a good argument is one that has data and rings true.
What those beliefs mean, in effect, is that, if you want to be an “objective” person you should only get your information from sources that confirm what you already believe. That’s pretty much the opposite of objective.
If you’re reasoning like a Stalinist, you’re reasoning badly. But the problem is that people trapped in the world in which a claim is true because it seems true don’t care whether they’re reasoning like Stalinists. They tell themselves, “Stalinists were wrong, but I’m not!” Anyone can believe that what they believe is true if they only honor sources that tell them that what they believe is true.
Every one of those six talking points is false and fallacious, but no person worked into outrage about them will admit that. I think they know that the arguments aren’t rational, and that’s why they won’t read any CRT, or anything trying to point out that the anti-CRT rhetoric doesn’t make sense.
Lots of people arguing with them point that out refusal to be informed by reading actual sources, and it has no impact. I’ve only had one person try to defend themselves by citing CRT, but he obviously hadn’t read the link he’d offered. It was a law school textbook from 1995. So, it didn’t actually support his claim that CRT was being taught in K-12 now.
The argument that CRT is being taught in K-12, and that it’s Marxist and anti-Christian works this way. (And, unlike people up in arms about CRT, I’ve read the things I’m criticizing.) First, what is being taught in K-12 is that the US still racist, racism is a problem of institutions and structures and not individuals hostility, and the US has a history of racist action. CRT was a theory advocated by legal theorists, some of whom were Marxist, that said that racism was not a question of intent, but legal systems and institutions.
Therefore, and here’s one of many fallacious leaps, anyone who says that racism is not a question of individual intent, but institutional racism and systemic oppression got their ideas from CRT. Since Marxism also says there is systemic oppression, and then all people who say that there is institutional racism are Marxist. If someone teaches that, for instance, the GI Bill was applied in racist ways, or that the system of slavery was racist, or that segregation was systemic racism, then that person is teaching that there is institutional racism and therefore they’re a Marxist and teaching CRT.
That’s a way of arguing that makes absolutely no sense–it’s a combination of the genetic fallacy and the fallacy of guilt by association. And people can see that it’s fallacious when that kind of reasoning is applied to them. For instance, Marx said that capitalism relies on workers being desperate for employment, and therefore it requires that there be people who can’t survive without working. That was the GOP argument for workfare, and it’s what many GOP politicians have said is wrong with the stimulus package–that it’s making things harder for businesses. In other words, they are saying that a free market requires that there are people who can’t survive without working. Since GOP political leaders are saying something Marx said, they must be Marxist, and since CRT theorists are Marxists, Republicans are CRT!!!!!
I could go on. The first Puritan settlers in New England tried to hold all their property in common. Since that’s something Marx advocated, they were Marxist! Therefore, Thanksgiving is Marxist. Therefore, schools that put up Thanksgiving decorations are advocating Marxism.
That argument makes as much sense as the anti-CRT demagoguery.
Of course it’s a flawed argument, because it’s a flawed way to argue. If it’s a flawed way to argue about Republicans or Thanksgiving, then it’s a flawed way to argue about K-12 teachers.
So, let’s just start with the claim (which I’m happy to have disproven) that no one making the above six claims can support them with rational-critical argumentation.
In other words, the people making those arguments are consuming and repeating demagoguery.
As far as the first claim, that depends on making CRT every way of talking about racism that says it’s systematic and institutional. Since even abolitionists talked about racism that way in the 1830s, and Marx didn’t start theorizing Marxism till the late 1840s, Das Kapital wasn’t published till the 1867, and the first English translation was in 1887, then the claim that anyone who talks about racism as built into American institution is inspired by Marxism fails on its face. That takes care of 2-4.
Since critics of CRT will not themselves live by the standard they’ve set for their opposition (argument by association), they also fail at making a rational argument (again, even they think that the logic behind 2-4 is fallacious, but only when it applies to them, and not when they apply it to others).
The claim that there is institutional discrimination, and that not every individual has the same chances at success does not invalidate the principles of Christianity. It does invalidate the “just world model” or its incarnation as “prosperity gospel,” but those are very recent ways of reading Scripture, and not all Christians endorse them. So, talking about institutional discrimination might invalidate people who think Christianity and prosperity gospel are identical, but they don’t speak for all Christians. (And, really, they need to know their own history—the notion that people deserve what they get was used to justify slavery, after all.)
That these people claim that MLK would be on their side is the final thing that frosts my cupcake.
