One way to win an argument is to control the usage of words. If you can get the other side to use your definitions, or even just to use your terms with different definitions (which differences may be lost on those watching the argument), you’ve won half the battle. You’re certainly in better shape than if you have to use your opponent’s terms. We see this in lots of areas, the prochoice/prolife debate being the most obvious, but there are many others.
I’m reminded of the old Sci-Fi story, “To Serve Man“, which often seems to reflect the way our government “serves” us, at least economically.
Here is some discussion called The Pursuit of Happiness ~ Are You Being Served?.
“In the animal kingdom,” said psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” It is important to use words carefully, to use words that have as exact a meaning as you can achieve. Those who manage to persuade others to use the words they wish used have enormous power; they define the debate. They can almost determine the outcome of a discussion before it begins. This is fine, as long as the words are used exactly and honestly. But often people use this power to smuggle in meanings and thus stack the debating deck.
Take the word “generous.” When I think of someone being generous, I think of the dictionary definition: magnanimous, kindly. But the term is often used to describe government programs that forcibly take money from some people and give it to others. Where is the generosity? Certainly not in the government’s treatment of those whose wealth it takes. Perhaps, then, the government is being generous in the size of these forcible transfers. But that’s not really generosity either. How can a government official be magnanimous with money that’s not his own?
Consider a debate between a proponent of forced transfers and an opponent. If the proponent can define the issue as one of whether the government should be generous to people, the opponent will likely lose before the debate begins. But if the opponent insists that the issue be stated without words that bias the discussion, as one of whether the government should forcibly transfer wealth from some to others, the opponent has a fighting chance. One reason I have hope for rolling back the massive power of government is that the proponents of power seem to use misleading terms at key points in their argument. If they were so confident of preserving that power, they would not need to.
Another term that is often abused in discussion is the term “serve” and its derivative “service.” There are some straightforward uses. For example, you go to a restaurant and a waitress asks if she can serve you. In that context, the term means the same thing to both of you. But I take issue with another use, which has become common: “government service.” The use of this term has corrupted and confused much of the discussion of what government does, in both domestic and foreign policy.
Often when someone introduces me to an audience, he will say I served as a senior economist with Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. But how does he know I served? All he knows is that I worked in the Reagan administration. I think I served. On almost a daily basis I tried to fight off bad ideas for further restricting Americans’ freedom and reducing their wealth. Most of these ideas came from other people within the executive branch, but occasionally I had time to fight off bad ideas from Congress. Like McGruff the crime dog, I tried to take a bite out of government. But the reason I don’t say that I served in the Reagan administration is that I don’t want to promote the idea that simply by working for the government, one serves the people.
In fact, the typical case is the opposite. The majority of government workers serve themselves and, unlike in the free market, there is no Adam Smithian invisible hand that causes them, by doing so, to serve others. Incentives in the political system are typically distorted, so that by serving themselves, most government officials work against the interests of those they claim to serve.
And there’s the problem, of course. How can we construct a system where the incentives are for people to behave as we hope? We lionize people who resist incentives to “serve us badly”, and do the right thing instead; and so we should. Or, maybe I should say that sometimes we lionize them, if they have not been successfully demonized by their opponents.
Still, whenever we use the word “tax”, I wish we had to say, “forcible confiscation of property”. (Democrats like to say “contribution” instead of “tax”.) When we use the word “abortion” I wish we had to say, “kill a small human being with a beating heart and brain waves”. And so on. The degree of success of Left leaning politicians seems often to be the direct inverse of their clarity of speech.
November 25th, 2008 1:28 pm
I think one of the reasons we have trouble seeing eye-to-eye is that you are highly skilled at controlling the the words that are used in debate. You are obviously skilled in debating and do your best tro win the argument. I will admit that I am not very good at that. In our discussion on violence and teh state, I’ve been trying to invite you to a different way of thinking. Whether or not the debate is won is unimportant to me. Rather, I have tried to show you a different way of looking at the world. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’ve wanted to do that, and we have typically gotten lost in the rhetorical exercise of debate.
November 25th, 2008 1:29 pm
I think the same problem surfaced in your critique of Jim Wallis’ response to Jim Dobson for his “2012 post-Obama” letter. I don’t think Wallis was trying to win an argument with Dobson, but merely point out that what he said was unhelpful and deeply devisive.
November 25th, 2008 6:48 pm
Hello Hello, you said:
I’m normally in favor of learning new ways of thinking. I have gradually moved to different positions in my life on a great many issues, and can hardly claim that I’ve now arrived at some point of perfection.
