“Three Deadly Sins of Public Discourse”

“Three Deadly Sins of Public Discourse”      Dec. 2, 2018      Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

 Henry Ford,“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it.”   

   CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

One of my guilty pleasures is enjoying my weekly dose of the New Yorker’s “Borowitz Report,” an unabashedly fake news source. A recent installment of Andy Borowitz’ humor declared:

Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.

“These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. “And yet, somehow, they have developed defenses that, for all intents and purposes, have rendered those faculties totally inactive.”

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.”

While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain. “The normal functions of human consciousness have been completely nullified,” Logsdon said.

While reaffirming the gloomy assessments of the study, Logsdon held out hope that the threat of fact-resistant humans could be mitigated in the future. “Our research is very preliminary, but it’s possible that they will become more receptive to facts once they are in an environment without food, water, or oxygen,” he said.

Most political satire makes fun of conservatives, usually portraying them as being both rather stupid and simultaneously fact averse. Many of you made a sincere effort at your family Thanksgiving table to reason with your Fox News infused relatives and I am willing to wager that while some are more courteous than others, that it is a pretty sure bet that no opinions were changed. 

I have relatively little exposure to right wing folks and all that I see of Fox News are the clips used in satire pieces or incredulously posted on social media, but it has always seemed ironic to me that they aim their intentional misinformation at an audience that is hungry to be misinformed but most interestingly, their style is one of constant condescension. Their target audience is certainly among the former C and D students of public schools, but they deliver their propaganda in a superior intonation that encourages their audience to refer to their A and B grade former classmates as if they were stupid. 

When they were young, they were forced into simply being the playground bullies who tried to beat up the smart students, now they are being fed a diet of lies by people who also assure them that they are now the intellectual elites. I’m serious. 

In August, Trump held a rally in Ohio in which he famously announced that Maxine Waters has a low IQ, an insult he typically reserves for women of color, but he also told his crowds not to listen to the “so called intellectual elites” because, he said to his crowd of minions, “you are the elites.” 

So, both conservatives and liberals tend to look over the fence that stands between them and convince themselves that the “others” are stupid. The ideological division in our country now rivals the days of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protests of fifty years ago. 

Going to our respective corners and hurling insults at one another certainly won’t bring any healing to our torn land. We have to learn how to talk to one another ANDto really listen to one another but talking and listening has to also follow some basic rules, not just of civility but of logic. 

I will not pretend to be neutral. While I have personally been more deeply hurt by liberals than I ever will be by conservatives, that is more a function of socializing with liberals and avoiding contact with conservatives. I know that sloppy logic and mean interpersonal exchanges happen on both sides of the fence but in the current political climate, well, The Washington Post is keeping a running tally of false

or misleading statements made by the president while in office. At the end of last month, the number was up to 6,420, showing a rapid escalation in public lies since he just crossed the 3000 threshold in May. We are seeing a level of intentional deception that would make Richard Nixon look like an amateur. 

Given that public discourse has gone off the rails, I would like to take a few minutes today to put up some civil and logical guardrails to help us to begin to talk across the fence more meaningfully. 

Law professors often tell their students that they are not there to teach them the law . . . there is a thousand times too much for any one person to learn in a lifetime. Students go to law school to learn how to think like a lawyer so that they can effectively do research and engage in the justice system.

At Vanderbilt, my peers and I were told the same thing. We were to learn how to think critically, as theologians. 

We were not expected to engage in rote memorization but in critical analysis and meaningful research. There are things that an educated person might be expected to know but beyond their ability to quote either case law or scripture, the important thing to know is how to tell the difference between objective facts and total BS. 

This is, by no means, a comprehensive list but I want to talk about three pitfalls that seem to be especially prevalent in modern discourse. Don’t be put off by words like “epistemology” and “equivalency” . . . this is not as hard as it sounds. 

In philosophy, we ask the question, “How do you know what you know?” This is the question of epistemology. Do you know things because you just know them? Are they revealed truths that you simply know? If so, that is what we call a prioriknowledge.

We have recently talked about the fact that one of our local pastors has advised members of his mega-church not to take yoga classes or they might become demon possessed . . . because, in his world, things that are even in the neighborhood of Hinduism are rife with demons. A few people wrote to me in the past week, objecting to my being incredulous that there are people in the 21^stcentury who still believe that angels and demons actually exist. A couple of people told me that I was wrong, and that angels do exist. When I asked them how that they know this, they replied, “I just know it.” They may add some flourishes of scriptural references or personal experiences but since none of that is testable or repeatable, we are left with relatively pure deduction and maybe some college era pharmaceuticals. 

 The other way of knowing, we call a posteriori. This is knowing derived from experience, through our senses. In the scientific method, things are known only if they are both observable and repeatable. The people who say that they have experienced angles or ghosts or UFO’s may tell us that they have seen them, or talked to them, or possibly even endured cavity probing “medical tests” at their tentacled hands, but since we cannot examine these claims through repetition, while the individual may seem sincere and even to be a reliable witness, no one else can “know it” with certainty.

Saying it doesn’t make it so. You can believe in angels and demons, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny… you can say that millions of people voted multiple times by going to their car and changing their hat and shirt. Telling a lie over and over again does not make it true. There has to be evidence. You can believe in an a prioritruth for your own pleasure . . . but if you want other people to believe it, there needs to be objective evidence. 

All appeals to scripture, religious visions, voices or private experiences are a prioritruth claims that have no standing in a conversation about what is actually true. 

When Trump or Rudy Giuliani or any authority figure makes claims that have no evidence to back them up, we need to treat that as having no more credibility than  what you read in a fortune cookie. In a recent interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Rudy was being asked why the president didn’t appear under oath before the Mueller investigation and just tell the truth so that he wouldn’t run the risk of perjury. Giuliani’s response will go down in history. For him, there are versions of truth that vary to such a degree that “truth isn’t truth.”

