anotherpanacea

Is paranoia and militancy the core of the Tea Party Movement? In the context of my recent foray into the Tea Party movement, I’ve been thinking recently about fallacies and bad critical thinking in the public sphere. My friend Robert Talisse has an article with Scott Aikin that I think all philosophers should read. In it, Talisse and Aikin propose a variant of the “Straw Man fallacy,” the “Weak Man.” The Weak Man fallacy doesn’t misstate a rival’s position like a ’straw man,’ but instead

chooses the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack.

Talisse developed an account of this fallacy in an article in Scientific American, “Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind“:

Weak man tactics are harder to detect than those of the straw man variety. Because straw man arguments are closely related to an opponent’s true position, a clever listener might be able to spot the truth amid the hyperbole, understatement or other corrupted version of that view. A weak man argument, however, is more opaque because it contains a grain of truth and often bears little similarity to the stronger arguments that should also be presented. Therefore, a listener has to know a lot more about the situation to imagine the information that a speaker or writer has cleverly disregarded.

The problem is that there are always both strong and weak interlocutors in the electorate. There are a lot of crazy, wrong, and stupid people in the United States. Should bloggers and scholars devote their energies to responding to them? Or should they respond to the strongest, smartest, best proponents of a policy with which we disagree? read more…

So after my last Tea Party post, I’ve been trying to track down more information about the movement. One interview does not an investigation make. Here’s what I’ve dug up: read more…

What would you do with $100 and a case of altruism? How about giving away umbrellas during a rainstorm:

David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world had other ideas.

“People thought there was something fishy about it,” Ibnale said. “There wasn’t. It was just free umbrellas.”

Ibnale was one of a dozen people in San Francisco who had been given $100 by a startup charity that is trying to get strangers to start doing nice things for other strangers. It’s a novel concept. Most folks, it turns out, aren’t prepared for it. “What’s the catch?” a man asked.

No catch, replied Ibnale. Take an umbrella. You’re getting wet.

“No, thanks,” the man answered, and kept walking through the rain. Ibnale began keeping count. He asked 27 wet people if they would like to have an umbrella. Seventeen of them said no.

Altruism is something of a novelty these days, and most people have little time to partake. But altruism is the whole idea behind the new charity, called the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy.

The article mentions other attempts at ordinary altruism, some of which were more successful. I love this sort of thing, less for for the evidence of suspicion built into our daily interactions (“What’s the catch?”) and more for the creativity it demands of folks and the plus-sized benefits it engenders. (400 quarters on a grammar school playground is worth more than $100.)

That said, the hedonic utilitarian in me (an unpleasant man to be sure) worries that we ought not to call random acts of generosity philanthropy, or even altruism, exactly. The reason to do this kind of show-off charity is thoroughly selfish, since we end up keeping so much of the enjoyment for ourselves. On this view, the real reason we love these stories is that they sound like fun: it’s the utility monster in all of us trying to find its way out. (“I can spend $100 better than you can!”) Though this kind of creativity is certainly welcome, there’s a niggling voice who insists that a true altruist wouldn’t even need to see the benefits of her efforts, and would donate the money to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders where it can do “the most good.”

So let’s put these suspicions to rest: understood as virtue or capacity cultivation, these kinds of exercises are more effective than duties or obligations for accomplishing the goals that duties and obligations seek. We know this with children: we use enjoyable and fun exercises cultivate the virtue of charity so that they learn to cherish altruism later and elsewhere. So why not skip that fancy dinner and buy some umbrellas? Maybe it’ll make you a better person, but even if you fail to flourish, there’ll be a lot of dry and suspiciously grateful people. And if it turns out to be fun, maybe we can skip two dinners, and split the proceeds: half for Haiti, half for random acts of kindness.

Zero-sum games are for suckers. Hedonic utilitarians ought to know that better than anyone: be full of win.

The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ’stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently a bit of a libertarian:

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs [Medicaid and Medicare] that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”

Progressives have largely ignored this movement, because of its association with organizations like the John Birch Society and those who deny that Barack Obama is an American citizen. But I’m struck by how much the Tea Party is beginning to coalesce as a a group of bipartisan deficit hawks, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians.

The Tea Party doesn’t have settled leadership or a national platform, and its members have largely rebuffed attempts by some in the old guard of the Republican Party to define it. It also seems significantly younger than the Republican Party. In the same light, it doesn’t seem that all of the people currently flirting with the Tea Party movement would recognize themselves in the image of potentially violent disenfranchisement described by Frank Rich, who identifies an ideological affinity between the Tea Party and Joe Stack, the terrorist who flew a private plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX:

…most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril.

Now Rich is convinced that Tea Party members is a nascent hate group, but I’m not persuaded. Certainly there are hate groups out there, and some of them have put out feelers, trying to determine whether the Tea Party might grant them some legitimacy, as it has done for the John Birch Society. But the membership doesn’t know what it is, yet.

Because I teach college students at a pretty expensive private university, I asked this morning if anybody would be willing to talk to me about the Tea Party. I’ve just concluded a discussion with one Tea Partier, not necessarily representative, but very interesting. read more…

Infinite Th0ught offers this op-ed by Alain Badiou:

The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l’identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter.