Centroids :
Interesting and entertaining example of writing, in this case about the
value of arguments.
Or about their non-value. The author illustrates his own thesis,
inadvertently, when
assuming that the only way to think about homosexuality is acceptance, no
evidence
required to settle questions about this morbid condition, but otherwise
the essay
raises important questions.
What good do "rational" arguments based on evidence do ?
A strong case can be made that what counts the most is what Christians call
"witnessing."
In fact, the successes of the homosexual movement are almost all based on
the Left-wing
equivalent of witnessing, that is, influence from one person to another
based on emotional
appeals --in this case to feelings ( not evidence ) about justice and
fairness.
In time a new consensus emerges.
These things matter, but they matter in the absence of compelling
counter-arguments
which are ( 1 ) based on evidence, and ( 2 ), promoted with passion.
Plato said that in terms of worth of arguments, those based on knowledge
are always
superior, those based on opinion are always inferior. This is a truism. But
opinion-based
arguments can win, as homosexual fairness appeals have mostly won in
politics to date,
when the other side appeals to opinions that are less persuasive to
majorities, in the
case of Christians, to poorly understood Bible-based views on the subject.
However, there is the Margaret Thatcher example to consider : "First win
the argument,
then win the vote." This presumes information-based arguments,
evidentiary arguments
that can, in effect, stand up in court. The author of the article never
seems to watch
TV detective shows, or forensics who-done-it TV shows, or for that matter,
to
never read mysteries or spy fiction.
Evidentiary arguments can easily win against opinion driven arguments, but
proponents
have to actually have the evidence, AND a stake in the outcome that matters
to them,
enough so that they feel passionately about winning.
McCain never heard of Margaret Thatcher. He did not feel passionately about
much of anything, at least not beyond his concern, which was all for the
good, about
the well being of our troops in Iraq. But beyond that, zilch. Still another
Bob Dole,
like most of the 2011 Republican field.
This explains Sarah Palin's strengths, it certainly is not in command of
evidence,
although in that department she isn't as bad as some people say. It also
explains
Ron Paul's strengths, although he does have command of some sets of facts /
evidence.
On the Democratic side , thinking about 2008, it also explains Hillary's
weaknesses,
very little passion, except self-serving passion for the cause of Hillary,
which is not
what this is all about. Politics is about mobilizing people around causes
that matter
to them, not about self aggrandizement.
Which is why, to get to a theme that Ernie mentioned recently, creation of
a movement
does not depend on first inventing a full blown philosophy. Think Tea
Party. Where is its
fully developed philosophy ? It still doesn't exist, but it sure is a
movement.
Still, it is better to have a philosophy. This was the case for Kobo
Daishi, founder or
Shingon Buddhism in Japan over a thousand years ago, and for much of that
millennium
Shingon was the leading school of the Dharma in the country, and still is #
3 in terms
of membership. He created a philosophy and then a movement around it. Or
take the
Existentialist movement in philosophy in the 20th century. There was no
movement
of this kind when most of the Existentialists were alive. But the
philosophy was ready
when its time came, and there was a movement, and its effects are still
with us.
The key to a successful philosophy-led movement seems to be passion for
educating
others to 'the truth.' This, in turn requires a passion for marketing of
ideas. That is,
a passion for persuasion. This requires commitment to learning how to
persuade,
which is salesmanship.
The strength of a philosophy-led movement is that is has a developed set of
ideas
based on evidence to appeal to in arguments. These don't matter ? Like hell
they don't. Ask any Jesuit --or lawyer or investigative journalist or
judge or
serious candidate for president.
The trick is that evidentiary arguments, void of passion, can easily fail,
therefore
you need "fire in the belly." Passion alone may persuade those who are
uninformed
but combined with knowledge it can persuade the informed, the 5 % who are
opinion leaders in society, and that is the argument which is most worth
winning.
Billy
======================================================
RD magazine
* June 20, 2011
* Why Liberal Religious Arguments Fail
* By _Peter Laarman_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/peterlaarman/)
* Peter Laarman is executive director of Progressive Christians
Uniting, a network of activist individuals and congregations headquartered in
Los Angeles. He served as the senior minister of New York’s Judson Memorial
Church from 1994 to 2004. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, Peter
spent 15 years as a labor movement strategist and communications specialist
prior to training for the ministry.
* A lot has been made recently of a pair of efforts to turn the
Republican Party’s ostentatious religious posture against it. In early June,
conservative Republican Rep. Paul Ryan was _handed_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4708/paul_ryan’s_bible,_jim_wallis’
,_or_none_of_the_above) a Bible flagging passages on the poor in response to
his
heavily-criticized budget proposal, followed closely by the American Values
Network’s “must-see” _video_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4721/the_problem_with_ayn_rand_isn't_atheism/)
claiming to
debunk the notion that Ayn Rand’s ideas can be reconciled with Christian
teaching. The AVN people exulted that they had boxed Ryan into a corner: that,
logically, he must repudiate either Rand or Jesus.
