Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian
For many of our readers and potential readers, the Labour leadership result was a singular moment of hope, even euphoria. It was the first time many of our young readers felt anything like relevance to, let alone empowerment within, a political system that has alienated them utterly.
The Observer – a broad church, to which I’m doggedly loyal – responded to Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide with an editorial foreseeing inevitable failure at a general election of the mandate on which he won. For what it’s worth, I felt we let down many readers and others by not embracing at least the spirit of the result, propelled as it was by moral principles of equality, peace and justice. These are no longer tap-room dreams but belong to a mass movement in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe.
It came as a disappointment – as I suspect it did to others who supported Corbyn, or were interested – to find such a consensus ready to pour cold water on the parade. To behold so little curiosity towards, let alone sympathy with, why this happened.
Of course the rest of the media were in on the offensive. Our sister paper the Guardian had endorsed a candidate who lost, humiliated; the Tory press barons performed to script. Here was a chance for the Observer to stand out from the crowd. But instead, we conjoined the chorus with our own – admittedly more progressive – version of this obsession with electoral strategy with little regard to what Corbyn says about the principles of justice, peace and equality (or less inequality). It came across as churlish, I’m sure, to many readers on a rare day of something different.
I accept that we are a reformist paper, and within those parameters one has to get elected. But that should not mean a digging-in by, and with, the parliamentary inside-baseball Labour party whose days and ways of presenting politics like corporate management selling a product (or explaining a product fault) have just been soundly rejected by its membership. Why embed with MPs in a parliament no one trusts against the democratic vote outside it?
And anyway, what if? Who, five years ago, would have predicted Syriza’s victory in Greece or bet on Podemos taking Madrid and Barcelona, now preparing for a role in government? It’s not as though the Observer’s accumulated editorials disagree that much with Corbyn.
During Ed Miliband’s Labour, the Observer robustly questioned the health of capitalism – our columnist Will Hutton calls it “turbo-capitalism”. We urged support for a living wage and the working poor, and the likes of Robert Reich and David Simon have filled our pages with more radical critiques of capitalism than Corbyn’s.
Anyway, how much of what Corbyn argues do most voters disagree with, if they stop to think? Do people approve of bewildering, high tariffs set by the cartel of energy companies, while thousands of elderly people die each winter of cold-related diseases? Do students and parents from middle- and low-income families want tuition fees?
Do people like paying ludicrous fares for signal-failure, delays and overcrowding on inept railways? Do people urge tax evasion by multinationals and billionaires, which they then subsidise with cuts to the NHS? Post-cold war, who exactly are we supposed to kill en masse with these expensive nuclear missiles? What’s so good about the things Corbyn wants to drastically change?
Even more fundamental is the appeal to principle and morality – peace, justice and internationalism – which drove the Labour grassroots vote, and was spoken at the rally for refugees which Corbyn made his first engagement and for which this newspaper stands absolutely. Why not embrace those principles, or at least show an interest in the fact that hundreds of thousands of people just did? Which better reflects the Britain we want: Corbyn’s “open your hearts” or Cameron’s “swarm”?
The parliamentary bubble – and our editorial – calculate that we cannot fundamentally change Britain on the basis of these aspirations, even if many people yearn to. In the acceptance speech, Corbyn should have appealed beyond the party in which he is steeped; perhaps he too inhabits a different echo-chamber.
But this isn’t about Corbyn, it’s about why he’s suddenly there. And what an appalling lesson to draw: someone is overwhelmingly elected to falteringly but seriously challenge that stasis and order of things – by urging peace, justice, republic and equality – only to be evicted by the deep system into a lethal ice-storm the moment he leaves the tent, like Captain Oates, though not of his own volition.
And even if middle England is more adverse to radical politics than middle Spain or Greece, does that mean we have to align with this mainstream stasis, just because it is so? What’s the point of principles if their trade-off for power is a principle in itself? Why have principles at all?
The legal philosopher Costas Douzinas argues for a separation of words: using “politics” to describe horse-trading between parties, which feign differences but actually agree, and “the political” to describe antagonisms that really exist in society. On that basis, why start with the stasis of “politics” to approach “the political”, rather than the reverse: invoke “the political” to challenge the stasis of “politics”? Especially alongside Greece, Spain and elsewhere.
Instead of a stirring leader, which did not have to endorse Corbyn but could celebrate the spirit of the vote along with those who delivered it, we’ve left a lot of good, loyal and decent people who read our newspaper feeling betrayed.
