Tag Archives: Argumentation

Eye, You, and Donald Trump

26 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in Childhood, Politics

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U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump listens to a question from the audience at one of the New England Council’s “Politics and Eggs” breakfasts in Manchester, New Hampshire November 11, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder – RTS6IWM

I think I found the source for Donald Trump’s approach to public speaking. There is a clear precedent for his technique.

It’s Jane Elliot!

Jane Elliot is of course the Ohio grade-school teacher made famous for a classroom exercise in which she taught her students to discriminate against each other on the basis of eye-color. If you watch her in action, you can see the elements of Donald Trump’s rhetoric style unfolding before you.

It’s funny, because I’ve been thinking for some time that I have never seen anyone lie so readily, so easily, and in the face of such clear counter-evidence. Never have I seen anyone whose praise or whose censure was so obviously a function of his own self-interest. It is as if facts have no bearing on his evaluation of anything or anyone, and the only thing that registers significance in his evaluation of the world around him is what he wants to happen. Those who support his goals are terrific, and those who oppose him are failures, sad. I keep thinking, no-one I know of has ever been so obvious about it. But no. The man has a clear role model. If you watch Elliot teaching her students to mistreat each other, it’s all there. She may have meant her exercise to warn people against this sort of thing, but I can’t help wondering of Trump didn’t watch her at some point and say to himself; “Yep! That’s exactly what I want to be.”

Elliot set out to instill prejudice in her third graders in the space of a single day, and then to reverse that prejudice the following day, before debriefing the lot of them and ending the lesson. She didn’t have a lot of time and she wasn’t the least bit subtle about it.She employed all manner of tactics to communicate contempt for the wrong-eyed children in her classroom.

You might think Elliot’s lessons less relevant to real-world politics, because, well third graders, right? But of course, Donald Trump’s own rhetoric has all the features of grade school communication. Far from a detriment, it turns out childish vocabulary and simplistic arguments are actually one of the keys to his success. With his simple words and constant repetition of basic themes, Trump leaves a very clear impression. It is the single-mindedness of Trump’s presentation that seems to resonate with his supporters, and in that respect, his approach is very much like that of Elliot.

But does the nature of the message matter?

You bet it does.

It’s not just any simplistic message that Trump offers supporters; it is a simplistic message about who is a better person; them or someone else? In this respect, his approach mirrors that of Elliot. It isn’t merely that Trump advances a message of hatred; it is that he presents that hatred in terms of a clear pay-off. You are are better than they are! That is what Trump keeps telling people (whoever you are and whoever they might be). It’s an invitation to enter a world with a clear hierarchy of value, and to enter that world on the value-laden side of that hierarchy. You don’t even need to do anything. You are already better than the many scapegoats he offers you (Muslims, Mexicans, the Media, minority activists, etc.) Trump really doesn’t call on supporters to do much more than vote for him. Their role in his his America is to be the real Americans while the rest of us take our lumps. It’s this message that survives all the messy details. It is a message not the least bit undermined by questions of fact, reason, or even the evidence of the senses. In this respect, Trump is very much like Elliot teaching half of her classroom to think of the other half as lesser people.

When I watch Elliot tell a child (at about 5:20) that a blue-eyed parent would never kick his son while using the apparent claim that a brown-eyed parent had done that very thing, I can’t help but think of Trump’s many anecdotal attacks on immigrants. It shouldn’t take much critical thinking to see past the argument, but is that more important than the invitation to be better than someone else?

Apparently not for a lot of people.

When Elliot begins telling the Brown-eyed children they can’t use the drinking fountain (at around 6:10), and when she restricts their playground privileges, she is effectively telling the blue-eyed children they are special. The things they all used to take for granted now belong only to the blue-eyed children (at least for a day). The pay-off is not substantially different from that enjoyed by an audience assure more of their kind of jobs will be created while watching others threatened by cuts, told their own health-care will be taken care of (somehow) by cutting others loose, and of course their citizenship will not be sullied by the presence of certain kinds of people. (And no legality was NEVER the issue in Trump’s new-fangled Know-nothingism) We on the left haggle over the details of these policies as if they matter. To the average Trump supporter, I do not think they do. He may be right about this or wrong about that, but what matters most to those who support them is that he keeps elevating them above someone else. He does it free of charge. They don’t have to understand anything difficult; they don’t have to work harder (at least he doesn’t say they will); they don’t even have to listen very carefully. Being better in Trump’s world is as simple as saying yes to him and his gold gilded message. In scapegoating enemies domestic and foreign, Trump is telling anyone who cares to accept him that they are special. They get to drink at the fountain. Others don’t.

When Elliot tells her children that the brown-eyed people are slow or stupid, she creates the very facts she purports to describe. Elliot noted (at 13:15) how the student performance rose or fell with the changes in their status during the course of her exercise. There is little to distinguish this from the effects of social stigma and/or poverty on groups for whom prejudice is not simply an exercise. When Trump promotes such distinctions, he generates real harm.

