Algorithm & Blues

Gretchen Rubin

Has anybody actually calculated the useful life expectancy of a Pandora channel? You probably know what I mean. You input some artist you’ve recently discovered, and Pandora starts giving you sufficiently similar artists. You like Nick Drake (let’s say hypothetically), so it introduces you to Ralph McTell, John Cale, and Donovan. Yippee! But at some vague point, it starts giving you only artists you already know. It stops being useful.

Gretchen Rubin writes that Pandora’s own corporate executives agree that their product is a mixed blessing. (Rubin interviewed a selected executive before Sirius XM bought out Pandora.) The service introduces listeners to artists they’d never encounter through commercial FM radio, particularly if their seed artist is esoteric, international, or regional. But Pandora doesn’t introduce listeners to new kinds of artists. We hear more artists, but less diversity.

Pandora, like similar streaming services including Spotify and Deezer, make our worlds paradoxically deeper, but narrower. By contrast, FM radio or the original MTV showed a greater range of artists, but didn’t explore most options particularly minutely: they made our worlds broader, but shallower. Because broadcast and cable services need to attract large audiences to maintain ad revenue, getting too particular drives away sweet, sweet dollar signs.

I noticed this pattern when social media began aggressively showing me ads from Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. The Facebook and Twitter algorithms observe me using Christian language and discussing my faith, and assume I’m conservative. I keep playing whack-a-mole to drive these ads away. Meanwhile YouTube (a Google subsidiary) knows I like leftist videos, so it assumes I’m atheist, and aggressively pushes videos by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

My Netflix and Amazon Prime recommendations, once a labyrinthe of new discoveries, have become ingrown, like a toenail. As I become bored of the once-vast panoply of options, I don’t know where to begin looking for new options because, unlike FM radio and broadcast TV that once dominated our lives, the streaming services don’t vary. To break free from enforced monotony, I’m forced to flee the paid services.

Sasha Issenberg

This observation probably seems obvious to most people today. But the longer I ruminate over it, the more I realize it’s become a defining reality of daily life. Our employment options have become constrained by mass corporate consolidation, especially for older workers with more responsibilities. Anybody who’s looked for work recently knows that, as the employment market has become more controlled, filling out one application can take an entire day.

Likewise, the ubiquity of single-use urban design based on feeder roads means we have little need, much less opportunity, to visit most of the cities we dwell in. Despite living in a city under fifteen square miles myself, I recently realized entire neighborhoods are terra incognita to me, because there’s no reason to enter without invitation. My daily world has shrunk to a small handful of streets and prefab buildings.

This trend reaches its culmination in political parties. In America, if you favor free markets, you’d better join the Republicans and also favor hoarding guns and shitting on the environment. If you favor racial equality, you’ll join the Democrats and favor abortion on demand and hiking the minimum wage. Sure, third parties exist, but in America’s winner-take-all system, if you hope to win, you’d better buy into the duopoly.

Nor is this accidental. Political parties, and the superpacs that bankroll them, have channeled massive algorithms into politicking. As Sasha Issenberg writes, numerous private companies store databases derived from your purchase records, social media behavior, and other sources, which make predictions about your political allegiances. Parties use these databases to steer what information you see, making your political views more siloed, extreme, and frequently intolerant.

Free will, if humans truly have it, is always conditioned. That’s not revolutionary to say; even I've said something similar. But as algorithms control what information we’re permitted to discover, the conditions circumscribing our choices become more extreme. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon make first-order profit by making our options deeper, but narrower, just like Pandora. Their second-order profit comes from selling those limits to the rich and powerful.

If public discussions have become more polarized and intolerant—and evidence suggests they have—then these controlling algorithms bear a robust share of the responsibility. By making sure we never encounter new ideas, new people, or even new music, these algorithms reduce us to crude caricatures of our once-vibrant selves. Our horizons become shriveled. And unfortunately, it seems impossible to resist on an individual basis.

Thinking About Thinking, and the Meaning of Meaning

Jonathan Haber, Critical Thinking: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Throughout my teaching career, I regularly heard “critical thinking” extolled as one of my field’s primary goals. In multiple fields, but especially in fundamental core courses like freshman writing (which is what I taught), we repeatedly heard that students should emerge with more refined and practicable critical thinking skills. Seldom did I hear what those skills were or how they were evaluated; their innate goodness was just viscerally understood.