“There’s something happening in here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”, wrote Stephen Stills in 1967. It’s a good description of where we are with all this – we don’t as yet have the map whence this came, where it’s going or even what it is.
Dave Crosby sang: “Don’t try to get yourself elected” (from a mighty number called “Long Time Gone”). Along with almost half this country, I was inclined to agree, but Corbyn’s election throws Crosby’s dictum into question, just as to cut Corbyn down would prove Crosby right. “We can change the world” sang Graham Nash. But are we only allowed to try if middle England, the media and parliament try too?
Showing posts with label stasis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stasis. Show all posts
Sunday 20 September 2015
Sunday 16 February 2014
Why we argue – and how to do it properly
The internet provides ample space for stating opinions. But true persuasion is an art – one this week-long series aims to teach
Marlon Brando as Mark Anthony in the 1953 film Julius Caesar. 'True persuasion is democratic.' Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar
It's the weekend and you are heading out to meet friends at the cinema. You are looking forward to seeing the new thriller by a favourite director. But then you discover that some of your friends would rather see the latest superhero movie, or some a new romantic comedy. Everybody pauses, uncertain how to proceed. You decide to get everyone to see the thriller. You won't force them – after all, they are your friends and unlikely to remain so if you threaten them. You could bribe them by offering to buy the tickets – but movie-going is expensive enough as it is, and you don't want to set a precedent. So you decide to try and persuade them – to get them to really want to go. But how?
You could begin by telling your friends about reviews you have read recommending your chosen film and trashing the others – or by pointing out the relative box office success of the movies on offer. But what reviewers do your friends trust? Do they want to see a hit movie or are they the sort of people who like to "discover" hidden gems?
Perhaps you should remind them that on previous visits to the cinema your choices have been good ones. And all you want is for everybody to have a good time. Alternatively you might explain just how much you have been looking forward to the movie after a really bad week. Are your friends likely to be moved by pity or should you appeal to other feelings?
Perhaps these appeals – to the authority of reviewers, your own character, and to your friends' emotions – seem too manipulative. You could try logic. Movie-going may not be an exact science but there are degrees of reasonableness. If a director's movies have been dire since that first breakout hit then it's a good bet that the new one will be weak. You might argue that the superhero blockbuster is good but the genre can never be truly great; that one of the movies has a lead actor with a bad track record; that the comedy is so long the bar will shut before it ends.
However strong your convictions about quality cinema may be, these alone will not win the day. You need to make an argument. And a successful argument must appeal not to just anyone in general but to your friends in particular. It must be adapted to their estimations of movie reviewers, feelings and beliefs about you and your character, and rely on rational claims of a kind they will recognise.
What is true of the cinema is – in this case – also true in public and political life. In a democracy, rather than force or bribe people to assent to our ideology, we try to win them over through persuasion. That can be a challenge. It requires us to understand where other people are coming from and to develop arguments that are outward-facing.
Not everyone thinks as we do. People have different experiences and possess different information; they have different values and do not always share our criteria of judgment. To persuade them we have to make connections with our audience – with what they might think, feel and be familiar with. This is not about tricking people or fooling them. It is about truly persuading them to share our views on a particular issue – and that means developing a relationship.
A glance at the newspapers and much of the internet demonstrates, however, that many people think the purpose of public communication is to reflect well on themselves – to announce their own importance, specialness or cleverness. An infamous academic chooses not to be convincing but to increase his brand value by performing provocatively; a troll communicates publicly but seeks only private "lulz"; shouting things your audience already believes, yet pretending that you're not allowed to say them, seems to be an easy route to success on talk radio or the op-ed pages. But the only thing such people are saying with their arguments is "look at me!"
Online communication makes easy the simple affirmation of our beliefs, the monetisation of strident "opinion" and the anonymous onanistic expression of inchoate hostility. And that means more arguments – but less persuasion.
True persuasion is democratic. In giving people reasons to act with us we recognise that they aren't inferiors who can be compelled but thinking, feeling and speaking beings. And true persuasion is an art. Contrary to the books on the self-help and business psychology shelves there are no magic "words that work". You have to cultivate an "eye", developing a feel for situations and empathy for those you want to persuade. The name of that art is "rhetoric".
Of course, you don't need to bother with any of this if you and your friends just go and see your favoured films separately. But that is to give up on society, politics and progress. If people cannot persuade or be persuaded then there can be no shared beliefs, co-ordinated collective action or intellectual evolution. The only change will come from force, bribery or manipulation.
