In our ep. 99, Daniel Horne suggested we have more antagonist-guests, i.e. people with entrenched positions that we know we disagree with: a hard-core Marxist or libertarian or Christian or pro-scientism person. OK, we did already do the last of these, and listeners will know already how that turned out.
One can point, as we did on ep. 99, to crap like Crossfire as having degraded and despoiled the debate format, but that's not a definitive criticism. Is it merely because we want to keep things cordial? Well, there are plenty of very nice though very opinionated people we could bring on, and certainly we don't have a problem with that when we regulars have a particular beef about something. Or maybe we just don't want to have to defend our views? Well, our views as voiced on a particular episode are typically about the interpretation of some textual passage, or whether or not some author's concept really makes any sense, or whether the take the author has chosen is really an effective way of making a point at all. In most cases, what's most effective and least irritating for an audience is for us to articulate these views in as much detail as their importance in the overall discussion deserves (which means sometimes we just gesture at some point, and sometimes take the whole discussion to hash it over) and let you all decide. This articulation and counter-articulation may or may not resemble an argument or debate as it's normally recognized.
Key here is the difference between a specific claim and an overall point of view. We all know that you can't effectively argue someone out of his point of view, at least within a particular discussion. You'd have to be a mighty poor Christian (or atheist, etc.) to be converted by a particular argument. You don't get turned from an optimist to a pessimist, from a conformist to a radical, or from a democrat to a republican overnight, unless your initial views were pretty thoroughly unexamined.
But an individual claim should be arguable, right? Global warning is real or it's not. The social contract is a bullshit concept or it's not. Derrida is a huckster or he's not. Well, as the sequence of my three examples there was supposed to show, individual claims are not always so easy to extract from a larger point of view. The social contract takes many forms in different authors, and it's much easier to focus on someone's particular argument for it than to say categorically that no argument for anything like the social contract will work. And "work" for what purpose? Am I trying to convince you to simply pay the taxes you legally owe (and to affirm that it's just to do so)? Or am I trying to convince you that you have the obligation to enlist in the army, or not to run away when you're drafted?
When I was looking recently at Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" I was initially turned off by the anti-government rhetoric ("The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it."), but then quickly realized that he was specifically concerned with a) the war of his day, and this was of course in the time of the draft, and b) slavery. So instead of arguing with his wording ("is equally liable"? How could someone possibly support that claim as stated in a convincing way? It falls into the "bullshit generalization" category that philosophy was designed to save us from), I can agree with the thrust of his views. Specific claims have a context, and that is the individual's overall world view. Conflicts in world view are often conflicts of emphasis.
Consider Wes's beef with Michael Sandel in episode 97: His argument was that Sandel had misrepresented Rawls's overall point: Rawls was trying to establish some minimum principles that widely differing people would agree to in order to found a society. Sandel was arguing that this whole project is ill-conceived. Given that we're in a society, given who we actually are, and all we have in common, there are things that it would be best for us as a group to promote, i.e. human well-being according to our common telos (our nature). Each thinker can grant the bulk of the claims the other makes but add "but that's not the point." The argument is not primarily over the truth of particular sentences, and getting bogged down in arguing over one particular one would be beside the point. The argument is over emphasis, about relevance, about emphasis, ultimately about one's goals in telling a philosophical story, which is a part of, for lack of a better term, world view.
On the one hand we have the rigorous ethic that says "if you believe something rationally, you need to stand up for your convictions and argue for it." On the other we have the ethic that says "my world view is me, and you disrespect me if you try to silence my voice with attacks" (this latter might seem foreign to readers here but is dogma, for instance, in the domestic violence intervention program that my wife attended). These are two sides of the same bogus coin, misrepresenting the process of gaining knowledge as a matter of conquest to be either embraced or repressed.
A better model for philosophy is "I'll show you mine, and you show me yours," where two or more different visions are articulated, each responding in part to the last, pointing out points of agreement or difference where illustrative, but not pretending to be able to fully deconstruct and refute the other's view. We see this on display in The Symposium, where Socrates's bullying is much less of a factor than in any other Platonic dialogues, but really all of Plato's work insofar as he's interacting with the reader (and not Socrates with his stooges) displays it as well. Yes, challenge your beliefs; listen to other people and take their concerns and counter-points seriously, but the reflective equilibrium involved is yours: these are your beliefs, undergirding your life, that you need to live with, and any tipping of the whole tray is your own doing, even if it's in reaction to some or another great author (or podcast!) that you've just discovered.
