The best defense against bad faith

Writing about the incredible determination and fiercely polemical nature of Glenn Greenwald's political diatribes, Lance at A Second Hand Conjecture makes a very important point:

People confuse stridency and heated rhetoric with conviction.
They certainly do. This is a major reason why activists win. Ordinary people don't lie down with signs in front of oncoming traffic, and while they might not mind sharing opinions and honestly discussing things, they tend not to spend their time waging endless hair-splitting debates. But they are making a logical mistake if they assume that the willingness to exhaust an opponent in a war of words is any more indicative of sincerity or conviction than a willingness to sit at a committee meeting until two in the morning in order to "win."

Lest I be accused of ignoring reality, I do not deny that people who place winning first and who are willing to do anything to win are in fact more likely to win than people who want to get along, who'd rather share ideas than win debates, and who prefer sleep to listening to activists drone on all night. But attrition is precisely how activists win.

Being right has nothing to do with it. Nor does having convictions. Or "good faith." It's about winning. Philosophically speaking, the desire to win by any means necessary has to be considered a form of conviction, and I suppose that people who are fanatic enough about something (like Communists, Islamists, or animal rights activists) believe that any and all tactics including demagoguery and bad faith are completely justified.

That is why I think it is so important for non-activists to understand that when they are dealing with activists, the apparent issue at hand is never the issue, but is only part of an agenda, and nearly always temporarily expendable. If you are willing to waste a huge amount of time going to the mat over one of these issues, thus forcing the activists to "lose," the issue will be set aside but another one will spring up in its place. Likewise, if you decide to let them have their way on a particular issue in the hope that they'll go away, rest assured that they will not. (Thus, the removal of Robert E. Lee's name from a particular street or building only clears the way for a new campaign to demand the removal of some other dead white slaveholder's name from something, and the process will continue ad infinitum, even after George Washington has long vanished from the dollar bill.)

Catching an activist in a lie or a misstatement of fact is like catching a troll lying in a blog comment. It means nothing, the particular issue will be summarily dropped, and the subject changed to something else.

Hence, good faith debates tend not to take place between activists and non-activists.

In addition to confusing stridency and heated rhetoric with conviction, people also tend to confuse good speaking and good writing with good thinking. No matter how articulately or how beautifully thoughts might be framed, that has nothing to do with whether they are right. Adolf Hitler's great oratorical talent is an extreme example, but most of the time, the process is infinitely more subtle. If a talented writer in the New Yorker dazzles us with his prose, it is natural for readers to be lulled into thinking that what he says constitutes original thought, and that it must therefore be right.

That's an easy observation for me to make, though, as I studied Rhetoric in college, and I was taught that "critical thinking" meant being acutely aware that bias often lurks within mounds of beautifully created bullshit.

It often seems that today, "critical thinking" has come to mean something very different. Instead of learning how to think for themselves and maintaining skepticism, people are taught that "critical thinking" means being led by such bizarre doctrines as "critical literacy."

The critics with the loudest claims to having "convictions" seem to win these academic debates (for they will exhaust their opponents as surely as any activist, which I suspect most of them are). But few of "followers" in their admittedly captive audience stop to ask them why the self-canceling standards they're applying to Aristotle and Shakespeare might not apply equally to them. (Not that I really blame them. College is not a good time or place for normal people to confront professors.)

I don't think critical thinking is dead, though. Just exhausted.

The real challenge for me is that I am as biased as anyone else because I am human and have opinions. Thus, when I read something and agree with it, I tend to be less "critical" of it than when I read something and disagree with it. Nearly everyone does this to a certain degree, but just as some people are more exhausted than others, some people are more likely to succumb to uncritical acceptance than others. Uncritical acceptance can lead to being led, though, and that's how activists get their foot in the door.

Next thing you know, you're being led!

Now, I realize that avoidance of having to make an awful choice between leading and following presents a major analytical challenge far beyond the scope of this blog post, but I think I can fairly say that the best way to deal with an activist who is trying to lead you is to do what a lot of college kids do today.

Just roll your eyes.

And if you think eyeball-rolling is rude, you can always internalize the process. (Maybe by "all but" rolling your eyes.)

MORE (10/23/06): Ann Althouse offers a free lesson in eyeball rolling. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I wish more professors did that.

posted by Eric on 10.22.06 at 09:22 AM





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