The Dying Dialectic

The worst thing about social media is that it gives a voice to the stupid.

I worry that we are losing the concept of the dialectic. In fact, I wish we could eliminate the word "argument" from our language and replace it with "conversation." Dialogue should be about two people, eschewing pathos, logically laying out their points and counter points. If done correctly, the end result is that both parties are better informed than before the conversation began.

The second worst thing about social media is that the first person to make a Nazi comparison wins the argument.

Watch two people on Facebook have a debate about guns. With all the red herrings and strawman arguments it's like a logical fallacy convention. Any attempt at rationality is drowned in a sea of over-the-top accusations.

If you want to change abortion, gun culture, healthcare, or foreign policy, you'll never get there by insulting the other side. You will need a good portion of those people to come to your side and shaming them will never work. You'll have to find common ground and that will only happen through a dialectic approach.

What, exactly, are we arguing about?

Whenever controversy arises—like steaming diarrhea out of the toilet of a highway rest stop—you can always count on the citizins citizens (who got the Departed reference??) of this country to obstinately and stubbornly refuse to have the same argument.

Take Kim Davis. The law changed the duties of her position. She refused to bend, based on religious conviction, and went to jail for it. The strawman arguments amount to "Why do you hate Christians," and "Why do you hate gay people?" When the question should be: at what point does a person's religious freedom end?

It's dicey because it requires something both sides don't want to admit; that you either have no respect for another person's religious beliefs or that you don't care about discriminating against a minority group. (Side note: you obviously cannot kill someone if your religion says so. But scripture has been used to justify everything from banning interracial marriage to slavery. But discrimination? As someone once said, "People don't derive their values from scripture. They insert their values into scripture." Let's be honest, if you oppose gay marriage it's because you don't like gay people.)

Same thing with abortion. If you boil down the debate to a single image, that image is a fetus. That's what gets aborted. Pro-choicers try to turn that image into a woman, saying "this is who's rights you are violating." Pro-lifers try to turn that image into a baby, saying "this is who you are killing." Once again, people refuse to actually have the same argument.

Going Meta

"I see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for the red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow ... and you have not touched the secret of that influence." -Henry David Thoreau

There's a moment in the movie Up in the Air when George Clooney's character and Anna Kendrick's character are having an argument. Clooney is talking about accumulating enough sky miles to join an exclusive club, one of the benefits being his name airbrushed onto an airplane. From memory, here is how the conversation plays out:

Anna Kendrick: "What is it with men always trying to put their name on everything?"
George Clooney: "And why do you think that is?"
AK: "It's probably because you can't have babies."
GC: (in a very condescending tone) "The baby argument."

The argument ends there and the viewer gets the feeling that Clooney won. But why? He simply "went meta." He stepped outside of the conversation and put a label on her argument. Isn't that sidestepping the argument? At best, it's a weak ad hominem attack?

Going meta is something that happens in fiction all the time and it's considered writing for an erudite crowd.

• Tyler Durden tries to free people from their white collar, corporate "slave" jobs in Fight Club. When they join Tyler's "army" they unknowingly become slaves to everything he asks them to do. 
• In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is pegged to star in a play with the intent that he will fail and the play will bomb. The producers realized they will make more money if the play is not a success. The play is The Producers, which is essentially the same plot. 
• In Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, the author becomes a character in the book.

Today, we seem to equate a person's ability to "go meta" with intellect. If you don't see this, you are the dumb one. The dummies don't realize they're using the "baby argument." The dummies don't realize how they traded corporate slavery for Tyler Durden slavery. The dummies don't realize the reference to The Producers in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But what if they're wrong? I admire those who can get so caught up in the moment, so entrenched in pure experience, that they don't allow themselves to be distracted by meta-fictional references.

Because once you step outside the plot or label the argument, you lose it. It becomes a whole different experience where we feel proud of ourselves for identifying the author's clues. We place ourselves in a pseudo-intellectual class, where we are better than those who don't get the joke.

I'm even doing it now as I'm going meta on going meta.

The Eggers Effect

I don't always read the foreword of a book, but when I do, I usually forget it.

There is one exception to an appropriately exceptional novel: Infinite Jest. The foreword (at least in my edition) was written by Dave Eggers. I don't remember everything but I remember his general point was that David Foster Wallace proved you could write high-brow literature and still include low-brow jokes. For example, there is an entire chapter in IJ about a fart.

Eggers comments on this because it fits his style of writing. While it might not be as high-brow as Wallace's (then again, whose writing is?), Eggers' work is a good example of well done postmodern literature. You can see this style prevalent in much of the work published by McSweeney's. You can see it in his Best American Nonrequired Reading series, even though he supposedly works with high school students to select submissions.

The most recent place I see this is in Grantland, perhaps the best writing on the internet. My favorite writer is Jason Concepcion. Not just because he answers all my Game of Thrones questions in his Ask the Maester column. His prose is brilliant, funny, and intellectual. In a Game of Thrones column, he refers to Mance Rayder as Colonel Kurtz. How many people got the Heart of Darkness reference? Or even the Apoclypse Now reference? I don't know, but I loved it.

All of these examples tell me one thing: comedy is smart. Humor often gets frowned upon because it's seen as not serious. Many of the rules of grammar and proper usage of words I only know because I devoured George Carlin books as an adolescent.

Sure, there is cheap comedy, which relies on swearing and getting kicked in the crotch. But good, quality humor comes from intelligent minds. Even if the jokes are sophomoric, you can be erudite and still appreciate them.

As Louis C.K. once said of a fart joke, "You don't have to be smart to laugh at it. But you have to be dumb not to."

The Slave of the Passions

"Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions." -David Hume

From the time of the ancient Greeks, we have valued reason, thinking with a clear mind, not jumping to conclusions. Rational thought is at the heart of science, it keeps our own biases out of the equation. To make an emotional decision is to choose poorly.

Plato's concept of rhetoric deploys three concepts: emotion, logic, and credibility. Or pathos, logos, and ethos. As someone who works in non profit, pathos is my best tool for soliciting donations.

But what if I told you pathos was the best way to turn away a pesky salesman? The salesman's pitch is all about logic. Whatever reason you give for not buying what they're selling, they already have a logical answer for. It usually works because people have trouble saying no to logic when it's staring them in the face. 

And it takes logic to trump logic. Emotion always fails. Well, not always.

"Mr. Scanlon, are you satisfied with the windows we installed?"

"Yes."

"Would you consider us again?"

"Yes."

"We have a special, no-commitment deal right now. I have an open spot tomorrow at 2. It's a free estimate so there is no commitment but the deal expires tomorrow."

I can't say that I'm not interested or the price is too high or any other logical reason because I've already said I like the current windows they installed for me and I would buy them again. He follows that question with an opportunity to buy them again.

So I countered with emotion.

I said I have several items I am currently paying off and thinking about taking on more debt is only going to make me stressed. There is no comeback because he cannot tell me how I feel. Reason trumped by passion.