(At about 12:10) “Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad. Very very sad.” …this one speaks for itself.

One might think that folks would see past such a thinly disguised gambit. Elliot is working with third graders. Surely, adults would know better!

Evidently not!

In the end, this may not be a question of what people actually think. It’s a question of what narratives they circulate. We keep hearing that Steve Bannon isn’t really an antisemite or even that Donald Trump isn’t personally against homosexuals, Mexicans, women, etc., but the Trump camp and its supporters keeps producing stories denigrating to these groups and anyone who gets in their way. Like Elliot, they may know better, but like Elliot, they do it anyway.

Except for one thing.

There will be no debriefing at the end of Trump’s Presidency. There will be no great learning moment, no sudden transformation of the whole situation into a great learning lesson. Whatever cynical reasons he and his supporters may have for throwing the rest of humanity under the bus, there is little reason to believe it will stop any time soon. The only credible promise this man ever made is that he would hurt people in their name, and for whatever reason, that was reason enough for a number of people last November. We can only hope that enough people come to their senses, and that if and when they do, something can be done about it.

In the interim, the Trump administration continues its own experiment in social control. The continue teaching us to humor this man’s fantasies, and to think of ourselves as better for doing so.

Let us hope the nation as a whole can respond a little more appropriately than Jane Elliot’s third graders!

When Truth Can’t Handle You!

06 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Movies, Politics

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“You can’t handle the truth!”

It’s a popular response in political debate, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a powerful denunciation (delivered in the midst of an amazing performance), a line that serves both to deny someone the right to an honest answer and to place responsibility for that denial on those to whom the truth is denied. It’s the sort of response one could follow with a mic drop. Really it is.

What people seem to forget is that this is a line issued by a character who really is lying in defense of a crime he really did commit. When you keep that in mind, it puts efforts to use the line in real life in a whole new perspective.

Good Without an Apology

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in atheism, Philosophy

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god

Saw this in Cedar City this summer (I think Moni took the picture.)

Atheists can’t provide a sound basis for their morality.

…it’s the kinder gentler version of “atheists can’t be moral,” which is a common theme among Christian apologists. To be sure, some folks go back and forth between the two messages, but at least some apologists do seem to keep a clear distinction between the claim that atheists cannot be moral and the claim that whatever morals we may have, we simply cannot justify them in rational terms.

Some folks express this position in the form of an architectural metaphor; we have no foundation for our ethics, so the argument goes. Alternatively, we cannot ground our moral principles in a sound basis of judgement; our morals aren’t based on anything objective, and so on. The sheer physicality of this rhetoric is always striking to me.

I know.

Metaphors happen.

Still, I can’t help thinking some of those using this language could stand to think about those metaphors a little bit. It would be nice if they at least recognized them as metaphors. As often as not, I suspect many of those producing such messages take these terms rather literally.

All that aside, lately, I’ve been thinking about this less in terms of the argument at hand and more in terms of the narrative about that argument. Questions about the nature of morality go back a rather long way in the history of western philosophy, to say nothing of countless other contexts in which people could ask about what people ought to do and whether or not they can provide a sound reason for their answer. This is not just one ongoing debate; it is many, and while that debate rages on with no likelihood of a clear winner, this story of the unique moral failure of atheism flourishes in its own right. The notion that atheists can’t provide an adequate account of the nature of morality may be a contention to be argued in select circles. It can also be a story told about the difference between us and them.

…in this case, I’m a them. Damn! (Othered in my own blog post.)

***

First an anecdote!

This theme reminds me of a time a college friend took me to see Gary Habermas speak at his church. Habermas is a renowned apologist, so I was expecting to hear an interesting argument in favor of Christianity. Suffice to say that I didn’t. I don’t know how to convey just how unimpressive Habermas was on that occasion. I could hardly believe my ears. To this day, I wonder if I missed something important or if Habermas was just having an exceptionally bad day? I don’t know.

The whole performance got a great deal more interesting though after Habermas stepped down, and the regular pastor for this church took a moment to add a few thoughts of his own. The pastor himself struck me as a fairly nice guy. I couldn’t help but like him, but there I sat listening to him try to put Habermas’ presentation into perspective for his audience. What impressed the pastor was the notion that someone could field a complex and sophisticated argument in favor of the Christian faith. He ended his own comments by saying how good it felt to know that people of intelligence could defend the faith, that smart people did in fact believe in Jesus and that they could justify that faith.

So, there I sat thinking on the one hand that Gary Habermas might be a smart guy, but we sure as Hell hadn’t seen anything to prove it on that particular day. More importantly, I couldn’t help noting how much had been lost on the pastor. He had nothing to say on the topic at hand, or the arguments Habermas had made, nothing at all. The mere fact that Habermas had fielded an argument in favor of Christianity was what interested the pastor. Such an argument did exist, and its existence was a comfort to him. It should also, he thought, be a comfort to others attending his church.

