Is Charitableness Desirable In Public Argument Always Or Just Usually?
Certain writers for whom I have the utmost respect, like James Fallows, Eugene Volokh, and Reihan Salam, manage to forcefully argue various matters even as they treat their interlocutors perfectly charitably. It’s a trait that always impresses me. On more than one occasion, I’ve cited the wisdom in the examples they set to young writers who’ve sought out my advice. In my own writing, I try hard to presume good faith in those with whom I disagree. When I succeed it typically strengthens the quality of my work; after failing I often regret it.
What I wonder is whether this approach to public discourse is prudent to adopt as a general rule. I want to think so. It’s nice to have a reliable standard to apply, even when living up to it is difficult. But I have my doubts. Take the theory Dinesh D’Souza is putting forth about The Roots of Obama’s Rage, as he titled the book length version. Were I to write an honest assessment of his argument, it would be no less scathing than the responses by Heather Mac Donald and Andrew Ferguson. I can’t help but cheer their essays. Would it be possible to make all the same substantive points while being more charitable toward the author? I actually don’t know… but assume so for the sake of argument.
Even given that hypothetical, how are we to respond to the letter Mr. D’Souza sent to The Weekly Standard in response to the Ferguson review? Here is the most egregious passage:
I cannot recall a more dishonest review in recent times, and would not have expected it of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. My friends tell me I should not worry about Ferguson’s Lilliputian arrows. This book is my sixth New York Times bestseller and my biggest book yet. The book’s impact can be gauged from the intensity of White House attacks on it, and also from the indignation of liberals from Maureen Dowd to Jonathan Alter to Keith Olbermann. Leading conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Steve Forbes, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich have lavishly praised the book. Interestingly, however, Gingrich’s remark that The Roots of Obama’s Rage is “the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama” seems to have rankled some lesser pundits on the right. What does Gingrich’s comment say about what they have been writing about Obama all this time? The implication is that these scribblers have completely missed the boat! Here we may have a clue to the roots of Ferguson’s rage.
In situations like these, I can’t help but think that the rule about subjecting the words of interlocutors to the most charitable interpretation possible fails. It’s possible that D’Souza lacks the critical distance or intellectual capacity to see that his theory is full of obvious, gaping holes, even subsequent to their being pointed out in venues across the ideological spectrum. Or maybe he sees them after the fact, but is too prideful to admit them? Alternatively, it’s possible that he’s a charlatan who knowingly wrote a hack book, but is so immoral, intellectually dishonest and ballsy that he’s nevertheless attacking his critics in uncharitable, self-righteous language.
I’m sure there are other theories that could explain his recent output, but I can’t think of any that don’t reflect very poorly on its author one way or another. Is it worse to innocently produce stunningly shoddy work in one’s professional area of expertise, or to cannily produce a dishonest product that earns you a lot of money? Judging by my own moral code, I’d say the latter is much worse, but some in the world of ideological book publishing clearly subscribe to a different system of ethics than I do. Were I trying to be a charitable reviewer, would I presume the motivation that I find least repugnant? What if my subject’s code is different than mine? Isn’t a journalist actually bound to follow the evidence in assessing what motivates an author? Or is it improper to even try because we can’t ever know for certain?
I don’t have answers to these questions, I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to stop writing entirely about subjects that raise them; and other times I provisionally conclude, with fleeting conviction and in worse moments a bit of sanctimony, that it’s important for some people to subject the shoddiest journalists to critical scrutiny — even while giving thanks that lots of people ignore them, and spend their time on worthier subjects. Does it make sense that I’d pay money to stop the authors I mentioned at the beginning of this post to refrain from tilting at my windmill of choice, Mark Levin, even though I’ve clearly deemed it worthwhile to hold forth on the subject, and think that it was a good thing for Jim Manzi, another writer I admire, to issue his own scathing critique?
I can’t articulate a general standard that makes sense here, nor am I entirely clear on how I might improve what I’m sure are my flawed methods for engaging in this project.
What I can explain is how I react when I read sentences like this one:
My friends tell me I should not worry about Ferguson’s Lilliputian arrows. This book is my sixth New York Times bestseller and my biggest book yet.
