Afterward: Inevitable Criticisms
In professional wrestling, mullet-haired monster men often snarl at each other before matches, engaging in the time-honoured tradition of trash talking. The purpose of this is to build anticipation for the match.
It would be a very odd thing if, after weeks of trash talking, only one of the wrestlers showed up for the fight.
It would be considered an act of supreme cowardice to trash-talk an opposing athlete while refusing to show up for the actual event.
The same process often occurs in philosophy, wherein an opponent slanders you, insults you, surrounds you with a fiery moat of negative adjectives, while never actually addressing the content of your arguments.
The actual fight is about the reason and evidence presented – everything else is just a distraction. Albert Einstein, remarking on a group of scientists who had signed a document stating he was wrong, said that one scientist proving him wrong would suffice.
If you have the capacity to actually prove someone wrong, you do not need to be hostile or insulting. You do not need to imagine malevolent motives on the part of your opponent, you do not need to insult their intelligence, education, writing skills or appearance – you just need to clearly show where he or she is wrong.
We all know this, but many people seem to constantly forget it at the same time.
I have been reasoning, reading, debating, writing and arguing in the realm of philosophy for over 35 years. I have an Ivy League education at the master’s level, and my dissertation was a deep thesis on the history of Western philosophy, for which I received top marks. For many years, I have had the privilege of hosting the world’s largest and most popular philosophy show, with over half a billion views and downloads. I have interviewed hundreds of subject-matter experts in a wide variety of fields, debated both professionals and laypeople on many complex topics, written half a dozen books, and been interviewed myself by friends and foes alike.
None of this means my arguments are correct, of course – I could have achieved all of this and still be spectacularly wrong. There are many thinkers with greater credentials than I have, whom I consider to be spectacularly wrong. Neither credentials nor experience fundamentally matter in terms of the argument. I bring all of this up because no doubt I will be attacked and scorned with regards to experience or credentials or what have you. I am wrong, some will say, because I do not hold a PhD in philosophy from Harvard or Yale.
This is a fascinating position – I really cannot call it an argument – because the entire history of philosophy is the history of rejecting authority in favour of reason and evidence. Academic philosophers with doctorates worship Socrates; Socrates had no doctorate and scorned arguments from authority. As the saying goes, all science is founded on scepticism of authority. With philosophy, it goes even further. All philosophy is founded on hostility toward authority.
Philosophy is the ultimate democratic discipline. Rational philosophy holds that individuals are
entirely capable of processing reality, of reasoning effectively, and of coming to the right conclusions. Philosophy empowers individuals with the capacity to push back against irrational or anti-rational authority using their own individual capacity for thought.
Generally, a refusal to rebut the content of an argument is a confession of cowardice, incompetence or malevolence. Insulting your opponent – at least, absent clear rebuttals to arguments – is a betrayal of philosophy, not its fulfilment.
This is not to say that philosophers must engage with every person who makes a mistake. We do not want to become like the hapless husband in a famous cartoon, who says to his wife that he cannot possibly come to bed yet, because someone is wrong on the internet. However, when someone of prominence and influence is publicly making bad arguments, philosophers are honour-bound to push back against these errors. We do not have to argue with a crazy man on the street corner who is waving a Wingdings pamphlet at rain clouds, but egregious errors from a prominent person tend to stand unless and until we correct them.
If you refuse to engage in such a necessary debate, clearly that is because you fear losing, or you fear anyone coming into contact with your opponent’s ideas. However, if you can effectively rebut bad arguments, why on earth would you fear their increased exposure?
You might fear the exposure of bad arguments because you imagine that the majority of people cannot think and will end up buried under the verbal dexterity and sophistry of a well- credentialed street preacher.
I accept that as a possible position – but then your job should be to instruct the masses on how to think, or at least how to think better, instead of engaging with a sophist who cannot be distinguished from the philosopher by the untutored multitude. Maybe you cannot stop all the sugary commercials aimed at your children, but you can at least educate your children about the dangers of sugar.
If you call your wrestling opponent a coward, but then refuse to show up to the fight, your criticism is utterly exposed as projection – it is you who are the coward.
If you call your intellectual opponent wrong, but then refuse to show up to the debate, your attack is utterly exposed as projection – it is you who are wrong.
The more extravagant your trash talking of your opponent, the more your cowardice is revealed when you refuse to fight him.
The more hysterical your abuse of your intellectual opponent, the more your cowardice is revealed when you avoid debating him.
A number of words and phrases show up as distinct “tells” for intellectual cowardice. I am sure I will receive some of them, so it is worth going over them briefly. As I said above, for philosophy, prevention is by far the better part of cure.
Generic Pejoratives
Calling someone’s argument “reductionist,” or “simplistic,” or “amateurish,” or “unconvincing” is a boring way of saying that you are too cowardly or stupid to engage in a debate. If someone’s ideas are worth insulting, then surely they are worth rationally rebutting first.
Calling someone a misogynist, a cult leader, a racist – we all understand that none of these are arguments; they are confessions of intellectual cowardice and impotence. If you show up to an oncologist to have him remove a deadly tumour, and he spends half an hour verbally insulting it, would you consider yourself cured? If you go to an optometrist to get help with blurry vision, is your problem solved if your optometrist merely rails against the greed of the eyeglass industry, or says that all vision is merely subjective, so how do you really know that your vision is blurry?
Another trick is to call someone “overambitious” or “grandiose,” or to imply that the problem is far more complex than he assumes – without addressing the content of his arguments. I am fully aware that I have taken on enormous philosophical problems in this book and claimed to have solved them. This is an ambitious project to be sure – calling it “overambitious” is not an argument.
Another trick is to call an argument “incomplete,” which is a variation of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. All arguments are “incomplete,” because language has limitations, we are mortal, readers have lives to live, and all resources are finite. I may not have read arguments for determinism written in ancient Aramaic, or I may have failed to address the ethical arguments of a particular Indian philosopher – and I may not have rebutted some article against me – but so what? If the definition of “complete” is pretty much synonymous with “omniscient,” it can be safely discarded as a ridiculous standard. Dragging thinkers off to continually research and respond to everyone else’s thoughts is just a silly way of ensuring that thinkers remain cripplingly unoriginal. If you cannot paint a picture of a boat until you have lived at sea, studied the history of boating, and learned the details of every other picture of a boat, then clearly the purpose of all those restrictions is to stop you from painting your own picture of a boat.
It’s a trap!
Let us say that a man named David comes up with an argument called X. Let us say that you wish to oppose argument X, but without actually engaging with the content of the argument – here is another silly trick. Find some other argument that David has made that is generally unpopular – we can call this Y. Now, instead of engaging with argument X, you can instead wave around the red flag of argument Y, and hope – usually correctly – that the resulting howls of mob outrage about argument Y drown out your lack of rational rebuttal to argument X.
Another approach is to create a fiery language moat of ostracism around David, to the point where no one feels safe engaging with him. If you can portray David as so crazy, so evil, so malevolent and so ridiculous that to even engage with him is to give him more credibility than he deserves, then you can sink original thought in the foggy canyons of social aversion. This is not always an incorrect position – since such crazy people certainly exist – but it is invalid in the face of significant popularity. I do not spend any time rebutting the personal paranoias of inconsequential individuals – but when someone like Karl Marx remains so popular, he is prominent enough to deserve exposure and rebuttal.
Here is another way you can avoid getting into the ring with a strong thinker – find the least popular person who likes that thinker’s arguments, and then promote that unpopular person as a “guilt by association” representative. If David Duke retweeted you once, that means that you and David Duke are pretty much the same person! The beauty of this cowardly move is that you never have to apply it to the thinkers that you like – such as Barack Obama and his association with Louis Farrakhan.
Exposing the personal hypocrisies of your opponents can also be a rich vein of avoidance- mining. If Albert rails against government subsidies, but once had a job at a company that took government subsidies, you can just point out that fact and think you have done something to dismantle Albert’s arguments against government subsidies. As before, the beauty of this is that you never have to apply it to those you like. Karl Marx, while simultaneously railing against the exploitation of workers by bosses, impregnated his maid, then tossed her out into the street.
