Guide to Better Arguments, Step 1: Assume Humanity

After a couple months of social media hiatus (and a four year blog silence), I'm reintroducing myself by working to counter the negativity that led me to take a break in the first place. It's probably not secret that we have a social media problem. With all the great things it's given us, like the ability to stay in contact with old friends all over the world, get better connected to new friends, share images of our family and our meals, and so on, anyone with a heart and mind can see that it has created some serious problems. Perhaps the most obvious and insidious is that it has exposed, in a very real way, that we have an argument problem. The defaced, dehumanized nature of social media has magnified our inability to argue well and perhaps among some, our unwillingness to. The fact that we can say whatever we want without the fear of getting punched in the nose has allowed us to be very nasty indeed, and I think has, in many ways, revealed who we really have been all along.

Part of the problem is that we are all convinced that we are not the problem. They are. And if they would just start seeing things like I did, there wouldn't be a problem. See the problem?

Furthermore, we've so thoroughly convinced ourselves that social media life isn't real life that we see it is an anything goes, zero sums political/social/philosophical game. But in fact we've done real damage in the actual world. This is because, as it turns out, internet life is real life after all. We've got social media presidents, social media news stories, and social media controversies. The problem being that we've learned to hold ideas about complex issues that are only 280 characters deep (but at least it's up from 140).

With all that in mind, I've decided that the least I can do is use my distant voice in the wilderness to try to help us be better. I would just as soon limit social media to cat videos, kid news, and food photos. But since people are going to use social media and the internet to argue, we might might as well try to make it better.

When I was studying Rhetoric in graduate school, my guiding sense of purpose was that we rhetoricians could be a guiding light in a culture that needs to learn to argue effectively and ethically. I thought we could really influence the world by influencing our students not to follow the patterns of cable news, sports talk shows, and political debates, but instead follow a more Socratic path toward well-intentioned truth seeking. Ultimately, though, I started advancing in my civil service career and chose mammon over truth. Then I became disillusioned with the whole project: first disillusioned that my own field actually shared any of that ethical sensibility in the first place, and finally that people were really able or willing to learn what we had to teach--we were, after all, just a gen-ed that students were trying to survive so they could get to their "real" classes. Nevertheless, in the hopes that there are some who want to be better, who want to argue better, I'm writing out this series of posts about how to argue effectively and humanely. There are other such works out there, most of which are better than mine. But here are mine anyway. Beginning with Step 1:

Assume Humanity

One of the things I would tell students early on in my classes is that in academic writing, they should assume that people who disagree with them are just as smart as they are. Our culture of political argument love to posit the "other side" as stupid or evil. We love to set up straw men. We easily claim that people who disagree with us are dumb, or immoral, or communist, or fascist, or racist, or whatever other pejorative term fits the particular situation. 

The problems with this approach are that 1) these claims about others are almost always false and 2) they immediately shut down any conversation with people in those groups. This is not a path to affective argument, at least not properly understood. Instead it's a refusal to argue at all. It's a way of saying about the other, "I don't have to listen to you because you are a _____." Because of this, we set up arguments where the only people willing to listen to us are people who already agree with us.

While such approaches my resonate well in our own self-selected echo chambers, they do nothing to actually advance the conversation or to help bring about a reasonable and humane conclusion. Mostly, they end up helping to maintain the status quo. After all, if all you're doing through your argument is railing against an opponent with more power, then they are likely just to shut you out and shut you up. . .and remain in power. If, in the other hand, you are able to build enough groundswell of support to replace old power with new power, history shows that you are almost always going to replace the old with an equally awful new (read Paulo Freire, or if that proves too hard to find, listen to the Who). The oppressed simply become the new oppressor. 

But if the point is to actually be heard, to hear one another, and to build a better world (or school system, or criminal justice system, or roommate relationship) those types of arguments can only ever fail.

Instead, if we are to begin to argue better and more effectively (which I am defining as arguing toward substantive and humane understanding and action) than we need a different type of argument. And that begins by assuming one another's humanity. You must begin by assuming that the "other side" is as real as you are and as sincere in their beliefs and motives. You may have difficulty understanding how they could possibly see things the way they do, but you must assume that they do so for good reason. You must begin to ask what values they hold that would lead to their conclusions and you must be willing to accept that these values are as real and important to them as yours are to you. You must be willing to concede that yours might not be the only values that are valid and important and you must begin to wonder if there is middle ground that upholds both your values. 

If you accept the humanity of people that you don't agree with, you cannot call them communist (unless they themselves say they are, in which case you have to accept that communists mean well enough and have a history of valid complaints that led them to where they are). You can't "teach them a lesson" by threatening them or releasing their addresses on the internet. You can't call them sexist, racist or other names, accuse them of murder or any of these other straw-man tactics. Instead, effective and ethical argument starts with affirming their humanity. It means assuming that, like you, they want what's best and they think their beliefs achieve this. You must be willing to accept that they are just as real and just as valuable as you are.

This may see elementary to you, but it's clear that this is the root of a lot of our problems, and so it's step one. Assume the humanity of others. Start here.