Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.
The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.
Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.
Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida? Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving.
Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity.
I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem for Black advancement.
Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.
For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?
Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters forced to choose between an insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.
Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.