“How to win a debate without needing to be right”
In my evolving series of case studies in the rhetoric of postmodern Latin American “fear, uncertainty and doubt” — e.g., David Sasaki’s (Hearing) Global Voices Online sitrep on Oaxaca, Fear and Misinformation Abound — one book makes for essential reading: the recently published Portuguese translation of a Schopenhauer treatise on informal fallacies by Olavo de Carvalho.
Carvalho’s principal contribution to the (public-domain) text is having rebranded Schopenhauer’s Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten (The Art Of Controversy) as “How to Win a Debate Without Necessarily Being Right.”
The book was reviewed recently by Microsoft PR contractor InfomediaTV — which demonstrably practices the FUD techniques that Carvalho preaches.
Carvalho, who says he lives in Virginia on a U.S. “journalist” visa at the moment, and bills himself as a sort of an ad hoc ambassador to the U.S. extreme religious right — see Olavo de Carvalho: The Council on Foreign Relations is a Tool of the Communist Devils — was fired last year as a freelance columnist by the Zero Hora newspaper in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, for sourcing unverifiable factoids to unreliable anonymous sources
The “source” in question: the blog of an anonymous putative “ex-Worker’s Party member”; the portrait of the author is a stock photo of a Bozo-style circus clown.
See Carvalho x Zero Hora.
At about the same time, the tenth anniversary of the publication of one of his books was given a full page in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. See also The Folha de S. Paulo Explains The Theory of the Master Race.
From Aristotle on (at least), the study of informal fallacy has been taught in order to help people (1) recognize phony reasoning in order to (2) avoid believing in the nonexistent facts it supports, which can lead to (3) making very bad decisions.
(In this connection, I often think of my Bhaghwanee friend from 1980s San Francisco, who left town when the Bhagwan announced the world was about to end, then drifted back in six months later, rueful, mournful and minus the orange shirt and locket with the portrait of the great guru.)
Carvalho’s rebranding of the field, on the other hand, is designed to help people (1) deploy phony reasoning in order to to (2) induce people to believe in nonexistent facts.
A couple of Harvard professors have actually written an excellent book on this precise topic, which I highly recommend to you:
As Toulmin and Jonsen note, the term “casuistry” — like the term “rhetoric” itself — has two definitions, one negative and the other neutral:
- argumentation that is specious or excessively subtle and intended to be misleading
- moral philosophy based on the application of general ethical principles to resolve moral dilemmas
See also the famous Harvard Business School “case studies” method (PDF) — an example, in its original conception, of the casuistic method in its neutral sense, in this case in the sphere of instrumental reasoning rather than moral reasoning.
How to minimize overhead, maximize profits and sustain market share: an empirical, reality-based approach. That sort of thing.
In his preface, Schopenhauer neatly summarizes the Richard Edelman theory of public relations (Edelman on Rashōmon):
For human nature is such that if A. and B. are engaged in thinking in common, and are communicating their opinions to one another on any subject, so long as it is not a mere fact of history, and A. perceives that B.’s thoughts on one end the same subject are not the same as his own, he does not begin by revising his own process of thinking, so as to discover any mistake which he may have made, but he assumes that the mistake has occurred in B.’s.
Schopenhauer was, of course, proverbially pessimistic about the default state of the human condition.
On the other hand, he also viewed the application of reason as a way of compensating for human “villainy and baseness.”
The language of moral condemnation he uses here makes it very clear that our own tendency toward dishonesty is something we ought to try and overcome, rather than simply wallowing in it:
However, this very dishonesty, this persistence in a proposition which seems false even to ourselves, has something to be said for it. It often happens that we begin with the firm conviction of the truth of our statement; but our opponent’s argument appears to refute it. Should we abandon our position at once, we may discover later on that we were right after all: the proof we offered was false, but nevertheless there was a proof for our statement which was true. The argument which would have been our salvation did not occur to us at the moment. Hence we make it a rule to attack a counter-argument, even though to all appearances it is true and forcible, in the belief that its truth is only superficial, and that in the course of the dispute another argument will occur to us by which we may upset it, or succeed in confirming the truth of our statement. In this way we are almost compelled to become dishonest; or, at any rate, the temptation to do so is very great. Thus it is that the weakness of our intellect and the perversity of our will lend each other mutual support; and that, generally, a disputant fights not for truth, but for his proposition, as though it were a battle pro aris et focis. He sets to work per fas et nefas; nay, as we have seen, he cannot easily do otherwise. As a rule, then, every man will insist on maintaining whatever he has said, even though for the moment he may consider it false or doubtful.
“… as though it were a battle for hearth and home …”
” … sets to work by fair means or foul …”
On the notion that there is no alternative to wallowing in our own essential wickedness — Carvalho bills himself as a student of Gnosticism, some variants of which view earthly existence, nihilistically, as a mere illusion concocted by the evil Demiurge — see also “Violence is a Natural Part of the Political Process”: Diogo Mainardi and the Hog Heaven of the Hard Men.
A similar thought is encapsulated in that famous maxim of American marketing: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Case in counterpoint: “The smartest guys in the room” at Enron.
And similar rationales are often based on the famous metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion in Abrams v. United States:
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas–that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
It is a common creative misreading of this rhetorical sally — which logically speaking may seem a bit circular — that if lies manage to defeat truth in the marketplace of ideas, then it must be because the consumer of ideas would rather buy comforting illusions than inconvenient truths.
See, for example, the story related by Cesar “The Naked Maia” (Surrender Unto Cesar! The Naked Maia Strikes Again):
The other day, at a dinner in a fashionable restaurant, a senior editor for a major national media operation was saying — that same red wine again — that the fundamental thing you have to do to “loyalize” your audience is to trash the government. That this is the common attitude of people who would rather not take responsibility for their own failures and therefore like to hear that all of their problems are the government’s fault. Trash, criticize, find errors and generalize them, show one side of the dispute as if it were the whole picture, this is the kind of thing the reader or view or listener never tires of hearing, and the people who thrive in the media business are the ones that give the people what they really want.
But that is not what Justice Holmes says.
He says that in a democratic society, our belief in truth, and our recogntiion that our own “fighting faiths” of the moment are subject to human frailty and fallibility, must be greater than our belief in “the very foundations of our own conduct.”
That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.
On making the (phony) case that opinions that we “loathe and believe to be fraught with death” pose “an imminent threat,” see
- Murdoch’s Fox Mangled By Globo Blog Dog! (Fox News experts “report” that “Chavez is a brutal dictator” … “All who oppose hiim are imprisoned or suffer grave threats” … “There is now no news media outlet in the country that opposes his government.”)
- Aznar on the Phantom Menace (“Latin American indigenous rights movements are enemies of civilization on a par with al-Qaeda.”)
It is quite simple, really.
The hard men need to inflate the sense of imminent danger in order to hang onto their hog heaven:
If anything characterizes our times, it is a sense of pervading chaos. In every field of human endeavor, the windstorms of change are fast altering the ways we live. Contemporary man is no longer anchored in certainties and thus has lost sight of who he is, where he comes from and where he is going. — The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, quoted in my Spinning the World Backwards.
That is all there is to it.
Ergo, Richard Edelman and PBS — see PBS: “The Imaginary News & Nonsense Agency” — share a philosophy of life in general with gabbling banana-republican fascists.
Literally.
Decorative mosaic, Conjunto Nacional (1958) office block and shopping mall, Avenida Paulista at R. Consolação, São Paulo, Brazil.
The New Market Machines 