In all my time spent trying to figure out how one begins a blog, I’ve decided first to address some of the issues that I see in the nature of debate itself.
I love debate. I love it more than is good for me. It’s probably my main pastime, and I love it because I can learn so much through it. As such, it is important that I work to have meaningful contributors that care enough to read and respond—especially to disagree with me. As such, I address this first post, I would respond to something I read recently on a friend’s blog. He had made a list of views so far-out, and so wrong, that any time he should encounter such a view, that was the sign for discussion with that person to come to an immediate end.
My problem with that is the idea that any subject of debate is taboo.
Of course, I’ve definitely pissed away enough time arguing with some hard-headed idiotic time-burglars, but in my view, the times when debate are futile are denoted more by process than by content.
I see mainly two major things that are required: agreement on the approach to debate and the nature of rational discourse, and an understood degree of common ground in values. If you have those two things, then no idea that can be debated within that framework is, in my view, off limits.
Agreement on the approach to debate requires only a few things. You need to have a shared respect for logic, you need to agree that valid points deserve a response, that certain logical fallacies are useless, and that threats, shouting, etc. have no place.
Most illustrative of this idea to me was a former coworker over a decade back. I had said something about how my legs ached from the lunges I had been required to do in my weight training class. Raul responded, “You hurt, you lose.” I replied very simply that it was a good sort of ache, because it meant I knew I had done a good work out, and that pain was necessary for building muscle. Before I could finish this sentiment, he increased his volume to repeat, “YOU HURT, YOU LOSE! YOU HURT, YOU LOSE! Can’t change the rules—God makes the rules!” This fairly well exemplifies everything I hate about irrational discourse.
I hear the words “You hurt, you lose!” whenever I find myself with a person that is dedicated to hearing absolutely nothing of what the other person has to say.
To this, I’d add a few things. Appeals to authority are a common pitfall. Two devoted Jews/Christians/Muslims might agree with one another that the words of the Talmud/New Testament/Quran were valid as an argument. None of these would be able to make such an appeal between groups, and none of these approaches will pass with an agnostic or other person that subscribes to no Abrahamic faith. If you both agree, then more power to you. If you don’t, then there’s hardly any point in arguing with one another and using any such appeals. As such, I agree with most Americans that engage with people on generally secular grounds; my approach is one of logical positivism, loosely defined.
As for the second, we need to have common values. It’s one thing to argue an issue like living wills or abortion with a general understanding that both sides value life, happiness, quality of life, autonomy, dignity, and security. But if you think that we need to start putting old people on ice floes or you think that abortion should be legal until several years after birth because there are too many people, then there is a fundamental disconnect that makes any useful discourse impossible. If two people who believe in freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and prosperity want to debate whether Operation Iraqi Freedom was a good idea or a bad idea, they can. The person who approaches the question from the perspective of one who thinks America is an evil empire and needs to die, and that the death of all Americans would be a good thing, however, lacks any common ground upon which I can discuss ideas.
Tying these two issues together, I’d have to make a final point about Godwin’s Law. Common perception of Godwin’s law is that given enough time, someone will call someone a Nazi or make a comparison to Hitler, and thereby lose the argument, because such comparisons are such a lame thing to do. This has even been relabeled as the “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy.
I have a serious problem with this perspective. And here, I must invoke the great line delivered by Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) in The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
I get to feel at times as though people think that Hitler and that entire epoch was some fluke, like flipping a quarter and landing heads a million times in a row. That people think that the odds of something like that ever happening again—certainly in the Western Industrialized nations—is so negligibly low as to be essentially impossible.
This idea is a very dangerous idea. It is as dangerous as ideas come.
The truth is that the Nazis were not the exception to the rule. Liberal constitutional democratic republics are the true exceptions. They are very young as a general rule, fairly rare, and most tend to slide continually back into centralization and consolidation of power that destroys liberty and subverts self-determination. As the ashes of World War II settled and the light fell upon the atrocities of the Holocaust, we swore, “never again!” And then convinced of the idea that our resolve was as useful as action, we sat by as slaughters appeared again and again throughout the last half of the 20th century, from the Balkans, to Rwanda, to Cambodia.
And these abuses exist everywhere for the bulk of all history: the Mongol Horde to the Maori, Tasmania to South Africa, Ireland to the Caribbean, Armenia to Nanking. It is far, far easier to find examples of mass slaughter of innocents and systemic destruction of entire peoples than it is to pull forward examples of truly free constitutional republics.
As we tend to slap the label of Godwin’s Law on everything that touches the European theater of WWII, we come to diminish our ability to discuss things among the most important. I, for one, feel that we must be vigilant, and that this will ever require us to see the signs of oppression before they take root. How can we do this if we can’t talk about it? Why censor this end of debate?
As it happens, I imagine that many will regard such enforcement against violators of Godwin’s Law as a necessary response to the completely over-blown invocation of Nazi Germany. Why do we invoke it so much?
My own sense is that such overdone comparisons stem from the combination of the need to meet my second criteria—agreed upon values—and the plague of moral relativism that undermines our abilities to find common ground. Maybe America is the blight of the earth, and to use Adil Hoxha’s phrase, “the machinery of capitalism is oiled with the blood of the workers.” Maybe the Czar was so horrendous that Lenin and Stalin’s ends justified their means. Maybe human sacrifice among the Aztecs and Maya was an honor and people wanted to be slaughtered to appease their thirsty gods. Maybe it’s all just our imperialistic Eurocentric Christian dogmatism that leads us to fail to understand the perspectives of these different cultures.
When you hit that wall, what can you do? How can you find the common ground needed to discuss a matter as trivial as tariffs or traffic laws with a person whose values are so disconnected from your own that they would justify such senseless slaughters? The answer, of course is the Holocaust. In the US, you can try to take any side you want in any war in history or today. You can hate on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King, Kennedy, Reagan, and any other American you want. You can justify the decisions of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hirohito, Pol Pot, Castro, or Ho Chi Minh all you want. But Hitler is off-limits. He’s a bad man, and everyone in this country has to appreciate the enormity of the Holocaust. If you want the quick route to common ground, then Hitler is the fastest and surest road to get there.
In the end, I think it’s best to avoid excessive comparisons to Hitler if for no other reason than the dangers of trivializing such a matter. But I will not avoid it wholesale or decide that any comparisons to Nazi Germany are off limits. Instead, I’ll articulate my values so that trivial invocations become unnecessary.
I believe in liberty. Not “freedom,” with all of FDR’s “freedom froms” which serve as a justification for further encroachments on liberty. I believe in family, hard work, discipline, and integrity (though I do not claim to be a model in exercising all such virtues). I believe in distributed control and freedom on conscience. I believe in the sanctity of human life and human dignity alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment