Everything is an Argument
Learning to argue better is the only escape from the inescapable
First in a series
There is No Safe Space
When the Coronavirus lockdown began in March, the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation started a clever promotion: three free months, to anyone who wanted them, of their FenderPlay music-instruction program. I was working from home like so many others, and I had an acoustic guitar that had been hanging on a wall since my first attempt to learn how to play it a decade ago, so I decided to give it a try. Part of their program is a busy Facebook community where students in the program can post videos of their attempts to play (always a vulnerable thing), ask questions, and encourage others.
A couple weeks ago in the Facebook boards, someone posted a photo of himself playing a song on guitar. He was wearing a red MAGA hat, and pandemonium ensued. The pro-hat and anti-hat people went at each other, and pretty soon the moderators shut the thing down. But the most common complaint from everyone else on the board was that the FenderPlay community was supposed to be an escape from the bitterness and divisiveness of the real world, and that politics has nothing to do with playing guitar.
Implicit but unspoken was this fear: How could we support each other if politics got introduced? How were we supposed to constructively critique this guy’s guitar playing when he was wearing that red-flag red hat? How could we possibly be a community anymore?
But several of us commented that you cannot divorce music from politics. From individual protest songs (“War,” “Ohio,” “Revolution,” “Born This Way”) to acts whose whole purpose is political (Woody Guthrie, Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy), music and politics have been intertwined from the start. You can follow the thread all the way back, from Stravinsky to Richard Wagner to Bach’s religious music, because religion is an argument too.
Even songs that seem innocuous aren’t really: they only seem that way because you already agree with their viewpoint (“Isn’t She Lovely,” for instance, might get some pushback from atheists but probably not since it’s so pretty), or because the message is hidden behind metaphor (in early blues tracks, singing about a mean old mule masked your feelings about the brutal overseer, and so on), or because you just weren’t paying attention to the lyrics (almost any R.E.M. song, for instance). Anyone picking a Neil Young song to practice is probably getting a heaping helping of politics to go with it, whether the student is aware of it or not.
The challenge, then, is not how to keep a community sanitized of politics, the challenge is how to recognize that there are politics, there will always be politics, and we need to find a way to support each other anyway.
What is an Argument?
There is of course the classical model, exemplified by the clichéd Greek image of toga-wearing philosophers standing amidst marble columns on the Acropolis, pontificating with their students gathered at their feet. But the real truth of that image is the Socratic dialectic, wherein the opposition of arguments produces understanding and knowledge (thesis vs. antithesis = synthesis, a new idea).
There are also the arguments with which we are all too familiar: with the crazy family member at Thanksgiving, with the boss who gave a stingy raise, with the ref in a close game, with that guy who cut you off and caused a fender-bender, with the person at the bar who loves pushing your buttons, etc.
But I submit that in truth, everything is an argument. Because an argument is any attempt to assert or establish the worth of an idea, and that describes just about everything. Rather, it describes everything in the human world. Is a flower an argument? Perhaps, perhaps not; depends on whether one believes there is a consciousness behind the flower’s existence. Consciousness is the key: everything done consciously is an argument.
Everything
- A story (play, movie, novel, ghost story told by a campfire, tall tale about the fish you almost caught) is an argument: it has a point of view that the storyteller wishes to promote, even if it’s a very simple point of view like Love Conquers All.
- A stapler is an argument: it has been designed to achieve a specific purpose efficiently and well; but it is not the only way to achieve that purpose, so every time a stapler is purchased, the purchaser is agreeing with the utility of that stapler. Why not use a paper clip for that stack of pages? Or a rubber band? Because the designer of the stapler made a successful argument. Everything that is designed and built is a similar kind of argument, and the reason why you bought this cabinet but not that one is because you were convinced by the argument.
- A relationship is an argument (one that is itself, sometimes, alas, comprised of arguments): it is based on faith, on the belief that the company of this other person will ease the suffering of life, hopefully for both of you. Sometimes family members or friends will say you’re crazy to be with your loved one, and sometimes they’ll be right or they’ll be wrong, but of all the people in the world, at this moment, you believe that this one person is the one person for you. And to hell with anyone who tries to get in your way. Love Conquers All.
- Because faith is also an argument: any religion, for instance, is an argument over what happens after we die. (Christians and Muslims believe we go to reward or punishment, depending on our virtues in life; Jews believe we die when we die and that’s the end of that; Buddhists believe we are reborn, given another chance to lead a virtuous life; and so on.) Nations go to war over this argument; civilizations rise and fall because of this argument.
Swim or Drown
So if all that is true, how is a person supposed to respond? If the bitterness and acrimony of the current American conversation feels like more than you can bear but everything else in the world is also an argument, what can you do? How can you find a moment of peace? How can you build a community when that community is constantly threatened by the likes of that guitar-playing guy in his red hat?
The answer, as any musician will tell you, is embodied in the old joke: A guy runs up to a cop in New York and asks, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The cop says, “Practice, practice, practice.”
I learned to swim because my dad kept throwing me into the deep end of a lake. I was simultaneously attracted to and terrified of the water (chronic asthma makes a kid worry very much about breath), and all previous attempts to get me to learn to swim had failed, so eventually my dad did what his dad had done and removed choice from the equation. I did not like it, and kept wondering, as I flailed in what seemed like miles-deep water (it wasn’t), why my father was trying to murder me. But I can’t argue with the success of the tactic. I did learn to tread water, to keep my head above the surface, to not drown, and finally to swim. In Boy Scouts I even did the Mile Swim, eventually. So maybe the current American conversation is a kind of society-wide version of getting hurled into the deep end, and we’re all still flailing.
And the main trouble with the American conversation right now is not the fact that we’re arguing. It’s that so many of those arguments are in bad faith. We’ll discuss that at length in the next article.
What we need, then, is practice, practice, practice. The following articles in this series will attempt to lay out various techniques and practices that will help you to argue more effectively, to learn how to recognize a bad argument and counter it, how to support someone despite disagreements, how to admit you were wrong without freaking out about it, how to swim in some very deep waters. The publication as a whole will take a broader look at the argument that everything is an argument, with particular attention to argumentation in politics, culture, and the environment.
Because if you don’t understand these arguments, then you are — absolutely, 100% no doubt about it — being manipulated by people who do understand these arguments. And odds are, they’re not manipulating you for your own good. They have something to gain from it, and it’s at your expense. And as just about every action movie tells us (these too are arguments), eventually you just can’t take it anymore and you have to do something.
This is how you do it. Read on…
PART TWO: A Bad Faith World