And that, I’ll submit, is just nuts. There are no conservative facts, or liberal facts, no democratic facts or Republican facts, there is reality and that’s where our conversation needs to take root. It is like trying to live with an alcoholic. You don’t do them any favors by either believing or pretending to believe their lies. We need to be devoted to reality. An argument is not won by simply shouting the lies more loudly. An argument is won by presenting factual evidence.

The second pitfall of public discourse I want to talk about is the one that makes me really crazy, that is the False Equivalence. When you are trying to talk about something like the fact that Trump has told more than 7000 lies in less than two years in office, conservatives will bring up the famous Obama promise that if you like your health insurance that you can keep it. The implication being that all politicians lie and so Trump’s daily totally of about 6 lies a day is just par for the course. This is factually false. Of course, it matters what a president lies about and to whom but on the whole, what we are seeing here is unprecedented, it is dangerous because it creates instability in the markets, in international relationships, and in voter confidence. What I would love to see out of Trump supporters is a public demand that he start telling the truth. 

He is a salesman, or more likely a con man, so some exaggeration and over selling is to be expected. But saying that you are, for example, protecting insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions while trying to terminate such coverage . . . that’s a deception that will have a casualty count and he should be held accountable for such stuff.

But the use of false equivalency is not typically intended to win an argument, it is intended to stop a conversation. Public outrage over the child separation policy at the Mexican border and the more recent use of tear gas on homeless families who were gathering at the fence in Mexico has elicited claims on Fox that President Obama did the same thing. 

Here is the real danger of a false equivalence: There is some similarity, some apparent equality because Obama did have a tough immigration policy and families were separated at the border when the parents were sent to a prison and we don’t typically put children in prison. But that is where the similarity ends. Obama never ordered active duty troops to the border. Obama never authorized the use of armed, lethal force. Obama didn’t use child separation to dissuade people from applying for asylum. In short, Obama’s policy was nothing like Trump’s and saying that it was is not just dishonest, it is an attempt to say that what Trump is doing is not wrong.

Again, basic honesty and decency demands that both conservatives and liberals push back on an administration that puts children in cages and uses chemical weapons on homeless children. This is too wrong to leave room for dismissal on the basis of a partisan battle. You can disagree about the solutions to illegal immigration, but you cannot rationally disagree about traumatizing children. Once you favor this kind of child abuse, you have, in my opinion, forfeited your right to participate in public discourse. You are either too stupid or too mean to be involved.

The third and last sin of public discourse I want to talk about today is commonly called “what-about-ism”. Wikipedia says that it is a variant of the Latin named logical fallacy “tu quoque”which basically translates into “you’re a hypocrite.” Which is similar to the equally familiar Latin named fallacy, “ad homonym” in which you try to dismiss an argument by attacking the character of the person who presents the argument. Again, this is not winning an argument, this is bringing conversation to a halt by changing the subject or by distraction. 

We see this a lot lately when President Trump is asked about his campaign’s fairly well documented collusion with the Russian government during the election, he responds by insisting that the Justice Department should be looking into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails or something about Bengazi. He is screaming, basically, “I’m not guilty, they are guilty!” He recently raised the ante on this argument by tweeting  out this picture that not only shows a number of his Democratic predecessors and rivals behind bars but there are at least three Republicans featured here including former FBI directors, James Comey and Robert Muller, and a member of Trump’s own administration, Deputy Attorney General, Ron Rosenstein. This is not just shocking behavior for a sitting American president, but it is also remarkably stupid. But he isn’t actually trying to make a case against these people, he is just saying “What about Clinton, Comey, Huma Abedin?” all in an attempt to get people to talk about something other than his crimes, which, in my view, certainly includes treason.

Trump has complained about the media always reporting negatively about him. He has even recently suggested that he would like to create a national media outlet that would report glowingly on his administration. 

What I am suggesting today is that we really must look at both sides of this coin. If the president wants the media to stop talking about his lies, he has the option before him to simply stop lying. Then if the media still insists that he is lying, then they really do become fake news. But we can’t hold the media at fault for fact- checking our liar-in-chief. 

But even more, I am begging conservatives and liberals to unite in honest and open conversation in which we can find common ground. Because of our polarization, liberals constantly talk about how much they despise Trump and Trump supporters feel the need to constantly defend him and trumpet what they believe are his accomplishments. That conversation is a non-starter.

I would ask Trump supporters, “Wouldn’t you like Trump better if he stopped lying? Wouldn’t you like Trump better if he didn’t collude with foreign enemies to undermine our democracy? Wouldn’t you like your president more if he did not degrade our military by forcing them to abuse children?” 

Even my best friends and most devoted supporters have every reason to ignore any political prediction I make because I have been wrong over the past 20 years much more often than I have been right; but at the risk of degrading my prognostication reputation even further, I will offer this:

 I do not believe that Donald Trump will finish his first term in office. I believe that he will be impeached.

But I do not believe that this should be the end of our two-party system, or the end of our democracy. Democrats need a strong Republican Party just as reasonable Republicans recognize that they need a strong Democratic Party. I am proposing that we try hard to meet on the common ground of a desire for a good government, the common ground of honesty, intelligence, integrity. 

We will not always agree on how to manage our nation, but we should be able to agree on being a good people who can together, create a great nation. America is not a great nation right now. It used to be a lot better, but we have allowed ourselves to fall into partisan bickering that threatens our future and has made us an international pariah. But we can do better and because we can, we must. 

 I’ll leave you with one last Latin phrase, “Illegitimi non carborundum,” which literally means, “Don’t let the sons of unwed parents get you down.”