I understand this is a sort of a minority opinion in today's society, so I forgive most people for not respecting this, but I'm sort of depressed with how often I'll try to talk very calmly about something that I care about, and have this interpreted as apathy. I've occasionally asked people to calm down and be more polite, only to hear something about how they cannot talk politely to people who disagree with them because they care too much, and while this is something I can understand and forgive, it's not something I see as some sign of moral superiority as others seem to. In fact, I sometimes feel like I'm attacked for not coming across as worked-up during some discussion or another.
Along similar lines, I also dislike it when my requests for people to tone down the discussion and be more civil are interpreted as backing down or admitting that I don't have a good counterargument, or that I can't handle talking to the Big Boys. Recently I got into a rather annoying discussion with someone who isn't a friend of mine, but whose journal I sometimes read and whose opinions I usually respect. At some point I tried to correct something he said (it turns out I'd misunderstood the sentence in question, but I still hold that his wording was unclear and that most people would misunderstand similarly), and the response comment was, literally, "You're wrong." He then continued on to make some counterargument or another. When I asked him to be more polite and expressed concern that he was interpreting my arguments in the least charitable possible way, I got more "WRONG" and a good heaping of "well YOU interpreted ME uncharitably!" To put it unpolitely: LAME. Plus, this was not an argument that could POSSIBLY have meant much to the person.
I guarantee you I am tenacious, I am intelligent, and I probably have a reasonable counterargument. Moreover, I can certainly "handle" your intellectual bullying, and in fact I detect a subtle misogyny in the assumption that harmonizers are weak and irrational. I simply find such verbal behavior unpleasant and counterproductive.
SO THERE!
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Comments
I like arguing because arguing is *fun*, whether I care about the issue or not. Since I don't believe that I'm ever going to convince anyone who doesn't already think I'm right that I'm right anyway, I argue about things I care deeply about the same way I argue about things I care nothing about.
Also, while I get a thrill from aggressive argument, I find that it often comes back to me the next morning, sort of like a night of heavy drinking.
But speaking of misinterpreting, you said
Willingness to act as an ambassador to people who disagree, and attempt in good faith to change their minds, is something I consider an important indicator of serious committment to a cause. I understand this is a sort of a minority opinion in today's society...
I interpreted this as "people in today's society rarely serve as ambassadors to people who disagree." I then started to compose in my head a long reply countering this with the anecdotal evidence of how I've solicited people to write to their senators on behalf of good causes such as saving the Hubble Space Telescope, or funding higher education, or I plan to soon do the same regarding the "under God" phrase in the pledge of allegiance. (Specifically I want to castigate my senators for condemning the California federal court ruling that the pledge is unconstitutional - if not a single one of my friends disagrees with me I'll be shocked.)
But point is, I misread you, and figured it out before I typed this reply, but decided to include it anyway just to be random. :-P
Also, you're a really good example. You're being charitable, thinking before you disagree, and also good at writing letters to senators (hopefully not rude ones!). But I do think that such behavior is becoming less visible and less openly encouraged in our society - see, for instance, the popularity of loud, bullying pundits and such. You don't often see someone getting public airplay because they're just so nice and reasonable. And people have been bemoaning the rude-one-liner depenence in sitcoms for a long time. It's sad.
By the way, as I was reading your post I thought of an article I read a while back about a study that found that a disturbing amount of the pay gap between professional men and women is because the men are "bullies" and women are not (i.e. the men will demand pay raises whereas women will expect a boss to give her a raise when appropriate). The problem doubles because bosses become accustomed to giving raises only when asked for one, and will figure that a woman is simply satisfied with her lower pay, or unambitious, since she isn't barging into their office with demands. And, of course, do we address this by teaching women to "go for it" or "be more ambitious" (or other such cheery terms for business related bullying of some kind, and this is generally what happens, since clearly the male way of doing business is superior) or do we try to tame the other side? Whee...
To answer with another mini-rant, I've decided that a lot of the problems women have in the professional world have to do with being told to be aggressive, and not actually having the practice to pull it off. Boys spend their entire lives learning how to assert themselves without looking like they're bullying, because they got in trouble for it. But women who realize all of a sudden that they have to be aggressive sometimes end up acting like 13-year-old boys, behavior that is not actually acceptable in the adult world. I'm somewhat convinced that aggressive women get accused of being "shrill" for at least some reasons apart from simple misogyny and unwillingness to accept powerful women.