If they think that MLK never talked about institutional racism, then they’re just showing that they reason and read badly. But, really what they’re showing is that, just as they’ve read no CRT (but only things about it), they’ve read little or no MLK. In fact, MLK talked a lot about how racism was not about angry redneck individuals, but white “moderates” who wouldn’t face the institutional problems (that’s the point of most of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). For instance, from his speech “The Other America” (which every critic of CRT should read in its entirety):
But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality, and it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good, solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine quality integrated education a reality. And so today, we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality. It’s not merely a struggle against extremist behavior toward Negros. And I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in the South are not willing to go all the way now. [….] I say that however unpleasant it is, we must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America. It’s still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South. [….] In 1875, the nation passed a civil rights bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill, and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty-stricken, for the disadvantaged, and brought into being a poverty bill. But at the same time, it put such little money into the program that it was hardly and still remains hardly a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath, contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things, tell us that America has been back lashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negros and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years. [….] But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities, as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. And in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. So in a real sense, our nation’s summer’s riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
What I learned arguing with Stalinists is that some people believe that personal certainty is objectivity, data is proof, and sources that agree with them are unbiased. The Stalinist were wrong on all counts. But, if reasoning like some group means you are part of that group (people who talk about institutional racism are like CRT and CRT are Marxist), then critics of CRT are Stalinists.
If, like me, you have spent your life arguing with assholes, then you find yourself in the same kind of argument. It doesn’t matter if they’re Stalinists, Maoists (my least favorite interlocutors), crude Freudians, raw food for dog cultists, or, now, anti-maskers. Assholes aren’t restricted to any one place on the political spectrum, or even necessarily restricted to the “political” spectrum at all. By “asshole,” I don’t mean people who are unpleasant or aggressive, but people who can’t defend their position rationally, and feel no obligation to do so. Although they can’t defend their position rationally, they are certain that they are right because 1) they can find data to support them, and 2) they feel certain that they’re right.
In general, you find someone like this on every issue, but there are some issues on which everyone is like this. What I’ve found by drifting around and trying to read the best anti-mask/anti-vaccine posts is that none of them can defend their position rationally, so those are in that latter category.
When pushed to support their case rationally (e.g, hold all data to the same standards, have an internally consistent argument, be able to name the data that would cause them to change their mind, represent opposition arguments fairly, avoid fallacies) they get mad. They get mad if asked to support their case rationally, and they try to shift the burden of proof–their position is true because it can’t be proven wrong. Once again, that isn’t a rational argument.
Making a rational argument isn’t about your tone, whether you have evidence, or whether it feels true to you–anyone can cherrypick the data to make any case. I learned this watching someone present a lot of data that Stephen King and Richard Nixon conspired together to kill John Lennon–lots of data, all of it cherrypicked, none of it rationally related to the overall claim. That guy had done too much speed, and ended up in jail for stalking Stephen King. Having data that to you proves a point doesn’t mean you have a rational argument. You might have done too much speed.
For this post, I’ll talk about the strongest argument I’ve seen against masks (since it cited a study). And the first point I’ll make is that no anti-mask or anti-vax person has read this far. They do not read anything that might complicate, let alone disconfirm, their point of view. So, they fail the absolutely lowest level of having a rational position–being able to engage the smartest opposition. They don’t even engage dumb oppositions. They run away from opposition information the way I run away from snakes. It isn’t rational, but it’s what I do. If you refuse to read opposition arguments (and not what your in-group tells you are the opposition arguments) then you don’t have a rational position–it doesn’t matter what the issue is.
Anti-maskers often claim that 1) masks are ineffective, and 2) they reduce oxygen intake and exhalation of carbon monoxide. The “and” is important. On its face (prima facie) this is an irrational argument. Both of those claims cannot be true at the same time. If masks significantly inhibit inhalation and exhalation, then they would definitely inhibit the spread of and threat of infection from covid.
I recently pointed this out, and someone responded by citing this study.
This is typical. They found a study that says that masks do inhibit inhalation and exhalation. That study doesn’t solve the basic contradiction–if masks are extremely effective at restricting inhalation/exhalation, they are extremely effective at preventing the spread of COVID.
But, let’s set aside that contradiction (one present in the cited study). I’m not an epidemiologist, but I am an expert in argumentation, and one of the most salient aspects of an irrational position is cherry-picking data. (As I said, this is true of irrational positions on all issues.)
The most prominent characteristic of an irrational position–whether it’s about masks, tax breaks, raw food for dogs, my desire for a camper, whether your boss is a jerk– is that it’s about finding data to support our position, and not taking one step above, and thinking about our position in terms of whether it relies on premises and data you’d think valid if they led to opposite conclusions.
