A Good Argument is Good For Us

Now, I should declare my biases here. Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that man is, in his deepest depths, a rational animal. Nor do I believe that most people, much of the time, will change their most deeply held convictions on the basis of even the most persuasive and logical statement of disagreement. If you really believe that George W. blew up the Twin Towers, it is very likely that your conspiratorial worldview is so deeply rooted in some such judgments of the human condition as, ‘the real is always what is hidden’ and/or ‘most people are gullible fools’; that no change of mind is probable.

So why bother with this post?  Because, to quote one of my mother’s favorite sayings, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  We may never get there, but we can be better. We can educate ourselves as to what makes a coherent argument, we can be more alert to fallacious reasoning, and perhaps most importantly, we can be more aware of the extraordinarily skilful and persuasive emotional manipulation that surrounds us, in fact envelops us, almost all of the time.

From ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century, logic ( analysis of valid and invalid argument)  and rhetoric (the art of persuasion) were central subjects in the western educational curriculum. Now, and spite of the increasing complexity of our world, they are not. Like sex, fifty years ago, we have to pick this stuff up on the street. Something is awry here, we now teach the Kama Sutra to eight-year olds, but the skills needed to refine rational discourse, live only in university philosophy and (occasionally english and so-called media and communication) courses, where most of us will never find them.)

Why do you suppose the quality of debate is generally higher in the British Parliament than it is in the U.S. Congress or even the Canadian House of Commons? One doubts that this is because lawyers are over-represented, that would apply to all three institutions in probably, roughly equal percentages. No, I would contend (admittedly without hard data to back it up) that the percentage of former private school boys is still higher in the British parliament. And what do they still teach in private schools — debating skills, the use of logic and rhetoric.

Those who study science will of course learn to  frame and analyse hypotheses. While this is helpful, most of the minefields that hinder rational debate live in the world of ordinary language. They are the fallacies of relevance and ambiguity that a high-school course in inductive reasoning could easily train students to detect. I used to entertain my kids by belaboring them with instances of bad argument. (One of my personal favorites is argumentum ad misericordiam, (appeal to pity) exemplified by the young man up on charges for the heinous murder of his parents who pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.)

As hilarious as examples of bad arguments sometimes are, this is a serious issue. Our general deficiency in this area was made all the more glaringly obvious to me recently when I attended a Munk debate on U.S. foreign policy. The two teams arguing for and against the question at issue marshalled logical points and employed rhetorical devices with a degree of skill and ease seldom seen in most public debates. The three-thousand people who attended found it every bit as compelling as the latest Hollywood opus.

Why do you suppose the quality of debate is generally higher in the British Parliament than it is in the U.S. Congress or even the Canadian House of Commons?

In a world where (so a recent survey tells us) most of us would rather have dental work done without anesthesia than get up and speak to a group about anything, the increasing gap between the few who can do this well and the most of us who can’t or won’t do it at all, is worrying. It is a form of creeping elitism that will damage democracy itself if we do nothing about it.

That we all have a right to express our own opinion, and God knows, opinions rain down in an unending flood. We could all be better however, at deconstructing arguments, separating fact from irrelevant or ambiguous premises (we do not have the right to our own facts), and stripping the emotional overlay out of reasoned disagreements.  Some people are profoundly gifted in this area, but I don’t have to be Jimi Hendrix to play the guitar. To a larger degree than most of us now understand, good argument is a technique, a learned skill, that we simply no longer learn.

My wife hates it when I bring up contentious political issues in certain family circles. She will say to me, ” why raise the emotional temperature in the room – nobody’s mind is ever changed anyway.”  She is not wrong in one sense; but the effort itself and the skill it requires are important to the maintenance of the way we live. Whether we are in the kitchen or the Mother of Parliaments, we should learn to salute a good argument wherever and whenever we find it. 

This is Part One of a Discussion on Argument and Debate.  You might also want to read Part Two.