Educational entrepreneur and curriculum writer Jonathan Haber spent his career trying to better understand what critical thinking was, and how its principles could be made portable. This, one of his last publications before his abrupt passing, compiles his insights into an easily readable pamphlet for general or specialist readers. It encompasses the important debates, and explores them in plain English. It’s a good introduction to the necessary components.

Haber introduces general principles and history of critical thinking. Though descended from the general history of Western intellectual process, critical thinking is a distinctly American distillation of that tradition, based on making mental processes practical. From Plato and Aristotle, to William James and Thomas Dewey, Haber lays out the critical thinking heritage in brief, with an emphasis on useful concepts. It’s fun, exciting, and intellectually dynamic.

What, though, actually is critical thinking? Haber acknowledges that remains controversial, but that academic consensus exists on several important points. Critical thinking involves reason based on evidence and testing, incorporating both scientific method and rhetorical communication. Useful application of these skills usually boils down to three important traits: “knowledge, skills, and dispositions.” That is, knowing information, using that information productively, and maintaining character traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, and creativity.

Though Haber dedicates an entire chapter to teaching and evaluating critical thinking, he doesn’t do anything as prescriptive as writing lesson plans. Though he describes having written social science curricula himself, he seems to prize individual and institutional autonomy. And he admits that evaluating critical thinking is slippery. Though scholars have written evaluative rubrics, none has achieved widespread use; evaluation is ultimately subjective.

Jonathan Haber

One declaration Haber is willing to make: repeated studies demonstrate that teaching critical thinking explicitly, yields better outcomes than teaching it implicitly. Expecting students to absorb critical thinking skills through osmosis, in classes like math, writing, science, and history, generally doesn’t work. Students learn best when teachers explain exactly what skills matter, demonstrate them in action, and give students ample opportunity to practice.

I really like Haber’s process. He directly explains concepts I needed to learn through trial and error, and never wholly figured out how to apply. Though he doesn’t write teachers’ lesson plans for them, he provides enough access to existing resources, and enough keywords for ongoing research, that committed teachers can close that gap themselves. If I’m ever given another opportunity to teach, I’ll apply Haber’s principles from the begining.

However.

Much as I appreciate Haber’s tutelage, I cannot help noticing shortcomings. First, Haber lavishly praises reason and analysis as benchmarks of critical thinking. He never acknowledges a growing corpus of scholarship, led by researchers like Jonathan Haidt, who contend (with evidence) that most human decision-making is instantaneous and preconscious. Though I think reason can retrain Haidt’s preconscious choices, such retraining must happen openly and deliberately. Which, right now, it isn’t.

Also, Haber praises advances in American critical education, and discusses how critical thinking makes for better citizens. How to reconcile this civil application with the evidence of increasing political intolerance around us? As critical thinking has become more widespread in American education, our body politic has become more divided, characterized by factionalism, in-group thinking, and violence. Almost like critical thinking in school isn’t enough on its own.

Indeed, one of Haber’s critical thinking virtues is “charity,” understanding the other side in the most forgiving terms possible. In today’s politics, one side desperately tries to play fair, court the center, and make peace; the other doubles down on sectarianism and anger. That side also decries higher-order education as anti-American and evil. You can’t educate people out of insularity when they consider fairness itself an immoral educational goal.

Therefore, let’s read Haber’s guide as introductory, not exhaustive. Haber himself talks about reading others’ claims to find the unspoken premise. In Haber’s case, the unspoken premise is that critical thinking is a challenge, not a goal: spreading deeper thought undermines some power structures, and those power structures respond by opposing education. Haber’s premise is incomplete for not addressing current affairs. But it is, nevertheless, a necessary first step to actually dealing with the problem.

Are the January 6th Hearings Just Doomed?

