Inconsistency, Fallacy, & OWS

Last fall I was a bit confused by the entire Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon.  So I asked two friends with polar perspectives to help me understand what was going on, what was at stake, how they assessed matters, and how the debate was taking shape.  Having had now six months to reflect on things, here is some of what I gleaned.


My sympathetic friend forwarded a link to this article and provided some commentary:
Bernard Harcourt, "Occupy's new grammar of political disobedience."  My critical friend forwarded a link to this video by Samantha Bee and also provided some commentary:  "Occupy Wall Street Divided" (The Daily Show, 11/16/2011).


Their links, commentaries, and interpretations were instructive, but something didn't sit completely well with me.   I think I know what it was.


Ultimately, as I thought about the national conversation taking place, I found the argumentative or persuasive power of these respective pieces as forwarded explanations or arguments to be lacking in some respect.  Each recommender thought the suggested piece was in its own way smart.  They were seen to be pungent, persuasive, and able to cause those alternately critical and sympathetic to rethink (and perhaps to change) their positions.


That may very well be the case, but there can also be a danger of fallacious argumentation caught up in the mix when links are passed back and forth for that purpose.  My friends may not have been guilty of fallacious argumentation (I checked with them).  I wish to be clear about that.  But fallacious argumentation is my chief concern to explore in this post as these, and other, important issues continue to be debated in society.  Why?  Because I desire sound argumentation and debate instead.  What do I have in mind?


First, Mr. Harcourt's op-ed in The Guardian may be boiled down to this:  OWS is so novel and so cutting-edge as a protest movement that it has its own grammar, or structure of meaning and way of conveying political meaning.  More particularly, this unique grammar insulates it from traditional explanation and critique.  OWS transcends regular political discourse.  It cannot be analyzed or criticized by someone who does not meet the two Occupy protest conditions that Mr. Harcourt identifies:  someone (a) who is physically occupying space and (b) who is nurturing the proper self-conception as an occupier-protestor and thus is part of the resistance movement.  Both conditions are necessary for permitted and correct discourse; neither by itself is sufficient.  What do I find potentially fallacious about this?


Fallacy #1:  Self-defeating.  My friend's point in sharing this article was that there is something new about the Occupy protest movement and that Mr. Harcourt has tried to capture it.  But if Mr. Harcourt is right -- that is, if meaningful sentences about the Occupy movement may be issued only by someone who (a) is physically occupying space and (b) nurturing the proper self-conception -- then he is wrong.  Why?  Because at the very least he, in his position as a newspaper op-ed contributor, may not have simultaneously been occupying space and was definitely not in the mode of protestor when he donned the professor's cap of explainer.  Therefore, he is not, by his own dicta, qualified to speak about the Occupy movement.  The Occupy movement requires a different discourse, a different media grammar, than that which Mr. Harcourt has pursued.  Hence, his own speech about the Occupy protests is disqualified by the protests' very nature.  Or, if he has accurately characterized the uniqueness of the movement, then he cannot be right about his basic claim that it defies his speech about it, since he does not meet both criteria.  His argument is, most basically, self-defeating.

Inconsistency does not prove falsity, but it does raise some questions.

Second, the video clip by Samantha Bee of "The Daily Show" is entertaining but for a specific reason:  it humorously highlights the inconsistencies of the Occupy movement and its promoters.  As Ms. Bee and Jon Stewart both say, Occupy Wall Street was, just a few weeks into the protest movement, at risk of becoming the very thing that it was protesting against, namely, a divided society of power-broker patricians and ragamuffin plebeians.  Now, the argument against OWS from the clip "Occupy Wall Street Divided" would seem to run like this:  If OWS fails to live up to its own ideals for the broader culture, how can it foist those same ideals upon the broader culture?  If those ideals cannot be embodied to a lesser extent, then how can they be embodied to a greater extent?


Fallacy #2: tu quoque ("you, too").  Where is the fallacy in the a fortiori argument here?  It is not that the rhetorical argument cannot be persuasive (it can be).  It is not even that it is logically illegitimate to move from the absence of the more probable to the absence of the less probable (it is).  The fallacy that struck me was in the potentially implied argumentative force of a video clip like this, that is, what someone is likely suggesting polemically by sharing it and letting it do the dirty work of argumentation against something.  So the implied fallacy is that inconsistency in practice also logically entails falsity in principle -- it does not.  Inconsistent practice does not logically entail falsity in theory.  Something may be inconsistently executed, but that thing may still be true.  It may still be noble beautiful, admirable, or virtuous, even if the practitioner is not.

Some OWS protesters advocated for a certain redistribution of 

property; thefts prompted one protester to make this sign.

Both of these examples do raise some other questions.  If something cannot be practiced consistently -- whether discourse about the new discourse of the Occupy protest movement or the ideal vision of a classless society that is the hallmark of the movement itself -- one should pause to reflect on what is going on at the root.  Where are things going wrong?  Is the one argument too clever by half?  Is OWS as novel and as unique as it is claimed?  Does our eagerness to make rhetorical points about inconsistency in people's lives sometimes prevent us from discerning the true and noble mixed up in them?  Do we pause to think about the reasons for the inconsistent practice?  What does this tell us about human nature?


Third, I received from another source a tip about this article in The New Yorker by Mattathias Schwartz, "Pre-Occupied: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street."  The article is about the anarchist origins of the OWS movement, and it does a pretty good job of establishing its thesis.  Therefore, one may wonder about the legitimacy of the movement if one doubts or disapproves of anarchists in general, since some anarchists were undeniably involved in spawning the movement.


