A taxonomy of projected ideas

[skyecaptain]

From Paul Krugman's blog:

One thing Chait doesn’t mention, though, is that the willingness of right-wingers to believe this particular myth has a lot to do with projection. On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle - smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their

Comments

[dubdobdee]

This thread interested me, I think because of the way the politcis of it shifts between the substantive and the meta-level: is it an argument about the content of the law the legality of certain actions, or about argument about the proper way to approach such an argument? It's a clash between Salon columnist and constitutional activist Glenn Greenwald and law professor Orin Kerr of the rightwing/libertarian law blog The Volokh Conspiracy. The original poster was arguing that a different mode of argumentative engagement would serve the issues -- the conversation -- better; Greenwald and his supporters are arguing that this demand in fact shuts out the main substantive point that Greenwald is making. (That's my description of the meta-level: I'm dodging what Kerr or Greenwald are actually arguing because i. I suspect it requires very close and careful and extensive reading to be exact on either side; ii. I get the sense -- possibly wrongly -- that both sides are sliding around a little, though in rather different ways; iii. At lkeast some of the read of the meaning of what Greenwald is saying Kerr is saying depends on extensive background reading which I haven't made.)

Anyway it interested me because, given the potential level of toxicity, it's quite a sustained discussion: and yet basically its' sliding around going nowhere (certainly not clarifying) because the two camps, by virtue of their different politics, have different basic understandings of the rules (and purpose) of debate. Side A says the rules of civility are there to further knowledge; Side B says that rules of civility are there to exclude certain positions from the outset. (Actually I think there's a less clearly stated mirror stance also being taken, where Side B says [xx] is necessary to acknowledge constitutional propriety, or some such formulation; and Side A says that to cede [xx] is to exclude certain positions from the outset. But I'd have to reread quite carefully to put my finger on [xx], I think.)

Even being reasonably careful -- and abstract -- about this description (I'm not American and don't have a particularly significant dog in the fight about what the US Constitution allows and doesn't) actually risks placing me somewhere predecided and prejudiced in respect of the argument. To claim that the two sides mirror one another (even if only formally) leads to one kind of politics; the claim that -- whatever the formal stance the organisation enabling the debate to be staged must take -- one side is right and the other wrong, even if the case has not been made to the world yet, and may never be made to the world*, leads to another, and quite distinct kind of politics

*ie the correct side may lose in this court and all subsequent courts and still be the "correct" side

[dubdobdee]

boiling this down maybe:

Law is better understood if we consider its discussion an arm of academic debate (pure "schoolroom"?)
vs
Law is better understood if we consider its discussion an arm of political struggle (pure "hallway"?)

[dubdobdee]

here's edenbaum's first gloss; and here's his second

[dubdobdee]

(to echo frank's long-ago fantasy about richards meltzer and rorty, i'd like to lock him and edenbaum in a room at gunpoint till they each got the other to understand what they were talking about: sometimes i think they'd reach accord straight away -- ie that they're talking about the same thing -- and come out and deal with me; and sometimes i think the opposite, and i'd end up being arrested for their mysterious permanent disappearance)

[dubdobdee]

First gloss

edenbaum

[koganbot]

Haven't clicked on any of these yet because I have other things I need to write this morning, but what pops into my head is that it's not a given what "the rules of civility" means, it's not a given that power struggles can't be engaged in with civility, etc.

But I might want to invert your characterization of the hallway-classroom split. The way I'd formulated it (and recall that I'm really talking about a split in the social psyche, not something that is always represented in actual hallways and classrooms): in the hallway we talk to and about each other; in the classroom we talk about some third thing, the subject matter.

Now, this doesn't give "civility" to one area or another. I'd speculated that the reason the classroom convention ("talk about the subject matter") retains its hold is that in addressing ourselves to the subject matter rather than each other we're de-emphasizing the personal and social differences between us and therefore the risk of social conflict. But if I'm right, what that means is that the classroom doesn't assume an underlying civility; it assumes underlying conflict that can only be forestalled by an emphasis on the subject matter and a suppression of personal and social interaction.

There's a similarity - not an analogy, but a family resemblance - to Rorty's discussion of foundationalism and truth etc. Attacks on Kuhn tended to be along the lines of: if you get rid of agreed-upon procedures for determining truth you're left with either mob rule or the forced adherence to social norms. And Rorty's response would be that we don't have and aren't going to get agreed-upon procedures for determining truth, what we've got is discussion and civility and curiosity etc.* (and, I would add, plenty of actual determinations of truth thereby).

*I don't recall where Rorty actually said this, and I'm surely pulling together arguments that he made in several different places (so the discussion of Kuhn and the mention of civility may not be in the same place, but nonetheless I'm sure I'm depicting Rorty's line of thought accurately).