October 8, 2017
Ideas Fight Back
At the top of every discussion thread in r/politics, the reddit forum for U.S. political news with over three million subscribers, there stands an automatically generated message exhorting users to engage one another in a civil manner. In particular it demands: “Attack ideas, not users.”
Well-intentioned as it is, there is surely something amiss in a call to civility which is, at the same time, a call to arms.
To be clear, I am not at all claiming that this message asks users to take up guns and knives, nor that any sensible person could understand it as an invitation to physical violence – it is ostensibly directed toward peace. What it calls for is an activity modeled on physical violence: it asks users to participate in attacks. The consequences of and alternatives to this framing device deserve consideration.
An attack is an attempt to destroy something. It is by definition a violent act. We do not typically respect what we attack; we mean it harm. We want to get rid of it, to fight it away. These truisms elaborate the literal, ordinary meanings of the word. When it is applied in broader contexts, these are the consequences that carry over unless explicitly denied. It takes effort to think in terms of attacking respectfully, or attacking to build – these phrases do not call us to immediate action, as they present with too many uncertainties. An “attack of joy” rings amusingly oxymoronic – perhaps we are so unaccustomed to the pleasure that our instinct is to put up our guard.
That our engagement with ideas can take the form of an attack shows itself all the more clearly in how we respond to such engagements. When our ideas are attacked, we defend them. When something of yours is attacked, you are immediately drawn to fight back, to repel the assault. In this light the so-called backfire effect – the phenomenon wherein people met with evidence for facts contrary to their beliefs only become more confident in what they previously thought – emerges not just as unsurprising, but in a certain sense rational.1 If your idea is being attacked, you will have to steel yourself to return fire. If you are not prepared to defend it, why did you hold and value it in the first place? It would be weak, in the face of repeated attacks, to tend habitually toward concession, and to expect to lose territory.
All this sort of talk is what comes naturally if we conceptualize argument as a battle, with winners and losers. But if what we want is convergence toward truth, agreement, and cooperation – all requirements of functional democracy – it seems clear to me that this sort of engagement should be treated, as in the case of physical violence, as a last resort.
Combative and Collaborative Attitudes
How do we attack ideas? By calling them stupid, irrational, full of shit; by shouting over their expressions; by declaring that they need to die. More generally, we know how to attack ideas when and because we have adopted a combative discursive attitude. When we hear someone express an enemy idea, we think “I must correct them,” taking ourselves to be the arbiters of truth, tasked with the targeted elimination of falsehood. To mark an idea for destruction is to ensure it can find no quarter, and this requires changing minds. To attack is to try to do so by force.
We cannot decry partisanship while acting like soldiers. The truth does not need us to be her chivalrous knights. The truth will out. Contrary to contemporary panic, no amount of lying and bullshit can convert itself into truth. What needs our defense are the attitudes and environments conducive to the intensely challenging and necessarily collaborative pursuit of truth.
This attitude will strike many as naïve, even dangerous. Are there not ideas, growing in strength at this moment, which ought to be destroyed – ideas inimical to our most cherished values, which twist hearts with hate and murderous compulsion, and whose tolerance is complacency? Who but a coward or traitor would not rise to combat against them, when their invasion threatens our institutions and the safety of our beloved?
I stand firm in my opposition to hateful ideologies, but shouting and condemning them out of existence can be expected to fare as well as bombing away terrorism. My argument stems less from pacifism than from simple pragmatism.2 Attacking ideas almost never destroys them. Ideas fight back. There is perhaps no surer way to revitalize an ignored ideology than to slander it in the most offensive and polarizing terms; at once an army will coalesce around the target to dress its wounds and fortify it. The logic of the afflicted can be almost syllogistic: “you can’t be right; you say I’m wrong; so, I must be right.”
One possible reaction to this phenomenon is to blame it on fragile egos, on an emotionally charged inability to hold our beliefs at a sufficient distance to submit them to vivisection under the cool, uncaring light of reason. (Many attackers ridicule their opponents for becoming defensive.) But this account rests on an implausible reductive idealization of belief. Our beliefs do not float apart in some platonic realm, divorced from our interests and commitments. Only the inconsequent trivia can be painlessly plucked out like grey hairs. The complex precepts which feature in anger-stained discourse are set too deeply and constitutively in our network of understandings. They often inform what we should do and who we are, and it is hard if not impossible to distinguish an attack on a self-descriptive belief from an attack on a self. When we are told that such a belief we hold is wrong, it can be or seem most rational to dismiss the possibility, for so long as we stand on the same foundation, the belief cannot be wrong – its negation would set off a cascade of contradictions, with cherished values among them. When a given framework makes a belief reasonable, reasons against it alone will not compel us to abandon it; the resulting discord would be most easily resolved by snapping the original belief back to its proper place. To change such a belief we must root it out, and we will not be interested in doing so unless alternative foundations can be made more sensible, more right, more appealing.