In these very pages Sarah Posner dived deeply and revealingly into the many
potential problems of _dueling biblicisms_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/sarahposner/4708/paul_ryan’s_bible,_jim_wallis’
,_or_none_of_the_above/) , but I want to look more closely at the broader
problem of
seeking to debunk or refute or demolish the religiously-grounded views of
others. It’s important for me to say immediately that I rank chief among
sinners in this regard. I love, love, LOVE telling others how puny and
undeveloped their ideas are, and in particular how little they comprehend of
the Bible
’s great themes of exodus and liberation. (Really—you can check my
greatest hits _here_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/peterlaarman/) at RD if you
doubt me.) And yes: I am, in fact, using argument here in
order to make the point that argument is generally unhelpful, particularly
in respect to religiously-tinged viewpoints. God help me, I can do no other.
Ideation and argument are mother’s milk to many of us, and especially to
those of us nurtured in what I will shorthand as The Wordy Anglo-Protestant
Tradition—a tradition that also inflects significant parts of American
Judaism. When something moves us or provokes us, what do we do? We write a
manifesto or a platform statement or a treatise.
We issue declarations. We ask people to sign our statement; join our
remonstrance.
And, just as massive rocks along the shore repel the pounding waves and
reduce them to mere mist, our adversaries—especially our religious adversaries
—pay not the slightest attention to our remonstrance or declaration, no
matter how rock-solid our reasoning.
I am not proposing that we stop arguing, because I don’t think we can. We
are addicted to argumentation. I am proposing, however, that we pause to
consider how ineffective such wrangling is. Which also means pausing to
consider how small and pathetic it can be when people crow about the points
they
imagine they’ve scored by means of supple arguments and clever ripostes.
Calling the AVN video a “must-see” triumph of faith-based Ryan/Rand
demolition is just such a hollow claim.
We can see how ineffective our argumentation is by looking at the
interminable debate over whether to welcome LGBT persons as full and equal
members
of congregations—not to mention as ordainable leaders, marriageable people,
and members of normal families.
Every poll and every wise observer points out that gay-affirming folks have
not been winning on account of superior arguments, whether arguments from
the Bible or theology or science. They aren’t winning on account of their
superior debating skills. They’re winning by being present and visible in
faith communities: by coming out in ways that clergy and congregations can’t
ignore. Gay people are winning because straight people who love and respect
them are coming out right along with them.
The classic instance is the faithful older church woman—a devoted and
beloved member of the community—who, at just the right moment in a
congregational meeting, stands up and says, “Well, friends, I guess we can
argue about
all of this until the cows come home. All I know is that ________, my
________, is as dear a child of God as I will ever hope to be.” She then goes
on
to tell the story of she found out about ________, how they stayed close,
and how her heart was changed. Bingo. Are we ready for the vote?
_Frank Marinelli_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/4665/“i_‘came_out’_for_marriage_equality”
:_an_anti-gay_activist_changes_his_mind) , the reformed anti-gay campaigner,
recently confessed to Welton
Gaddy on “State of Belief” that his earlier convictions about homosexuality
were untempered by any actual encounters with gay people: “I understood
their talking points, I understood their case, but I chose not to accept it
because I didn’t see how it was a real issue that was directly affecting real
people.”
You will say that I am cheating by choosing such an obvious example. I have
another.
I participated for a time in a Los Angeles-area peace and justice group, an
interfaith group filled with good and righteous people. Following the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was decided that we should be reaching
out to area congregations to ask if we could provide them with guest
speakers who would then tell the members of those congregations just how wrong
and
pointless the war and occupation was. There were few takers. Meanwhile,
but on a separate track, this same group was establishing relationships with
returning soldiers and military family members who opposed the war. I
suggested that we might ask congregations whether they would care to hear from
a service member or a military family member, someone who would simply tell
their story, rather than hear from one of the well-briefed peaceniks. My
suggestion was rejected, as this would have deprived the peaceniks of a
chance to sound off about how wrong (how very wrong) George W. Bush and Don
Rumsfeld had been in regard to principles of international law. I withdrew
from the group shortly thereafter.
What is the point here? The point is that there IS no point to endless
argumentation. Hearts and minds don’t change that way. They change when we
share our stories and when we become present in a different way to those whom
we wish to influence. The further point is that hearts change before minds
do. It rarely works the other way around.
And now some _scientists_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html?_r=1&emc=eta1)
believe that we don’t
actually argue to arrive at clarity or truth—argumentation is a “social
adaptation,” they contend: we are in debates to win, and we will readily use
flawed arguments if we think they will sway the other side. Irrationality is
not merely a “kink” in the process of truth-seeking. I think it
noteworthy that the scholars from France and the U.S. who looked into
self-serving
argumentation endorse the kind of small-scale deliberative democracy
espoused by philosophers like Rawls and Habermas: small-scale collaborative
forums
that can help “overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes
and deadlock.” This is also precisely how I believe interlocutors with
sharply differing theo-political views should be attempting to engage one
another: in respectful small-scale conversations, not by tossing fusillades
across the barricades.
