Here's a cartoon perhaps some can relate to.
Category Archives: General discussion
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Why We Fight
I'm reminded today of a set of arguments that I find both compelling and well-executed, a set of arguments that is sadly under-appreciated (in my view, anyway). And while much of what we do here is criticism, today we turn our attentions to some good arguments. We've commented recently on certain views on American patriotism, as well as on various uses and abuses of the term "fascism," especially as they are applied to those who might offer up dissent to the policies of the current administration. A troubling trend in recent political op-eds is that fascism–and its (erroneously so-called) cousins, communism and terrorism–has been posited as the binary opposite of patriotism. So, today we discuss dissent. And there could no more fitting day than the anniversary of this manifesto of dissent. The men and women who founded this country were concerned about dissent. After all, its very founding was an act of dissent. And so, once it was born, they worried what might happen if some recalcitrant groups of citizens decided to up and overthrow them. One of them had an answer:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.
There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.
It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
I'd like to note two things here: one, Madison begins by clearly defining his terms. He avoids any equivocation and the likelihood of misinterpretation by getting his terms clear from the start. Two, the argument here is clearly and deftly stated. No tricks, no semantic sleight-of-hand, just premises and conclusions. Read it through, please. It's a wonderful piece of argument. On a deeper level though, notice that differing opinions are not only to be tolerated by the government, but cultivated by the government. As Madison will go on to argue, it is only the effects of faction that need to be controlled, and this will happen naturally, as a function of widely differing opinions. This is not the language of fealty and demagoguery; it is the language of free expression and independent thought.
Here's our bit: this was written in a newspaper. It is no small shame that such elevated and concise discourse does not occupy the op-ed pages of today's newspapers. Instead we have partisan-baiting, ad hominem attacks, and rhetorical trickery. Our national discourse is in shambles and we bear the burden of bringing it back up. Don't settle. Demand something better. That's why we do what we do here. Not because we like to titillate ourselves with the cleverness of our ratiocinations, nor because we think the refutation of some pundit's stance on a particular issue proves the veracity of our own privately-held view. We do it because it is in the best American spirit to speak out. So, we'll be here, gentle reader, keeping up the fight. We wish you and yours the very best on this Fourth of July.
Credibility
Challenging someone's credibility when that person's credibility is relevant to whether or not one should believe him or her does not constitute an ad hominem attack. Someone ought to tell John Bolton, whose credibility in matters of foreign affairs ought to have suffered for the Iraq debacle. Well, someone did. An interviewer asked whether Americans would be rightly skeptical of the administration and its minions' claims about Iran's military intentions. And here is how Bolton responded:
Absolutely not! And by the way, the credibility point is an ad hominem reference. And certainly ad hominem attacks in American politics are nothing new. But to address the merits of the argument requires a response on the merits, not an ad hominem attack.
No it's not an ad hominem attack. An ad hominem argument uses irrelevant information about the person making an argument to discredit them–whether one should believe Bolton's doomsday rhetoric about Iran is certainly relevant.
You can hear the audio here.
Argumentum ad titulum
Here's a new fallacy. It's a specific variation of the straw man. It involves attacking the titles of someone's work in place of the work itself. George Will–what would we do without him–has been working on this one for several years now. Several years ago, before the NonSequitur, I saw him on ABC's This Week critique a series of New York Times' articles by reading their titles. From what I could gather, he didn't bother to read the actual article. The very same subject came up again this past Sunday.
Here is what he writes:
Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today's near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling" (1997), "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" (1998), "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" (2000) and "More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime" (2003).
Headlines! Without reading those articles, one can tell that the titles suggest a counter-intuitive irony. Will challenges this by not reading it and accusing the author (and the newspaper) of denying an obvious causal connection.
We're Humean about such things, so we don't think causal connections can be divined a priori.
Homepwnership
I don't think Paul Krugman has been at his best lately. Perhaps, as someone here suggested, the problem is that he's strayed too far from economics, his home base. Well today he writes about economics, home ownership, and he seems to mess it up. Unlike many of the people we talk about here, Krugman has shown that he's better than this. So it's sad to see him write:
But here’s a question rarely asked, at least in Washington: Why should ever-increasing homeownership be a policy goal? How many people should own homes, anyway?
Listening to politicians, you’d think that every family should own its home — in fact, that you’re not a real American unless you’re a homeowner. “If you own something,” Mr. Bush once declared, “you have a vital stake in the future of our country.” Presumably, then, citizens who live in rented housing, and therefore lack that “vital stake,” can’t be properly patriotic. Bring back property qualifications for voting!
Even Democrats seem to share the sense that Americans who don’t own houses are second-class citizens. Early last year, just as the mortgage meltdown was beginning, Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who is one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, warned against a crackdown on subprime lending. “For be it ever so humble,” he wrote, “there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage.”
The first question, however jarring, seems to be a legitimate one. But it ought to be directed at our intuitions about home ownership (that it gives you more of a stake in your neighborhood, etc.). Instead, Krugman aims this one first at what is clearly a caricature of the advocates of home ownership–one that barely even satisfies its own ridiculousness.