What I am able to do, however, is to point out specific facts and connections that I had failed to acknowledge when I held certain positions earlier in life, positions that I no longer hold. In other words, I didn’t really learn a “new way of thinking”, I simply thought better, with a more complete factual predicate, and without allowing myself to be blinded to certain realities that I either failed to notice, or just didn’t want to acknowledge, for whatever reason. In other words, my “new way of thinking” was simply “thinking better”.
An example: when I was in my 20s, and renting an apartment, Proposition 13 was quite a controversial public policy topic in California. It was about controlling the growth of property taxes in California, which many felt were getting out of hand in a various ways. Opponents to Proposition 13 claimed that it would result in a huge cut to public services and would hurt the poor, defund schools, result in crumbling infrastructure, probably cause higher crime because of the reductions that were threatened in police services, after school programs, welfare, various social work programs, and …. you’ve heard all of this kind of thing before, haven’t you? It is, in a nutshell, what the Left always cries out whenever anyone suggests cutting taxes.
I recall quite distinctly what my opinion was about it, at the time. To my shame (I now realize), I thought that Proposition 13 was a bad idea because it would probably result in people living in the inner city to do something to replace the lost resources they had been getting from government, that the something they would do would very likely involve higher crime, that insurance rates would go up because of the higher crime rates (you know, ravening hordes of poor minority people erupting into the suburbs, stealing stuff and robbing people), and that we’d all end up paying for it one way or another, so why not pay for it in taxes instead of higher crime rates and insurance rates and so on?
My racism at the time was breathtaking.
Consider: I actually thought that minority people would do things that I would not do if was in their situation. I thought some of them “just couldn’t help it”, and that we fortunate middle class people just had to suck it up and pay. I would never have thought of it as racism at the time. I would have felt quite liberal and forgiving about it all, a “white man’s burden” sort of self-regard. But it boiled down to this, in my mind: pay now, or get held up later.
Somewhere along the way, I began to realize the very low opinion I held of poor minorities, to believe that, without money taxed from us fortunate folk, they would be unable to resist the allure of a life of crime and mayhem, because their situation was just so hard. Forget the fact that no one in my family would have considered sticking someone up, no matter how much they needed the money. I expected that kind of restraint from MY people, but not from THEIRS.
So, how do I now “think better”? I realize now that the “victicrats” of the world want us to have that fear of what will happen if we don’t pay up. I realize that their entire industry is based on creating a sense of entitlement and “we just can’t help it” in the communities they “serve” (there’s that word again….). I realize that the people who think the worst of young black men are the people who have no expectations of them being able to stay out of criminal activity, finish school, get a job and not make babies until they’re married, unless they get a big slice from the public coffers in one way or another, and unless we all look the other when they misbehave. And, I realize that I was paying those property taxes, too, because my landlord was passing them on to me, and so was every business where I shopped, but I was too much the economic ignoramus at the time to think about that. At the time, it seemed impossible that I would ever be able to buy a house (we were in the middle of the Jimmy Carter stagflation years) so it wouldn’t really affect me, I thought, though at the time I virtuously didn’t consider myself; I was just thinking that those richer people should have to help the poor.
To summarize: I was too stupid to know I was paying the taxes too, I was jealous of people who had more than I did, and afraid of people who had less.
And now, I have a “different way of thinking”. But I would call it just thinking well, and what I did before was to think badly.
November 27th, 2008 11:54 pm
Interesting story. You prefer to think of it as refined thinking, I am referring to it as a different way of thinking…either way, that’s not quite what I’m getting at.
I think this sort of serves as an example for what I was saying. You focused on one very small portion of what I said while ignoring the main substance of the post. There are different rhetorical styles, and it seems like you only want to engage on one level of that.
Which is fine, but I think it means that we will talk past each other.
November 28th, 2008 12:24 am
Can you give me an example of what you call “a different way of thinking” that does not boil down to ignoring things you don’t want to think about?
November 28th, 2008 8:31 am
Maybe a different way of thinking is ‘feeling’. When decisions are thought through with feelings instead of logical rationale, different conclusions are drawn. The outcome of individual or corporate actions are irrelevant because the entire exercise was about how we feel. An example of this would be the debate between Obama and Hillary with Charles Gibson as moderator. Obama was defending his tax hike on incomes over $250K. When Charlie asked why, in light of the proven fact that “cutting” taxes on that group of people would actually bring “More” money into government coffers, Obama would still increase taxes on this group, Obama responded that it wasn’t about more money to help the less fortunate but rather “being fair”. In other words, Obama wants people who fall into the upper-middle income bracket and up to hurt financially so that they will feel like poor people. He wasn’t interested in the financial welfare of the people at the bottom end of the financial spectrum, he only wanted them to ‘feel’ that he was going to ‘stick-it’ to the rich.
