I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with assholes. Because I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with all sorts of people.
I was at Berkeley for many years, and argued with all sorts of people–anarchists, Democrats, environmentalists, evangelicals, feminists, Libertarians, Maoists, Moonies (they were terrible-car–crash-can’t-look-away bad at arguing), Republicans, Stalinists, Trotskyites, vegetarians. If you’re paying attention, then you’ve noticed I argued with everyone, including people with whom I agreed, but I disagreed with them on some point that seemed important to me. And some of them, even people with whom I agreed, argued in a way that I’ve come to call “arguing like an asshole.” By the way, so did I from time to time (and not everyone with whom I disagreed argued like an asshole).
Then I got on Usenet, and got to argue with (or watch arguments among) all sorts of people about all sorts of issues, from fairly trivial things (arguments about cooking methods, or dog training) to scammy (get laid fast, make money fast) to the biggest (genocide deniers or defenders). And then I drifted into other social media sites, and I took to arguing with all sorts of people with various alts. And I learned a lot about argument by doing that (also about how algorithms work, and many scams).
One of the things I learned is that, while there are some arguments that are never argued reasonably (e.g., make money fast, or get laid fast), there are assholes everywhere, albeit not evenly distributed. And that is the important point. Arguing like an asshole isn’t about what position you hold, but how you argue.
During all this time, for complicated reasons having to do with a Great Blue Heron, I was becoming a scholar of bad arguments, or, as I like to say, a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation. And by train wrecks, I don’t mean that people made decisions that turned out disastrously because they didn’t have the information they needed (e.g., they didn’t know how cholera works), but when they had enough information to make a good decision, and they rejected it. What made (and makes) them assholes is how they rejected that information they could and should have considered.
It wasn’t necessarily because they were stupid, or corrupt, or villainous. Often they were very smart and good people who were sincerely trying to do what they believed to be the right thing.
And it was interesting to me that the train wrecks involved the same ways of disagreeing that assholes at Berkeley or in social media argued.
If, at this point, you want me to tell you the simple solution to the problem of how people (often very good people, and people whom we should admire) made disastrously bad decisions, and you want me to put it into 25 words or less, you can skip to the end. If you skip to the end and decide I’m wrong because you don’t agree with my conclusions, then you win the first gold star of assholery. Let’s call it the McNamara medal.
There are two parts to this error. First is believing that all complicated problems can be cogently and clearly summarized, and then persuasively communicated to any person, without having to go through the data; and that good and smart people can instantly recognize whether an argument is true without having to work through the reasoning. (In other words, that no situation is so complex that it can’t be easily and quickly communicated to smart people.)
Second, and related, is that the cogent and accurate summary of a problem necessarily leads to an equally cogent and easily communicable solution. The correct solution to any problem—no matter how apparently complicated—is obvious to smart and good people.
This is one of the most popular ways that countries, political leaders, business leaders, and others wreck a train: assume that every problem has a straightforward solution that is obvious to reasonable people (i.e., them). The problem is exactly as it looks to them, and the solution is the one that seems obvious to them. And if you can’t articulate the problem and solution in such a way that it’s obvious to any and everyone, then you have no clue what you’re doing. If the McNamaras of the world get pushback, oppositions, or counterarguments, they conclude that their opponents/critics are too stupid to understand an obviously true argument or too corrupt to accept it. Or both.
Assholes, regardless of the political, religious, or whatever affiliation, decide that an argument is right or wrong on the basis of whether it confirms what they already believe. Their beliefs are non-falsifiable, not in the sense that they’re so true that no one can prove them false, but in the sense that their attachment to those beliefs is not up for reconsideration. (What’s funny is that they do actually change their minds, as well as have a lot of contradictory beliefs, as well as beliefs they believe they have, but that have no influence on their behavior—we all have some of those–but I’ll get to that much later.)
There’s still debate as to whether the US could have won in Vietnam without paying an unacceptable moral, political, and economic cost, but there isn’t debate about whether McNamara’s strategy of limited war with limited means for a limited time could have worked. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Even he later admitted that. But, when he did, he failed to mention that he was told so at the time, and given all the evidence necessary to come to that conclusion as early as January of 1963.
McNamara wasn’t particularly vehement in his arguing, and he always had lots of data, but he argued like an asshole.