This is what I mean by the narrative value of the argument. Habermas and people like him continue to make their arguments, and people like me continue to be unimpressed by them. Still, the arguments seem to hold a value in believing circles, a value almost entirely unrelated to the soundness of the arguments themselves, much less the impact of those arguments in contested circles. An apologist may fail to engage unbelievers entirely and still count as a success in believing circles. For some, it is enough to know that smart people defend the faith.

Toward what end is another question.

***

So what? Conflict is a common source of good narrative material, and conflict over religious beliefs is no different. We unbelievers have been known to tell a story or two out of season ourselves, but I don’t think we’ve established quite the market for selling to the non-choir, at least not yet. A few unbelievers may be working tales of battle into a profession of sorts, but we are generations behind the business of Christian apologetics. So, our narratives are generally more fluid, the pay-off less certain, and the likely consumers for such stories less obvious. When an atheist fields an argument against a believer, it is still reasonably likely that the believer is the actual person we are trying to communicate with. Christian apologetics, by contrast is full of people framing arguments in terms of a confrontation with unbelievers only to produce them for the benefit of other believers. It is in effect a business aimed at producing stories like those told by the pastor above, stories of reassurance.

Let’s come back to the notion that atheists can’t justify our own ethical principles. What does this contention provide when it’s construed in terms of narrative themes? I think the payoff is very clear, namely in the implied contrast. If we non-believers can’t justify our moral principles, so the argument seems to suggest, those who believe in God can. As much as people working this argument may be trying to tell us about the failures of unbelief, they are also claiming a victory for theism, or at least for specific variations of theism.

What is wrong with us, so the story goes, is we cannot justify our moral principles. We may be moral people, but our morality is lacking something, and that something is important. Don’t get me wrong; this story a damned site better than the argument that non-believers are inherently immoral, but this particular concession that we are moral without a sound reason damns us with faint praise.

What’s so infuriating about this is the difficulty of the issue. It really is very difficult to establish a rational justification for ethics. We can often establish reasonable connections between certain basic value judgements and more specific propositions (Kant’s categorical imperative could be used for example to suggest that one ought not to lie to someone else as that would entail reducing them to the status of a means to an end), but providing those basic value judgements with a non-circular justification is damned difficult. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s certainly difficult, and always subject to contention. Is morality deontological or consequentialist? Universal or some variety of relative? These are all pretty difficult questions, and belief in a god simply doesn’t provide an obvious solution to any of them.

When apologists pretend that atheists are uniquely unable to handle the matter, it always strikes me as a rather premature declaration of victory. As often as not, they seem to confound two or more sub-themes in these discussions. When for example a theist claims their oral principles are objective because they have been mandated by God, I find myself at a loss for words. Even an ultimate subject is still a subject, and a morality derived from the will of a subject, even an ultimate subject, is still a subjective ethics. …unless of course one can demonstrate that the subject (God) has Herself based her judgement on something objective. Or perhaps, there is an objective reason why we as subjects are obligated to do what God (that uber-subject) wishes, but that would be stretching the meaning of objectivity a bit thin. I can certainly understand someone expressing skepticism at any of the attempts to establish an objective or absolutist form of ethics, but atheists simply are not uniquely implicated in this problem. I’ve known Christians who handle this issue very well. They are not among those proclaiming to failures of atheist ethical theory to the faithful in their churches.

***

In the end, I think this theme has two significant practical implications:

First, it reverses the point of morality, at least for purposes of the narrative in question. One might expect that the value of ethical behavior would in some sense be found in the behavior itself. Those hawking the notion that atheists are unable to demonstrate a sound basis for our moral judgements are, in those moments at least, shifting the focus of the work at hand. They are in effect, presenting the intellectual justification for morality as an end in itself. The point of morality is in such stories a bit intellectual exercise. I might do right by my neighbor, so the story goes, but I don’t really know why I should do so.

And thus doing right by my neighbor becomes just a little less important.

Second, this theme seems to produce a kind of moral hierarchy. There are those of us who do right, so the story goes, and those who know why we do right, or at least why we should do so. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this kind of division of labor appearing as a theme in apologetics, but it is fascinating to see the way it takes shape in this rhetoric. The authority of the faithful seems to colonize the world at large in these stories, and those of us who are merely moral (at best) are just a little less than those that know why we should be so. Our actions are just a little less significant than those who claim to know the objective basis for moral principles. We can say no, as I surely do, but that’s to be expected of us. The faithful know.

But of course this isn’t simply a claim to authority over the rest of us, and it isn’t even a claim that privileges the perspectives of priests and pastors, much less the avergae everyday believer. It is a claim that privileges the perspectives of apologists. Simple pastors like the man I mentioned in the story above can do their best, but it is up to the smart people who defend the faith to do the real work of ethics. The rest of us, believer and unbeliever alike can be moral, sure, but our morality will always be missing something.

