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  This kind of writing is dangerous because it goes beyond (mere) argumentation; it becomes immersion, method acting, dual-booting. To make your argument strong, you have to make your opponent’s argument stronger. You need sharp thinking and compelling language, but you also need close attention and deep empathy. I don’t mean to be too woo-woo about it, but truly, you need love. The overall sensibility is closer to caregiving than to punditry.

  It’s hard to make this point without sounding pretty “woo-woo,” but the alternatives are depressing to contemplate.

  Let me contrast what Sloan saw in the Long Now debate with an experience of my own. I am a Christian in the Anglican tradition, and Anglicans have been a combustibly angry tribe for the past fifteen years or so, largely because of issues related to sexuality, especially homosexuality. One day I was exploring one of the Anglican blogs and came across a fierce denunciation of Rowan Williams, who was then Archbishop of Canterbury. The writer argued that not only was Williams largely to blame for the rise of pro-homosexual views within the Anglican world but also he took these unacceptably antibiblical positions on sexuality because he didn’t believe in the Bible at all, held no orthodox theological positions, and may not even have believed in God. I considered this an outrageous set of assertions, and defended Williams’s orthodoxy, even though I had at best mixed views about his theology of sexuality. And before long I had come to a series of conclusions about the writer’s own exercise in bad logic and bad faith, and was hammering out in some detail the views he really held but lacked the courage and honesty to state explicitly. But then—in the midst of what would surely have been an irresistibly powerful assault on my opponent’s position, and his character—I paused.

  I didn’t pause because I realized that I was in-other-wordsing with the worst of them. I didn’t pause because I realized that I was treating debate as war and was desperately eager for victory. I paused because my hands were shaking so violently I couldn’t type accurately. That’s how angry I was. So I had to “give it five minutes”; I didn’t have a choice. And during that enforced break I did start to realize what I was doing—what I was becoming. I wasn’t offering “close attention and deep empathy”; my sensibility did not overlap with “caregiving” at any point. Now, it may very well have been true that the person I was arguing with didn’t practice any of these virtues either. But he was beyond my control. I had a problem of my own that I needed to address. So I deleted the comment I was writing and shut down the computer and walked away. And I have not commented on an Anglican blog since.

  METHOD ACTING AND DUAL BOOTING

  Robin Sloan’s post on the Long Now debates draws together many of the themes of this chapter, indeed of this whole book. I want to expand now on two of his metaphors.

  The first is “method acting.” The method actor tries to become the character she is to portray, to work her way into that alien sensibility. And yet on some level, method acting—perhaps all acting—brings one to see that that sensibility is not so completely alien after all. My friend Mark Lewis, an actor and longtime teacher of acting, tells his students that the key to playing a really nasty character, and saying and doing the really nasty things that make up that character, is to realize that in different circumstances you could be that person. Similarly, the life-transforming event in the life of the Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came when, in prison, he looked at the guard who treated him cruelly and realized that had their circumstances been reversed, had by some turn of fate he been a guard, he would have treated prisoners cruelly too. Solzhenitsyn, like a method actor, projected himself into the life of another and discovered that they had far more in common than he would ever have wanted to believe.

  Sloan’s second metaphor is “dual booting,” which means having two operating systems, say Windows and Linux, installed on the same computer, so that you can use the computer with either one or the other. If you do this, and alternate between the two systems, you’ll learn that most of what you can do on one you can also do on the other, though using different techniques, and in a different style. You won’t end up thinking that both are the same, but you won’t see them as totally incompatible ways of getting things done either. After switching back and forth for a while, you may find one of them philosophically or practically superior to the other, but the one you like less won’t be totally alien to you. It’ll be a world you could live in if you had to, even if you don’t particularly want to.

  And we should notice how all of this is made possible by a format that absolutely prevents immediate entry into Refutation Mode. It’s a clever twist on the “give it five minutes” rule: you can speak right away, but you have to speak someone else’s thoughts, and for that time forgo advocating for your own. It’s often said that when you learn a foreign language you haven’t succeeded in mastering it until you can think in it—which is to say, perceive the world from within that language: and within that language the world looks and feels different than it does in English. Something similar happens when you try out someone else’s vocabulary: you experience the world from within that mode of describing it, with a new set of “terministic screens,” and some things you’re used to seeing disappear from view while new and different ones suddenly become visible.

  Moreover, if, as is also often said, you don’t fully understand the resources and tendencies of your native language until you learn another one, the same is surely true of moral and political languages. To experience the world in this more complex and less dichotomous way—in this way that promotes empathy and even, yes, love, “woo-woo” though that may be—is to give yourself a chance to think. It is to loosen the hold of keywords, metaphors, and myths upon your mind. It is to demote them from money—the money of fools—to counters—the counters of the wise.

