Teaching Americans to Argue Civilly

             In a quietly inspiring story in the USA Today network of newspapers, Gabe Cavallaro tells how Meg Heubeck of the Center for Politics' Youth Leadership Initiative (UVa) "works with teachers nationally to help students respectfully deal with the divides of our society through civil discourse, debate[,] and compromise."

            From what I've seen in comment sections of articles on line, and based in 40 years teaching courses in rhetoric, "the art of ethical persuasion," I'll suggest a broader project.

            One of the reasons so much of our public discourse is uncivil is that too few Americans know how to put together an argument and therefore fall back on personal attack. (Too few Americans can argue well privately with a spouse or other family member or friend, which is a related issue.)

            For the last three generations, middle-class kids have gotten little practice arguing in contexts they care about. Their families have fewer children, and family dinners have become rare, so young children don't get supervised practice arguing with siblings, with feedback from parents on the order of "'Johnny is a doodie-head' is not an argument!" Older children aren't routinely shooed out of the house to organize their own games, and by the time they're teens moving toward adulthood, economically-privileged kids are trapped in what I've called "The Little-League Syndrome."

            Little League Baseball and similar organizations for other sports, and grammar school and high-school athletic teams, teach kids to play the sports well, and these adult-organized and coached sports have been excellent for father-daughter relationships. They have been bad, though, for allowing American kids opportunities to organize their own activities and learn how to persuade their peers.

            On a couple of occasions, my students were surprised to learn my age cohort really didn't have Little League when and where I grew up, but teenage boys had high school fraternities and social-athletic clubs and ran our own leagues. "It's not like we built the parks and playing fields," I told my students, but we did put together teams, arrange schedules, and, sometimes, had to decide what to do with some schmucks who'd embezzled the money the clubs had chipped in for trophies.

            And there were year clubs for boys and for girls that arranged social events.

            Poorer American kids still have gangs — which look to me authoritarian and led by adults — but current fashions in middle-class American parenting and school management seem to preclude kids' organizing their own activities.

            So, one thing that can be done to improve American discourse is for parents and other adults to teach children basic manners and insist on basic decency to others — including no bullying — and to draw back a bit at a time to allow older kids to run more of their own activities and have to persuade one another to do what they want them to do.

            Little League and such teaches kids how to fit into a bureaucracy and follow orders; kid-organized activities teach democratic organizing, which includes persuasion of peers on issues kids care about (and some activities that may legitimately horrify their parents and others in authority).

            The schools need to teach things kids may care less about: argument as a kind of summation of skills, but also description and definition and analysis and other "modes" of discourse. For a slogan for this kind of teaching, we used to have "Unplug the Scantron machines!": i.e., get rid of multiple-choice tests (as an ultimate goal) and have students write out present orally descriptions, extended definitions, analyses, and finally arguments.

            Logical thought isn't exactly natural, and kids need to be taught, and adults need to be reminded, how to use evidence and present a logical argument (if one with enough of an emotional appeal to get it accepted).

            And young adults and some older ones need to be taught how to debate with one another on matters for adults, and for citizens.

            This doesn't mean just pure politics, but — obviously! — issues in the sciences, including military science and tactics, history, theology, and the arts. And it means some training in the sort of deep analysis where you can figure out why political arguments so often go in circles.

            One reasons for a "failure to communicate": Different people often use the same key words with different meanings. E.g., if a human being is essentially a soul to be saved and "ensoulment" occurs at conception, then abortion may be worse than murder. If you're not big on theories of souls and/or if you think theological issues shouldn't enter American politics — then you'll have a different view on abortion (and we haven't even gotten to historical questions on control of women's bodies!). For another example, what do we mean by "patriot"? In 1969 or so, I told an FBI agent, "Mr. N_____ is a very patriotic young man" since Mr. N_____ started out in Marine ROTC, studied US warfare in Vietnam and decided it was wrong, dropped his plans for a military career, and joined the Peace Movement, actively opposing the war. Now that is a patriot, like John Kerry, only a bit earlier. The FBI agent may have had different ideas on patriotism and, indeed, might have thought my idea of a patriot his idea of a traitor.

            The sort of rough-and-ready analysis I just did requires training, and pulling it off in the real world requires practice — a lot of practice — in controlling one's temper and getting opponents to control theirs.

            Meg Heubeck is doing important and difficult work; she deserves a wide variety of support.

