On Arguing about Politics

by Mark Wallace

I generally avoid internet arguments, indeed arguments of any kind. The thing about a debate on a political/ moral/ sociological/ other big topic is that it immediately takes an adversarial colouring. One participant is defending one side, the other is defending the other side. Face-saving comes into play: the importance of not being wrong. Especially not being publicly wrong. This generally means that no quarter will be given. For the purpose of arguing, one cannot allow oneself to say, Maybe I could have thought this through more. Imagine an argument that ends with a Yeah, you’re right from one of the participants. It just doesn’t happen. One defines one’s position before the argument, and does everything to uphold it during the argument. Arguing, then, I consider to be an inherently polarizing process, and the reason that people argue is not in a search for truth, but  generally to define themselves in relation to a group which believes in a certain thing or behaves in a certain way. It’s about identification, arguing for something, and with somebody or some group. Together, a social grouping can develop a set of tools which allow them to answer any criticism, and do so in such a way that, while it may be unconvincing to those outside the group, will always convince insiders.

Buzzwords help towards this. In political discourse today (and I’m thinking specifically of leftist discourse at the moment), there are lots of buzzwords to which certain groups react in a predictable way. There are ways of defining people which make them enemies, and open them up to any sort of abuse that can be conceived. To own these buzzwords is to always win the support of one community (there’s an element of xenophobia at play); but, crucially, to always win the emnity of another. It’s safe, but non-progressive. Preaching to the choir, but never going beyond them, never even wanting to. Something similar has recently been articulated by Fredrik de Boer:

Online liberalism, as I’ve said many times, is not actually a series of political beliefs and alliances but instead a set of social cues that are adopted to demonstrate one’s class background– economic class, certainly, but more cultural class, the various linguistic and consumptive signals that assure those around you that you’re the right kind of person and which appear to be the only thing that America’s 20-something progressives really care about anymore.

Political discourse as a set of social cues is something I feel comes close to the mark in today’s internet culture. These cues are, as I said, polarizing: if you belong to that/ this group, then you definitely don’t belong to this/that group. The cue is put forward early (the site on which an article appears is often a very specific cue in itself), and everyone knows where they stand and where it’s going. A task that might be worthwhile, then, for anyone wishing to write on these things, is to try and scramble the signal: to avoid these cues (maybe impossible), to keep them weakish, to alternate the direction of cues – to keep the politically minded reader asking, Where is he/she coming from? What’s his/ her angle? Not making it easy to be owned. Creating an active reading in which the reader is forced to confront this apparently shifting position and can’t rest on easy cues. Political discussion is characterized by easily arrived at and trenchantly defended opinions – the more these opinions are flatly opposed, the more they are flatly asserted, the deeper they sink, and the less capable the holder becomes of moving beyond formulaic and ideological thinking.

Which is all to say that the best way to think about politics is sometimes not to think about politics. The best way to talk about politics is not to talk about politics – not explicitly anyway. This is where the critical thinking involved in humanities studies comes in. This is to a great extent what I want to do in my thesis (which is not explicitly political anyway, though it’s inflected with politics): it’s a matter of remembering that politics is a term of analysis more than of substance – it denotes certain structures and institutions, but also certain abstraction that can’t be separated out from the whole of the mental and social processes we go through. It is an element in relation with other elements in a whole way of life, in Raymond Williams’ formulation (Long Revolution, Kindle: Parthian, loc 1315). If one has to be theoretically vague about it, that seems to be better than the alternative – to be excessively definite about it, excessively sure about it. Being sure about something politically is so often down to a refusal to confront the psychological and psycho-social roots of one’s own beliefs, the ideological and community-derived sources of political opinion, that it’s a stance more often harmful than helpful. And to begin to argue from a sense of certainty cheaply bought is the end of any possibility for critical thinking.