We learn formal logic and argumentative fallacies as a type of laboratory grunt work: we learn to see when someone is using a slippery slope argument (but of course, aren't some argumentative slopes actually slippery?), or confusing correlation with cause (though causation is often a perfectly reasonable hypothesis given observed correlation; you can't know without more testing), or overgeneralizing from a too-small set of cases (not that induction isn't often necessary, helpful, and/or the best we can do), but the scenario whereby you can lay out all of your opponent's arguments in symbolic form and show where the fallacies occur is mostly mythical, unless your opponent is a five-year-old. Popper gave us a model whereby scientific generalizations are refuted by countervailing evidence, but Kuhn pointed out that this pretty much never happens, that accepting something as countervailing evidence as opposed to an unexplained anomaly involves some larger change in world-view.
Learning these fundamentals helps us develop critical skills, and likewise a high-school debate format is useful... for people in high school. A debate like the one between Bill Nye and Ken Ham (discussed in ep. 96) can yield a few interesting facts or argumentative strategies that you can then regurgitate, but its primary purpose is as a gladiatorial display where each team roots for their guy. So I do think that we have something to learn from hard-core X's, but a real engagement with those ideas is going to be best done by reading their work and engaging with it deliberately, as we did with Ayn Rand and the New Atheists, rather than getting someone similarly belligerent on the show with us and "taking him on."
-Mark Linsenmayer
Wow, this was a wonderful piece.
And re “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine”: Yeah, very contested issues that run from confused or confusing social and political issues to the most abstract of philosophical issues (for example, “Are there such things as properties?”) really do seem to be about the articulation of some part of a world view. True, the world view can be ill defined and not as well thought out as an alternative but letting people put their cards out on the table like that, conjecturing and putting forth hypotheses or whole theories about the way something in the world works involves hearing a particular story or attempt at an explanation, refining that, contrasting that with another explanatory attempt, and so on.
To relay a personal story, I remember being interested in what I thought were some of the really cool particular insights of Buddhism, namely the way in which it seems to me to be an empirical fact that life involves a great deal of suffering and dissatisfaction and the way to deal with it involves seeing certain things for what they really are and moderating your desires and living virtuously. I was so delighted about discovering this that I told a friend and I was sort of eager to convert him to a kind of naturalized Buddhism a la the Flanagan episode. He was unimpressed. He asked me something like, “Why can’t I accept that what you said there is true and believing also that a whole host of other things are true about the way the world works and the way you ought to live? What is special about Buddhism making these claims?” I tried to explain to him how these insights seemed to have been codified in Buddhism before any other spiritual or philosophical tradition. He accepted the insights but thought there was something impoverished about the view. For him and the way he lives his life, this is not worth focusing on. As you wrote, Mark, the issue here really was one of emphasis, what he as opposed to what I was choosing to focus on.
But the blend of Sethian incredulity and Wesian disdain is so captivating! Perhaps you should start a new show called “Oh my God!” where Seth hosts, goading Wes with leading questions from bad philosophers.
You could have a Colbert Report-esq segment “The Logos”: “The Word today is Can’tian. Sandel just can’t understand Kant… he says “…”, Ayn Rand just does understand Kant… she says “….”, … the whole philosophical establishment used to be Kantians, now they’re Can’tians and that’s the Word goodnight.”.
NB*: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/63ite2/the-word—truthiness
So now for some debate: my main beef with Sandel is not that he got something minor wrong about Rawls or Kant. My main beef with Sandel is that whether you think liberalism is founded theoretically on a minimalistic conception of the self is entirely irrelevant to whether liberal societies are antithetical to community. The entire argument simple does not follow. This makes most of Sandel’s book a completely irrelevant academic exercise masking the trite point — with which no one would disagree — that lack of community is a bad thing.
Whatever he think of Rawls, Sandel was arguing that liberalism is misconceived — Sandel is a liberal. He has no daring politics to back up his pseudo-daring theory. Sandel’s book is a dissertation-exercise in spotting some potential flaws in a bigwig’s argument, no matter how tenuous and irrelevant, and going at them full force. It’s what most analytic philosophy looks like today, a good example of what’s wrong with the profession, and a good example of the kind of nitpicking you seem (in part) to be arguing against here. His “worldview” is without substance — and that’s something that debate can help one ascertain.
Debate also matters if you think something is at stake in ideas. Public discourse is full of bad political and moral ideas (of the kind Nietzsche raged against), and these ideas have their effect on the course of a society. Debate is important in the case of Sandel because lots of people use communitarian sorts of arguments to justify their anti-liberalism and in some cases very thinly disguised sympathy for authoritarianism of one sort or another. This sympathy for authoritarianism I see as dangerous, and I don’t think I need to recite the well-known historical examples to say why.