This is really a shame. It's nice to have one's intuitions challenged. Krugman could have done this well, had it not been for his George Will style "presumably" argument.
logical correctness
There's a difference between using a word and "mentioning" it–I mean, mentioning it without the quotes. Mentioning it means you refer to the word qua word, not what the word means. This is in effect what you do when you refer to someone else's words–he said "you're a jerk"–doesn't call you a jerk. Reporters do this sort of thing all of the time when they refer to someone's words or accusations or whatever in their stories. One not unfair criticism of the press is that this is all they do (i.e., the stenography objection).
But that objection concerns when they note they're mentioning someone else's words: "Obama said that McCain was xyz." McCain responded, "Obama is abc." Sometimes, however, you don't really know whether the journalist is using or mentioning. Here's an example from today's New York Times business section:
Indeed, Wal-Mart has gone so far on some initiatives, like the environmental programs, that it has started to draw scattered attacks from the right, particularly from a group called the National Legal and Policy Center that has accused the company of giving in to political correctness.
While it's clear the author is talking about someone's accusation, it's not clear that "political correctness" has meaning independent of that accusation. Since there's no gloss on what that accusation might mean, one might suppose it's being used, not mentioned, that the author, in other words, thinks that phrase is the proper description of the union's activity.
Besides, wasn't it once the case that "political correctness" referred to restrictions on representational content–one could not, say, use sexist or racist language in a public museum. When did it become the case that conservationist environmental policies qualify?
Pluralisms
I don't know what Tony Blair's actual views are (He used to be Prime Minister of Britain. But he isn't any more. He has converted to Catholicism–something he waited to do until he left office, for to avoid breaking the law), but he inadvisedly let Michael Gerson explain them. Gerson writes:
But Blair is also critical of an "aggressive secularization," which, he told me, makes it easier to "forget a higher calling than the fulfillment of our own desires." Religious faith, at its best, not only encourages idealism, it provides an explanation and foundation for human rights and dignity, "an inalienable principle, rising above relativism and expediency." This does not "eliminate the painful compromises of political existence," Blair recognizes. But it does mean that "not everything can be considered in a utilitarian way." Blair defends a pluralism without relativism, a tolerance consistent with a belief in religious and moral truth — indeed, a tolerance that arises from within those convictions.
That view–that religious faith "provides an explanation and foundation for human rights" seems to be slightly self-refuting–it suggests that atheists (or for that matter people whose religious views differ from Blair's and Gerson's) cannot explain human rights. It rejects pluralism at the same time that it purports to embrace it. We embrace pluralism, one who affirms this view might say, it's just that you're an amoral or an immoral relativist–which has no place in our pluralistic view.
He might say, of course, certain religious doctrines or faiths are not inconsistent with political and moral and religious pluralism. And that pluralism of the political, moral, and religious variety is not the sole property of any one member of the plural. He might. But he didn't.
Sins of omission
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times, took the editor of the Times' opinion page to task for having published the moronic ravings of Edward Luttwak on Obama. He concludes that the Times ought to be more responsible on factual questions. He writes:
The Times Op-Ed page, quite properly, is home to a lot of provocative opinions. But all are supposed to be grounded on the bedrock of fact. Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture.
Sounds right to me. Two cheers for Hoyt.
But the editing job ought to beyond the straight up factual claims. Disregarding obvious countervailing evidence, which can happen when op-ed writers "stress" some facts and not others, is just as bad, if not in fact worse.
Envirocommunism
The President of the Czech Republic has helped Charles Krauthammer find the true enemy of freedom. It's knowledge about the natural world. This knowledge is especially dangerous if Krauthammer doesn't have the patience, time, or expertise to understand it. He writes:
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.
But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.
For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).
Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.
Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.
Such a combination of straw men (the weakest versions of global warming arguments–not to Newsweeks's idea of "debate" about global warming), red herrings (communism, socialism, etc.), ad hominem (arrogant scientists are just trying to rule the world), ad ignorantiam (since we don't know much about the effects of carbon, let's do nothing. . . ), and just plain non sequiturs (Newton's law of motion was "overthrown" so distrust everything short of that) has not been seen for, um, weeks on this page.
La’ ci darem la mano
E.J. Dionne seems conflicted about gay marriage. He writes:
And, as a New York Court of Appeals judge cited by the California court majority noted, fundamental rights "cannot be denied to particular groups on the ground that these groups have historically been denied those rights." If history and tradition had constrained us, equal rights for African Americans would never have become law.
But to find a constitutional right to gay marriage, the California majority chose to argue that the state's very progressive law endorsing domestic partnerships for homosexuals — it grants all the rights of marriage except the name — was itself a form of discrimination.
This is odd and potentially destructive. As Justice Carol Corrigan argued in her dissent, "to make its case for a constitutional violation, the majority distorts and diminishes the historic achievements" of the state's Domestic Partnership Act.
The court found, correctly according to Dionne, that the domestic partnership law–however historically "progressive"–amounted to discrimination. Dionne ought to know that these two laws are different things (the progressive one about domestic partnership and the one about marriage). "Progressive" legislation aimed at circumventing legal discrimination (the denial of marriage to homosexuals for whatever reason) may be nice, but it still endorses the discrimination as legal (so goes, at least, the argument of the California court). So even if the legislation is, in its proper historical context quite "progressive", that fact hardly justifies maintaining it. Imagine had equal rights been handled this way–let's not call them "rights" but "things due" or something like that. Dionne's position, it seems to me, is just the obverse–the double negative as it were–of the argument he has just rejected. That is to say, the "progressiveness" of the legislation is no more reason to maintain it than the fact that such discrimination has long been lawful.