It interests me that the very same Anglo-Protestant tradition I fault for
its bad habit of prolix argumentation contains within it a sub-tradition
that reflects and honors a different form of wordy discourse: the sharing of
individual faith stories or faith journeys. (And someone please help me
here, because it may be that this alternate tradition comes more from the
Anglican/Methodist side than from the Lutheran/Calvinist side, or it may be
that telling faith stories is a peculiarly American thing—I just don’t know.)
In any case, because gathering to share our stories clearly does have such
impact it’s that much more surprising that such sharing almost never
happens at the level of big intra-religious conflicts over economic policy or
torture or immigration or health care. Yes, the storytelling business is messy
and diffuse. It doesn’t lend itself to sound bites as readily as the “I’m
right/you’re wrong” confrontational throwdown does. But religious
progressives in particular might well benefit from going this route, because
so
many of us have journeyed farther and over rockier ground than have our
conservative counterparts.
Storytelling is already powerful when we hear the stories of others, but it
starts to become transformative when echoes and parallels among individual
stories begin to create what feels like our story. Now try to tell us
that we’re wrong on the facts—that we’re wrong on points. Good luck with
that.
Effective community organizers invariably give the people they’re
organizing plenty of time to voice their own narratives, the warp and weave of
their struggles. And as this goes on, you can see others in the room begin to
nod and sometimes whoop their identification with the story.
I don’t want to leave the impression that only progressives have good
individual stories, plus a slamming big story, to tell—conservatives are past
masters at painting a picture and forging a narrative about how the world
works. Remember too that our big stories don’t have to be logical in ways that
Wittgenstein would approve; they just have to be internally neat and
emotionally satisfying.
Like this:
Good people tend to have money, because why would they be rich if they
were not good? Conversely, there might be something wrong, some moral
deficiency, in those who aren’t doing well. Government may also be holding
them back
—sapping their initiative. Government is almost always a threat to
individual achievement and to competition: to what made American great, in
other
words. God surely smiled upon the old laissez faire American Way—but God
cannot be pleased by our drift into Big Government and a nanny state. We need
to restore America’s greatness, blah-di-blah-blah-blah.
It is pure folly to imagine that conservatives, and especially religious
conservatives, will be prepared to surrender their viewpoint based on, for
example, the trifling fact that the Bush tax cuts for the rich and corporate
tax cuts cannot be correlated to any expanded economic activity or job
creation. Conservatives who benefit very directly from the economic status quo
have a vested interest (literally) in sticking to their story. When people
believe additionally that God has ordained or sanctified the economic
status quo, we can totally forget about shaking them loose via factual
argumentation.
There is one more huge deficiency with liberal argumentation. It’s the
facts-but-no-feelings problem. I recently heard a preacher quote the old
observation by Archibald MacLeish on the danger of having no feelings around
the
knowledge we possess. These days we have dozens of progressive think
tanks, all eager to tell us how gruesome the unemployment and discouraged
worker
numbers continue to be, and how desperation and depression are taking
their toll for millions who struggle for a livelihood. If there is any passion
at all in these recitations, it is a passion in the head. Better than none,
I suppose. But if we want to galvanize people who themselves are not
struggling around the grim state of the economy, reeling off the facts won’t
cut
it. People must be invited to engage directly with those who suffer: that
is where transformation can begin.
So yes, religious progressives should at least try to temper the bad habit
of imagining they can reason their way, debate their way, to greater power
and reach. That’s mostly a fool’s errand. And we should maybe also take a
lesson from our own formative stories.
For the vast majority of Americans there’s the example of the ultimate
non-debater and storyteller... That guy. They said that he spoke “not as the
scribes, but as one having authority.” What does it mean? I like to think it
means that he was not debating (except just once in a while when greatly
provoked). For the most part he was teaching and demonstrating. He was
mixing it up high and low, becoming fully present to friends and enemies
alike.
Spinning out all of those parables. Hunkering down and scratching his
finger in the sand. Laying hands upon the sick. Getting in an out of boats.
Going off to pray alone, sometimes weeping alone. Breaking bread and seeing to
it that there was enough wine to go around. Laughing, eating, making bad
puns.
When he was gone, did they first remember his list of religious
instructions? Did they remember his debating points against his adversaries?
Eventually they remembered these things. But first they remembered the Good
Shepherd. Archaeology shows that long before the cross became the symbol of
the
church, his symbol was the picture of the shepherd with the lost lamb wrapped
over his shoulders. His words were remembered, too. But they were recalled
most vividly around a table of bread and wine and within a circle of
people doing what he taught them to do, not saying what he taught them to say.
Did he win over heart and minds? You bet he did. As do many others today
who have the good sense to show it more than they say it.
We could do worse than to learn from our great storytellers while looking
somewhat askance at our great debaters. The clash of competing views is
attractive, and it’s endlessly entertaining. But it will always be the people
with compelling stories—and with big hearts to match—who get us to rise up
and follow.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