In defiance of such a bleak outcome, Comment is free will over the coming week run a series on how to argue in the spirit of Isocrates, the ancient Greek philosopher and rhetorician: "the kind of art which can implant honesty and justice in depraved natures has never existed and does not exist … But I do hold that people can become better and worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well, if they become possessed of the desire to be able to persuade their hearers."
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How to judge your audience and remain true to your arguments
Being two-faced has had a bad rap recently. But to convince people of your argument you have to adapt it to your audience
'On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try.' Photograph: Matt Crossick/PA
One of the greatest achievements of reality television gameshows has been the promotion of a distinctive ethical principle: that almost the worst thing you can do is be "two-faced". To say one thing to one group of people and something else to another is widely regarded as the epitome of dishonesty. And the very worst thing? The failure to be "true" to yourself – to moderate or modify your public appearance in response to the expectations of others.
Adapt to circumstances
But if you want to persuade people, or simply communicate clearly, the last thing you should do is say the same thing to everyone and refuse to adapt to circumstances. On the contrary, the first step in developing a good argument is to think about how to fit it to the situation in which you find yourself. It used to be that skill in this was considered a virtue. Rhetoricians called it "decorum".
Today we think of being "decorous" as conforming. But all it means is being "fitting" – using words and arguments that are "apt" given the situation. It is generally a bad idea to give an expletive-packed wedding speech that endlessly insults the bride, not because expletives and insults are always bad but because they are at odds with the mood of collective celebration characteristic of weddings.
Similarly, an economist explaining the Phillips curve ought to do so differently if talking to a niece taking business studies GCSE, the retired sales executive next door or a room full of trade unionists.
Know your audience
In making an argument you are trying to bring three things into alignment: yourself, your words and your audience. You are trying to move your audience so that it is in agreement with you – but to do that you need to move too. And between you – what moves you both – is a form of words and a set of arguments. If you are inflexible, using words and making references that are completely at odds with your audience you won't persuade anybody of anything (except of the view that you are unconvincing and unintelligible).
In practical terms this simply means that you need to know your audience. Cicero, the Roman philosopher, rhetorician and politician, believed that the perfect orator would have to master everything to do with the life of other citizens: laws and customs, traditions and general outlooks, "the way people usually think". In becoming familiar with the general outlooks of other people, as well as the particular outlook of specific groups, you are better placed to adapt your argument as needed.
A problem in the present day is that contemporary communications media make decorum extremely difficult, if not completely impossible. Politicians have long been aware that words said in one context may be rebroadcast in quite another. They have tended to deal with this by being bland and non-commital or by supplementing what they say with briefing and spin. In adopting such positions on the basis of opinion polls and focus groups politicians make the opposite mistake to the foul-mouthed best man. They forget their argument and give themselves over entirely to the audience (who, in turn, succumb to boredom).
It's not only politicians who can find their words taken and used in a quite unexpected context. These days any of us might be live-tweeted or filmed and put online. The examples are piling up of those who forgot that what they said on social media was not private but being said to everybody. On below-the-line comments boards – where most are anonymous or pseudonymous – it is difficult to be sure who one is talking to. This is one reason why people on Guardian comment threads often try to appeal to the (possibly imaginary) audience they know that exists: the moderators, subeditors, or "Guardian readers".
Pitching to the third party
But if you want to persuade you need to have a better idea of the audience you mean to reach. And it isn't the person whose comments you are attacking. On BBC Question Time Russell Brand is never going to persuade Melanie Phillips, and she will never sway him. They'd be foolish to try. They are trying to persuade the people watching them. It is the same online. Persuasive arguments will be pitched to a "third party" – the audience of readers.
Of course you don't know who that audience is. Are they old or young, male or female, new to the topic or experienced? Yet all of us, when we start to compose some kind of general argument, has in mind an "ideal" or "typical" audience. It is worth being clear to yourself who you think this is. It shouldn't be people who think exactly as you do – since those aren't people you need to persuade. Nor should it be a bunch of idiosyncratic types who think like nobody else.
Let's be reasonable
It needs to be something like generally "reasonable" people, neither fanatical nor obstinate, informed but not specialist. What views or outlooks can you assume they share? What are they likely to think decent, kind and reasonable and what might they think is unacceptable, unkind and daft? Be clear on this and you can start to think about how to argue your case. That means paying attention to, and thinking about, other people, their feelings and experiences. If you want to have a chance of persuading people then you need to have a lot more than two faces. Don't be true to yourself. Be true to your arguments.
