Disagreements are like onions II

(or “Why we shouldn’t put all our arguments in one rhetorical basket”)

[Content note: Pulse shooting, homophobia, Islamophobia, gun issues, fundamentalist Christianity, and, sadly, more Donald Trump. A bit on the disjointed side, and perhaps best read as three separate sub-essays.]

As the title suggests, this is a direct follow-up to my last post, “Disagreements are like onions“.

I. Separation, period

…What was I saying? Oh yes, I think all of this can be generalized a little further. In the other post, I suggested that we should make a priority of separating the object level from the meta level, or different “degrees of meta”, when analyzing a given disagreement. One obvious challenge that could be raised against this thesis is whether for any two “layers” of an argument one is really more “meta” than the other in some obvious way. For instance, in the example I gave in the other post about separating the possibility of Trump not being the rightful president from the possibility that his executive orders were wrong, it doesn’t seem that clear whether “legitimacy of election” is the meta-level issue while “morality/legality of executive action” is the object-level issue or vice versa. And it doesn’t really matter — the arguments I was giving were for separating the two, without necessarily applying any particular asymmetric treatment to them.

So the moral of the story as I see it is even a little simpler: just try not to conflate different layers. And now, “layers” is not meant to imply hierarchy with respect to any axis. Considering this in terms of object/meta level distinctions was useful, because it seemed to me that an awful lot of this conflation was between layers that differed in levels of meta-ness, but this isn’t always so.

When we strip away all the talk of object and meta levels and just talk about “levels”, the primary reason for the fallacy becomes even more apparent. A person who is defending a position with many levels is often tempted to throw all of their eggs into the basket of their favorite one, which is often the one which feels easiest to defend.

Although this behavior seems extremely common and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it plenty of times without realizing it, some of the most blatant (and kind of hilarious) examples of it which come most easily to my mind involve fundamentalist Christian apologetics of the most extreme and crackpotty kind. For instance, I remember hearing an open-air preacher on a university campus who was carrying on, in his slow, booming voice, by giving a rendition all of what he considered to be the principal sinful behaviors of us students. It quickly became clear that homosexuality held a position of special status among this horde of evil lifestyle choices, because apparently every single other one was a special case of it. “Extramarital relations is what happens when you give in to your baser passions, so that is a form of homosexuality. Same with pot-smoking, so that is a form of homosexuality. Social Darwinism is also a form of homosexuality. Being a Democrat is a form of homosexuality. Mormonism is a form of homosexuality…” And so on and so on. Now the issue of same-sex attraction isn’t in any obvious way more or less “meta” than questions surrounding these other supposed evils. But it was certainly a hot-button issue at the time as well as evidently this preacher’s specialty, so it was convenient for him to frame absolutely every idea he wanted to attack in terms of homosexuality.

(On a purely comical note, I’m reminded of a Canadian friend who facetiously explained to me that where he grew up, not only do bears represent the epitome of danger, but every threatening thing up there is in fact, at least in some indirect way, a form of bear-ness. As far as I’m concerned, this assertion is really no less ridiculous than that of the evangelical preacher above.)

And while extreme fundamentalist Christians are on my mind, does anyone remember the young-earth creationist Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind?  His “doctoral dissertation” is available in pdf format online and is another quintessential example of bundling all of one’s ideological opposition into one narrow category.  Apparently, every non-Christian idea that Hovind disliked was yet another face of the “religion of evolution”, throughout all 6,000 years of our world’s existence, from Cain and Abel to the ancient Greek philosophers to Galileo to the origins of Communism.