Were political authors truly freed from worrying about anything but the market performance of their books, we’d be a lot worse off, not because the reading public is stupid, but because they’ve got jobs and lives that don’t allow the vast majority to make informed decisions about the titles they buy (a situation made worse by the fact that a lot of the people and institutions they imprudently trust are more than willing to tout books based on metrics other than intellectual honesty, accuracy, and overall quality).
It’s forthright reviewers like Andrew Ferguson, intellectually honest writers like Heather Mac Donald, and insofar as I succeed in this project, bloggers like me who make possible something that the ideological book market alone doesn’t: the possibility than an author who sells lots of copies, but falls below some minimal standard of quality, will be publicly embarrassed among his peers, and denied the respect of thinking people. Very few humans — even the worst sell-outs or least talented hacks — are fond of facing the rightful consequences of their defective output. Culpable along with substandard authors are the people who know damn well the poor quality of their work, but are complicit in investing their books with the veneer of respectability, whether because they are ideological allies or else fellow participants in the partly corrupt business of ideological book-selling. The sorry state of political non-fiction is on their conscience.
These are the most charitable words I can honestly offer on this subject, and although I’ve done my best, as always, to hit all the right notes, I can’t help but simultaneously worry that I’ve been too harsh and not harsh enough. I’d actually love to see a round table discussion on charitableness in public discourse that included Fallows, Salam, Volokh, Mac Donald, Ferguson, Michael Lewis, Katie Roiphe, Mark Oppenheimer, Jay Rosen, Christopher Hitchens, Bob Wright, Michael Kinsley, Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Chait, and Ta-Nehisis Coates. Damn. Is that too many people? But I can’t bear to cut any of them.
MacDonald’s review gets a bit heated in its rhetoric, but I fear that Ferguson and Manzi really do give D’Souza’s argument the “most charitable interpretation possible.” That’s what’s scary.
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 26, 11:50 AM · #
(Ferguson re D’Souza and Manzi re Levin, I meant. Still not awake.)
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 26, 11:52 AM · #
The practical problem with being uncharitable toward opposing arguers is that you construct a characiture and begin engaging with it and not the real person. There’s not much you can do, however, when the opposing arguer (like Levin, Beck, D’Souza, etc.) embraces the role and function of a characiture. Taking these folks at face value is like trying to debate immigration policy with Speedy Gonzalez.
Mike
— MBunge · Oct 26, 02:28 PM · #
Conor,
First of all, you want to include Christopher Hitchens and Glenn Greenwald in a round-table discussion of “charitableness in public discourse”!
For ironic effect?
Secondly, as someone who tend not to treat your writing very charitably, I thought this was an excellent post (and maybe after reading it I felt convicted). I must admit that when I read Ferguson’s review of D’Souza’s book and then D’Souza’s letter in response my immediate reaction was to question my own judgement — I had recently read D’Souza’s book about Christianity and I thought it was well argued. Now I want to go back and find all of its flaws. I really do think that “D’Souza lacks the critical distance or intellectual capacity to see that his theory is full of obvious, gaping holes, even subsequent to their being pointed out in venues across the ideological spectrum.” Being charitable, I hope that his long association with the Christian religion hasn’t warped his judgement as badly, but as I said, I need to go back and review his arguments just to make sure I’m being intellectually honest.
— Arminius · Oct 26, 03:28 PM · #
Conor:
The charitable thing to do when someone writes a dreadful book is not to write about it at all. Really.
— Noah Millman · Oct 26, 04:21 PM · #
As you suggest, the devil is in the details, Conor. As I have said repeatedly, comity is often argued for in a disingenuous way, thanks to the social and professional connections of people in the punditry business. Often I find that charitableness is used as a shield against legitimate criticism. This is additionally problematic because of the cover of ideological warfare; one of the ways that the DC bubble protects the people within it is by creating the appearance of harsh disagreement because of the existence of deep political differences while maintaining a refusal to consider harsh disagreements on comity grounds. In other words, people say, hey, we’ve got people from really diverse ideological perspectives, there must be rigorous disagreement, when in reality people who have personal ties can ignore salient criticisms of each other if it is socially necessary.
By the way, “charitability” would be such a better word than “charitableness.”
— Freddie · Oct 26, 04:26 PM · #
No D’Souza does not deserve charity because he does not believe his own arguments and is intellectually corrupt. That is evident from the “arguments” he makes and the constant contradictions that appear throughout his works, often in successive paragraphs. In What’s So Great About Christianity he complains that church-going is down while just two pages later he brags about the growing power of the Religious Right, citing as proof America’s burgeoning religiosity!