The difficulty of this endeavor should not be underestimated. We sometimes hear expressions like: “I would be glad to be proven wrong, because then I would have learned something.” While the motivation is commendable, at the risk of making perfect the enemy of the good I submit that glad here is a rather curious choice of words, which belies a possible unpreparedness to live up to one’s espousal. Yes, the realization “I was wrong” is a valuable experience which we can be glad to have had. But we should not forget how painful and challenging such experiences can be, nor forget about the transformations they can represent. The atheist who says “I would of course change my mind if God showed himself” is right only if they understand change my mind in a maximally robust sense, as what would take place could not be a mere toggling of a proposition or two, a switch from “not: there is God” to “there is God”. What was once our absurd fortune of existence is now a transcendent design; the unloved now embraced and the perfect crime now witnessed; the dead are not dead; all questions now have new possible answers and so all previous answers must be questioned afresh, if indeed the questions retain sense. Gladness is, if on some level appropriate, an odd emotion to expect upon the realization of a process that, at its most extreme, leaves us unrecognizable to our former selves.
In this light, forcing another to undergo this process emerges as an absurd prospect. What makes sense is a collaborative discourse, argument as cooperation. This is a rejection neither of objectivity nor disagreement, but of attitudes which impair their utilities. Conflict does not reveal the necessary copresence of the right and the wrong, but instead the possibility to fuse perspectives and trace back incompatibilities to unnoticed foundational commitments – or, yes, to simple error. It will not do for one party to assume the role of teacher unless the other is likewise prepared to be the pupil, and it is just as well, since we should not take the responsibility of teaching lightly.
Don’t attack ideas – explore them. Shine different lights on them. Take them apart and put them back together. Present alternatives and make the more compelling case for them. Unless viable alternatives are made conceivable and actionable, then even where we doubt or dislike our beliefs we may resign ourselves to acceptance that our stupid idea is the only game in town, and those who reject it are at best naïve. When ideas disgust you, study them as an artist, then paint them in naked honesty. It is an unskilled and untrusting artist who, after painting a scene of a massacre, feels the need to stand by the art and exclaim “look how barbaric, how cruel!” The tragedy will speak for itself, and where the art is skillful and true, the perpetrators may even recognize themselves in the portrait.
“Tell that to them...”
One response to this line will be obvious and prevalent: “I am all for constructive discourse, but we are not the problem. The people peddling hatred and falsehoods are often the same who are incapable of or totally uninterested in discussion. They think winning an argument means yelling the loudest, and that admitting an error is weakness.”
Yes: some people often act like hard-headed, ignorant loudmouths. The pragmatic point stands trivially: if someone is totally impervious to self-evaluation and change, nothing we do will get them to change their mind; cooperative engagement and combative refutation would be equally fruitless. But I am concerned primarily not with the extreme cases of screaming matches and slogan-chanting. I have in mind the more commonplace settings in which the participants at least put forward the pretense of reasonable discussion, where the combative attitude manifests not so often in overt rage, but in snide asides and scorekeeping. We may well suspect our interlocutor of bad faith, of entering spontaneous dialogue with a fixed script, but can we then fairly expect them to think any differently of us?
Yes, sometimes there can be little doubt that the person we are talking to is wrong. For the purposes of successful collaborative discourse, it doesn’t matter who is right. (Compare the absurdity of the following: You see something in the distance that looks like a bear. I tell you that you can see it better from over here. You come over and see that it is only a boulder. I call you a loser, and take pride in having won our interaction.) Honest discourse requires the sensible assumption that all parties are interested in understanding and making sense. It is far easier to assume that they are driven by “feels over reals” than it is to figure out how another mind like ours reached such foreign conclusions. We all want to get things right, and we all are emotionally invested in the process. The intellect whose every belief is logically and indifferently derived from incontrovertible axioms is a rationalist fantasy; that mind does not exist in a body, in a society.