But atheists have been known to engage in this kind of thing as well.  Around 2012, there was an attempt made by part of the atheist community to splinter off into a group called Atheism Plus, comprised of atheists who wanted to stand up for certain specific humanitarian values outside of the very basic brand of humanism that generally goes hand in hand with a positive lack of religious belief.  Although this new movement was advertised by luminaries such as Dr. Richard Carrier as being based simply upon the sentiment that as a group they should stand up against bad behavior on the part of members of the mainstream atheist community, it seemed clear pretty early on that the intent was to bind atheism together with the beliefs of the then-emerging online social justice movement. I can’t help but feel that by attempting to make such object-level beliefs an inherent part of what it meant to be an atheist, the advocates of Atheism Plus were muddying the distinction between the core of a skeptical belief system and adherence to the particular social and political ideas that they liked. I considered the attitude that an atheist committed to social justice shouldn’t be willing to march for secularist causes alongside other atheists who didn’t see exactly eye-to-eye with them on all social issues to be divisive, and I feared that it would weaken both the battle for freedom from religion and the battle for social justice. And it seemed clear that a lot of this arose from a desire (conscious or subconscious) to sneak in a lot of specific tricky, controversial views under the banner of general skepticism, which is a much more easily defensible value at least in a room of committed nonbelievers.

One Atheism-Plus-related essay that stuck in my mind was this manifesto (long, but altogether quite an insightful and relevant read for this discussion, although ultimately I disagree with it).  Here is a particular excerpt whose essence stayed with me years later:

I saw in skepticism a great deal of potential, too. It was a community that had until recently been very much based in the “hard” sciences and in addressing the more objectively falisfiable beliefs that people held, like cryptids, UFOs, alt-med and paranormal phenomena. But I saw absolutely no reason that skepticism couldn’t be compatible with the social justice issues I also cared about, like feminism. I saw in feminism a lot of repeated mistakes made due to a lack of critical inquiry and self-reflection, and rejection of the value of science and that kind of critical thought, and I also believed that a whole lot of what feminism, and other social justice movements, were trying to address was very similar kinds of irrational beliefs and assumptions, stemming from similar human needs and limitations as beliefs in the paranormal. Misogyny, sexism, cissexism, gender binarism, racism, able-ism… these things didn’t seem meaningfully different to me from pseudo-science, new age, woo, religious faith, occultism or the paranormal. All were human beings going for easy, intuitive conclusions based on what they most wanted or needed to believe, and on what most seemed to them to be true, without that moment of doubt, hesitation and humility that skepticism encourages.

What I felt skepticism could offer all of us, in enabling us to cope with our faulty perceptions and thought, was a certain kind of agency. An ability to make a choice about what we believe instead of just going with the comfortable and most apparent truthiness. And in allowing us that agency, in allowing us that choice… we could make the right choices. Instead of settling for what we are, how we tend to see, think and believe… we could try to be something better. We could look to what we could be, to how we could see, think and believe.

In other words, the writer, Natalie Reed, saw certain social justice stances as following from the same skeptical mindset from which atheism also follows and therefore as a necessary biproduct of performing atheism “the right way”. To me, this seemed in tension with what she said in the very next paragraph about freedom and ability to choose beliefs; clearly, Reed saw only one right answer to certain non-deity-related questions and was frustrated that the atheist community as a whole was failing to embrace it.  Here she didn’t come across to me as possessing the Theory of Mind to see that the skepticism that might lead others to non-belief in gods might not lead to non-belief in all of the other things she was skeptical of, or that other skeptics might even consider parts of her socially liberal ideology to be examples of “truthiness” which deserve more skepticism.

Anyway, to leave the arena of religion for more mainstream politics, I’ve also seen left-wing rhetoric along the lines of “being pro-gun is wrong because if you think about it, the presence of guns stifles free speech, which is one of the pillars of our democracy”.  To me this argument appears to be reaching pretty far by making a pretty indirect connection between gun control and a more popular and easier-to-defend American value.  I’m sure that this kind of argumentation is pervasive in right-wing spaces as well — probably lots of bending-over-backwards interpretations of various proposals as boiling down to “more government control” or something like that — but having had very little exposure to those spaces during the last decade, I don’t really know. I see no reason not to suppose that it is present in most ideological communities.

II. Another reason not to draft all arguments as soldiers

In this more general context of separating layers, my point (2) under section III of the last essay (“Upholding a principle that belongs to one ‘layer’ of the disagreement only on grounds of being in the right at another ‘layer’ isn’t upholding the principle at all”) reminds me a lot of something I wrote on my tumblelog (my Tumblr blog) back last August.  I link to it here and insert a more up-to-date revision of it as follows.