So there are things worth arguing about, and these arguments do have an influence on the world.
This is not a call to have belligerent people on this show. But we certainly shouldn’t shy away from an interesting (and non-belligerent) debate.
what hopefully won’t get lost as this is hashed out is that you first took the time to understand what he was saying and than took issue with it, a rare but welcome first step in the blogosphere.
Well, I think that’s a pretty uncharitable and I’d even say “hysterical” reading of Sandel.
Rawls (and liberalism, says Sandel) is by necessity morally neutral, and for the sound reason that you don’t want assholes to get in power and exert their heinous version of morality on the rest of us. This is the same kind of move as separating powers so that no one can be overweening or more generally limiting government so that it can’t do bad things to you.
Sandel claims the a morally neutral government is impossible and we should stop pretending. His mistake, if there is one, is in confusing the actions of an actual government, made of people, with laws enacted by full moral beings and so is of course shot full of morality of some kind or other, and the government structure. He seems to be claiming that the structure of government itself can’t be morally neutral, or even morally minimal (meaning it just is structured to rule out domination but doesn’t have any positive directionality built into it). But it sounds weird to me to say either way that a structure is morally neutral or not. So really his complaint can’t be with the fundamental structure, i.e. with what Rawls is concerned with, but with the end product, i.e. an actual government. He wants government to be able to take positive actions like the soda tax, and is incensed not that the government’s structure doesn’t permit this, but that the public will is not in favor of it.
However (arguing against myself a bit here), I don’t think that the distinction between the government as a set of individuals and laws and the government structure are so separable, due to de facto limitations on government power that were not intentionally written into its structure. So all the shit that makes us mad about the do-nothing Republican Congress–the filibuster abuse, the ubiquity of money in politics, the gerrymandering, the procedural rules and general culture that seem to make it impossible for individual representatives to break with the party leadership–all that is yes, enabled by real, actual assholes and (mostly) legal past legislative actions, but the result is a systemic problem, and I think his frustration comes from wanting to deal with that by at least nominally tinkering with “the system.” I’ve already said in a blog post (http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/07/31/sandel-whats-the-practical-upshot/) what I think this tinkering amounts to; to think he’s suggesting totalitarianism is just pretty silly.
In response to Wes and Mark:
Just to throw my two cents in here about one matter, thought I’d mention that Sandel says he’s not a liberal, and that he is instead a civic republican, a tradition that runs from Aristotle to maybe Hannah Arendt. In his book Democracy’s Discontent, he says that civic republicanism is about “deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good” in view of what the good life ought to be. Of course it could be argued, as I did in the blog post I wrote here on PEL about Democracy’s Discontent, that what he wants to get out of civic republicanism is perfectly compatible with the classical liberal tradition and with liberal democracies. Sandel said in an interview, “My main quarrel with liberalism is not that liberalism places great emphasis on individual rights—I believe rights are very important and need to be respected… The issue is whether it is possible to define and to justify our rights without taking a stand on the moral and even sometimes religious convictions that citizens bring to public life.” But that latter part, I think, is a misinterpretation of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism privileges self-sovereignty but does not require moral neutrality in all areas, but a minimal framework of rights and limited government as a starting point–which can be expanded or contracted as the political experiment moves on. In the same interview in which Sandel ‘clarified’ his view on liberalism, another author, a law professor named Stephen Holmes, said Sandel is really just a ‘soft anti-liberal.’ Holmes says, “Soft antiliberals malign liberalism verbally, but when faced with practical choices reveal a surprising fondness for liberal protections and freedoms.” Don’t know where I stand on that, though.
The interview I quoted from is available here: http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-Sandel-Wants-to-Talk/48573/
Thanks for the clarifications Billie — very helpful. I call Sandel a liberal — regardless of what he would like to call himself — because that’s functionally what he is. And soft anti-liberalism amounts to the same thing.
Mark — I guess you’re forcing me to finish my Sandel essay. This will make my objections look less hysterical — which is by the way a pretty strong response for someone who’s not a fan of debate.
Where does Rawls claim that government is morally neutral? If Sandel is right, Rawls derivation is akin to a Kantian derivation of basic morality from a thin conception of the self. This is not about neutrality or an abdication of “the good.” Its about a thin as possible conception of morality that allows a plurality of thicker conceptions of the good. No one would make the patently absurd claim that ensuring pluralism is a matter of total moral neutrality: it’s actually an attempt at a moral high ground. Pluralism has worked very well in the United States: I see no reason to stop “pretending,” if that’s what we want to call it.