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How to use your anecdotes well – and sparingly
There's an art to telling stories to complement an argument without overdoing it – or making yourself the centre of attention
David Cameron, left, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown all used anecdotes about people they had met during the 2010 leaders' debate. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
The most memorable moment of the 2010 general election leaders' debate was when David Cameron tried to justify a point about immigration by citing the agreement of "a 40-year-old black man" he had met in Plymouth who had served in the Royal Navy for 30 years (thus enlisting at the age of 10).
This impossibly young seaman was not the only person called as a witness in that debate: Nick Clegg had been talking to a ward nurse in a short-staffed hospital and a burglary victim from London; Gordon Brown had met a trainee chef and received a letter from a recovered cancer patient; Cameron had also recently met a crime victim from Crosby, a drug addict from Witney and a man suffering from cancer of the kidney. The latter reappeared in Cameron's 2012 speech to his party conference, and in a recent speech on social security Ed Miliband told stories of meeting a young unemployed man in Long Eaton and "somebody who had worked all his life, for 40 years" in the scaffolding business.
Are such stories a good form of argument? They seem to be popular with political speech writers and advertising copywriters who often use them to lend colour and "human interest" to a speech. But as the leaders' debate demonstrated, they can also sound such a false note that they distract from the claims you want to advance. To work well, stories must be in harmony with, and contributing to, your overall argument.
One way they can do this is by bringing to your argument "witnesses" who provide evidence that supports a particular claim. In school we learn to quote supposed "authorities" – writers who lend support to our case not simply because of the veracity of their findings or the eloquence they lend to our words but also because they have some kind of recognised standing which we hope to add to our own.
Know your witnesses
Outside school such citations are useful, but the range of potential sources is greater and the usefulness of any single one cannot be taken for granted. Different audiences value different sorts of "authorities" and a fundamental mistake is to refer to something your audience cannot evaluate or will not evaluate positively. Far from strengthen your case this will weaken it.
Use your anecdotes sparingly
Even good witnesses should be used sparingly and carefully. Excessive and obvious reliance on them will make it seem as if you can't think for yourself. And it can easily seem pretentious. Someone trying to persuade you simply by dropping names of powerful people they have met or of authors they have read is, to put it mildly, annoying.
Make anecdotes tell stories
Stories can also serve as examples – instances of reality which are presented as proofs of some kind of norm. They invite people to make an induction – to conclude that there is some kind of general underlying rule at work and of which we must take heed. When a child points out that their friend doesn't have to go to bed so early, or a teenager insists to a parent that "nobody else has to visit Grandma every weekend", they are trying to illustrate the presence of a rule or a norm from which their parents are unreasonably or bizarrely departing. In a similar way Cameron wants us to conclude from a single dramatic example that the NHS is bad for patients and Miliband that apprenticeships are working out well.
Anecdotal examples of this sort are a necessary and valuable part of everyday, public and political argument. That is because (climate change partially excepted) such arguments are rarely about the nature of physical reality but often about social reality. They concern partial and practical judgments about some aspect of our varied and complex cultures: whether or not people are on the whole trustworthy; the likelihood that people receiving social security are "striving" or "skiving"; whether exams are getting easier or harder.
To make strong claims about the social reality of these things you will need to present examples and these can be made vivid if expressed in the form of stories. The most effective – combined with other evidence and information – help bring clearly to mind something you want the audience to think about more, to sympathise with or to see in a new way. They help to establish a picture of a situation and a definition of reality on the basis of which conclusions may be drawn.
Stories come in many genres. They may be little comedies or tragedies, homely confirmations of what "everybody knows" or unexpected revelations. It is important to be sure that your story is emotionally in tune with the rest of your argument (rather than a substitute for it). And it certainly must not dominate.
Don't make yourself the story
One of the more annoying techniques of politicians is to use purely personal experience as an anecdotal exemplar – as if, just because the politician "got on their bike", we must accept that everyone could or should do likewise. Stories about the speaker may be fine for entertaining dinner speeches (on the way to which a really funny thing happened), but they have a limited place in argumentative speeches where the good character of a speaker should be evident and not need explicit mention.
The problem with Cameron, Clegg, Brown and Miliband's stories is that often they aren't a contribution to the main argument but an attempt to convince the audience that these are great guys, men of the people, on our level. They have forgotten that a good argument is always about the audience to whom it is addressed and not the person making it. If you make yourself the story your argument will fail.
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Ask yourself: what are you arguing about?