One major thrust of the rationalist approach to winning arguments is to avoid the “arguments are soldiers” mentality — that is, the attitude that every argument for one’s side of a debate, whether good or bad, is an ideological weapon and all must be deployed if one is to win on the political battlefield.  The argument against using arguments as weapons is itself a call for separating the object from the meta, but I see another objection: namely, that the use of “arguments as soldiers” oftentimes implicitly weakens the good arguments for one’s own side.

To give an example of this, I’m afraid I’m going to dredge up a horrible event from last summer: the Pulse shooting (~50 people killed at an Orlando nightclub).  I was traveling at the time it happened and wasn’t able to research all the updates on what was or wasn’t known about the killer hour by hour, so for a few days I was relying on what was popping up on my Facebook newsfeed.  As tragedies go, this one was especially tricky to respond to rhetorically because in the immediate aftermath, as there were so many potential political elements of it pertaining to all sides: in particular, Islam, homophobia, and guns.

Within a day, my Facebook was blowing up with articles giving particular views of the very sparse information we had on the killer at that moment.  The main two groups contributing to the political discussion seemed to be liberals who wanted to play up his homophobia and conservatives (as well as a few anti-Islam liberals / libertarians) who wanted to play up his Muslim-ness.  At the time, judging from preliminary reports I saw trickling in, the levels of both of these traits were unclear.  There were rumors in the early hours of the aftermath that he himself was a regular at the club, and that he had a gay dating app on his phone.  Meanwhile, while it was clear that he was a Muslim, he was raised in America, it wasn’t so clear exactly how strong his ties to ISIS and “radical Islam” were.

I’m going to focus now on the emphasis on the killer’s homophobia, mainly because the people pushing it were the ones on “my side” of most issues and vastly outnumbered the others anyway.  Now there’s nothing wrong in the fact that people were focusing on his homophobia.  After all, it’s extremely important to investigate exactly why someone would perform such an evil act, and it’s completely appropriate for us to feel outraged if part of the motive came from such vile bigotry.  And in fact, it looks like these people turned out to be right: he did choose a gay nightclub out of a desire to attack gays, and he certainly wasn’t a regular or openly gay, etc.  But suppose the evidence had come out differently: would it weaken the gay rights cause in any way?  It would not make gay rights one iota less valid if this guy had shot up a gay club out of pure sadism rather than directed bigotry.  I guess maybe it would make the gay rights cause seem an iota or two less worthwhile, because some of the practical value of a cause lies in how many lives will be affected by it (there’s some importance in demonstrating that homophobia kills).  But I’m going to suggest that even that is only affected a tiny bit, since those 100 lives are still a pretty small fraction of all those who have been killed for being somewhere on the queer spectrum.  My point is not that I was bothered by so many people drawing attention to it (after all, as I have said, this was absolutely appropriate and essential), but that there was this almost-desperate underlying tone implying of “see, this is why homophobia is bad, and this is why gay people deserve equal rights”.  I know that wasn’t actually what anyone was saying or probably even thinking, but that tone does in my opinion sort of communicate an attitude that the validity of gay rights is conditional on exactly which tragedies have arisen from not acknowledging them: if new evidence were to come in showing that the killer wasn’t anti-gay, then where would that leave us?

This reminds me of the common tactic that atheists use in debate where they make a big point of how many lives have been destroyed in the name of religion, implying that this is why religion is incorrect.  I’ve actually seen Richard Dawkins open a debate on the existence of God with this strategy, then backtrack when he sees his debate opponent is formidable at rebutting that point, saying, “But counting up the number of lives lost due to a particular ideology doesn’t really matter anyway; all I care about is which belief system is true!”  (Unfortunately I can’t recall which debate this was, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened more than once.)  Well then, Dr. Dawkins, why didn’t you start by arguing that way in the first place?  In this failed rhetorical maneuver, Dawkins has actually damaged the argument against religion as being antithetical to the objective pursuit of truth by implicitly making this point of view seem delicate, as thought it needed to be backed up by statistics on the number of deaths resulting from the failure to choose secularism.