  It might also cost you some friends. But we’ll deal with that unpleasant possibility later.

  * * *

  * Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Chapter IV, “Of Man.”

  * Melville, White-Jacket (1850), Chapter LXIII.

  * “Terministic Screens” is chapter 3 of part 1 of Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Form (University of California Press, 1966).

  * From Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1872), chap. 6.

  * “Politics and the English Language,” in George Orwell, Essays (Everyman’s Library, 2002), pp. 962–63. Orwell’s essay originally appeared in 1946, just after the end of World War II, a time of great political instability and disputatiousness.

  * Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press), 2003, p. 37.

  * Stephen Jay Gould, “Deconstructing the ‘Science Wars’ by Reconstructing an Old Mold,” Science 287 (January 14, 2000): 253– 61.

  * Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (Hogarth Press, 1934).

  †“Stanley Fish on the Impossibility of Arguing with Trump Supporters,” July 22, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/22/stanley-fish-donald-trump-winning-arguments-2016-election.

  * Midgley, Myths We Live By (Routledge, 2004), p. 1.

  †Robert Epstein, “The Empty Brain,” in Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer. Epstein continues, “We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.”

  * See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (Pantheon, 1983), especially chap. 4.

  * Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”: “You can shirk [the trouble of clear writing] by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important servi
ce of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself” (p. 962).

  * A phenomenon closely related to in-other-wordsing might be called “slippery-sloping.” If the in-other-wordser condemns you not for what you said but for what he insists you really meant, the slippery-sloper says that if you defend A, and A comes to pass, then A will result in B, and B in C, and so on all the way to Z. If you say you oppose prison sentences for drug users, the enthusiastic slippery-sloper will ask you why you’re in favor of drug-addicted infants—because after all, if people aren’t punished harshly for drug use, more people, including pregnant mothers, will use drugs, et cetera, et cetera. The fallacy is common enough that it may deserve a chapter unto itself, but it strikes me as being allied to in-other-wordsing because it shifts attention from what you said and toward something that is at best distantly related to what you said. (If I may be allowed a pedantic moment here: we typically speak of ideas sliding down slopes, but it’s really more like dominoes falling, because each unit of controversy is discrete.)

  * Sloan’s post is called “The Steel Man of #gamergate”: https://medium.com/message/the-steel-man-of-gamergate-7019d86dd5f5#.fgowovsr6. The “steel man” is the opposite of the straw man: Sloan borrows the term from Chana Messinger, who defines it as “the best form of the other person’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented.”

  five

  THE AGE OF LUMPING

  Investigating the categories into which we lump people and ideas

  In biology, taxonomy is the study of classification—the classification of living things. We need to sort them out so that we can think more clearly about them—there are just too darn many of them for us to function otherwise. But it has not always been obvious how living things should be classified. Should creatures with wings all go in one category? Those with two legs? But what about birds, which have wings and two legs? We are blessed that taxonomy got its start with Aristotle, who, while not perfect, was rather more systematic and sensible about these matters than most would have been.

  But even when there’s general agreement about what the best system of categorization is, as there has been among biologists more or less since Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, the problems of taxonomy are scarcely solved: for one thing, it can be hard to know when to place something in an existing category and when to create a new one. Charles Darwin thought often about this problem, and commented in a letter that taxonomists tend to have strong tendencies in one direction or the other. The ones who like to put organisms in existing categories he called “lumpers”; the ones who like to create new categories he called “splitters.”

  These reflections matter not just for biology but for everyday life, because we are all inveterate taxonomists, and go through our days lumping and splitting like crazy. And we tend to taxonomize according to the heuristics—the strategies of simplification that relieve cognitive load—that I’ve been discussing throughout this book: identifying ingroups and outgroups, deploying keywords, and the like. The hashtags I mentioned in the previous chapter (#cuckservative, #whiteprivilege) are essentially quick-and-dirty classifications, Instant Taxonomy.

  In general, our culture is a lumping one. And maybe all cultures are. If so, there would be, I think, two reasons.

  First, the life of the mind always requires triage, the sorting of the valuable from the less valuable, the usable from the unusable—and in conditions of information overload we start looking for reasons to rule things out. Think for instance of those beleaguered college admissions officers, faced with more application letters than they can possible read with care, most of which are indistinguishable from one another, who just need one piece of information—a GPA a shade too low, a gap where “extracurricular activities” should be, a grammatically shaky cover letter—to make them feel justified in writing RJ (Reject) and moving on to the next applicant. And even the ones who aren’t rejected immediately get classified in ways that might make an applicant feel slightly, or significantly, disrespected: the common annotation LBB, for instance: “Late-Blooming Boy.” Even if that’s in some sense what I were, I don’t think I’d like being tossed into that pile.

