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Friday, January 20, 2012
"You Are an Idiot For Agreeing With Me"
Let me make one other observation inspired by a VC post, although I'm not trying to target that post or poster particularly. In a recent post discussing a brief he has submitted in the mandate litigation, David Kopel writes:
Intelligent comments are welcome, although experience suggests that there will also be plenty of comments from twits who have not read the brief, yet proclaim their absolute certainty about supposedly fatal errors in its legal reasoning.
Aside from its lack of good manners, I have absolutely no problem with this, and the sentiment is common if not always so boldly stated. But it strikes a chord for me because it relates to something I think about increasingly as I grow older. In my time on this fine planet, I have often heard someone criticized for criticizing something he or she knows little or nothing about. How utterly common it is to read of a politician, or a writer, or a public figure saying not of one person but of a whole host of people who disagree with him or her that those people haven't done the work, don't understand the issue, simply have no idea what they're talking about, and should be quiet. (For a similar example, drawn this time from the left, see some of the largely disingenuous statements by Corey Robin in this article in yesterday's Times.)
But in an equal length of time, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone criticize someone who agrees with him or her for not having read the complete book/article/brief/etc., or for not understanding it well enough, and so on. Clearly, Kopel is poised to say to anyone who dares shallowly criticize the brief that he is an idiot. But is he equally prepared to say the same thing to someone who writes in with shallow praise for the brief? I grant that I sometimes go a little overboard in demanding humility, but I see no reason, as long as most of us are so prepared to somewhat haughtily dismiss the criticism of others as uninformed and inadequate, why we should not show equal disregard for those who tell us we are right. I find it a fascinating, ridiculous, and pretty well universal aspect of human nature. (One to which I am hardly immune, I should add.)
Posted by Paul Horwitz on January 20, 2012 at 09:58 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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Comments
David Bernstein's " ... the angst that leads to a silly book trying to 'figure out' the appeal of conservatism to get so much attention" just might apply to his book about "Rehabilitating ... " something.
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | Jan 24, 2012 10:56:19 AM
David, thanks. I have no issue with (1). On (2), I think our disagreement is a semantic one -- perhaps an important semantic difference, but still a semantic one. I'm old enough too to remember that some or many liberals of the time didn't want Clinton, because they considered him too conservative. He was, after all, a central figure in the DLC. I am also old enough to remember that some liberals--I was one of them--liked the DLC and thought its general approach would be, if not the salvation of the Democrats and of liberalism, then at least an intellectually and politically productive step forward beyond some of the old debates and dogmas in which the party was mired. Given your language, I suppose I would call them liberals and you would call them non-liberals; similarly, I suppose there are conservatives out there who would deny that Romney or Huntsman (I might give you Hunstman!) are conservatives at all. But in this country, at least, I am inclined to think of them all as liberals/conservatives while recognizing that there are intramural differences on what liberalism/conservatism means.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jan 24, 2012 7:36:42 AM
Paul:
(1) I wasn't referring to your angst, but the angst that leads to a silly book trying to "figure out" the appeal of conservatism to get so much attention.
(2) I'm old enough to remember that liberals of the time didn't consider Clinton to be one of them. They wanted Cuomo.
Posted by: David Bernstein | Jan 23, 2012 11:13:29 PM
David, I think I'll view that as off-topic for current purposes; as I said, I was more interested in the broader phenomenon than in the bit on Robin. But I will say: "most promising liberal leader for many decades?" I would have gone with Clinton, and I would have said he (and the times, of which he was an astute student) succeeded in shifting the mainstream in a number of ways. In any event, since I'm not of the left, I don't generally worry about its anguish. Whether Obama has succeeded or not as President, I'm not one of those who laments his not having governed from further left: I wanted an empathetic technocrat, not an ideologue.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jan 22, 2012 1:52:05 PM
I'd say that the fact that Robin's silly tome is getting any attention at all, much less a column in the Times after being panned by its reviewer, is itself interesting. Most likely, a sign of deep angst and soul-searching on the left that the most promising liberal leader for many decades, Barack Obama, appears incapable of shifting the center-right American political mainstream in any meaningful way.
Posted by: David Bernstein | Jan 22, 2012 12:59:40 PM
"In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result."
Translation: we want someone who can duke it out intellectually with those liberals on the court. Miers just ain't the person.