And of course I’m not suggesting that Sandel is endorsing totalitarianism. As I’ve said many times by now, Sandel is a liberal. He’s also a pretender to a theory that has something substantive to say about liberalism. It doesn’t. I’ll have more on why that is the case soon.
“Hysterical” is a word you like to use, so I thought I’d try it on, as referring to the claim that Sandel’s views lead to totalitarianism.
Yes, of course Rawls’s social setup is not morally neutral in the sense that it positively affirms respect for rights. Given what a wide range of actual political views Rawlsian liberalism admits (from near-libertarianism to a full-on welfare state), I accept your comment that liberalism “admits” of robust advocacy of some particular positive goods, e.g. trying to get New Work measures passed (and I’m always going to want to use some novel, progressive example like that instead of Sharia law or one of the other religious examples you bring up, for reasons I spelled out in my own blog post about this). Similarly, one can contort a Ptolemaic theory to admit observations that would seem to support Copernicus’s view.
So the question is, is there some comparable paradigm shift in the foundations of government that would not just theoretically (but never in reality) allow progressive measures to proceed, but would make them a central goal. In our utilitarianism episode, we despaired a little about how far from pursuing a “greatest good for the greatest number” philosophy our own government pursues, and how some governments actually have this right in the constitution. Now, of course pursuing this goal blindly would lead to all the screw-the-minority problems that utilitarianism has, just as pursuing straight-up democracy leads to a tyranny of the majority, but the latter has never made us shy away from stating democracy to be probably the central goal in governance (so when gerrymandering and other crap like that interferes, we think rightly that something is wrong).
A utilitarian program, like Harris’s program of moral objectivism, relies on humanity’s true interests to be on the whole the same, contra Nietzsche’s claim that people are just too heterogeneous for there to be any common good. While it wold be easy to stupidly overstate the amount of commonality among us, there’s a lot more to it than the thin theory of the self involves.
To make this concrete, consider universal public education. A thin theory of the good if I understand it acknowledges that we all have basic material needs, and that beyond that, we all have goals and want to maximize those goals. A thicker theory might add that, at least for us here at this point in history, we think that people are improved by education, not just as instrumental in allowing them to hook into the economy to fulfill their basic needs, or even just to make them adequate citizens, but that education is just part of the human good. (Which is not to say of course that if someone drops out of college they get a whippin’ or that education is otherwise forced on people.) Just like the right to vote is right there in our foundational government documents, why couldn’t education be there, instead of something that we somehow consider optional and which is subject to the whims of the democratic process, so that Alabama might say screw it? I’m not sure if Sandel is arguing for this kind of thing, but I’m having trouble figuring out any better interpretation for it.
Ultimately, I’m not beyond a certain point interested in arguing about what an author really said or really meant. The point of reading (says Emerson!) is inspiration, and what Sandel inspired in me is this common frustration among (lefty) liberals today about government being incapable of responding to even many obviously urgent human needs, much less being a forum for careful consideration of the human telos and how we can be encouraged to flourish.
A very interesting debate “against debate.”
Negating negation.
In support of Mark’s “Against Debate” and on a more ontological/epistmemological basis which is presented as a proponent versus an opponent, a protagonist against an antangonist:
Misleading negation begins when any given problem (issue of debate) is structured as a proposition (“I’m right, you’re wrong.”) If I’m looking for a text of poetry in my library and only find fiction I might say ‘there is no poetry book” (propositional) rather than saying “this is a fiction book” (factual). This is a simple failure of expectation. “’That is not the case’ means that a hypothesis passes over into the negative [there is no poetry book] in so far as it does not represent the currently fulfilled conditions of a problem, to which, on the contrary, another proposition corresponds [reality is that there is no poetry book].” (*p. 206)
Understanding that the problem (an issue of debate) accompanies learning, so “a problem is always reflected in false problems while it is being solved, so that the solution is generally perverted by an inseparable falsity” (*p. 207). By misperceiving the problem in terms of propositions, the negation (no poetry book) becomes a false ontological feature of the world (reality is that there is no poetry book).
If the problem (issue of debate) is just a collection of cases that could be solutions, then “each of these hypotheses [becomes] flanked by a double negative: whether the One is, whether the One is not . . . whether it is fine, whether it is not fine” (*p. 202). We falsely give negation a genuine existence when the problem (issue of debate) is considered in the same terms as the solution.