Fallacy #3:  Genetic.  The argumentation fallacy that can attend link-sharing of this sort is that discrediting the origin of an idea does not necessarily discredit the substance of the idea.  Whether anarchists endorse the core tenets of OWS technically has no bearing on whether those core tenets are themselves valid.


We all commit these fallacies, and more, with greater frequency than we care to admit.  But if we are to promote virtue and justice in society through civil discourse, then we need to reason and to communicate with each other fairly.


This got me to thinking about how the internet promotes such fallacious reasoning and communication. What are we really doing and what is our intended effect when we share a web link and pass it on without comment?  What are we trying to argue by posting on Facebook a photo and a newspaper or editorial title?  What, for that matter, are we really doing if we "like" this status posting of ours or someone else's?


Probably we are signaling some agreement with some part of the complex of debated topics around an issue.  We think there is something worth considering.  It may be that the headline clarifies what that single position is, but more than likely it does not.  We may just want to share with others an article.  That is, we may want (others) to reflect upon something well-said with which we ultimately disagree.  But "liking" something on Facebook does not disclose this nuance.


In those cases in which we do mean to contend for a position only by sharing a link with just a headline, we are arguing lazily -- maybe rhetorically, but still lazily.  What is more, we are encouraging others to do the same.  We are succumbing to the sensationalism of media headlines and using them as a replacement for substantive conversation.  We are doing this impersonally to our "Facebook friends" (are these all really friends?) and typically without accountability (we do not really have to answer for what we post, do we, since we can just click to "unfriend" a dissenter?).  That is part of what makes it so easy to "like" or "dislike" something.  We get the satisfaction of expressing ourselves but we avoid the dissatisfying position of having to defend them.


The topic of the ways of arguing on the internet is perhaps a subject to take up another time.  The subject at hand is the Occupy Wall Street movement and discourse about it.  Therefore, it is legitimate to ask:  What do I make of this movement?


I suppose that my thoughts on Occupy Wall Street itself continue to evolve.  Perhaps the best way to summarize my thinking now is to list a few questions that I am still pondering and that I might have asked someone in Zuccotti Park last fall:

• Can one be in favor of economic justice without being in favor of certain means of redistribution?
• Does economic justice necessarily require income equality or a greater degree of it?
• What ultimately is economic justice?
• What are the real causes of current income inequality in the English-speaking world?
• Is a significant contention of OWS ultimately one that is not unfamiliar to political philosophy:  that there be equality of outcomes and not simply equality of opportunity?
• If the matter of income inequality, variously defined, has been around (as it has) for decades, why did OWS in late 2011 hit such a cultural nerve so as to move the topic to the center of the national conversation?
• If OWS points to a real statistical fact, namely, the growing gap between the defined rich and poor in the country, is the gap by itself wrong or unjust?  The assumption seems to be that disparity itself is unjust.  But if this is so, why?
• Whether it is a matter of justice or only disparity, how should individuals best understand the situation and therefore address themselves to it?
• Should individuals or society collectively in terms of "the state" first and foremost be the agent(s) who address(es) the situation?
• Why does American society in general seem to have an unequal perspective on some income disparities depending on the profession? (See my earlier post "Mankiw on Rogoff on Lin.")
• Is OWS going to remain a protest movement with no clearly defined agenda or platform or demands (in the vein of Michel Foucault) or a protest movement with a clear, agreed-upon, and articulated goal and proposed means to achieve it (in the vein of Slavoj Žižek)?

I could list more questions, but these seem to be some central and abiding ones.


I remain somewhat unsure about how to assess OWS.  On the one hand, I think that it is probably repackaging in its protests concerns that are not themselves new:  economic justice, class divides, new (utopian) political vision, rectification of the American political process, and greater opportunity for all members of society.  Perhaps the fairest of the sympathetic treatments is a mostly descriptive piece in The Nation by Richard Kim, "The Audacity of Occupy Wall Street."  


On the other hand, OWS occurred at, and perhaps because of, a particular historical moment in the United States for some understandable reasons.  Two of the leading causes, it seems to me, are the following:

1. The United States political apparatus seems exceedingly and maybe increasingly ineffectual.
2. The events surrounding the credit bubble and protracted Great Recession highlighted the presence of economic fragility in both familiar and unfamiliar places.

Varied segments of American society are upset about both #1 and #2.


From my perspective, one can affirm both propositions above but disagree with others about the best means to address them.  Why?  Because people may reasonably disagree about the ultimate nature of the political and economic problems.


For instance, what is the root reason for income disparity that results in some people's having greater economic insecurity than others?  A very good discussion of this complex subject is this interview with MIT professor Daron Acemoglou on income inequality.


Another reason that people may agree about #1 and #2 but disagree about the best means to address them is simply this:  there remain fundamental fissures, even chasms, between how people understand justice and what it requires.


Because these important topics are complex, our reasoning and dialogue about them must be fair to all sides.  Here are some good questions to ask in this respect.

• One question touches on fairness:  "If I summarize another person's view, will that person say back to me, 'Yes; that is precisely what I am saying and meant to say'?"  We must be sympathetic before we can even begin to think about being critical.
• Second, when contending for a position, we may also wish to ask ourselves about avoiding fallacies:  "This point I have just made may be clever and rhetorically powerful, but is it logically valid?"
• A third question pertains to the mode of discussion or argumentation:  "If I dialogue or argue in this way, how am I positively promoting reasoned discourse both in myself and in others?  And am I raising the conversational bar?"

We will be making some progress to practical wisdom and the cultivation of virtue if we keep these things in mind and practice them in our lives.