Or, to give another example from the 2016 election campaign, I noticed that many people seemed very anxious to show that Donald Trump was never a competent businessman at all, as though that was the main factor relevant to his candidacy.  As far as I know, a lot of the memes supposedly demonstrating that he hasn’t actually done anything impressive with money were misleading, but I couldn’t actually care less either way because I saw much, much more crucial indications that he was not fit to be president.  I realized that there was some sense in trying to rebut the supporters of Trump who painted him as a savvy businessman, but displaying it in the front and center of the anti-Trump case seemed to me like a confusion of priorities and actually sort of validated the pro-Trump contention that being successful at business qualifies someone for the presidency.

To summarize, when arguments are used as soldiers in this way, it not only often leads to bad arguments being used, but it weakens other, extremely valid points supporting on the same side.  Then if the bad arguments are eventually knocked down, there’s not quite as much left on display in support our cause as there would have been if we had stuck to emphasizing the core reasoning behind it in the first place.

In other words, putting all one’s rhetorical eggs in a single basket (i.e. a particular aspect of one’s worldview) is a risky business.  At worst, the basket will break and the rhetorician will lose the whole debate despite the fact that some of their other stances were valid.  And at best, the single idea they’re classifying everything else under will come out looking correct, but sneaking all the other ideas in under it might come across as shady and underhanded, and those other ideas might not get the acknowledgment or credit they deserve.

III. A postscript on the March for Science

Tomorrow a lot of my American friends will be participating in a march which is purportedly a protest against the new presidential administration’s blatant disregard for some of the less popular findings of science in favor of pseudoscience and general “truthiness”.  While I am all for the original cause of this demonstration, I tend to have misgivings about protests in general.  A lot of these misgivings have something to do with what I’ve been discussing above: it seems that such protests are often billed as being about something at least sort of specific, but then a bunch of other statistically-correlated beliefs wind up getting lumped in with the original cause.  This appeared to be the case for instance with the American “Occupy Wall Street / 99 Percent” movement in the earlier part of this decade, for instance (inasmuch as that movement started out with any specific position in the first place).  It was also apparent at the Women’s March back in January (hello, intersectional feminism!).  I’m not saying that I was actually against any of these demonstrations, and in fact I think that at least some (such as the Women’s March) had wonderful effects.  But I’m bothered by the fact that such protests have a tendency to devolve into a shouting platform that enforces the clustering of a whole bundle of political positions rather than a unified, focused, and concretely-reasoned push for a particular goal.  I’m a member of a Facebook group dedicated to the March For Science, and I’ve certainly already seen a lot of posts there championing areas of science, or even tangential science-related causes like better representation of minorities, etc., which don’t seem directly relevant to the main crises at hand.

That said, the theme of this particular event, Science, is itself of interest when considering the issue of “separating layers”, because the spirit of Science seems in a certain sense to uphold the opposite value to the one I’ve been preaching here.  That is, the idea behind Science is that we are trying to explain empirical phenomena in terms of the most elegant possible models based on natural laws which apply universally.  In other words, Science is on some level all about not considering different questions independently.  For instance, it is often pointed out that to be consistent in one’s denial of biological evolution, one must also deny the validity of a wide range of scientific areas including geology and particle physics.  So I can’t really fault all the posts I see along the lines of “I march because without science we wouldn’t have the medical technology to treat my leukemia!”, even though it would be unfair to directly imply that support for the strains of pseudoscience peddled by the current administration automatically implies opposition to improving the lives of leukemia patients.  After all, the same respect for the scientific process that has led to so many widely celebrated inventions and breakthroughs ought to be applied when it comes to more politically controversial scientific findings as well.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see exactly how tomorrow’s event shapes up.  I guess that as far as my insistence on “separating layers” applies to this situation, I would say that it’s important to realize that it is possible for intellectually honest people to disagree with the scientific consensus on some (object-level) issues without necessarily opposing the (meta-level) values of the scientific process itself.  However, those of us who feel worried about what appears to be a pervasive disregard for science, who feel that people who hold to popular “truthy” beliefs not supported by scientists while otherwise tacitly supporting the scientific process are oftentimes operating on an inconsistent belief system, are certainly quite justified in wanting to engage in peaceful demonstrations against these worrisome modes of thinking.  Or at least as justified as I am in wanting to write long, rambling blog posts about what I consider to be worrisome modes of thinking.

(credit to Kendra Hamilton on Facebook)