It’s fun watching professional pundits live-tweet the January 6th hearings, like the ESPN commentators they secretly are. They breathlessly relate details guaranteed to verify their self-selecting audiences’ prevalent beliefs. Reducing the President’s Secret Service detail to Keystone Kops incompetence, or Josh Hawley to an also-ran from the Ministry of Silly Walks, makes True Believers feel good, Everything hinges on “revelations” that tell people what they already believe.

These hearings have been great political vaudeville. By running them during Prime Time, which many Representatives are ancient enough to think is still when grown-ups watch TV, they’ve hooked an audience for something that ordinarily would appear as compelling as reading aloud from the dictionary. New information dribbles out just fast enough to maintain soap-operatic pace, and audiences care about what’s happening with a “Who Shot J.R.?” level of dedication.

That’s the problem, however. By whipping audiences into high dudgeon, getting the emotional reaction that drives clicks and sweet, sweet internet ad revenue, these commentators create the illusion of action. Audiences feel like they’ve already done something by getting angry, then expressing their anger on the internet. They’ve already performed the necessary actions of political investiture, so there’s no reason to pursue anything further, not until Election Day anyway.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland has yoked America’s justice system to the illusion of neutrality. Garland believes his office should remain somehow aloof, apolitical and no respecter of electoral outcomes—a delusion that didn’t plague, say, James Comey. Unfortunately, for powerful people, neutrality is always illusory. In every situation, doing nothing ultimately supports the status quo. And that’s what we’re seeing from coup supporters who realize they won’t face consequences.

I’m old enough to remember the Iran-Contra hearings, my generation’s first immersion into real-time political muckraking. Like these hearings, they spread an administration’s dirtiest secrets across national media. Unlike these hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings occurred during daylight hours, but they also occurred mainly during the summer, so audiences my age, mostly schoolchildren, saw events develop. The gap between reality and middle-school American Civics was, ahem, educational.

Audiences definitely had strong reactions to Iran-Contra. While progressives decried a President who made an end-run around the Constitution to protect his ridiculous moral precepts, conservatives made a national hero of Oliver North, whose lies were egregiously obvious, though nobody could prove it. As Rachel Maddow writes, the Reagan Administration’s humiliation was so thoroughgoing that no less an authority than Newt Gingrich declared Reagan’s reputation was beyond rehabilitation.

My biggest historical takeaway from Iran-Contra, however, is that ultimately nothing happened. Oliver North spent some time in the pokey, sure. But after Lee Atwater successfully submarined Gary Hart’s presidential campaign, the first George Bush became President by essentially pledging to be Reagan: The Sequel. Old Ronald himself eventually received the rehabilitation Gingrich prophesied he’d never receive, to the point that Reagan’s executors have distanced themselves from President Trump.

Those televised hearings, like those happening now, allowed voters to enact the emotional journey of justice and reconciliation, without powerful people needing to do anything, and just as importantly, without forcing anybody to accept consequences for their illegal actions. Because we’d already had the cathartic experience, the process was, for us, finished. We felt no impetus to pressure the justice system to make consequences happen. So they didn’t.

Don’t mistake the importance here. Anybody who’s walked around a primarily Republican area recently and heard talk about Ronald Reagan (including the effusive hero worship still sometimes heaped upon Oliver North) can attest that conservative True Believers think justice happened in Iran-Contra. I’ve literally heard Republicans say they believe the guilty were held responsible, because they saw the guilty shamed on live television. People truly believe something happened.

We’re on track to witness that happen now. Without concomitant dedication from Garland’s Justice Department, Americans will believe something happened in these hearings, because we’ve already had the emotions necessary. By performing the kabuki-like rituals of justice, but not actually prosecuting anybody, the hearings lead Americans on an emotional journey that ends with us believing we’ve witnessed something. This authorizes us to rewrite history in our own brains.

We cannot permit ritual to upstage action here. Kabuki is appealing because it never changes, but we have to change. As racism, poverty, and global warming continue getting worse, the rituals of justice become not just repetitive, but dangerous. Airing the public humiliation of coup plotters does nothing if they’re permitted to rehabilitate their records later. That’s exactly what’s at stake unless somebody is prosecuted, and soon.

