Ego & Argument

INTERVIEW

My friend—I’ll call him Adam—is very smart, very kind, and very self-aware. When you see him angry on his own behalf, you almost expect a voiceover from David Attenborough to roll, explaining how rare is this display of wrath in the North American mensch.

If you knew Adam, and if you had been present for an academic talk he gave a couple of years ago, you would not have been expecting him to be thrown into a (literal) blind rage during the Q&A. But he was. More… »

I’ve recently contributed a couple of Ego & Argument-related pieces to a new online news and opinion site, The Mark. One is about rhetoric, and the other is about heckling.

ARGUER CASE STUDY

“William Buckley would argue about anything with anybody.” — Irv Kupcinet

“For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” — James 1:20, quoted by William F. Buckley in his essay “On Experiencing Gore Vidal”

At the end of his life, William F. Buckley was widely seen as the father of contemporary conservatism in America. When he began his career, however, Buckley was an ideological misfit (albeit a rich, handsome, popular one). It is not an exaggeration to say that during 59 years of firehose rhetorical output, he helped argue U.S. politics as we know it into being.

Buckley loved to argue. He argued in writing and he argued in speech. He estimated that he made 70 public speeches a year for 40 years. He hosted the television debate show “Firing Line” from 1966 to 1999: over 1400 episodes. The New York Times obituary estimated that his collected newspaper columns would fill 45 books. This in addition to his 55 actual books. [1] That Buckley died at his desk did not surprise his own National Review, which figured he went as he would have chosen to go: “At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.”

Thinking of the moment when Buckley set out, at age 29, to reshape his country’s political discourse, you do not imagine a dogged figure throwing his weight against a mountain in the faith that it might one day move. You imagine, rather, a puppy bounding into the biggest pile of leaves in the world, a pile raked carefully into place by generations of earnest groundskeepers. More… »

According to social psychologists, calibrating the cognitive instruments we use to interpret the world is easy and fun. Step One: establish yourself as the definition of normal. Step Two: judge others.

When we perform Step Two, the thumb of the ego presses hard on the scales of judgment, producing what those in the field call “egocentric contrast effects.” Garden-variety contrast effects occur when we perceive something differently because we are comparing it to something else that is fresh in our minds or senses. A toaster feels very light if you have just lifted an anvil. Compared to a bag of rice cakes, the same toaster seems to weigh more.

Egocentric contrast effects occur because our judgments of others are skewed by our own characteristics and expectations. We are the anvil. We are the rice cakes. Because it is standard cognitive procedure to situate ourselves at the centre of the universe and assess others according to how like or unlike us they are, we often overestimate the extent to which other people differ from us. [1] Moreover, we are prone to seeing these differences not as blooms in the blessed garden of humanity but as—what else?—evidence of other people’s inferiority. More… »

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