This is not brought up by Marxists, of course, but any remote inconsistency on the part of their opponents is shot into peoples’ eyeballs like reddish fireworks.
Pointing out that someone has been wrong in the past can also be a good way of getting out of a potentially humiliating debate. Being wrong is a natural consequence of making arguments – to wait for perfection is to stagnate in perpetuity. Could we have gotten to Einsteinian physics without going through Newtonian physics? It is doubtful. Saying that someone is wrong now because he has been wrong in the past is like saying you can easily beat a world champion boxer because he once lost a fight in the past.
Perhaps your intellectual opponent has an esoteric area of interest that has nothing to do with his current argument, which you can highlight with the goal of insulting his general competence. Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with alchemy and mysticism. Is it not far easier to point that out than to learn and rebut his general mathematical and physical theories? Christopher Hitchens was ridiculously enamored of the child murderer Che Guevara, but that has little relevance to Hitchens’s argument against the existence of God. If Hitchens claims to be a good judge of character, this can certainly be brought up as a counterexample, but its scope should be limited to the argument at hand.
Pointing out that a moralist has done something immoral does not necessarily invalidate that moralist’s ethical theories. If a televangelist who rails against infidelity has an affair, this does not automatically invalidate all of his prior arguments against infidelity – especially since Christianity itself states that everyone is a sinner and temptation is everywhere. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s grandson committed suicide – I have heard this fact used to support spanking, since Dr. Spock disapproved of the practice.
Not an argument.
At an even baser level, you can use flattering photographs of intellectuals you like, while using unflattering photographs of those you dislike. You can use positive adjectives to describe those who agree with you, while using negative adjectives to describe those who oppose you. For example, I have been described in the mainstream media as “a former IT worker.” I co-founded and grew a successful software company, like Steve Jobs, but I have never seen Steve Jobs referred to as “a former IT worker.”
If you like a thinker, you can quote his admirers – if you dislike a thinker, you can quote his detractors.
If you dislike a group of thinkers, you can create a label to describe them, and then infuse that label with as many pejoratives as possible. For instance, you can call people part of the “far right,” “extreme right,” or “alt-right,” and then hope – usually successfully – that people’s internal autocorrect transforms those labels into the ideologically required “fascist” or “Nazi.” You can label anyone who wishes to preserve his country’s culture as “far right/Nazi,” and then hope no one notices that Israel has a very strong desire to preserve its own culture, which means that, in this insane formulation, Jews are in fact Nazis.
You can also deride everyone on the left as a “snowflake,” even when leftists have powerful and legitimate criticisms of Western imperialism, traditional Republican warmongering and the military-industrial complex.
You can also divide a group of thinkers into “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” and woo those you deem acceptable with favourable articles and attractive photographs, in the hope – usually successful – that they will then start avoiding those you deem unacceptable. Bribing selected people with positive coverage is a great way of splitting a movement and turning it against itself.
Another way to deplatform a thinker is to manufacture a hysterical controversy and then continually refer to that controversy in the future. Repetition sinks reputation, and actual arguments are never addressed. This also serves as a standing threat against anyone who even dreams of taking a similar position.
Inevitably, you will hear that my arguments are reductionist, or simplistic, or incomplete, or that I have not addressed so-and-so’s argument, or that I have a bad reputation, or that I am not a philosopher, or that I avoid legitimate debates, or I am disliked, or I am grandiose, or that I was wrong about something sometime, or someone bad liked something I said once. You name it – the mud is thrown, while only hitting the gullible and ignorant.
Do not fall for the silly tricks. Do what I do – just skim the article, or speed up the audio, and see whether any actual arguments are addressed.
If not, just understand that the words are a foolish moat around a necessary treasure – and that the writer or the speaker is a mere fool, full of sound and fury, whose life signifies nothing but cowardice.
