Coming to an Understanding of Argument
In our classes, we like to make an initial approach to argument directly and inductively by examining two or more arguments on an issue, working out with our students which features of our examples are most likely to be shared with other arguments. This approach is illustrative of a more general approach to teaching that we favor: bottom-up, problem-based learning, grounded in application and ascending toward principles as opposed to the more traditional top-down, “presentational” mode of knowledge transmission (i.e., lecturing). There are to be sure costs as well as benefits to our inductive approach to learning. In exchange for actively learning important elements of argument we have foregone thoroughgoing, albeit passive, “coverage” of our topic. The best we can hope for from our initial examination of argument is a better understanding of some of its more prominent features and a better sense of how to think critically about the subject. That is one of the points of the exercise and of our course—the meaning of complex terms like “argument” is always contested because they are in effect inexhaustible.
Whatever the danger that students might mistake our selected parts for the whole, the benefits of our approach in our view significantly outweigh the potential costs. While we could transmit a good deal more declarative knowledge about argument through lecture, there is no guarantee that the knowledge we transmit would arrive at its intended destination, or that if it did arrive it would be sufficiently free of noise not to garble our signal or that students would have a clear notion of what to “do” with whatever knowledge survived the transmission. Our experience of lecturing on the definition of argument suggests that the most common question we manage to provoke about the material we present is the following: “Which of this will be on the test?” We do not take that to be a positive sign. Defining matters on which there is general agreement is, among other things, boring. Defining matters that are uncertain and contested is considerably more engaging. In our initial discussions on argument, we want our students to get a sense that the definition of any complex notion like argument is contestable, that the values and beliefs we bring to the exercise of defining the term influence our choice of its meaning, and that in turn how we define it determines how we practice it.
Every semester, at the end of our inductive exercise in definition, we are left not with the same tidy set of conclusions about the meaning of argument that we have rehearsed in our lectures, but with different, oftentimes unexpected, conclusions that arose out of freewheeling conversations. To be sure, we steer that conversation enough to ensure that at least a handful of points about argument are made, and not every point offered up in our classes survives the interrogation to which we submit it. (Like the ancient master of dialectic, Socrates, we are not above putting in the fix occasionally.) But each semester produces new insights into the meaning of argument. The important point to remember is that there will be plenty of time later to address the most crucial issues of definition left unanswered at the outset. In the meantime, students are more likely to be engaged by and ready to apply ideas that they have hand in producing.
The arguments that follow are not ones that we would use in a typical undergraduate class. The issues they raise are appropriate to a more theoretical discussion of argument than the one we seek to promote at the outset of an undergraduate class. Certainly we make no claims for them as argument exemplars. But neither are they randomly selected. They are “meta-arguments” of a sort that raise questions about the nature of argument central to our approach and preview issues that recur in the pages that follow. The two arguments and the ensuing discussion obviously cannot replicate an open-ended classroom encounter with the material. In order for you to at least get a feel for that experience, we invite you to read them the way we ask our students to read them. Before looking at our discussion, ask yourself how the two essays are different and how they are similar in both the way they argue and the conclusions they reach. The conclusions you reach can then be used to interrogate our own conclusions about the two arguments.
John Leo, “Cultural Relativism Leaves Some Blind to Evil” (2001, Universal Press Syndicate), 10/15/01
The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church put out a disgraceful statement on the terrorist attacks. After urging believers to “wage reconciliation” (i.e., not war), the bishops said: “The affluence of nations such as our own stands in stark contrast to other parts of the world wracked by crushing poverty which causes the death of 6,000 children in the course of a morning.” The number 6,000 and the reference to a single morning, of course, are meant to evoke Sept. 11 in a spirit of moral equivalence.
In plain English, the bishops seem to think that Americans are in no position to complain about the Manhattan massacre since 6,000 children around the world can die in a single day. The good bishops are apparently willing to tolerate 6,000 murders in New York* because the West has failed to eliminate world poverty, and perhaps should be blamed for causing it. But the terrorist attack has nothing to do with world hunger or disease. And the bishops’ statement is a moral mess. How many murders can Episcopalians now overlook because of the existence of crushing poverty? If 6,000, why not 60,000?
This is a minor example of what could be a major problem over the long haul. A large number of our cultural and moral leaders are unable to say plainly that evil exists in the world and that it must be confronted. Instead they are content to babble about “cycles of violence” and how “an eye for an eye makes the world blind,” as if the cop who stops the violent criminal is somehow guilty of the crime, too.
Part of this philosophy arises from the therapeutic culture. Accusing someone of being evil is bad thinking. There is no evil, no right and wrong, only misunderstandings that can fade if we withhold judgment and reach out emotionally to others. Everything can be mediated and talked out.
More of it comes from the moral relativism at the heart of the multicultural philosophy that has dominated our schools for a generation. Multiculturalism goes way beyond tolerance and appreciation of other cultures and nations. It teaches that all cultures and all cultural expressions are equally valid. This sweeps away moral standards. Every culture (except America, of course) is correct by its own standards and unjudgeable by others.
Teachers at all levels have been warning us for years about where this is headed. We are seeing large numbers of the young unable or unwilling to make the simplest distinctions between right and wrong. Even horrorific acts—mass human sacrifice by the Aztecs and genocide by the Nazis—are declared undjudgeable. “Of course I dislike the Nazis,” one upstate New York student told his professor. “But who is to say they are morally wrong?” The same argument, or non-argument, can apply to the terrorists of September as well.
Only a minority of students think this way, but multiculturalism, with its radical cultural relativism, is becoming a serious problem. It leaves a great many students dubious about traditional American values and cynical about any sense of common purpose or solidarity. This is particularly so when the mantra of the cultural left that America is “racist-sexist-homophobic” is added to the mix.
This hybrid philosophy—no judgment of other cultures, but severe judgment of our own—is already beginning to color many responses to the terrorist attacks. It peeks out from behind the “root causes” argument and the need to “understand” the terrorists and to see their acts “in context.” Often what is meant by the root-cause people is that reckless and imperial America brought the attacks on itself.
The philosophy also shines through many statements of concern about bias against Muslim Americans. Of course Muslims must not be singled out for attack or scorn. But a good many official statements about Sept. 11 made only brief reference to the horror of the attacks before launching long and lopsided attention to the possibility of anti-Muslim bias.
Terrorism is the worst threat the nation has ever faced, and at the moment Americans are solidly united to confront it. The multicultural-therapeutic left is small but concentrated in businesses that do most of the preaching to America—the universities, the press, the mainline churches and the entertainment industry. They will have to be pushed to move away from sloppy multiculturalism and all-purpose relativism. Let the pushing begin.
Stanley Fish, “Condemnation