Arguing is one of the great pleasures of my life, one which unfortunately I don’t get to enjoy much. Nobody wants to argue much these days.
“Huh? Haven’t you heard of Facebook?” I hear from a thousand incredulous voices.
Well yes. But what I meant was a formal ARGUMENT. That is, a set of propositions one of which, the conclusion, is claimed to necessarily follow from the others.
Logic is the study of the proposition, “it follows from.”
Logic was invented by a bunch of Greeks a long time ago, chief of whom was a guy named Aristotle.
Aristotle also wrote about something called “rhetoric,” the study of how to make your conclusions sound persuasive. Because it’s one thing to arrive at a correct, or at least supportable conclusion, it’s quite another to get people to buy into it.
“Would you rather have a nice thick juicy steak, or a segment of muscle tissue cut from the corpse of an immature castrated bull?” asked author Robert Heinlein.
What I’m reading a lot these days (on Facebook of course) are counterfeit “arguments” introduced by an attack.
“These people are awful and they’re the reason everything sucks.”
These awful people are depending on your politics, are somewhere between 20 to 50 percent of your countrymen. They’re either awful because they’re awful, or more charitably because they’re “brainwashed.”
This is then followed by a set of unsupported claims, just assumed to be true, with an attribution of motive.
“These congressmen voted this way because they want poor people to starve, they want America to go down the tubes, and they want the San Andreas Fault to open up and swallow the country.”
Counter-arguments are dismissed. “They just say that because they want to make money oppressing the poor and destroying the earth.”
This is a caricature of course. Sadly not all that much of one.
Oddly, some of the worst examples of this kind of counterfeit argument I’ve come across came from very successful attorneys. I’m not sure what that means but I wonder if they argue like that in court – and how well it works.
(And by the way, it irritates me to no end to be told I’m “supporting the one percent” by someone who makes more money off a single case than I do in a year’s worth of writing. But I digress.)
Like everyone, I have a side I prefer of course. I also think the side I incline towards generally does a better job of constructing valid arguments. Furthermore I think it’s because they hang around with people they disagree with, so they have to support their convictions a lot more than folks who associate with people they agree with all the time.
But there’s a couple of things I don’t think anybody considers.
One, could it be that the reason things suck is not because of awful people but because it is the nature of things to suck, and there are limits to what can be done about it?
“The poor we will always have with us,” a teacher who quit his day job as a carpenter once said.
We have made great strides in this country improving the lot of, well everybody. If you don’t think so, find me an American doctor who has seen first-hand beri-beri, pellagra, or scurvy.
But our good fortune has not spread evenly throughout the world, nor have we ever succeeded in creating a system without cracks that some people fall through.
Two, people arguing passionately for their beliefs almost never consider that they might both be right.
The argument for a social welfare state is (roughly) that modern society does not have a network of family and private charity sufficient to meet the needs of the destitute, handicapped, mentally ill or merely unfortunate. That government must meet those needs for ethical reasons, and practically to maintain minimal social stability.
The counter argument goes that welfare statism creates a culture of dependency resulting in an ever-growing underclass who become clients not citizens, to the eventual ruination of the state.
Has anybody noticed there is nothing mutually exclusive about these positions?
“But that would mean no state is stable in the long run!”
Looks that way to me too.
That carpenter turned teacher said, “The truth shall make you free,” he did not say it would make you comfortable.