Which of course makes Christian thought into a rather esoteric enterprise.

And no, that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

 

 

Argumentation and its Narrative Payoff

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Philosophy

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ARnold ConanIt’s been a long time since I read Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, but I was recently thinking the internet has surely added a lot of good material for some of its central themes. The the notion of argumentation as warfare comes to mind. In that book, they advanced the notion that a lot of the metaphors people use for argumentation are those associated with warfare and violence in general. This is certainly born out by a number of things you can see on the net.

To see what people say about argumentation on the internet, it would seem that the world of debate is tremendously violent. Everywhere one looks, one finds destruction in the wake of a rhetorical flourish. Case in point? “Pres Obama Brilliantly Destroys a Loaded FOXNews Question” in this clip. Go Bama! But wait a minute? Is that an accomplishment? How do you destroy a question anyway? Loaded or unloaded, do you bash them? Crush them? Hit them with a mega-devestating incinerator photon torpedawhomper Bomb? Not to worry, cause our man Obama gets some here. He totally destroys Trump in this speech. In this video a “60 Minutes Host Destroys Barack Obama On Syria.” “Dawkins destroys Muslim Morality” in this video. But don’t look now! “Rupert Sheldrake Destroys Dawkins Dillusion in Banned TED-x Talk.” …er (sic). Apparently the author of this book is content to merely “refute” him. (Merciful soul!) Bill Nye destroyed Ken Ham. Ken Ham took the Science guy down with him. …totally destroyed. Sam Harris kicks ass here. Ben Carson “demolishes liberalism entirely in this clip from The View.   Hillary Clinton destroys things too! Oh no, Rand Paul destroyed her! He destroyed Donald Trump too! But wait a minute! Donald Trump destroyed Paul. Mutual destruction, just what I like to see in the GOP.

But wait!

Hold the phone.

In this video Cenk Uygur “destroys, degrades, demolishes, desecrates Antonin Scalia.”

Destruction, degradation, demolition, AND  desecration? That’s it. Uyguyr wins the prize. he can just drop the mic now. He totally wins the violence as war meme for the day. Apparently the man is a veritable engine of rhetorical terror. Behold his verbal prowess and tremble!

***

Okay, so I know how to belabor a point, right? Well, I’m just getting started really, so please bear with me. The point here is NOT that argumentation is really a form of warfare, but rather that many of the ideas we attach to argumentation are derived from the world of violence. The metaphors we use when talking about argumentation are, as Lakoff and Johnson pointed out, borrowed from the world of war. We could use other metaphors, and sometimes we do, but when we approach this subject for some reason or another violence just keeps pushing its way to the front of our tropic tool-kit. And really, what else would we expect Violence to do? He’s a pushy bastard. That’s why we call him Violence.

What has me thinking about this today isn’t really the metaphors, per se; it’s the stories used in this case to convey them. Each of the links above provides a little mini narrative describing some argument as though it were a decisive victory in battle. Reading the links in question, we can practically hear the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan echoing in the background.

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Is this what every arguing argutizer really has in mind all along, an effort to achieve a victory so complete he can hear the lamentations of the women mourning his poor vanquished victim?

Perhaps.

But of course we want other things too. We want to show that we are smart. We want others to see our point, perhaps even to accept some truth that we regard as important. Sometimes we may want to learn ourselves, perhaps fleshing out our ideas in the effort to present them to others. We might even hope to learn more from another party by pushing them a little, getting them out of their comfort zone in the hopes that what they then tell us will be a little more worth listening to than what they say when the world feels like a warm moist hug.

Sometimes an argument leaves us with a narrative about conquest and destruction. That’s fair to say. But sometimes it leaves us with narratives about personal transformation, mural respect, learning, realization, …and, oh the fluffy! It burns!!! I’m really uncomfortable pleading the merits of such wholesome and earnest values, but honestly, they too play a large role in the construction of argumentation. Often these values are the more serious reasons for engaging in argumentation. Officially they are the reason we produce arguments in the classroom, for example, though someone might be excused for thinking the real reasons may at times be closer to those of argumentation as warfare. (I’m reminded of references to the ‘silverbacks’ in scholarly halls, people who contribute great thoughts to be sure, but also folks who are prone to pounding their chests and roaring at others whenever they feel the need.) One often feels a certain tension between these motivations, at least I do.

