Arguing against the absurd

At university, for the better or worse, I was quite involved in competitive debating. One rather surprising thing you learned was it was often a lot easier to argue for an extreme, or even absurd position than a reasonable one. What you said would be more interesting, more entertaining, and if you were good at it, give you more opportunity to use novel arguments. These would be harder for the other side to anticipate and they would have no experience refuting them.

The following example is illustrative, if a little embarrassing. I remember one day having to chairing a show debate about the legalisation of duelling. The proposition had 15 minutes to prepare their case. Their argument was simple. Individual preferences are difficult to discern. We allow people to make strange choices according to priorities which don't always make sense to an outsider. We also allow people to consent to large risks. If people are willing to consent to something with risks that large, they probably do so because it is very important to them. The opposition responded by questioning the ability of individuals to consent to that sort of risk. They talked about family and societal pressure, motivation by jealousy, shame, or rage, and argued that the kind of situation where somebody was likely to be involved in a duel was one where they could not rationally make a decision. But the proposition had a counter. Why could these things not constitute rationally valid motivations? If a sense of shame or lost honour is so important to you that you would be willing to risk your life for it, why could you not rationally make the choice that the risk was worth taking? The opposition had no idea how to respond to this argument.

That's not to say there weren't effective counters for the opposition out there. Or perhaps they should have sidestepped the issue of whether someone can consent to such harms, and framed the debate in terms of whether consent eliminates a harm. Perhaps they should have talked more about the consequences the practice imposed on loved ones, or how it would shift societal expectations of how people respond to shame.

Thinking back to this does make me cringe a little. But I think it helps make sense of popular debates, and why it can be so difficult to argue against absurd positions. Think about someone who wants to argue that natural selection is in fact a myth. An argument frequently used is that something like the eye could not possibly come about through natural selection, as it requires a high degree of complexity to be advantageous. There are so many mutations required for an eye that give no evolutionary advantage before you have something functional  (so the argument goes) that an organ like the eye would be highly unlikely to come about. This is not be a good argument against natural selection, but how would you respond to it? As a layman, it would actually quite hard to immediately know why the argument is wrong. Is it because there is already a good evolutionary account of the eye, or is it because the absence of one does not mean we should reject the theory of evolution? As it turns out, there are explanatory accounts of the eye. But unless you happened to be an evolutionary biologist, or spent some time researching the question after the conversation, you would have no idea what these explanatory accounts are. I still do not know how certain or speculative they are. The correct response in such a discussion might therefore be to say that while you can't explain the eye, a single incident of something currently only partially understood does not imply that you should reject a theoretical framework for which there are otherwise overwhelming grounds to accept. But it's easy to imagine a situation in which you fail to make that argument, or, in doing so, you seem to have conceded rather more than you actually did.

The point is that the person arguing against natural selection, however absurd their position, is actually likely to be far more familiar with how these arguments play out than most people who might hear their argument. They will have more experience arguing their position, and assuming they aren't arguing against a specialist, may even have more relevant  (albeit partially false) subject knowledge . It is likely to be an obsession, and something they have spent a considerable amount of time arguing about. And precisely because their argument is so absurd, most people will never have spent any time whatsoever thinking about how to defend their own, contrary beliefs. Indeed society would not be working properly if this were not the case: there is simply too much specialist information out there for us all to absorb, some conclusions must simply be taken on trust of those with expertise, and those experts themselves have to spend their time thinking about real scientific questions, not how to justify assumptions or positions in debates overwhelmingly resolved a very long time ago.

This, I think, was one of the initial advantages that the Leave side had in the 2016 Brexit referendum. They had been making their arguments for decades. They knew how audiences responded, they knew their case, and they had a much better idea of what the Remain case might look like than the other way round. Remainers, on the other hand, had almost no experience arguing their case. They had no idea which arguments worked and which didn't. And they had no idea how to respond to a position that they saw as inherently absurd. The Leave position seemed in some basic way to violate how the world worked. Figures like Daniel Hannan could do very well in televised debates by bamboozling opponents who had no idea what the flaws in his argument were. A lot of the time, they relied on specific falsehoods or factoids which took a lot of time and effort to refute.

On Brexit specifically, this may have gradually changed. A lot of people have suddenly found themselves finding a lot more out about the issues involved, and learning the contours of this strange 'debate'. People like Ian Dunt, Chris Grey and David Allen Green have large audiences for their work refuting some of the bad arguments made about Brexit. This is perhaps similar to the response from popular science writers who in the '90s and 2000's very publicly made the case for natural selection. But there is a more general problem here with populist movements for liberals and left liberals like myself. They rely on conspiracy theories that are very difficult to refute. And they attack the norms and practices of liberal democracies that are so established that very few people have thought about how to argue in favour of them, at a time when they are weakest. They make bold claims about how the world could be, or how governments could act, that nobody else has thought through. And what used to be a compelling argument, that such propositions just demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the world worked, now seems to be a much weaker one.