Refutation: A Training in Honesty
Many readers will be familiar with that infamous interview of Jordan Peterson, during which the journalist interviewing him repeatedly restated his claims in distorted or hyperbolic ways, in order to make his positions seem odious to the audience. So for instance, when Peterson argues that natural inclinations will always lead to certain disparities among men and women in the career paths they choose, the interviewer responds, “women aren’t going to make it, that’s what you’re really saying.” Over and over again, she uses the phrase “so what you’re saying” to completely misconstrue what it is Peterson is actually saying, a routine that reaches its absurd climax when, after listening to Peterson reiterate his well-known argument about how lobster neurology provides evidence for the natural (ie, non-socially constructed) origins of hierarchy, she responds, “you’re saying we should organize our society along the lines of the lobsters.” The entire interview essentially constituted a clinic in the straw man; a master performance on how to misrepresent the views of a polemical antagonist with relentless abandon.
For all the derision directed towards Cathy Newman, the journalist who carried out this travesty of an interview, there was nothing the least bit exceptional in her manner of debate. This habit of convoluting the positions of our ideological opponents in order to render them consistent with all our prior disdain for those opponents is prevalent throughout our society. In our time, the straw man is no longer merely a logical fallacy; it is just the standard mode of contemporary political discourse. We have seen it recently in debates over the content of school curricula: one side declares that they do not wish their children to be subject to a new version of racial discrimination under the deceptive label of “anti-racism,” and those on the other side of the aisle respond by saying, “see, they do not want us to teach slavery in school.” And this is now how Americans converse with one another on every topic imaginable.
An isolated case of the straw man might represent a fault in reasoning, but a habit of distorting the views of our opponents is almost always a revelation of some character flaw. It certainly represents a gross defect in one’s intellectual formation. A basic requirement for membership in the community of public reasoners is a willingness to engage with the views of other persons just as they present them, not as we mangle them into caricatures of our worst suspicions. That is what it means to be an honest reasoner, and honesty is an intellectual virtue that is indispensable towards fruitful dialogue. The prevalence of straw man reasoning throughout our public dialogue is nothing less than an epidemic of dishonesty. It is the result of a failure to firmly inculcate into young minds a basic expectation of honesty in debate.
This is why I have spent so much time in the past, when I used to teach classical rhetoric, on the refutation stage of argumentation. What I tried to emphasize to my students was that writing a proper refutation was not only a matter of good writing, or even of good thinking, but of good behavior. It wasn’t the outcome of academic prowess; it was a sign of honesty. They had often been subjected to cliches about the importance of “dialogue” or “civilized debate,” but what I wanted them to understand is that no such polemical comity is possible unless they commit themselves to a forthright confrontation with the best construal of their interlocutors’ views.
There were a variety of ways I tried to achieve this. We would study debates that took place in the past in which the kind of argumentative integrity I have described was evident. The famous Huxley-Arnold debate was exemplary in this regard; despite their pronounced disagreements over the proper orientation of a college curriculum, which ultimately grew from an even deeper divergence over the essence of human nature, these two thinkers wrestled with the actual stated positions of their adversary, and thereby strengthened the plausibility of their own respective positions. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is another excellent example of a close, candid engagement with the specific arguments the author means to refute. What these works serve to demonstrate to students is the indispensable imperative of quoting one’s opponent - and quoting at sufficient length and in sufficient context – in the course of confronting his ideas.
Besides the reading of such exemplary texts, there were other exercises I would have the students perform in class in order to absorb the habits of honest refutation. A simple one was to have the students read a short discursive piece, and then summarize the argument they found there; sometimes they would share their work with the class, and we would discuss whether each example captured the thrust of the original argument accurately. At times I would ask the students to jot down a position on a certain question; then they had to hand their argument to a student sitting next to them, who was required to pose an objection to their position. Finally, the paper was passed back to the original student, who had to respond to the objections directed against their argument. This could be done as an oral exercise, where students would stand in front of a class representing a certain thesis, and be required to respond to objections leveled at them by the class.
Whatever format these exercises took, the emphasis was always on engaging directly with the stated position of the students’ interlocutor. The habits of quoting and of accurately restating adverse arguments were constantly cultivated. The ethos I wanted my students to take away from these practices – and it was an ethos, not simply a set of guidelines for essay writing – was that their whole credibility as public reasoners, their very status as members of a civilized community, rested on their willingness and ability to do such things. In this way, the teaching of rhetoric rose from mere instruction in an academic discipline to a training in virtue.
Classical education stands on its claim to train virtue in young souls. The whole thrust of a classical curriculum is designed to call forth the whole range of human potential in students, and not just a narrow and fragmented set of skills. Teaching students the art of proper refutation is one of the surest ways classical educators can make good on this promise. To refute an opponent’s arguments well requires honesty and candor, and the more students practice this difficult art, the more opportunities they will have to grow in honesty and candor. Every day, our society provides more and more evidence of just how desperately it stands in need of such virtues.