Increasingly I am inclined to think of the tension between different rhetorical styles in terms of the narratives folks hope to tell about the arguments in question. Whether successful or not, at some point an argument passes into discursive history. It then rests in the background of subsequent discourse, taking on the form of the texts, ideas, quotes, and general resources others may use to communicate. They may recount an argument (or perhaps resurrect it in dead horse form just for the purpose of kicketation). As often as not, arguments make their appearance in later discourse in the form of stories like those referenced above. We talk about how Chomsky blew Skinner away on the nature of language (or perhaps he didn’t). We speak of the conflict (‘shedding more heat than light’ as one of my professors put it) between Masrahl Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Sometimes we simply say that one theory replaced another or that a given approach has become the standard in the field. Whatever else happens in such commentary, it transforms the point of an argument into a moment in a narrative. In many cases, I’ll warrant, this is hoped-for pay-off in producing an argument, that it will pass into the positive themes of a story. Maybe that story will be about how Bob kicked Joey’s ass on a random topic, or maybe it will be a story about how this or that idea came to be the dominant approach to a given subject.

Dominant? I’m back in the language of violence again. er, …perhaps the received wisdom in a given field? Anyway…

My point is that much of what people do in the course of pursuing an argument can be thought of as an effort, not simply to prove the truth of a claim as logicians might tell us, but to lay the groundwork for any number of stories one would hope to see told at some later time. Why do I think this is important? Not so much because it helps us understand the production of any particular argument, and certainly not because it helps us grasp the nature of academic argumentation (or any argumentation conforming to the normative ideals of my logic texts). What strikes me as important about this is that it helps to understand conflict with argumentative styles falling outside those norms. It helps precisely because it denies the centrality of those norms and reminds us that the effort to provide an objective case for the truth of a claim is just one of the many reasons someone might field an argument. He could also do so because he wants to hear the lamentations of your women.

I’m still belaboring the point, aren’t I? Thus far, it feels like I am painting too much in broad strokes, but wait! Oh! There’s another good metaphor for argumentation. Painting!!! Wouldn’t rhetoric be that much more colorful and that much less painful if we could construe arguments in terms of visual media? To make it work though, it needs to be generative. We need to be able to spell out the details of argumentation in painterly terms. Perhaps we could a prepare the canvas in reference to issues of context or outline a theory. Hey! We do ‘outline’ theories. We also sketch out the details of a position, make too fine a point of some things, and even speak of prevarication as erasure. Argumentation as art works. …but apparently not as often as warfare.

Artsy asides notwithstanding, what has me up at this undogly hour is the prospect of looking at the transition from an argument to a narrative in more detail. What happens when a genre defined in terms of premises and conclusions passes into the form of a genre defined by characters, plots, and events? What happens when relevance and logical support is transformed into dramatic tension? Are there regular patterns? If so, can they help us understand some of the details happening on either end of that transition?

There is plenty of interesting material out there. Election year political debates are a great example of this. Candidates do not approach these debates as an academic might. They are not trying to prove a point so much as provide an audience with a reason to vote in a certain way. The candidate with the most compelling argument for a given policy may not be the one who impresses voters the most. A large part of what determines this will be the way the arguments play in subsequent speech. A candidate, for example, who handles the details of a legal issue thoroughly may find himself resonating far less effectively than one who fielded a better sound bite in the same debate.

Obvious example is obvious.

Less obvious material? Internet trolls could perhaps provide us with a fair number of examples, but I think pure trolling is just the tip of the ice-berg. That kid who was too busy laughing at your avatar pic to care that your argument was sound will probably be as proud to tell the story of the encounter as you are, perhaps more so. Likewise the old fart who, hey that’s me! (Nevermind that example, we’re moving on…) If I’m ever tempted to use the phrase ‘social justice warrior’ in contempt it’s when I meet someone who seems more intent on claiming moral high ground over certain issues than addressing any number of objective concerns. You could absolutely prove a point to such a person and the only story they will tell about you is that you proved yourself to be a bad person for doing it. But of course one also encounters plenty of people happy to sneer and smirk at the the discomfort of others, especially anyone stupid enough to give a damn about the underprivileged. To let such a person know that you care about any given issue is little other than to tell them how to hurt you. They too will tell a tale about any argument you have with them. Your own tears (real or imagined) will figure prominently in the stories they hope to tell about you.

Such games aren’t limited to the net, of course, but the anonymity of online discussion seems to bring it all out so much more. It’s part of a general pattern of behavior one sees in public disagreements, especially those involving people from very different walks of life. All too often both parties in an argument will come away thinking they have won. In each case, what they actually come away with is a story that relates their victory. It would be easy to think this is because people simply don’t see their own errors, to think that only one of the stories about a given argument would be authentic, but that’s not usually the case. As often as not, the difference occurs because each side had a different sense of the win-loss conditions to begin with.

Yes, the notion of ‘winning’ an argument is already a problem.

The problem isn’t always that other speaking styles compete with those we might think of as more sound argumentative practice. Sometimes the alternative approaches are genuinely interesting in themselves. For example, sometimes an argument is encased in a legendary narrative, which of course makes possible a kind of indirection or an argument by allusion. One may simply refer to the story as a means of suggesting an argument about real world matters. My favorite example of this remains the separation of men and women in Navajo lore, though I suppose one can also see it in conventions of scriptural quotation among Christians (where it almost always takes on the quality of an authority argument). In each of these cases, the significance of an argument appears to be filtered through the significance of a set narrative that defines and shapes its meaning in ways you couldn’t get from a direct analysis of the argument itself. That argument appears as a brief moment in a stream of storytelling, and for some at least its possible significance will always be tied to that very narrative.

