Application

Now that it looks like we know who the two candidates/contenders/interlocutors will be for this November’s election, it’s time to start applying some of the ideas that have appeared on this blog over the last several months to actual political content (speeches, advertisements and the like).  So next up will be a bit of critical thinking analysis of one of the candidate’s stump speeches.

But before we go there I should point out that, unlike last election’s Undecidedman blog, this exercise is purely about using something we all have in common (a national election) to teach, learn about and apply various critical thinking skills.  The goal is not to come to a conclusion on which candidate to vote for, but to use one of the few experiences we all share as Americans to study a topic that struggles to find a home in traditional educational settings.

I mention this because one of the most important things you need to do to engage in this kind of activity is to embrace a Principle of Charity which requires you to actually take both sides in a political contest seriously. 

This is far easier said than done in a poll-tested and media-driven political age when political campaigns are informed far more by advertising and marketing techniques (branding – both positive and negative, targeted communications, demographic-driven decision-making) than by analysis of actual people or issues. 

As noted previously, most of us have pre-sorted ourselves into communities where genuine political disagreement is considered peculiar or profoundly uncomfortable.  And within these communities, we carefully filter our input, leveraging new technologies (notably cable or satellite TV and the Internet) to stream ourselves a steady diet of opinions we already agree with, coupled with pre-digested invective against those we don’t like.  Even the current affairs shelf of the bookstore (if you’re lucky enough to live near one) groan under the weight of ghost-written tomes by professional partisans who treat voters as market segments to be sold into.

More sinisterly, this same type of targeted marketing is the cornerstone of most professional campaigns.  To take one example, because I signed up on one of the candidate web sites during the last election, I ended up on the mailing list for one of the party’s congressional campaign committees who send me a steady stream of e-mails declaring that only I can stop the unceasing evil of the opposing party by writing an ongoing series of requested checks.  The notion that I would be appalled by such a transparent (and pathos-driven) appeal is irrelevant to the e-mail marketers sending out this spam since, as far as they’re concerned, I’m simply one of the millions of people who sit outside their anticipated 1.5% “hit rate.”

But to actually immerse yourself in a genuine political debate requires you to start with the Principle of Charity assumption that both candidates are reasonable and dedicated men who have things to say, arguments to present, and a genuine dedication to doing the right thing for the country.  Now even with this assumption as a starting point, we will likely find one candidate’s vision more compelling or their argument better presented than the other.  And since we need to make some decision as November rolls around, we will eventually need to choose a side in order to place our vote.

The alternative (especially if you knew years or decades ago how you would vote in this election, regardless of who the candidates are) is to spend the next 6-7 months creating justifications for a decision that’s already been made and calling that political deliberation.  This is actually the easiest option which both candidates (and their scientifically managed campaigns) fully support, so long as you do your thing in a state they can take for granted, allowing them to focus their resources and attention elsewhere (i.e., ignore you). 

The downside of such an approach is that it leaves you totally irrelevant as a political actor, letting you hole up in a sorted community, trading news about your preferred candidate’s virtues (or, more frequently, the vices and weirdness of his opponent) with the like-minded and awaiting orders from on high regarding where to send your money (since your vote is already taken for granted). 

The Principle of Charity offers an alternative (but equally simple) filtering mechanism.  For example, would Romney supporters be freaked out if their candidate spent his childhood abroad and was the product of elite American universities (as was Obama)?  If not, then this is not a genuine issue.  Similarly, are Obama supporters as curious about the hijinks their candidates participated in during his youth as they are regarding Romney’s high school behavior?  If not, this too can be put aside as we treat both candidates (and ourselves) as adults ready to use our full freedom (including freedom of thought) to make an informed decision – the most important one we will all make this year.

Principle of Charity

The last two posts highlighted the two-edged problems associated with bias. On the one hand, bias is within us and all around us (in various forms) and we must always be careful to be aware of it, account for it and not succumb to it when analyzing information and making decisions. At the same time, dwelling on our own or other people’s biases can lead to endless navel gazing, paralysis and (most important for the issue being discussed on this blog) an argumentative dead end about the most important issues we should be discussing and debating.

Complex challenges such as this can often be mitigated through the application of a bit of “folk wisdom,” vs. ruthlessly logical proofs. And philosophy offers us something that can serve this role in the “Principle of Charity.”

This “Principle of Charity” requires participants in debate to extend certain “benefits of the doubt” to one another. One manifestation of this principle would be to consider and engage with the strongest interpretation of an opponent’s arguments. In a detailed discussion of this principle, the philosopher Nigel Warburton uses this example to illustrate the concept:

“… in a debate about animal welfare, a speaker might state that all animals should be given equal rights. One response to this would be that that would be absurd, because it would be nonsensical, for example, to give giraffes the right to vote and own property since they would not understand either concept. A more charitable approach would be to interpret the claim ‘All animals should have equal rights’ as being a shorthand for ‘All animals should have equal rights of protection from harm’ and then to address that.”

Of course, the Principle of Charity does not (and should not) be automatically applied to every argument and every debater. Assuming the best of a proponent of perpetual motion machines or conspiracy theories, for example, could lend legitimacy to arguments which are, on their face, simply bad or mendacious, requiring no further interpretation generous or otherwise. At the same time, much of our political debate could be made much calmer and more illuminating with a healthy dose of this Principle.