Life is not a well-set exam – the questions we ask may be ambiguous. Defining the dispute is itself part of the argument
'When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture.' Photograph: CS-Stock / Alamy
The New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hasan recently addressed his online interlocutors thus: "Dear thickos on Twitter, for the 100th time: opposing arming the rebels does not make one 'pro-Assad'."
Now, there's a lot happening in this short rhetorical moment – including invective and hyperbole aimed at the refutation of a false syllogism. But overall it is an argument about arguments. Hasan wants to argue over the question "Should the UK arm the rebels in Syria?"; others would prefer the question: "Should the UK support Assad?" Although connected, these are two distinct questions. Which one is asked makes quite a difference to how a discussion about policy towards Syria will unfold. In any argument what we are arguing about may be the most important thing to dispute.
What are you arguing about?
Life is not a well-set examination. Our problems are not clearly specified and the questions we have to answer to ourselves are rarely unambiguous. Even something seemingly simple such as an argument about what music to play at a family party might also, possibly, be an argument about what kind of party it is to be, who the party should be for, or which members of the family deserve most respect. If you think the debate is about the relative merits of Britpop over glam rock, you might be in trouble if your partner thinks it is about your inability to respect your in-laws. In short, the point of a dispute isn't clear or fixed before an argument begins. It is one of the things established in and through the argument.
Understanding this can be emotionally important when organising the family get-together. It is of immense political importance when there is going to be a vote. Voters think lots of different things and they think them in all sorts of different ways.
Consequently, a vote will work out differently depending on how voters perceive an issue. For example, the renewal of Trident might be presented as purely a defence issue. People's views will then depend on how they think about threats to security and how they assess the usefulness of Trident in warding them off. But the issue can plausibly be construed as one of cost. In deciding on that question, the same people might take a different position. "Should we seek to deter nuclear attacks on the UK?" and "Are nuclear weapons your No 1 priority for government spending?" will lead to very different outcomes.
Four kinds of argument
In arguing, then, we need to think carefully about the explicit and implicit questions we are addressing and about the kind of argument that we want to have about them. Roman rhetoricians had a useful way of thinking about this. They used the term "stasis" for the "point" around which a dispute could or should turn, and identified four general kinds.
1. Fact
The first kind is "conjecture". This is the argument about fact – whether something is or is not the case. When your flatmate accuses you of eating the last of the cheese your first reaction might be to refute the conjecture – you were at work, you are allergic to dairy, your flatmate ate them last night when he had the munchies.
2. Definition
But suppose you did take the cheese and there is no denying it? The argument might then shift to "definition" – the name that should be given to your action. You might have taken the cheese thinking it was yours – in which case it wasn't "theft" but a "mistake".
3. Quality
Your third option is to make the argument one of "quality"; you admit the crime but argue that your action was a good one. You were aiding your flatmate in a diet, the cheese was almost out of date and you were avoiding waste, you gave it to someone who was really hungry.
These are all ways of shifting the terrain of a dispute. How you use them depends in part on whether or not you are in the position of prosecution or defence. A prosecutor wants to keep things narrow, presenting an audience with a simple choice of yes or no, guilty or not guilty. A defendant will want to open up a variety of arguments so as to sow reasonable doubt. The political conservative might want to keep things at conjecture so as to avoid challenges to "traditional values" while the political radical may want an argument about "quality" so as to show how an unconventional action expresses a higher moral code.
You can see how different stases work in many contemporary political arguments. Debate about the EU is an obvious example. "Sceptics" have successfully made the argument about a conjecture. They ask, implicitly, "who has given away British sovereignty?". They then resist any sort of nuance seeking only to bring forward as many examples as they can to prove the fact that sovereignty has been lost. "Europhiles" try to move on to a debate about definition (talking about "partnership" and so on) or over "quality", where they like to argue that since sovereignty is weakened by globalisation, joining a larger bloc is to enhance rather than give away power.
4. Place
There is a fourth "stasis" that the Romans referred to as "place". Here, the dispute is over jurisdiction – whether or not the issue is one that can legitimately be addressed. In Rome that meant disputing that it was something the court could hear. In politics this is usually a "reactionary" argument since it is intended to ward off disputes.
Thus, we hear often that government has no right to decide on same-sex marriage or tell people who they can and can't employ, and that courts cannot judge the content of newspapers. But in our crowded and cacophonous virtual public spheres we (like Mehdi Hasan) might all make good use of the stasis of place. The art of arguing involves knowing which questions to ask and how to ask them, learning how to answer the questions put and deciding which questions to ignore. Sometimes, just before the guests arrive is neither the time nor the place to start an argument.
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