When I used to post on Christian Forums, I recall a number of instances in which the arguments of atheists were described in terms of malevolent supernatural power. Realizing I was among the demons described in these narratives, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of anger and irritation. I also found it fascinating. These were people who measured arguments in terms of spiritual warfare. They measured such arguments in terms of powers not premises and faith instead of relevance. This is argumentation as war, to be sure, but in this case, it’s a war between demons and angels. Where I might havedescribed an argument on that forum in terms of proof and evidence, to the practitioners of spiritual warfare those same arguments became stories of a struggle with evil. In the abstract, that isn’t really too surprising, but I must say that it was odd to see just how that general theme played out in the details.

The Storify app would seem to be relevant to my thoughts at the moment? …Still not gonna use it!

Comedy strikes me as a particularly perplexing example of this problem. Stand-up comics produce arguments all the time, but of course their primary job is still to make people laugh. Often we laugh because the argument seems to make a good point in a clever and interesting way. At other times we may laugh because the argument is clearly absurd or irrelevant. The shear audacity of an obvious fallacy can be damned humorous if one isn’t expected to take it seriously. In such performances, our priorities shift and we may approve arguments which might otherwise seem foolish or genuinely asinine.

My tendency in such cases has always been to assume the comic doesn’t really mean it, but as I get older (and as some of my favorite comics do the same) I find at times these jokes are meant more seriously than I might have hoped. Victoria Jackson would be one particularly morbid example of this problem. What might have been a funny act, at least to some, appears less an less to be an act at all. Honestly, I think the same of Ted Nugent. I know he’s not a comic, but in his old television appearances I can’t help thinking his tone was tongue in cheek, that he at least realized he was taking some liberties with reason. I don’t see that when he speaks anymore. I see the same reckless leaps of lack-logic in Nugent’s speech, but he no longer seems to be in on his own joke. Its as if his reasoning has become so committed to the service of a personal narrative that it couldn’t matter anymore when he is wrong, not even enough for a wink.

How did I get onto Nugent?

Nevermind that!

My point is that in comedy argumentation and jokes are bound up together in interesting ways. Which takes priority over which just isn’t always that clear. Sometimes the strength of an argument carries the joke itself, and sometimes it’s the lack of that strength that makes us laugh. So, which is it in any given case? That’s not easy to tell. The guy laughing beside you may be thinking ‘that is so true’ even as you are busting a gut because it’s completely ridiculous. In either event, we are less likely to evaluate the work of a comedian in terms of the cogency of his reasoning or the truth of his assumptions than the cleverness of his words, his timing, projection, etc. With some clear exceptions, we can see this in the stories people tell about the work of comics.

On the other hand, the work of a good comic does bring us back to the argument as war metaphor. If an act is done right, we might well say of the comic that he killed it! I wonder if stand-up comics ever want to crush their audiences, to see those who came to a show driven before them, and to hear the lamentations of their women?

I’ve probably overdone that line, haven’t I?

Yes, I have.

 

 

 

 

There are More Persons in this Conversation than are Dreamed of in Your Philosophy!

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in atheism, Religion

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I don't believe in gods, but Tom Yum Ghai might just be a holy sacrament!

No gods, but perhaps a holy sacrament! (Tom Yum Ghai)

“I don’t believe in atheists.” That’s a phrase I’ve been seeing a lot lately. It passes for clever in apologetics blogs and it helps many a drive-by tweeter to troll the atheist hashtags. I somehow doubt the majority of these people are making references to the Chris Hedges book from 2008, but who knows how the meme rolls? The bottom line is that lots of folks have found it fun a fun phrase to say.

I wish I could give them all a cookie.

In one respect, at least, the argument does seem fitting. For so long the topic of ‘atheism’ has had a larger presence in Sunday school sermons than it has in the words of actual non-believers. To meet folks who actually claim the title must seem rather surreal to many believers, a bit like having the villains from a story come to life and begin talking back. How much this has to do with the emergence of the so-called new atheism, and how much of this may have been a problem even for the nay-sayers of previous generations, I don’t know, but I do think a lot of Christians must be rather surprised to find other voices have begun to shape a topic over which they expect full control. It really must seem like the height of rudeness for the characters in ones’ own stories to begin asserting ownership of their own narrative. Telling us that atheists aren’t real is a bit like banishing us back to the story lines of Christianity. We are supposed to be vanquished at the end of the sermon; we aren’t supposed to talk back.

…which is what this phrase is really all about.