King David and the Problem With Messiahs

Artist's depiction of King David

Did King David rape Bathsheba in the book of 2 Samuel? This question seemingly arises on Twitter every few months, and the breakdown of who answers in what way seemingly speaks volumes about important religious presumptions. Conservative Christians, particularly those with White Nationalist tendencies, perform profound mental gymnastics to excuse David’s behavior, usually shifting responsibility onto Bathsheba. I suspect this tendency says something grim about their Chrisianity.

Let’s make my answer to the foundational question clear first: yes. Though Iron Age Israelites didn’t conceptualize “consent” and “sexual autonomy” like we do, nevertheless, the reactions of Uriah and Nathan make explicitly clear that David committed wrong. As Richards and O’Brien make clear, when read from an honor-based viewpoint, the Bathsheba narrative shows David transgressing the bounds of regnal authority and military discipline. David misused his own soldiers’ trust.

However, those defending David on Twitter aren’t interested in reading from an Iron Age Hebrew outlook. They’re mainly interested in defending David’s authority because of the prophesied Davidic ancestry of Jesus Christ. Because these conservative Christians believe their political worldview derives from their interpretation of Christian scripture, they cannot brook any deviation from morality in Davidic descent. Therefore they defend David’s glaring sin because admitting it undermines their political cosmology.

David’s line, in Jewish prophecy, is מָשִׁיחַ, “anointed.” David’s line has received God’s blessing through pouring of sanctified oil. For those not versed in Hebrew, this word for anointing, מָשִׁיחַ, is pronounced “mashiach,” frequently Anglicized into “Messiah.” In Hebrew scripture, Messiah refers to kings whose rule has been sanctified through religious ritual. The books of Samuel describe both Saul and David as Messiah, and David explicitly calls Saul his Messiah.

Centuries of Christian thought, colored by Platonic mysticism and a belief in heavenly perfection, have taught us that Messiah comes to bring spiritual cleansing, capital-t Truth, and that particularly Christian concept, Salvation. But that isn’t what Messiah means in Hebrew. The original concept of Messiah is a political leader, with overtones of military might. When Jesus permitted his followers to call him Messiah, they were making an explicitly political declaration.

Unfortunately for Jesus, earthly politics are always sullying. “My kingdom,” Jesus told Pilate, “is not of this world.” From this, Christians define Messianism as otherworldly and mystical, and have historically looked for Paradise among the clouds. We’re uncomfortable with Jesus dirtying his hands with the business of governance; that’s why medieval Popes delegated actual governance to kings, and crowned monarchs in Jesus’ name. Let somebody expendable step in the shit.

I remember pastel-colored Sunday School pamphlets extolling King David’s supposed virtues. They always depicted him as young, fair-haired, and almost girlish. The David these lessons praised was the outsider, the rebel somehow simultaneously beloved and hated by King Saul. They always elided David’s actual reign, which saw him descend from triumph, to tyranny, to rape, and ultimately to his final days, housebound and useless, desperately trying to keep warm.

When conservative Chritians yearn for power, they overlook David actually enthroned. In Hebrew history, to become King always meant to become cursed. Every king of Israel and Judah, including David and Solomon, was punished by God for egregious transgressions; nearly every king died violently. Messiahs, that is anointed kings, are always promising in the future tense; when they actually get crowned, they end in disappointment and blood.

Not for nothing does Jesus’ “reign” not involve any practical governance. Even the Revelation of John, from which many Christian nationalists draw their triumphalist imagery, features Christ returning in violent, conquering glory, then stopping. Christ’s triumph is described; Christ’s government is not. Religious apocalyptic novelists like LaHaye and Jenkins, James BeauSeigneur, and Paul Meier likewise spotlight Christ’s triumph, then turn timid about what comes after.

As I write, many Christians who thought they’d won a major culture battle when Roe v. Wade was overturned last month, now face the less-than-savory reality of having to write laws to enforce their precepts. Opposition to abortion energized the base when it remained a high-minded ideal. But their coalition faces unanticipated problems when transitioning from the abstractions of political messianism, into the messy, morally irregular world of legislation.