In Enemy at Home, D’Souza makes friends with both the Religious Right and neo-conservatives when he says Muslims hate us for Will and Grace, gay pride parades and allowing women to work outside the home — not because we invaded their countries without cause and bombed their houses to rubble! In that same book, D’Souza says that charges of “McCarthyism” are nonsense because, unlike McCarthy, when he identifies the “enemies at home” he really means to NAME NAMES!
And in his latest book — and why it was excerpted in Forbes — Obama doesn’t really believe that Obama is a radical, anti-colonialist socialist whose policies reflect the radicalism of his father. He says it because calling Obama a radical lets D’Souza accomplish the mission that his billionaire benefactors gave to him at the start of this project, which was to paint as extreme those mainstream and conventional progressive economic policies that Obama has adopted and which D’Souza’s oligarch-sponsors want to discredit and destroy.
That’s what all this nonsense about Obama’s African father was about. It had nothing to do with Obama at all. It was all about making liberalism seem alien and extreme by using Obama’s exotic background to do it.
I have to say I have always enjoyed reading D’Souza simply for the perverse pleasure of experiencing shameless depravity up close and personal.
— Ted Frier · Oct 26, 05:19 PM · #
I found D’Souza’s comment about this being his sixth New York Times bestseller and “biggest book yet” by way of “refuting” Ferguson’s “Lilliputian arrows” to be very revealing. It is almost exactly the same sort of response you hear from Bill O’Reilly whenever he is attacked, particuarly from Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. O’Reilly then immediately falls back on a comparison between his show’s ratings and those of his antagonists, as if the size of one’s audience proved the “rightness” of ones position.
I would characterize both D’Souza’s and O’Reilly’s responses as typically “right wing” and not just because they are both political right wingers.
American liberals and conservatives can get along because both want to build larger communities on the basis of certain impartial and, in some ways, universal values and principles. And so consistency to these principles is important.
For the right wing, however, it is all about the tribe — its size and strength and security and one’s loyalty to it. Principles do not matter, however much they talk about “values,” which have no independent reality and are merely a way of locating fellow members of your tribe.
That is why market share is so important to a right wing tribalist like D’Souza or O’Reilly. Might makes right. Their work is not meant to eludidate a truth. It is meant to gather a following, a tribe. It’s why the right wing is so unprincipled, adopting a principle or argument one day if it works to the advantage of their tribe, and discarding it the next once it has outlived its purpose.
Liberals and principled conservatives find this kind of hypocrisy intolerable, but right wingers take it in stride as yet one more sign that for them politics is war by other means.
— Ted Frier · Oct 26, 05:43 PM · #
I would be reluctant to say someone wrote something they did not believe to make money. You can’t read their mind so that would be speculating on their motives. I have read plenty of irrational comments on the web that were written without compensation.
MacDonald’s review was very negative but there was nothing in it that suggested Souza was a cynic who only wrote for money. Ferguson only said he might be a cynic and devoted most of his review to detailing the faults in Souza’s arguments.
— Mercer · Oct 27, 12:28 AM · #
D’Souza, who lives in Rancho Santa Fe, one of the most expensive places in America, is in the business of making money from writing books. That’s a given.
Having read Obama’s memoir several times, as well as his father’s 1965 article “Problems with Our Socialism,” may I suggest that both D’Souza’s new book, as well as Ferguson’s various writings about Obama both miss the point? D’Souza emphasizes anti-colonialism, which is definitely a sizable theme throughout “Dreams from My Father.” But, that’s clearly not the major theme, which is specified in the subtitle: “A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Ferguson’s 2007 review of “Dreams” was far worse at missing the point of Obama’s book. He actually contended it was not about race! (I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t at that point finished Obama’s elegant but soporific book.)
The point of this “Story of Race and Inheritance” is Obama’s struggle to prove himself black enough to be a successful black politician on Chicago’s South Side — a perfectly reasonable worry for Obama considering he was defeated in 2000 for not being black enough. After that, he reinvented himself as the South Side black politician who was white enough for statewide and national office.
This is not particularly complicated to understand about the President, but it attests to the paralyzing impact the topic of race has on American pundits that almost nobody grasps the obvious.
— Steve Sailer · Oct 27, 06:45 PM · #