Another example would be Al Gore and his lavish lifestyle. He lives in energy consuming mansions, flies around the world in fuel consuming jets and tells the rest of us how terrible we are because of our carbon footprint when we drive an SUV full of our children to school. How dare we pollute the atmosphere. Now that people feel that they shouldn’t drive an SUV, sales are down. Now the auto industry needs taxpayer dollars to survive. But that’s okay because Al Gore really ‘cares’ about the environment.
November 29th, 2008 9:21 am
Nice emotional reasoning that doesn’t align with factual thinking. Trust me… if someone making over $250,000 gets taxed at a slightly higher rate, they still won’t be anywhere close to the financial hurt that “poor people” experience every day.
Wait… now you are trying to blame Al Gore for the problems in Detroit? Seriously?
November 29th, 2008 7:21 pm
Harmonicminer-
I don’t think in any of our discussions that I have avoided talking about certain subbjects. Are there any that stick out to you that I’ve not wanted to talk about? I think that even your follow-up question is an example of you trying to nitpick a small portion of my post while still ignoring the thing that I was trying to say. (Which was that you tend to be good at nitpicking small portions of posts while ignoring the things that I’m trying to say)
Nevertheless, an example may be found in your criticism of Obama’s tax plans. (DISCLAIMER: I did not vote for Obama, do not consider myself an Obama supporter, and by no means am a registered Democrat. And no, I’m not a registered Socialist, either. :-)) You suggest that it is wrong to want to attempt to “redistribute wealth” because it takes away from people who have worked hard all their lives, in order to give money to people who have not. You might suggest that it is “common sense” that someone should get to keep whatever they make with no questions asked, but I think the Biblical witness would respectfully disagree. You are viewing the world through a distinctly capitalist lense. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) seem to view economics from a lense Jubilee, where every so often debts are literally cancelled (“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”) and wealth is basically redistributed (to a degree).
My “other way of thinking” reference is supposed to refer to something like a shift from viewing the world through a capitalist lense to viewing the world through a lense of Jubilee. Hope this helps.
Your writings have made me curious on one point. What do you understand the church’s role to be on earth? How do you see this relating to “the powers that be?” How do you balance your allegiance to a country like America with your allegiance to Christ and God’s Kingdom?
November 29th, 2008 7:47 pm
Harmonicminer–To be clear, my point in the above post was not to necessarily argue specifically “jubilee v. capitalism” (though I am a proponent of Jubilee), but to give an example of “another way of thinking”.
Enharmonic–
You said…
“When decisions are thought through with feelings instead of logical rationale, different conclusions are drawn.” You then gave a couple of different examples of places where ‘feeling’ was followed over and against ‘logic’. I don’t know if you think that I support the ‘feeling’ behind those examples, and I’m a little unclear as to why you gave those examples…just for example’s sake, I guess?
Anyway, it’s interesting that things like “logic’, ‘common sense’, and ‘rationale’ are invoked in ways that make them seem like completely neutral, unbiased entities. I would like to suggest, however, that they are not. What is common rational, and logical in one place is not necessarily common, rational, or logical in another. It’s easy to poke fun at people who are “clearly” behaving “illogically” because they do not behave in ways that we would consider “rational”, but I would suggest that it might be helpful to take their words and actions seriously, and in their own context. Logic is something that we are taught should be as clear as 2+2=4, but in many cases it just doesn’t typically end up working that way. (It tends to be in the logical positivist school, but that is only one voice among many within philosophical discourse.)
November 29th, 2008 9:09 pm
Hello Hello, I just have one question: when is the next Jubilee? And, can I borrow some money? Maybe your car?
Seriously: there is no comparison between a custom of debt forgiveness, and the forcible extraction of money (with the underlying threat of violence for noncompliance) for the purpose of giving the money to someone else. You’re welcome to try to make the connection, but I think it’s a BIG stretch.
Is this your best example of “another way of thinking”?