An example that a (female) lawyer in my law firm, whom we'll call K, just told me:
K was a Plaintiff's lawyer on a case, and D was a defense lawyer. Both wanted to interview witnesses before trial, sent notice to the courts, and got a bunch of them together on the same day for the interview. Unfortunately for K, she needed information that D wouldn't provide until 10 minutes before the scheduled questioning, K asked D if she could have some more time so that she could review the info before questioning the witness. Although this was a really reasonable request, D flatly refused. K was, understandably, miffed. She had to do the questioning relatively unprepared.
THEN, the SAME THING happened to D - D hadn't prepared fully for the questioning, realized it halfway through, and asked for more time. K obviously refused, and D couldn't understand why. Needless to say, D flubbed her questions, her defense ended up sucking, and the Plaintiffs ended up getting a ton of money. Yay for niceness!
It's interesting how narratives about the advantages of not screwing over people because they will just screw you back don't often get circulated in our culture. And then liberals wonder why Conservatives don't seem to have much regard for useful international agreements like "don't assassinate foreign powers because if you do, then they will too, and that will suck."
It's rare to find a social concept that math geeks have figured out and that the rest of society kinda hasn't.
Meanwhile, I mentioned the whole event to a union officer (female also) and was immediately slapped down as being stupid and presumptuous. Hm, I thought unions were supposed to support their members?
There's a very wide gap between "bullying" and what most people mean by "being ambitious" or "being assertive". I think bullying is a terrible thing, but my hackles rise when people talk about how assertiveness or aggression or whatever are nasty evil things (especially when they talk about how they're nasty evil *male* things).
I sort of hold this as a theoretical ideal somewhere in the back of my mind, but sometimes people are just so uninterested in actual two-way dialogue and listening to my responses or thinking seriously about anything I say that I feel it's physically impossible to force myself to discuss it at all with them. So I hope the moral obligation only applies when discussing things with people who are also willing to discuss it quietly, maturely, and reasonably.
And while I may do it ALL THE TIME and am therefore a hypocrite, I do NOT recommend getting into snarkfests with such people. Best to just leave them alone and focus on more rewarding interactions.
But yeah, when's the last time you heard of a reasonable campaign? The last one I heard of was the astronomy community trying to save the Hubble Space Telescope, and I only know about it because I was involved. There were a number of statements written by the American Astronomical Society, the AAS (said "double-A-S"), which is the biggest professional astronomy organization in the world, and a large number of members wrote to their senators and representatives arguing for continued servicing missions. Both those who use the telescope and those who don't wrote, all of us arguing cogently what the benefits of the Hubble are. Some, like myself, even pressed their friends and family into writing/copying letters.
And you've seen how far it got us: Bush's gung-ho pointless "Moon to Mars" program.
It's excusable because I've given my Dad the anti-pledge argument and he's found himself conceding that I have a serious point. Also, because Bill O'Reilly is not worth reasoning with.
I hate politics.
Not even the Pledge itself is a tradition from the Forefathers. It was adopted in 1892 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of
Yesterday I went to a meeting of the Stanford chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild, a far-left legal organization. I agreed with a lot of the stuff they said. For example, when they went through the brief introduction critical legal studies, I was almost bored: I already believe this stuff! Tell me something I don't already know! (He also used he word 'reify' incorrectly about a dozen times, unless it no longer means 'to treat an abstraction as an entity'.)
But they also had a presentation on "the lies of the right" which was totally wrong. They conflated the entire right wing into some kind of monolith, portrayed right-wing beliefs in the least sympathetic way possible, came up with lousy counterarguments, then concluded that "the right wing" is a bunch of liars. And they sounded like they really sincerely believed this crap.
A great example would be their point about "activist judges". "This is a lie," they said. By way of proof, they came up with the talking point you've probably heard a million times by now about how the Rehnquist Court has struck down more acts of Congress than previous courts". The problem is, that's not what "judicial activism" means! "Judicial activism," as used by right-wingers, presupposes that there's some kind of neutral, objective standard by which we can judge the constitutionality of laws. Judicial activism is departing from that standard because you want a different policy result. I think this is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but it's not useful to believe that it's disproven by a counterargument that has no bearing on the concept you're trying to delegitimize.
There is some conservative rhetoric about "deferring to legislatures," and that's total b.s. because in practice the people who talk that way only want to defer to legislatures when the legislatures are passing legislation conservatives like. But not doing that isn't what conservatives mean when they talk about "judicial activism". Judicial activism is writing your policy preferences into law from the bench.
Perhaps, if you want to be charitable, you could say that the "Rehnquist court" argument mainly strikes down the argument that "liberal judicial activism" is wrong because it involves the Courts going against the Will of the People. Which is definitely a common argument and sort of independent from the "it's wrong because it ignores the Constitution" argument.
No real point, just throwing that out there.