If pressed on the matter, and sometimes without needing to be pressed at all, those repeating this almost-edgy mantra can usually produce an argument on the matter. Essentially the idea is that atheists are misrepresenting our own selves. Often the argument is that deep down we really know that there is a God. Sometimes, the argument is that we are just rebelling against a god we actually know to exist, or that we simply want to enjoy a life of sin regardless of this god that we really know about. …deep down in our hearts.

I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen this claim that atheists really know there is a god linked to the whole atheists-are-really-just-agnostics-who-need-a-dictionary theme, but that wouldn’t surprise me. Ultimately, both strategies effectively deny the reality of atheism, and of course variations of both arguments are legion.

There is of course little reason to respond to these arguments, but hang on because I’ve got a couple reasons for that at least.

…the not responding part.

I think it pays to recognize interpersonal aggression when you see it, and to separate that as much as possible from efforts at thoughtful discussion. Disbelief in atheism is a paradigm case of poisoning the well, and people don’t do it because they want to talk to you about what you believe, what they believe, or what people might believe in Eastern Mongolia. They are doing it because they want to establish control over you at the outset of the conversation. Why they want that is another question, but make no mistake the issue is control, not some theoretical point they might want to make about anything.

You can have a real conversation about whether or not God exists. You can have a real conversation about what She might be like. You can have a real conversation about what people might or might not know about Her. None of these conversations should be confused with questions about what is or isn’t an accurate representation of your beliefs on that topic.

How do we know what people believe? In most cases, the answer is simply because it is what they have told us what they believe. Support for the truth or falsehood of an assertion about something in this world would ideally take the form of objective evidence, but claims about what one does or doesn’t believe are normally declared by fiat, so to speak, and in most cases, the conversation proceeds from there.

I’m not suggesting there are never any grounds on which to doubt people’s self-representation, but I am suggesting that it’s more than a little unusual to do so. The basis for such doubts ought normally to come from the actions and statements of the party accused of misrepresenting themselves. When (as is almost always the case with dismissal of atheism) the grounds for doubt are little other than theoretical assumptions as to what other people MUST really believe despite their own protestations that is a question good and begged.

It’s also the end of the conversation.

There is of course a secular variant of this argument. We could as easily maintain that believers don’t actually believe what they say that they believe and that all of them are really just pretending to believe in gods. We can go that route if we really want to. But what would be the point of talking about it?

Or even thinking about it, really?

It’s a damned easy world in which those who don’t agree with you become liars or deluded wrecks right from the first nuh-uh, and taking seriously the possibility of real disagreement over an issue is part of taking the issue (whatever it may be) seriously to begin with.

Contempt is always contagious.

Preaching to the Non-Choir and Slouching Towards an Apologetic Tradition

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in atheism, Philosophy

≈ 20 Comments

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What is the difference between a Christian philosopher and a Christian apologist?

Quite simply, marketing.

When I think of a Christian philosopher, I think of someone genuinely engaged in thinking through the issues, someone who makes his bread and butter by addressing alternative viewpoints in a direct and reasonable manner. His career depends on his ability to challenge others with cogent arguments to the topic at hand. He writes and he speaks with an audience in mind that includes non-believers, even dedicated opponents of his own position. Good Christian philosophers give me pause; they make me think twice, and I enjoy reading or listening to their thoughts.

When I think of a Christian apologist, I think of someone whose real audience is already sitting in the church, and they have no intention of going anywhere else on a Sunday. That audience is happy to take in some argument fresh out of a can, telling them why the other guys (people like me) are wrong. They don’t really need convincing, just reassurance, and they certainly won’t be asking any tough questions, at least not without accepting any token answers that may come along. When I think of apologists I think of endless circular arguments and enough straw men to earn a visit from the fire marshal. Apologists can do this, precisely because they are not really making an effort to engage non-believers, they are just making a show of it for the benefit of the faithful.

The philosopher has a potentially hostile audience, and he knows it; the apologist is preaching to the choir, and he knows it too.

When I think of Christian philosophers I think of Alvin Plantinga. When I think of apologists I think of Ray Comfort and his damned banana. (Then I think of Dunning and Kruger, but that’s a rant for a different day.) Don’t get me wrong, there is no hard and fast dividing line between these practices, but one cannott help noticing the differences at the far ends of the continuum. Some folks are making an honest effort to engage people with different views, and some folks are just going through the motions.

An entire industry falls on the less-than-worthy side of that distinction, producing stock arguments for the benefit of believers everywhere. Diehard consumers of this literature often become adept at identifying the issues, naming the conventional arguments, and applying the necessary responses, or at least the labels thereof. Being tone-deaf to the particulars of any given conversation, such folks are happy to point you to a book or even supply a link to some guy who answered your argument (or at least another argument that would fall under the same label). “Just go there and read it and you’ll see…”

Damned irritating is the nicest thing I can say about such people.