November 29th, 2008 9:24 pm
My allegiance to “country and law” in comparison to “Christ and God’s Kingdom” may be measured this way: I am willing to do moral things that are illegal, and I am not prepared to do immoral things that are legal. But I am aware that there are ways in which it is impossible for me to avoid some level of participation in certain immoral acts. For example, it’s likely that the Obama administration will pursue policies that will result in the USA providing funding for abortions that aren’t medically necessary, yet I will continue to pay taxes. I shop at grocery stores, most of which are now soft-core porn outlets. I buy products manufactured, distributed or retailed by companies that donate money to immoral causes. Shoot, I buy electricity from PG&E, which donated huge money to defeat Proposition 8, and my 5th grader attends a public school, whose teachers union did the same.
None of us can live in society at any level and have totally clean hands in this regard. Jesus Christ himself benefited to some degree from draconian punishments meted out for trivial crimes by the Romans, to the degree that such punishments deterred crime that might have affected Him or His disciples during his many travels. Yet he was sinless individually, and he did preach a gospel that, if followed by more people, would have reduced the total amount of evil in the society.
So I conclude that we are responsible for that over which we have some degree of individual control.
Still, scripture teaches that we should follow society’s laws where there are not directly immoral. For example, if some society made a law that all babies with Down’s syndrome must be aborted, it would not be sinful to disobey.
November 30th, 2008 2:48 pm
“there is no comparison between a custom of debt forgiveness, and the forcible extraction of money (with the underlying threat of violence for noncompliance) for the purpose of giving the money to someone else. You’re welcome to try to make the connection, but I think it’s a BIG stretch.”
Oh, I couldn’t agree more, and I wasn’t trying to draw a 1:1 correlative relationship between the two, it was merely an example of a way that one might view something like “redistribution of wealth” differently if one subscribed to something other than a capitalist mindset. There is nothing within me that is excited about an increase in the American government or an increase in taxes.
I will be candid: Pre-election, I was very concerned with the way that many Christians were talking about Barack Obama. They talked about him as if he was the answer to all that was wrong in the world, and that somehow he was going to usher in the Kingdom of God or something. Post-election I have seen some of this talk die down a bit, but I hope that Christians (particularly younger Christians) don’t get too wrapped up in any social wellfare programs that Obama might create. I’m sure he will do some things that do some good while he is in office, but they will all be inherently designed for the glory of America, not the Kingdom of God. I don’t expect anything different, because that’s just how America is made to function.
Anyway, I do not think that there is any sort of connection between an economic system based on debt cancellation and one based on increased taxation. They are pretty much directly opposed, I would say. However, I would venture that the capitalist system has similarly little to do with an economics of debt cancellation and forgiveness. That is really my point.
To your second post: I read you to basically be boiling the Kingdom of God down to an individual ethical code. I agree that is part of it, but it is so much more than that. The Christian life is not about not committing sin or whether our hands are “clean” or “dirty.” Your reading of Jesus is very interesting, you make him sound like a card-carrying Conservative! This, I think, forces you into a very utilitarian understanding of good and evil, that the goal is basically to act in such a way that there is just a little less evil and a little more good. I think, rather, that the gospel is about freedom, liberation, and salvation.
Also, how do you account for structural sin? If sin entered the world, then it infected the entire natural order, including the way that people organize together, which means that we can never create a good or even a nuetral man-made system of governance. It is all touched by sin. I read you as saying that man-made governments are basically neutral and can even be essentially good, nevermind that they exist on the foundation of violence. This kind of coercive power is a result of the fall, and is not what God intended for the world.
November 30th, 2008 3:23 pm
Hello Hello,
But the fall happened. Nothing in the NT tells us that it will “unhappen” until the Second Coming. It does not tell us that we sinners who have accepted forgiveness will cease to sin, thought that should be our goal.
I still do not understand your use of the term “thinking differently” as being other than “ignoring what doesn’t fit your world view” or “taking positions based on feelings instead of evidence”, or something similar. You give an example, I show it doesn’t work, then you say you didn’t mean it all along. That simply makes no sense to me.
So while I could spend the next 30 minutes showing all the places you put words in my mouth, and deconstructing to find the actual meaning behind many of your assertions above, and quoting scriptures that directly support my perspectives, which are not as you have described them… I am going to do something constructive and dig in the dirt in my yard to install a brick walkway.
I’ll watch occasionally to see if you can refine your concept of “thinking differently” in a way that makes it clearer to me that it means “thinking better”, which is my goal, always.
November 30th, 2008 7:18 pm
Hello Hello, you said:
True for “common”. MAYBE true for “rational”. Not true for Logic. There are laws of reason built into the very fabric of things.
You might read this discussion. In it is a pretty complete presentation of my perspective on reason, in dialog with some others who have different points of view.
November 30th, 2008 10:36 pm
You are a fan of open theism? Hmm… I would have never guessed that.