Conservative Christians reflexively defend King David because they need a morally pure Davidic Messiah. They can’t handle the innate sloppiness of real-world governance. They look forward eagerly to Jesus returning and praising their moral purity, but their story stops there, because they realize, if unconsciously, that moral purity doesn’t jibe with human carelessness. They love future Jesus; they’re unprepared for מָשִׁיחַ to reign.

Candide for the Romcom Era

Ellie Martin-McKinsey, Turtle A

The Girl doesn’t have a name, or friends, or a direction in life; she’s never needed them. She follows directions from The Universe, which gives her missions, and she simply obeys. Her latest mission takes her to Illinois, where Nico, an exotic dancer running from his past, ignores any universal plan. But once there, The Universe stops communicating with The Girl. She finds herself stranded with a stranger who doesn’t understand her mission.

Debut novelist Ellie Martin-McKinsey has basically written a conventional romcom, but rather than two mismatched characters, her story features two common ways of seeing the modern world. The Girl believes in radical purpose, and spends her life pursuing a higher calling, to the point where she’s become a complete cypher, even to herself. Nico believes in total individualism, but being self-reliant hasn’t made him happy; quite the opposite, he lives with constant, bottled disappointment.

Both characters depend on their philosophies because, so far, they’ve worked. The Universe keeps providing The Girl with missions, and she constantly falls bass-ackward into the money, connections, and transportation necessary to reach each job. Rules and morals are provisional; she simply goes where she’s needed. She squishily avoids questions of whether The Universe is God, but her explanation matches Thomist definitions.

Nico, by contrast, eschews all connections to a larger plan. He walked away from controlling family, from the strictures of higher education, and from any moral guideposts he didn’t write for himself. The resulting life isn’t lucrative—he works two low-paying jobs for rent and groceries—but it’s entirely his own, and that’s what matters. If anyone talks about responsibilities, community, or any Higher Plan, he responds with simmering wrath.

Two characters, each equally confident in their own philosophy. Life has conspired to reassure them that their system works. Until plot contrivances push them together, forcing them to work through their incompatible beliefs. (Martin-McKinsey doesn’t pretend to conceal her authorial fingerprints; she’s having too much fun for that.) Suddenly they have to make compromises, listen to each other, and try to understand.

Ellie Martin-McKinsey

Again, the plot follows the basic signposts of romantic comedy. The meet-cute, the mismatched personalities, the learning curve, the crisis point. Martin-McKinsey takes a comfortable commercial narrative form, which she confidently expects most audiences already understand, and uses it to pitch two commonly held philosophies into conflict. It’s easy to imagine Voltaire or Sartre doing something similar, had they lived in our era of Hollywood excess.

It’s easy to imagine an inexperienced author reducing this premise to mawkish lectures; I probably would’ve. But Martin-McKinsey eschews name-dropping exposition; the characters don’t explain the story to one another. They’re too busy living by their philosophies, and amending them where needs must. And Martin-McKinsey herself clearly has too much fun letting these characters roll to bother inserting herself to sententiously ensure we understand her point.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, her characters start as Platonic ideals, confident in their philosophy because it works on paper. But both authors remind us that Platonic philosophy only works in a friction-free atmosphere, which, until now, the Universe has politely provided them. But their collision forces both to reevaluate everything they’ve previously considered settled. Nothing, Martin-McKinsey reminds us, is ever completely settled when other people are involved.

Cultural purists like me often pooh-pooh the repetitive romcom structure. Superficially, little seems at stake; in most circumstances we know how it will end for the characters. Indeed, though Martin-McKinsey slightly subverts our final expectations, it remains easy to imagine someone like Richard Curtis writing this for Hollywood. Snooty writing professors disparage romcoms as structurally allergic to surprise, innovation, or depth.

But I don’t make Voltaire comparisons lightly. Candide follows similarly commercial novelistic patterns popular during Voltaire’s time, guiding audiences to understand his point because they already understand the plot structure. Both Voltaire and Martin-McKinsey divert audience resistance to deep concepts by keeping their attention on a story that they already know and enjoy. Readers don’t like being told what to think, but we enjoy going on a journey with the characters.