  Sometimes the need for triage isn’t about ruling something (someone) in or out but about deciding what, if anything, to do next: where to invest limited resources. In a hospital, for example, a newborn whose appearance suggests some possible anomaly gets a note on his chart: FLK (Funny-Looking Kid). An elderly woman whose vitals are fading: CTD (Circling the Drain). Someone who dies on the ward is “discharged up” or “transferred to the ECU” (Eternal Care Unit). Hospital staff make these seemingly callous judgments because time is usually scarce, and doctors and nurses simply cannot afford to pause and consider the relevant in its full human dimensionality, lest they become overwhelmed. A complete awareness of what’s at stake is valuable—of course it’s valuable, and doctors and nurses know the value—but they keep this awareness at bay because it’s not in their immediate context usable. Indeed, it can inhibit their ability to do what they have to do.

  We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us. We don’t want our lives summarized with an acronym, or our deaths with a bitterly ironic joke. We’re funny that way. We don’t like our distinctiveness, our me-ness, compromised or ignored. I recall a pickup football game I played in my childhood during which a friend of mine received a busted lip. He touched his fingers to his mouth, pulled them away, and muttered, “Blood”—and then, as though realizing the truly germane point, added, “My blood!”

  LUMPING AND SOLIDARITY

  Lumping is a powerful strategy for information management, and a certain filtering out of individuality is the price we simply have to pay to get our choices under some kind of control. But lumping can also be desirable for a very different—indeed, almost the opposite—reason, as a strategy of inclusion. Consider, as an example, the rise in the past half century of the movement in America for gay and lesbian rights. First, people spoke of the common interests of lesbian women and gay men. Then someone asked, “But what about bisexuals?” And someone else said, “You’re forgetting the transgendered.” After which a yet another person said, “But some of us prefer to identify as ‘queer.’ ” Thus an initialism was born: LGBTQ.

  Of course, this was not the end of it. There are strong advocates now for LGBTQIA, in order to make room in the community for those who describe themselves as “intersex” and those who identify as “asexual.” Other add-ons have been suggested. But the point is, these initialisms exemplify lumping not for dismissal or ruling out but for solidarity, for the making of common cause. The implicit argument behind the idea of “the LGBTQIA community” goes something like this: “We may be a highly diverse group of people in most ways but in one major way we belong together: our sexuality is not treated fairly or respectfully in mainstream culture.”

  But whenever lumping by solidarity occurs—and it occurs in many different contexts: I could have chosen as my main example some ecumenical religious organization, of which there are many—the unity thus created is a fragile one, constantly threatening to separate. Some feminists say that transgender women don’t know what it’s really like to be a woman, since they enjoyed male privilege until they decided to try something else; in the eyes of self-proclaimed queers, bisexuals always have an open door to “normalcy”; and so on. Moreover, people might question whether categories of sexuality are the only relevant ones here: black lesbians might note (indeed have noted) that the solidarity that arises from sexuality doesn’t make racial difference go away.

  Political and social conservatives tend to make fun of this sort of thing—“Ha ha, the Revolution is eating itself”—but their own categories are just as fragile, as the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump revealed. All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are of
ten created by opposition. Those who are subject to the same forces, the same powers-that-be, can find themselves grouped together, sometimes to their own surprise and discomfort: for example, homosexuals and Jews in Nazi Germany. The various sorts of people who gather under the LGBTQIA banner, give or take a letter or two, do so largely in response to what they call “heteronormativity”; but what happens when heterosexuality becomes a little less insistently normative? In recent years we’ve seen one answer to that question: some people start questioning the validity of the alliance. Letters get amputated from the initialism, or the whole project of classifying people primarily by sexuality gets called into question.

  George Orwell’s great fable Animal Farm gets its name from the rebellion of the animals against human domination. Animal solidarity is their one great law, their governing principle, and they gain the leverage that earns them their freedom by lumping animals into one comprehensive category and men into the other. Thus their definitive statement: “All animals are equal.” But gradually, as the pigs come to dominate, that statement receives its famous amendment: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” And at the end, when the pigs negotiate with the men for joint control of the farm, “the creatures”—all the other animals—“looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” It turns out that the relevant taxonomic opposition here is not between man and animal; it is between the powerful and the powerless.