But all of this is just background material. What has me thinking about this is the possibility of an emergent apologetics tradition within atheism. Now some might take it for granted that everything I just said about arguments for Christianity would be true of non-believers as well; if one side of a debate is doing it, so a kind of popular wisdom goes, you can sure bet the other side is doing it too. But that just isn’t always the case. (Allow us please the possibility of a different set of vices.) In this instance the difference lies in the relative absence of a viable market for such messages.

…until recently.

For most of my life being an atheist has been a rather lonely experience. Oh sure, I could find lots of people happy to bitch about religion, and plenty more who could tell me (their faces beaming) about the time their minister got mad at them for asking too many questions. But with few exceptions, these same folks stop well short of  denying the existence of God altogether. Most have little better tom say about atheists than they do the preachers of those stories.

Perhaps, my experiences have been atypical, but I don’t think so. Near as I can tell, unbelievers haven’t generally run in crowds all that much, not in the western world at any rate, not the least of reasons being that we have a hard time finding each other.

Had, that is! …had.

The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, once suggested that the invention of the internet has served to empower atheism in important ways, perhaps even given us an edge over believers in public discourse. I have my reservations over Mehta’s full take on the subject, but there is something about his observations that ring true for me. I do think the net is a bit of a game changer even if the outlook of this new game may be less than clear at this point.

The whole issue reminds me of an evening spent surfing the Apologetics page at Christianforums.com only to find the only other people on there were atheists like me. I challenged one of my fellow heathen to debate me anyway, suggesting we flip a coin to decide who would play the part of a believer, but he just wrote ‘lol’. The internet had no love for an argumentative guy that night. Anyway, that was my first taste of the power of the net to draw the unbelievers out into the open, or at least the virtual equivalent thereof.

I live and work in a remote village in the Bible hat of the country. I’ve met three self-professed atheists (that I know of) since moving here, and that’s three more than I met the dozen or so years I worked on the Navajo Nation. In this respect my experience is clearly not typical, but here is my point, I still count dozens of atheists as my friends, and I can interact with them as often as I want to. I have only to go online. That, for me anyway, is the difference between unbelief with the net and unbelief without it.

And yes, that strikes me as a good thing.

What worries me is the possibility that with this form of empowerment, some of us have picked up a few vices, not the east of them being a penchant for crafting arguments with less probative value than inflammatory potential. You can often do both at the same time, and maybe there is good reason to rally the troops on occasion, but sometimes people do make a choice, even without realizing it. There is something deeply inauthentic about fielding an argument that just doesn’t confront the other side in a meaningful way.

It is concerns about this that have me looking sideways at some of the memes circulating through the unbelieving corners of the net. Don’t get me wrong, I laugh at (and hit the ‘like’ button) on lots of these, but some are just genuinely foolish or outright deceptive. I did find it a little disturbing one day when I realized the front page of the atheist reddit consisted of nothing but memes, and I shudder to think at the 140-bit mindset developing on twitter. One can hope that people are learning and developing more complex messages in other contexts, but the medium of expression does shape content. And I can’t help thinking the sound-bite quality of some internet media will have an impact on the sorts of messages circulating about in them.

But of course I am not simply talking about a non-believing net. Recent years have seen the rise of countless conferences for skepticism, secularism, and non belief. Numerous unbelieving organizations, including a range of student groups have come into being, each pursuing a range of closely related agendas. Once again, there is tremendous potential in this. But at least part of that potential is a capacity for group-think and a chance to build a reputation (perhaps even a career) out of interactions with mostly like-minded people. In itself, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t hep if one’s goals are at least partly to engage with others.

The recent Palin-Billboard debacle over at American Atheists would be a nice case-in-point. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone puts them on a billboard, or doubles down on the subject when questioned about it (or brags about high standards when finally correcting the mistake). No, not everyone does that, and David Barton is NOT good company folks. But of course the point here is hardly that someone made a mistake and was slow to correct it. The problem is that such behavior becomes much more likely when your bread&butter does not rest so much on your ability to issue a credible challenge to believers as it does on your ability to comfort those already in your own camp.

No, this post is not about being nice, and it’s not about compromise. It’s about taking the time and effort to do more than tell dirty stories about the stupidity of believers, and to field arguments that will do more than make other non-believers feel good. We are all hit or miss on the topic, even with the best of intentions, but some folks may not even be making that effort.

When your intended audience is in your camp, it is amazing how easy it is to field a compelling argument.

But that is a path that leads to Comfort and bananas.

The point here is that those of us who just say ‘no’ to gods can communicate our views more effectively now than ever. We can reach more people and we can insert our views into more conversations than previously possible. It would be a damned shame if these new possibilities were wasted on the production of in-jokes and arguments appealing only to confirmation bias.

I’m not against Schadenfreude either; I don’t much care what people laugh about three beers into a night out with the guys. But one ought to know the difference between a cheap shot and cogent argument. And one ought to be able to sober up when the time comes and field a case for one’s own position, a case that actually moves the conversation with others forward in some meaningful way.

I do think a few folks could work on that a bit.