Martin-McKinsey uses our familiarity with comfy Hollywood storytelling to guide us on a journey we probably wouldn’t take in more solemn classroom conditions. Like Candide, this novel is short, fast-paced, and driven by action and dialog, not exposition. Our characters don’t have a point, they live their point, and encourage us to see them in their living. And when they’re forced to change their minds, we already understand why. It’s deep and philosophical, yes, but it’s also just fun.

What Even Is a “Constitution”?

Boris Johnson, like his ideological cohort Donald Trump, inarguably left his country worse off for having held power. Both men governed through a mixture of whimsy, machismo, and telling the worst elements of the masses whatever they wanted to hear. Their incoherent policies and inability to stomach change left their countries defenseless against a world-class pandemic and economic volatility. Both leave their official residence permanently stained with a combination of Red Bull, gunpowder, and jizz.

But despite their similarities, their positions aren’t interchangeable. American newshounds sometimes forget that American and British systems follow different patterns, starting with one fundamental gap: Britain doesn’t have a written constitution. While the United States has the world’s oldest written constitution still in force (and the second shortest, hat-tip to Monaco), Britain only ever had a written constitution during Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Johnson’s position depends entirely on the entire government’s ad hoc agreement that it exists.

This doesn’t mean Britain has no constitution. But where America’s supposed principles are written down and subject to rhetorical analysis, Britain’s constitution is decentralized. It consists of traditions, legislation, treaties, and sometimes handshake deals. Americans have recently witnessed the ways our judges argue about how to construe Constitutional texts, sometimes in ways little more erudite than reading a Ouija board. British constitutional debates, however, often begin by arguing over which laws actually are the constitution.

Superficially, the American approach seems more reasonable, at least from the rhetorical debate perspective. Having a system of principles lets us draw a line and say the argument can reach back this far, no farther. We don’t have to constantly relitigate the organization of Congress, for instance, unlike Britain, where all hereditary members were expelled from the House of Lords in 1999. Likewise, Britain’s Supreme Court wasn’t established until 2009, and remains subordinate to Parliament.

P.J. ORourke

However, American Constitutional politics are equally flimsy when pressed. To provide one example that’s mattered recently, the Second Amendment is only 27 words long. But as rhetorician Craig Rood points out, those 27 words aren’t the entirety of the Second Amendment. Nearly 250 years of case law, tradition, lobbying, and media messaging have defined how we receive those 27 words. So, although our Constitution is the world’s oldest, it’s evolved more than we may realize.

I grew up in a conservative Republican household. Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke accurately described my adolescent poli-sci understanding when he wrote: “I take the same attitude toward the Constitution that Reformation Protestants took toward the Bible: anyone can read it and witness the truth thereof.” But as a Christian and an American citizen, I’m now mature enough to realize that both the Bible and the Constitution are littered with centuries of debate, misreading, and baggage.

For instance, in 2008, the Supreme Court held in D.C. v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted individuals the right to privately own firearms, a position never previously held in American case law. Even conservative courts had fudged on that interpretation. Did the Constitution change when the Court offered that opinion? Actually yes, it did. Though the text remains unamended since 1992, recent decisions like Heller, Dobbs, and Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta do change the Constitution.

Let’s complicate things further. These Supreme Court decisions define how we read and apply the Constitution, and especially in an activist Court like this one, that reading can change rapidly. But the Supreme Court’s constitutional review authority isn’t in the Constitution. Article III vests judicial authority in “one supreme Court,” but doesn’t enumerate that Court’s authority. The very judicial review which has caused such anger recently, is a matter of judicial precedent, not Constitutional authority.

Therefore, though America has an 8,000-word textual backstop against rhetorical anarchy, which Britain lacks, that only means something in the most general sense. Like in Britain, reading the actual Constitution requires plowing through reams of relevant legislation, precedents, and treaties. After nearly 250 years, our Constitution is a morass that only specially trained lawyers have the capacity to parse. If you can’t afford an attorney, you have little chance of knowing your rudimentary Constitutional rights.

We’ve heard the words “constitutional crisis” used recently to describe the hurricane-like devastation which Donald Trump and Boris Johnson leave in their respective wakes. But I suggest that any such crisis predates the men who made it visible. Though Trump is out of office, and Johnson will soon be, we can’t ignore the truth both men have exposed: that when a nation’s constitution is unreadable, powerful people will exploit that obscurity to do terrible damage.