Tale of a T-Shirt: My Kerry/Edwards "T," 2004 (7 May 2013)

Rate: 0 Flag

"We can pull a sledge together without being kemmerings" —

I.e., approximately, We can cooperate without liking one another.

— A saying on the planet Gethen in Ursula K. Le Guin's

The Left Hand of Darkness (ch. 6)

 
         The actual occasion for this essay was my taking out my Election 2004 Kerry/Edwards T-shirt to wear while exercising and having to decide whether to wear it as the bottom layer of my T-shirt, thermal underwear shirt, T-shirt sandwich, where it would be invisible, or the top, where it would make its statement to the world.

            I'll return to that T-shirt, but I have a somewhat more respectable and definitely more up-to-day "hook" for this essay in the brouhaha in early May of 2013 over Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson's contrasting the great economist John Maynard Keynes and the great conservative thinker Edmund Burke. Ferguson argued, approximately, that Keynes discounted future generations, whereas Burke stressed our continuity with and obligation to them, because Keynes was gay and childless and Burke heterosexual and a father. As the self-admittedly rather conservative Tim Worstall points out in Forbes on line, Ferguson's comment "is wrong on so many different levels that it’s complicated to point them all out," and Ferguson has since withdrawn the comment and apologized.

            A couple things here. First, the folks calling for Harvard to fire Ferguson should save their breaths. Ferguson is tenured, and tenure includes the right to be wrong and stupid in public without fearing for one's job. Tenure is free speech given economic meaning, and as the ACLU saith, the answer to the problems of free speech is (almost always) more free speech. Ferguson's right to say wrong and stupid things in public is balanced by the right of people like Tim Worstall to point out in public and at some length that Ferguson has said something wrong and stupid. And professors occasionally saying dumb and/or harmful things is a small price to pay for having us around to say useful things that are politically unorthodox or politically incorrect (e.g., pointing out that the arguments for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq had serious problems). Think of professors as if we were the Court Foole or a satirist: licensed wise-asses speaking Truth to power, except scholarly discourse comes with citations and less entertainment value.

            But moving on: One should also refrain from demanding firing the man if Ferguson is a homophobe, or if he were a Communist or sexist or Ayn-Randian atheist or free-will-denying Calvinist or Arian heretic or Aryan chauvinist or any other state of being or identification. The issue is what Ferguson or any professor does in the classroom and his research and other official duties or, if it's really egregious, does outside the classroom. Saying some heretical or offensive thing occasionally, fine, possibly even helpful; intimidating students outside of a little Socratic bullying, uh no. Going off on rants or insisting your students believe your bullshit — or believe anything, for that matter — definitely not.

            (As a mediator for an academic department I sometimes had to explain the know/believe distinction to young teachers. Teachers can insist that their students learn and understand all sorts of things; they may not insist that the students believe any of it. See J. S. Mill, On Liberty [1859]: freedom of thought for all concerned is a basic principle of academic freedom. For me as a Jew who taught a fair amount of Christian theology so students could understand large swaths of English literature, it's a truism that "to know" doesn't necessarily mean "to believe." I also taught some Freudian theory on occasion — and, more often, the theory of the Four Elements [Air, Earth, Fire, and Water], which is arguably more demonstrable than Freudian theory.)

            The second thing I'd bring up from this affair de Fergie is the extent to which Ferguson's dumb-ass comment on Keynes should be added to other of his errors to discourage right-thinking people like me  to dismiss Ferguson generally and entirely.

            The answer is, Not much: not to a significant extent.

            I'm approaching here a question of ethos or "the ethical proof" or what I'll deal with in a strong form as "The John Edwards Issue": the idea that in judging an argument one should "Consider the source." The most legitimate use of this criterion is a person's record on accuracy, insightfulness, usefulness, and other positive rhetorical stuff. When people have histories of error and dishonesty, we should be especially skeptical about anything they go on to say. Even as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs," assertions by the careless, malicious, and/or mendacious require extraordinarily careful testing.

            Still, only in logic puzzles do liars always tell lies and truth-tellers always speak truth. In the real world, anyone can screw up, and nasty, stupid, often mendacious people may be right sometimes, and their intellectual and ethical betters can be screamingly, horribly wrong.

            I've listened to a couple of Niall Ferguson's books with profit and pleasure and found them, where questionable, still usefully provocative. Economic historians can find much to complain about in Ferguson's work, but for someone on my level what I heard was instructive, and I don't think I was seriously misled.