Irrational people on the internet find a study that supports what they believe, on the basis of the abstract. (They reject all studies that don’t support them, also based on the abstract.) I read the study. The person who cited it obviously didn’t. (This is typical.) But, if one study proves you right, then one study proves you wrong.
And this study didn’t even prove them right. Most of the study looked at research regarding N95 mask use among medical workers. As the study says, “Thirty papers referred to surgical masks (68%), 30 publications related to N95 masks (68%), and only 10 studies pertained to fabric masks (23%).” The study says that surgical and N95 masks are effective for preventing the spread of COVID (see especially pages 20-21), so the person cited a study as an authority that contradicts the anti-mask talking point. That’s also typical of someone who can’t support their case rationally (because they don’t read the studies they cite).
Most important, the negative consequences were associated with N95 masks, not fabric ones. So, how many people out in public are wearing N95 masks? I asked the person who posted this study what she thought of the following paragraph. She never responded. Also typical of someone defending a position irrationally.
“In addition, we found a mathematically grouped common appearance of statistically significant confirmed effects of masks in the primary studies (p < 0.05 and n ≥ 50%) as shown in Figure 2. In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%). Skin temperature rise under masks was associated with fatigue in 50% (three out of six primary studies). The dual occurrence of the physical parameter temperature rise and respiratory impairment was found in seven of the eight studies (88%). A combined occurrence of the physical parameters temperature rise and humidity/moisture under the mask was found in 100% within six of six studies, with significant readings of these parameters (Figure 2).”
To be clear, the study expresses skepticism about mask-wearing generally, but their meta-research doesn’t support that skepticism. When they get to the part of the argument in which they want to say that wearing masks is harmful, the authors abandon their meta-research (because meta-research wouldn’t support their position) and start citing various individual studies that suggest that fabric masks might not be very effective. So, on the whole, the study shows that fabric masks might not be effective but aren’t harmful, and N95 are effective but might be harmful. Not an argument against wearing masks.
And the “harms” the study identifies for the N95 masks are far preferable to the harms of getting COVID. When it gets to the harms of fabric masks, the study starts arguing syllogistically, and seems to be assuming that people are not washing their masks. (Yeah, if you wear a fabric mask and don’t wash it on a daily basis, you’re likely to get acne. If this is news to you, we need to talk about your underwear.)
I could make other points about the study, such as that they didn’t include the variable of social distancing, none of the authors appears to be an epidemiologist, and it isn’t clear that anyone is a statistician, but the most important point is that the study as a whole doesn’t support the claim that masks are useless, let alone that masks are useless and harmful. What it does show is something that experts have been saying for a while: wearing a fabric mask (especially if, as the authors assume, one keeps wearing a fabric mask without washing it) is not a guarantee in and of itself (helllooooo, social distancing!) and might have problems. That is something that research has been saying for at least a year. Wearing a mask and engaging in social distancing is probably a good strategy:
“Evidence for efficacy of face masks against the first SARS virus, SARS-CoV-1, implies that they may be effective against the current outbreak of SARS-Cov-2 virus. This is important as mathematical modeling suggests that even small reductions of in transmission rates can make a large difference over time, potentially slowing the pace of viral pandemics and limiting their spread. Perhaps the strongest argument for the use of masks is that countries with early adoption of masks have tended to see flatter pandemic curves, even without strict nationwide lockdowns.[…] Improvised masks are less effective than medical masks, but may provide better protection than nothing at all.”
I picked this study because it’s over a year old, and pretty typical of what studies of fabric masks had and have been saying for a while. It also includes the issue of social distancing–a variable the anti-mask study didn’t include. This study says that a person wearing a non N95 mask can still expel droplets 20 cm. (That’s about eight inches.) So, social distancing is an important factor. This study doesn’t support a claim that masks are guaranteed to prevent infection, just as seat belts won’t magically prevent a person from injuries in a car wreck (and a person might be injured by the seat belt, albeit less injured than if they weren’t wearing one), but it does give good reason to think that wearing a mask, coupled with social distancing, will reduce COVID infection rates.
The anti-masker position is irrational because its advocates can’t put forward arguments that meet the lowest standards of a rational argument. They fail at the most basic level of: 1) having an internally consistent argument; 2) engaging the best opposition arguments; 3) holding themselves and their oppositions to the same standards of proof; 4) avoiding major fallacies.
Here’s how an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer could prove me wrong: identify the data that would cause you to admit you’re wrong; put forward an internally consistent argument that holds all data to the same standards; engage the best opposition arguments.