The “Lawyer Style” in Leftist Rhetoric

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

It all followed a formulaic sequence. Within minutes of SCOTUS announcing the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, left-leaning Americans began posting memes. “Women are sick of this treatment!” “Women will withhold household services until we’re treated with appropriate respect!” “Women have had enough of this shit, and if you haven’t, why not?”

Then, with almost clockwork regularity, other left-leaning Americans swooped in, scolding the first bunch for their casual use of the word “women.” Not everybody who identifies as female, in today’s more inclusive society, is capable of becoming pregnant, and vice versa.This definition of “women” that makes gender synonymous with biological sex undercuts important progress made in recent years toward including transgendered people in the social fabric.

I’m not unsympathetic with either position. The first batch of arguers needed a tactic that was short and punchy enough to fit into an image macro, because people reading online have a very short attention span. (I’m under no illusions; not many people read my essays.) The second batch wanted a subtle, nuanced definition inclusive of how people figure themselves and want others to perceive them. Neither position is unreasonable.

Just as I managed to swallow my objection to this useless fight, however, another arose. If having a dog in the Dobbs fight requires having a fertile uterus, this third position asked, how do we include those born female, but without functioning uteri? The United States practiced forced sterilization on racial minorities as recently as the 1970s, and on prisoners as recently as 2010. By separating a funcional uterus from womanhood, the well-meaning were perpetuating their own injustice.

This argument neatly encapsulates my problem with partisan politics today. While the political Right often works by finding the worst possible example of whatever out-group they currently like, and ginning up outrage and moral lather, the political Left descends into infighting over definitions of terms. Thus the Right gathers followers who, by necessity, don’t examine questions more deeply, because depth and nuance are often the opposite of emotional engagement.

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

Please don’t mistake me; this slow, deliberative approach is frequently necessary. I call this approach “the lawyer style” because, in courts and legal documents, language must be parsed in ways that exclude ambiguity. Anybody who’s read contracts, leases, or loan agreements recently, already knows that legal documents require clear definitions in the opening paragraphs. Without agreed definitions, the resulting agreement will be vulnerable to endless, costly litigation.

But law courts differ from the court of public opinion. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes, people make moral decisions almost instantly; all subsequent moral reasoning happens to justify that instantaneous decision. When the Right offers easy, emotionally inflammatory terms, they permit their followers to take sides without needing to think. When Leftists start arguing among themselves over definitions of terms, they relinquish that magic moment of instant reaction.

Saying “women” to mean “that class of humans capable of becoming pregnant, with all the attendant risks and costs that experience carries,” is not accurate in all situations. There are times when it’s important to acknowledge that womanhood isn’t necessarily synonymous with having a certain set of natural-born genitals. Even those conservatives obsessed with concepts like “traditional manhood” tacitly acknowledge that gender is as much about roles as about biology.

However, in mustering the force to resist the ham-handed state intervention in sexual decisions that will inevitably follow the Dobbs decision, it’s necessary to become less specific. It’s necessary, from a rhetorical perspective, to use terms and language which permit people to have an emotional reaction. Because without that reaction, they won’t care enough to become involved—a price we’re already paying in some political arenas.

Back in college, I read Plato’s Euthyphro, a very short dialog where Socrates challenges the titular Euthyphro to define “piety.” When Euthyphro offers a definition that’s specific to his current legal case, Socrates is able to challenge the definition because it isn’t portable. But when Euthyphro offers a more general, inclusive definition, Socrates also challenges it, because it’s excessively sweeping, and unscrupulous actors could find ways to make it fit whatever they wanted.

Reading that dialog, I learned something important: evidence is often the opposite of persuasion. It isn’t enough to muster the facts, especially when your intended audience gets lost in meaningless definitions of terms and loses the unifying moral thread of your argument. Sometimes, in persuading the larger crowd, it’s better to be inexact, to surrender the false goal of precise language. Unless you’re in court, speaking lawyer-ese won’t help anyone.