Posted by: anon | Jan 21, 2012 3:23:11 PM
What was it Groucho Marx said about joining a club that would accept him as a member?
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | Jan 21, 2012 6:47:54 AM
Petty and Cacioppo have an extensive line of research on when people counter-argue and with what effect, linking it to, among other things, motivation and individual involvement in the argument. See e.g. Petty & Cacioppo, 1979: "under high involvement subjects generated more favorable thoughts and fewer counterarguments to the proattitudinal advocacy than to the counterattitudinal one; under low involvement, however, neither the number of favorable thoughts nor the number of counterarguments was affected by message direction. Surprisingly, there was a tendency for subjects hearing the proattitudinal message under low involvement to generate more counterarguments than did subjects hearing the same message under high involvement." (http://osil.psy.ua.edu:16080/~Rosanna/Soc_Inf/week7/petty%26cacioppo.pdf; see also http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/display.asp?id=6329&print=1)
Posted by: Erik | Jan 20, 2012 10:37:45 PM
In reading anon's interesting comments, I'm reminded of George Will's column on the Harriet Miers nomination. The key paragraph is this:
"In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result."
Posted by: Adam Scales | Jan 20, 2012 7:57:37 PM
I may be the rare person who does what you suggest. I am a public interest attorney who works on an issue of national interest (I don't want to identify the specific issue, but think: Guantanamo, abortion, death penalty, War on Terror, etc.) I've never met anyone who lacks an opinion on my field. While I certainly appreciate all agreement and support that I can get, I do get frustrated with people who agree with me for shallow, poorly thought-out reasons. I dislike it when people have no appreciation for the "shades of gray" within my field -- when they announce to me that I'm categorically right based on simplistic popular rhetoric. To be sure, I dislike their opinions LESS than uninformed, inadequate disagreement with my stance. ;) But when someone announces to me that my "noble" work "saves lives" - it usually becomes clear that they have no appreciation for the underlying legal and financial principles, moral and policy considerations, and extreme emotional complexities of my work. And that is frustrating.
Posted by: anon | Jan 20, 2012 1:13:46 PM
Thank you, Stuart and Orin! You show your fine qualities by...wait, what?
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jan 20, 2012 12:05:51 PM
Stuart beat me to it, rats.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Jan 20, 2012 12:02:10 PM
I didn't quite read this whole blog post (stopped after the Kopel quote, in fact), but I have to say: well done.
Posted by: Stuart Buck | Jan 20, 2012 11:47:24 AM
I wholeheartedly agree, alas: I did set myself up for this. It was unnecessary for purposes of this post. I should have some kind of macro on my computer that stops me whenever I let slip a stray phrase out of pique. So I won't defend the sentence too strongly. But in answer to the questions, I've read significant excerpts from the book but not the whole thing, I've read the principal reviews including those discussed in the Times piece, and the particular bit I thought was disingenuous was: “I don’t know what is driving the critics,” Mr. Robin, 44, said in a recent interview at his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “The argument itself just bothers them, and I don’t know why.”
I hope my post stands with or without that line, and would point out that any ironies involved cut both ways, since I will venture that Prof. Robin has many fans who are no more informed than his critics. Perhaps, in fairness to him, he disregards empty or mostly ideologically motivated praise. In any event, the post isn't about Robin or even Kopel, and it applies to me as well. I am simply interested in the lengths most of us will go to in demanding that our critics meet a high burden of argument, while our egos are easily soothed and our opinions of others easily raised by praise, to which we rarely apply the same high burden. It's not a political critique; just a moment of marveling at the vanities of the human animal.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Jan 20, 2012 11:28:31 AM
Hmm, yes- I'm curious now too. None of the statements by Robins seemed to me to be _obviously_ "disingenuous", though of course some of them may be wrong. Which ones do you have in mind, and why?
On the main point, I think that Thomas Kuhn often complained that those who thought they were adopting and supporting his views both didn't understand them and probably hadn't read what he wrote (or the background material) very clearly. (I think he was probably right.)
Posted by: Matt | Jan 20, 2012 10:57:38 AM
You've set yourself up for this question: precisely which statements of Professor Robin's are "disingenous," and what is the evidence? Did you read his book? The reviews he is responding to?
Posted by: Brian | Jan 20, 2012 10:05:02 AM
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