Ego & Argument

The force we can summon to defend an idea we don’t care about is astounding. A topic as void as the most efficient route to a restaurant can provoke cruelty and invective better suited to a war crimes trial than an evening out.

It’s no secret that, between intimates, a fight about directions is not really about directions. It is a fight about whether you realize I got along fine before I met you and became the beneficiary of your precious advice. It is a fight about whether you think I’m that big an idiot. It is a fight about respect, status, safety, and love. It is obvious to everyone, including the arguers, that the fight about directions is not really about directions.

And yet the assumption that underlies nearly all formal debates is that the fight about string theory is really about string theory, the fight about literature really about literature.

When personal animosity becomes so palpable that it upstages the debate—as when William Buckley threatened to punch Gore Vidal on a public affairs program in 1968, amid a nominal discussion of the Democratic convention—this strain of the overall conflict becomes a kind of open secret. Amazingly, however, the effect of personal acrimony on the substance of a debate is rarely examined. Ill-will may be mentioned in biography, which as a genre will admit that people have feelings, but it’s usually categorized as gossip or colour—like Churchill’s naps. Anger, fear, and status-seeking are not taken seriously as forces that drive our disputes and therefore shape our ideas.

In a serious debate, logic and evidence stand between the arguers, muffling their advocates’ animal lust for dominance and esteem. But argumentative substance does not eliminate the hunger for victory; the former merely covers over the latter. And the buffer of polite disputation is easily worn away with time and stubbornness. “Controvertists cannot long retain their kindness for each other,” Dr. Johnson wrote, reflecting on the implosion of the life-long friendship of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The two writers fell out over politics; Addison died angry mid-dispute; Steele died heartbroken a decade later.

Most arguers earnestly want to defend good ideas: to promote smarter policies or a better understanding of their field. They want to say things that are true and helpful. But to the extent that human beings believe themselves to be right (oh and we do), the defence of the best ideas and the defence of one’s own position are two projects easily and often conflated. A debate is always personal.

Rhetoricians say an ad hominem attack is based on a fallacy: the idea that an argument is organically connected to the arguer. If you are an evil person and you suggest that the sun revolves around the earth, you are wrong—but not because you are evil. An attack on your character leaves your false claim unscathed.

The reverse, however, does not hold. The rules of rhetoric may dictate that a claim cannot be undermined by its advocate, but anyone who has met an outspoken idiot knows that an advocate can be undermined by his claims. When we are wrong we lose credibility. When we lose credibility we lose status, and thereafter money, friends, sexual charisma, and other things we would rather keep. We experience an animal pain, but we cannot admit this. We just argue harder.

The truth is, we are organically connected to our arguments. This is so not because they depend on us (they are neither strengthened nor weakened by their association with us) but because we depend on them once we have made them. Our arguments live in a world of logic where they can fall apart painlessly; we live among people, where falling apart is unbearable.

*                         *                         *                         *

Ego and Argument is a web site dedicated to the interaction between arguments and emotions. I hope to access this territory by reflecting on fiction, academic literature, current events, and interviews.

The goal is not to deride or deflate the arguers. (Well, maybe a little–if they really have it coming.) The goal is to explore an emotional economy that, when ignored, draws people toward all manner of acrimony, anxiety, and escalation. Ego and Argument wants us to talk to each other better by understanding ourselves better.

Thanks for visiting. Watch this space.