In his little
book on the Scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, the English essayist
G.K. Chesterton remarked that one of the problems of the modern age is that few
people take the time to argue. That is,
few people take the time to argue fairly. All too many people find more than enough
time to argue unfairly — mostly by
sneering at anyone who disagrees with them.
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| No, this is not how you argue. It's how you bully others. |
Possibly the most
common way of playing this shoddy trick — and it is a trick, even if the people
pulling it don’t recognize it as such — is to insist on berating or attacking
something based on your principles or definitions rather than on the principles
and definitions of what it is you’re going after, and then implying that the
other party is stupid. Back in Algebra
101 they called this “mixing apples and oranges.” You’re essentially blaming a pig for not
being a sheep. As Chesterton put it,
It is no good to tell an atheist
that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of
denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong,
by proving that he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on his own. .
. . [T]he principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we
must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and
not ours. We may do other things instead
of arguing, according to our views of what actions are morally permissible; but
if we argue we must argue “on the reasons and statements of the philosophers
themselves.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint
Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1956, 95-96.)
All this was
driven home yesterday when we got not one, but three people all pulling the same stunt! The first one we saw was someone who was
reacting to the short series we finished off yesterday on the difference
between investment and speculation.
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| Real argument has rules. |
The fellow kept
up a running commentary, insisting that there is no difference between
investment and speculation. No matter
how many times we defined our terms (investment is buying an asset for the
income the asset itself generates, while speculation is buying and selling
assets to make money on the arbitrage — i.e.,
the change in the price of the asset itself), he kept insisting that there is
no difference between the two because what people today call investment is
actually speculation.
Not only did he
miss the point of the postings — that we were agreeing with him! — he failed to
understand what can be done to put an end to such confusion. He was too busy trying to prove our
definition of investment versus speculation wrong because he and others use a
different definition. The result was a
completely pointless argument . . . at least for the fellow. Others might understand the main point and
shake their heads over the fellow’s mulish insistence on using his definitions
to try and understand our system. It
can’t be done, at least, not in any rational universe.
#30#