Whether seeking a book of poetry or a book of prose, both prose and poetry are two forms of language which are subsets of forms of language/books. Oppositions and limitations are not interchangeable, nor is negation (this/not that) how to determine something. This is not the denial that there is negation, but that negation gives the false implication that determination is real rather than the result of arbitrary logic.
Determination actually operates through the reciprocal determination of differentials rather than determination by negation (oppositional debates) and limitation. Negation does not pertain outside of opposition. The problem is that ” negation gives the false implication that determination is real rather than the result of arbitrary logic.”
*Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Fruitful discussion often arises from the tension that develops between two sides that strongly disagree with each other while, simultaneously, those sides are maintaining an openness and receptivity for what the other side is saying. Call this ‘openness’ a ‘respect with genuine interest’ or whatever. Two sides may have entrenched, even dogmatic positions, but this does not by necessity imply that the two sides cannot have useful discussion. The two sides must at least share a respect for one another, and each must also possess the openness I speak of, but this openness is not necessarily a willingness to change one’s position, but simply the capacity to receive what the other person believes. The openness is a ‘space of possibility’ within the other to at least grasp different positions.
The petty arguments in congress, on reality TV, etc. are between people who do not possess this receptivity. I too have entrenched ideas that I will defend, but I will also try to suspend these ideas when trying to comprehend someone who has a vastly different position. This suppression is an emotional exercise or skill; it has nothing to do with the content of my beliefs or knowledge.
Anyway, I’m in favor of having people on your show who have vastly different positions–not to be belligerent or to beat them down–but to encourage the outgrowth of ideas in a respectful manner.
As for the David Brin episode, it seemed as though he didn’t let you guys get a word in. I do imagine you would have to be a little more forceful or assertive with guest like him to get a more productive debate, but I don’t think it would have degraded into name-calling or anything. I would have liked for you to have called him when he said that the primary use of philosophy was to teach us about logical fallacies. That statement was begging for discussion and critique, but it didn’t happen. (again, not to beat him up for up, but to expose it).
From a fuctional standpoint you guys could totally do debate–it would essentially be deuling precogs. Real academic debate, like that from the debating unions from Oxford to Glasgow, is neither high schoolish nor crossfireish. It is about two things: holding the floor for a set amount of time and defending a position regardless of if you actually believe it. Not to say you have to do this, but debate is, at its best an incredible art that transcends dichotomies to both unique insights and really funny jokes.
Stuff that would fit dueling precogs would not be Aynd Rand is on crack or the New Atheist are just evangelicals of another form. Potential topics do present themselves from past episodes
-Kant has it right about sex
-Mysticism is overrated
-Nozick is closer to the truth than Rawls
-Plato is right about democracy
Anyhow, you guys are awesome and I deeply admire and appreciate what you do. But as someone who went to school on a debate scholarship I think debate is awesome too.
I think two concepts may be being conflated here. When I think of debates I think of those stupid university sponsored theism/atheism circuses rather than a public presentation of disagreeing sides. Discussions are better than debates. Debates are always susceptible to heavy use of rhetorical devices and serve the clever wordsmith more than they do the informed party. I don’t really get the feeling Mark was talking about debates in that sense though, but I imagine that’s what most people think of when they hear that word.
I think the incredibly underwhelming Thiel/Graeber “debate” has just converted me to Mark’s line of thought.
Graeber is a twit, sadly he has gotten famous while not many folks know the work of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott
Well, he is not a publicity hound like Graeber, but academically Scott was very influential with the resistance/hegemony stuff. Personally I liked his Seeing Like a State book. Of Graeber’s stuff I found Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value most useful.
http://zombie-popcorn.com/ZP-Lib/David%20Graeber/Toward%20An%20Anthropological%20Theory%20of%20(1097)/Toward%20An%20Anthropological%20Theor%20-%20David%20Graeber.pdf
I’ve not read any of Graeber’s long form work, but his shorter pieces for The Baffler and other places have given me a similar impression. I find both of those guys myopic and obnoxious in pretty similar ways, actually. With The Baffler promoting the event as “Graeber vs. Thiel”, I mistakenly assumed we might see some real friction between ideas, you know, for the public’s benefit, but both seem less enthusiastic when not preaching to their respective choirs.
Bravo Mark. Very well written, well argued, and illuminating critique of the confused demand for ‘gladiator spectacles’, usually demanded in the name of a ‘reason’ that is really not so reasonable after all upon your Khunian analysis.
Thanks, Tom. Good to hear from you!
My critique of “Liberalism and the Limits of Justice” is available here: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/10/21/the-incoherence-of-michael-sandels-critique-of-liberalism/