For example, if we were to apply the Principle of Charity to next year’s presidential contest, the first thing we would have to do would be to take the candidates at their word that their primary motivation for running for President is their love for America and their desire to contribute to improving it. While it is possible that one or both of next year’s Presidential candidates are Manchurian in nature, secretly planning to turn the country over to its enemies or transform us into a plutocracy, we are likely to get a better understanding of the candidates and the issues if we start with the charitable (and, likely, more accurate) position that the primary motivations for these candidates are positive.

This principle is similar to other concepts, such as Christ’s Golden Rule or Aristotle’s Golden Mean in preventing our own biases from overwhelming our judgment through a healthy application of balance and open mindedness.

To take one small example, we recently had a brief political dustup in my home state between the two likely candidates for Senator next year: one male, one female. In this instance, one of the candidates had posed for fashion photos in their youth which led the other candidate to joke that they “didn’t need to take [their] cloths off to get through college,” to which the other candidate replied “Thank God.”

Now this could have been interpreted as light political banter between rivals (hardly Churchillian in its wit, but still humorous). But instead it became the subject of accusation and counter-accusation of sexism vs. snobbery. And if you knew which candidate belonged to which gender and party, you can pretty much guess on which side most partisans landed in this debate.

But what if you didn’t know who was who? If you find yourself withholding your outrage until you find out which party each quipper belonged to, more than likely this is not a genuine issue but rather a matter of political theatrics which provides little insight into anything other than our own biases. How much simpler to just apply the Principle of Charity and assume this exchange to be nothing more than some light hearted back-and-forthing between rivals that pretty much means nothing, then moving onto matters more worthy of discussion and debate.

In addition to the benefits this principle brings to prioritization (a key requirement for critical thinking), it also has an emotional upside. For unlike the partisan thinker who spends an entire election cycle in a perpetual rage against the behavior of their political foes, those that subscribe to the Principle of Charity can ride out an election cycle feeling pretty good about themselves and their country, even as they grapple with the difficult matter of how to make it better.

The Return of Undecidedman

This is actually the second time I’ve blogged on the subject of critical thinking and US elections, although I didn’t realize that this is what I was doing the last time around.

You see, four years ago I was getting set to cast a party-line vote, just as I had always done (for the same candidate most of my friends and family were voting for). But then I noticed something happening to my kids (who were 8 and 5 at the time). They too were getting swept up in the “mania” surrounding one of the two candidates for President, and were expressing their enthusiasm by mimicking the unquestioning behavior of their parents and most of the adults around them, treating anyone considering any other decision with ridicule and disdain.

This triggered memories of years spent in Washington, DC with a group of partisan friends who had trained their children to denigrate detested members of the other party, kids who could be called upon to sneer at their parents political bogeymen like trained seals. While amusing at the time, I was not prepared to let my children start their political life unexposed to anyone who was not prepared to consider more than one political option. And so I decided to become an undecided voter.

This decision came at a time when the undecided voter was making news, and for good reason. For while the results of the last election seemed inevitable on Election Eve, right up to that point if you added the statistically undecided vote to the vote assured by either candidate, the race still seemed up for grabs. And so a fevered rush was on to convince these undecideds and when that didn’t seem to create an assured result, cajoling of undecideds turned to ridicule and wrath.

In my case, undecidedness was a chosen (and somewhat artificial) identity that I used to alert my kids (and the rest of my family) that at least one person they knew was planning to think about whom to vote for until the last possible second. And a short-lived (and now-defunct) blog I created (called Undecidedman) was the place where I publically explored different issues and weighted each candidate until finally making my choice on Election Day.

Looking back, many of the critical thinking concepts (notably the Principle of Charity) we will be exploring during this election cycle were the foundation of that blog. And while the site gathered a small but stable following (some fellow undecided, some the aforementioned critics of anyone who had not made up their mind), it was the reaction of those closest to me that I found most interesting.

For while they were prepared to support this somewhat-eccentric project, it clearly disturbed them that someone in their midst was not acting in a politically predictable way. Some suspected this was an elaborate effort to justify switching parties, and it took until after election fever had worn off for many of them to somewhat “get” the point of what I was doing.

Looking back, this reaction makes perfect sense. For the period during which Undecidedman was up was the homestretch to Election Day in which all choices save one had already been made. In such a context, why shouldn’t someone who was still thinking things through be seen as either wishy-washy or weird?

Which gets back to the reasons why this project is starting so early in the election cycle. For, as noted previously, we are now in a period when more than one choice and more than one outcome are clearly possible. The candidate for one party has yet to be chosen, and even now one can imagine various possibilities for change in the entire makeup of the election, such as the emergence of a viable third-party candidate (something we have seen in recent memory).

Because people, by nature, like to think of themselves as open- and broad-minded, imagination thus becomes an effective component of critical thinking. For if you can imagine multiple possibilities then you are open to thinking about them. And while we will surely be seeing and talking about the closing of people’s minds to multiple options as the number of possibilities begins to shrink and we head into head-to-head electioneering between assured candidates, for now even the most partisan voter has a stake in maintaining their own artificial identity as an undecided voter.

And who did I end up voting for after the whole Undecidedman exercise ran its course? I’ll let you know next week as we explore (and this writer admits to) the all-important concept of bias.