Just musing and trying to clarify some thoughts I’ve had on political discourse for a while… any help in further clarifying much welcomed.
Looking over at Brad Wardell’s blog today, I came across a couple of things that had me thinking. See:
and:
http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/361064/This_is_an_example_of_why_Obama_creeps_me_out
Both of these contain arguments that strike me as being profoundly wrong, but there’s a crucial difference of type between them. The first argument is about why healthcare should be privately insured and why government involvement would be bad. The second argument suggests that because Obama is closely associated with a logo, he is like Hitler, who was also closely associated with a logo.
If I had the time and inclination, I could write a long essay explaining why I disagree with the first proposition. And I think I could do it in a way that would be recognised by people who disagree with my position as being based on reason. That is, they could make an argument against my position based on the content of what I had to say. This process is what I think of as being “rational discourse”, and even though it’s very slow and there’s a lot of disagreement about how best to do it and we may never agree or we may make only the most painfully tiny progress towards agreement, it seems to me like an important thing to do. It’s kind of a way of… acknowledging and dealing with differences in a “community of ideas” that we all, in some sense, belong to. Whatever you believe, millions of people out there believe you’re wrong, but to a greater or lesser extent, you have to live with those people.
The second argument, though… I mean, I can talk about weak analogies or affirming the consequent or whatever kind of rational argument I want to make against it, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like doing any of that stuff, because it just makes me angry. And I suspect it comes out of anger, as well. You know, is it Mencken who said, “someone you like spills soup in your lap and it’s charming, but someone you hate enrages you by the way he holds his spoon”? I forget the person and the exact words, but the sentiment strikes me as true. I see it in myself when I get ticked off at Bush for saying “nyookyoolar”. It’s a word, people pronounce it different ways, who gives a fuck? That would be the rational attitude, but someone I dislike “mispronounces” it and suddenly it’s a big deal.
…and also I think the difference between the two arguments is frequently misunderstood as being about intelligence. We all like to show off how smart we are and so we attack the first argument as being “dumb” and the second argument as being “really really dumb”, but to me it seems that’s totally off the mark. The second argument seems to me to be something that has virtually nothing to do with intelligence at all. Anyone who can program the AI in GalCiv is not dumb. So I think this sort of… discourse exists on a plane where intelligence is not even relevant, and… rational explanations of what is wrong with it are… attacks on the wrong thing.
…anyway, it seems like a lot of the time on the internet that second type of argument is the one that people make, and respond to. It’s the stuff that there is no meaningful response to that gets the biggest response. And as a leftist I feel quite comfortable in saying that this is one respect, at least, in which the left differs very little from the right. It’s like that C.S. Lewis thing about wanting “the enemy” to be as bad as possible to justify hating them as much as possible.
What I’ve tried to do (often unsuccessfully) in approaching this sort of stuff is to just ignore arguments of the 2nd type wherever they occur, on whatever side of politics… and to participate as much as I have energy and time and patience for in arguments of the 1st kind. But… I wish there was something more I could do. It seems hopeless sometimes to “just ignore it” because… it has such a powerful kind of energy to it, it seems to overwhelm everything else. And I also… feel inclined to say something about it when it’s on “my” side of the political fence, because… I feel invested in how grown-up “we” are able to be about this stuff, I guess.
I guess partly what I’m hunting around for is just a word or some terminology to encapsulate what the difference between the two kinds of discourse is that doesn’t boil down to “smart v dumb” or even “rude v polite”, that… accurately labels what the “planar difference” is between them.
tl;dr: How do we talk to people we disagree w/ without it devolving into a pointless slanging match?