Yes, there are ideas which are poisons – ideas with such abominable consequences that we see no way they could ever reside in a healthy mind. There are ideas which we are right not to tolerate. But what is the function of the declaration that we will not stand with such ideas in our midst? Spoken among ourselves, this is at best a reaffirmation of values, at worst a self-congratulatory definition of the irredeemable. Spoken in the presence of the intolerated, such a verbal act can only move us forward if it sits upon the understanding: but we want to stand with you, we wish you would stand with us. Without this foundation, the intolerance of the idea becomes the intolerance of the person. When someone with whom we share respect censures thoughts we find in ourselves, we may turn from the thoughts in shame. When the censure comes from those who dismiss and ridicule us, we are vindicated in our accepting company.
A plausible counterpoint asserts that there is value in ridiculing such ideas to deny them prestige and legitimacy. But while ridicule may shame the costumed aspirant to resignation, to the devoted it provides only fuel and fortitude: look how they mock us! So self-righteous, so ignorant; they laugh because they fear what will happen once their friends take us seriously. No, the treatment which such ideologies cannot withstand is not ridicule, but total and genuine lack of interest. Ideologies gain adherents by being compelling, by presenting what seem to be irresistible certainties. When we witness an unmistakable life of excellence in which these ideologies were not only resistible but totally without purchase, the spell can be broken.
Try as we might, we will be attacked. Efforts at crossing divides will be met with rebuke and boastful ignorance, and not only by our disputants. (“They believe ____; why are you even talking to them?”) There is little to gain from reflecting on what they could have done differently, while turning this question on oneself is often fruitful. (Did the phrasing of my apparently innocent question make a hurtful or thoughtless assumption? It is useful to wonder even when the answer is “not unless you insist on reading it that way”.) The only hateful speech we have the sure power to prevent is our own. The point of taking the high road is not to look down on those we see below.
I suspect some will call this weakness, perhaps a conflict-averse cowardice, unwilling to challenge misinformation and bigotry head-on. It is a strange accusation, since anger is so quick and easy, when the pursuit of understanding and equanimity so deeply tests our strength. Indeed collaborative discourse often asks of us more strength than we have, for unlike battles which reward the victors with thickened egos, collaboration asks us to welcome our own selves’ destruction, if that is what deeper understanding demands. Let those who have an ineliminable thirst for the glories of combat be assured: there is no shortage of demons to be vanquished on the road of self-understanding.
Roses by Other Names
As I hope the above makes clear, I am not suggesting we stop arguing – quite the contrary. At a certain level of description, the activities I am criticizing and those I am advocating are the same – voicing disagreement, presenting contrary evidence, identifying weakly supported steps of argumentation. I am rather criticizing the use of a particular set of entrenched metaphors which frame these activities – one drawn from the language of the battlefield, in which the bad ideas are the enemy who deserves to die, whom we are duty-bound to kill. I do so because I believe that the metaphors which frame our activities structure our approach to them (normally not explicitly but through having internalized them): by bringing forward certain possible actions (and suppressing others), providing sense to our progress and goals, and informing our attitudes toward them.3 And I criticize this framework not because I find it mean-spirited (though this is also often the case), but because I think it is harming where it means to help, actively blocking paths to truth. It is the wrong tool for the job.
Of course, there is no necessary connection here: we could use this talk of attack and defense without importing an attitude of destructive conflict. But if we do so reflectively, it should become clear to us that our language is at some level inappropriate, at odds with what we mean to do. And we cannot be surprised when beginners in the practice get “the wrong idea” plainly suggested by unapt terminology. In any case, my critique is not limited to the vocabulary, but extends to the attitude itself, which so readily takes it up.
All metaphors have their limits. On whether, for example, we sometimes must or should “use lethal (verbal) force in self-defense” of an idea I have nothing to say; it’s not clear to me what that would mean. Similarly I have meant to avoid as much as possible the tangled topic of whether violent speech is in some sense literally violence; for the purpose of my argument, it doesn’t matter. Fundamentally I hope only to bring out the inherent tension which an attitude of attack in the context of a collaborative endeavor represents. We cannot fight each other to agreement. We can only work together towards it.
1. I understand such an effect, however intuitively familiar, has actually proven hard to reproduce scientifically. Might it emerge more clearly when the subjects' beliefs are challenged the more clearly as an attack?
2. I mean pragmatism as colloquially understood, not in the philosophical sense, sympathies with the latter notwithstanding.
3. To one interested in this sort of analysis, the obvoius recommendation is George Lakoff, whom I am to some extent echoing, though one also finds in Heidegger inspiration to take our words seriously.
I'd love to hear your comments. Email me at editor@thehenwell.com, and let me know, if relevant, if I may affix your comment to this post.
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