The “Troll Style” in American Politics

Elmo and his dad, Louie (Sesame Workshop)

Senator Ted Cruz is angry again. Seems he’s outraged that Sesame Street star Elmo wants his grade-school fans to get a COVID-19 shot. He claims that Elmo’s assertion that getting your shot protects the whole neighborhood has “ZERO scientific evidence,” a claim he bolsters by linking to his official Senate website. The public pushback on social media was predictable, as thousands of Americans hastily tweeted their ripostes.

I understand the impulse to correct, quarrel with, and shame Senator Cruz. For people whose ideal of political engagement includes being in command of the facts, his mind-numbingly stupid tweet violates one of their first principles. But the more I read, the more I can’t take things at face value anymore. Having read Sienkiewicz and Marx, I realize Senator Cruz isn’t a politician. He’s the lowest form of internet comedian: the Troll.

That’s a loaded statement, because different people have different definitions of trolls. As Mick Hume writes, “trolls” are often anybody doing anything online that others disagree with. But Sienkiewicz and Marx have a very specific definition of trolldom in mind, starting with that elite minority who actively identify themselves as trolls. They specifically highlight Michael Malice, who has turned trolldom into a lucrative career, appearing on others’ shows and publishing books.

To Malice, and therefore Sienkiewicz and Marx, trolldom is a domain of performance art. His goal (and it’s usually a self-identified male) doesn’t have a point to prove; the troll’s only goal is to reduce all respondents to the worst versions of themselves. Trolls make others angry, causing them to act in ways contrary to their own stated moral code. The troll doesn’t win debates by upholding key values or demonstrating some truth, the troll wins by making you look bad.

Trolls are hollow beings, absent of a moral core. Trolls don’t enter (or, more often, kick-start) debates to make the world better, advance causes, or increase anybody’s well-being, health, or mental clarity. The troll only wants to reduce others to the worst possible versions of themselves. In so doing, trolls make ordinary people into objects of ridicule, then invites audiences to join in pointing and laughing. Literally their only goal is to humiliate others.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)

That’s what we’re witnessing in contemporary politics. When progressives complain that conservatives, like Cruz, appear inconsistent, or that they fail to see their own moral and logical inconsistencies, we presume that Cruz and other trolls have core principles. We assume they participate in arguments from a good-faith position of wanting to convince others. We presuppose that they argue from a position of deeply held conviction. We are deceived.

Rather than logical argument, perhaps let’s consider trolling like street theatre. The artist wants to create a spectacle, which doesn’t make the audience feel good or think deeply, but rather makes part of the audience feel vindicated at another part’s expense. Consider comedians whose core routine is cutting down hecklers, or stage hypnotists who strip volunteers of their inhibitions. Like trolls, these performers encourage us to laugh at other audience members.

When Ted Cruz or Michael Malice sneer at basic attempts to make people care or act responsibly, they don’t want anything. They don’t expect to persuade. They only expect to reduce the other side to screaming incoherence, then claim victory. Trolls win, not when others are convinced, but when others lose their composure. Look, the troll says, the other side secretly has no moral core! This is, of course, no knock on the troll, who never pretended to have a core.

That’s what Cruz wants when one throwaway statement makes dozens, even hundreds, of other tweeters to lose their composure. He wants to make progressives fail to live up to their own standards. The troll’s ultimate invitation isn’t to understand more deeply, it’s to feel superior to those who, pressed into a corner, relinquish their core values and get angry. Trolls don’t argue in bad faith; they argue in no faith.

Now, trolls aren’t necessarily conservative. Sienkiewicz and Marx describe Michael Malice targeting his performance art at right-wingers too, reducing them similarly to screaming puddles of outraged goo. However, trolls frequently work best from a conservative launchpad, because progressives tend to have complex, nuanced, and strongly held moral cores. American conservatives today have loose cores founded on advantage rather than morality.

Without any moral foundation, trolls have no need to make sense. Trolls can believe in both libertarianism and authoritarianism simultaneously. They can “support” kids’ freedom, while abjuring any duty to ensure children reach adulthood. Ordinary people seek morality, consistency, and standards; but to the troll, nothing matters. They don’t win by persuading anybody, they win by making you lose. And you lose whenever you engage them.