            Sometimes it's all the more dangerous for being attractive, but vigorous and thought-provoking error can often be more useful than truths that just sort of lie there and glows with righteousness.

            Pushing the point brings me to my T-shirt, the John Edwards for Vice President part of it.

            I wore the T-short, and on the outside.

            First off, the political memory of Americans is about 2.5 weeks, which is, nowadays, maybe two news cycles; plus few Americans walking their dogs at 8:15 a.m. seriously read other people's T-shirts. So I could be pretty sure I wouldn't get hassled for the "T" and what was involved, mostly, was my self-respect.

            You see, John Edwards is a cad and has done the deeds of a cad and in addition may be a scoundrel: unconvicted, but quite possibly a felon who misappropriated campaign funds to cover up his extramarital affair … plus siring a bastard child, lying — a bunch of shit.  So if you would decline to vote for John Edwards if he ever tries to rehabilitate himself, I'm not going to argue with you.

            Still, I'll keep the "T" and wear it because John Edwards brought some useful messages to the 2004 and 2008 campaigns: he stressed issues of class.

            Provocation can be useful, and if anyone does note my T-shirt I can remind them that "During the campaign of 2004," the in-this-Honorable John Edwards "spoke often of the two Americas: the America of the privileged and the wealthy, and the America of those who lived from paycheck to paycheck." Edwards was the Senator and candidate who "spoke of the difference in the schools, the difference in the loan rates, the difference in opportunity"; the Senator who brought again into mainstream discourse Benjamin Disraeli's crucial observation in 1845 of the "Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor."

            I can see not voting for Edwards if he fails what might be called the nausea test. Most American women should never vote for Edwards; but I might. "The personal is the political" indeed, but people, maybe especially men-type people, are notoriously good at compartmentalizing our minds and, thank God, often even better at hypocrisy. I believe Edwards could have been kept to his words on rich vs. poor and pressured into working to keep the US from falling to where Americans are rich or poor, and those are the non-choices and the poor get consistently and royally screwed.

            Anyway, I'll keep the T-shirt and keep it in its place in rotation of my exercise wear. And I'll wear it on the outside now and then, and hit the elliptical trainer with my iPod, perhaps listening to The Ascent of Money or Civilization, audiobooks by Niall Ferguson.

____________________________
 Addendum: on Tuesday, 7 May 2013, Mark Sanford was elected to the United State Congress in a special election in Shouth Carolina's First Congressional District. When governor of South Carolina in 2009, Mr. Sanford disappeared for six days to visit his lover in Argentina, a woman who was not his wife. Mr. Sanford's actions were less reprehensible than those of John Edwards but a good deal weirder; Sanford's quick political rehabilitation is a strong sign of growing tolerance for politicians' behaving badly in private, so long as they act offically in ways people see as the public interest, or at least in the interest of "our kind."

Crusades: A Quick non-Latin-Orthodox-Catholic-Christian View (8 March 2014)

Trudy Rubin of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an excellent column on Sec. of State John Kerry’s February 2014 efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the column included an unfortunate phrase picked up in its headline by my local newspaper and elsewhere: "Kerry’s crusade just what the Mideast needs."

            "Crusade"? Really? Like George W. Bush didn't screw that one up enough for editors to remember?

            Working on my own writing, I had out Matthew White’s The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (2012) and could do some quick checking undone at several respectable news sources.

            The literal Crusades of 1095-1291 make #30 on White’s list of mass killing, with a body count of approximately three million. A significant and — trust me on this — highly restrained paragraph in White's entry describes the climax of the First Crusade: "Finally, Jerusalem was besieged and captured in July 1099. The crusaders looted the city and killed 70,000 people in the streets — Muslims mostly, but also anyone who looked Muslim. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue were burned inside. The chroniclers wrote of crusaders wading through blood as deep as their horses’ bridles — an exaggeration obviously, but we can certainly imagine them splashing through sticky puddles of blood leaking from bodies in the streets" (p. 101).


            Please do picture crusaders splashing through "puddles of blood" and those bodies in the streets in Jerusalem — and at other times in Constantinople (killing Greek Orthodox Christians) and Acre and a number of cities on the crusaders’ routes; and then never again wish on the Mideast or any place else another crusade. Especially not on the Middle East.