It has been a while since I read either the Cancelling of the American Mind or the Coddling of the American Mind, so the idea I am trying to articulate may have been covered in one of these two books, and I have simply forgotten it.
My understanding of the concept of rhetorical fortress is that we can label other people as being “right wing” or “socialist” or something else, and safely ignore anything they have to say. In a sense, it is a group form of ad hominem attack.
I see one other phenomenon that I think is also a significant factor in how we view people and news sources, and it comes at bias from the opposite direction. It is survivor bias or what is not there.
Historically I had been liberal in orientation. I am college educated, live in a large city, am not religious, and have an upper middleclass income. My (previous) orientation is predictable. I graduated from college in the early 1980s.
A few years ago, my youngest son came home from college (Madison WI) complaining how woke his collage was. Every topic was a land mine. Woke? Really? My experience was college was a bastion of free speech. What are you talking about kid? Yea, I know college is a little on the liberal side, and Madison more than others, but come on….
A couple things happened to change my view. I retired and had more time to read, and I chose to read broadly. I happened to read the Coddling of the American Mind, many of Thomas Sowell’s books, and Abigail Shirer’s book “Irreversible Damage” among dozens of other books. The picture I got from these sources was different, and more in line with what my son was seeing.
Recently I was talking with several friends about political topics and new sources, and I told them I was far more skeptical now about news sources than I had been in the past. It should have been evident to them, if they were listening, that my previously more liberal views, had changed. They told me that both left leaning and right leaning news sources had some slant, but the right leaning sources were significantly more misleading than left leaning sources. Left leaning news sources were much more honest. They told me that the New York Times, certainly had a liberal opinion page, but the news pages themselves just told the news, no spin.
In some respects, the New York Times does just tell the news, but its political bias is visible if you are looking at both what is there, and what is not there. Part of their bias is what they choose to cover or not cover, and if they do cover a topic, how often. Part of their bias it is what is missing or not emphasized. If you watch Ben Shapiro, he talks about some of the obvious (at least to me) cognitive decline of Joe Biden. I don’t recall the New York Times spending much time pointing this out.
If I had a wall in my house that was 50% red and 50% green, but if I wrote endless stories about the red side of the wall, you might easily assume that the wall was mostly or all red. I would not be lying about the color of the wall, but I would be allowing you to draw the wrong conclusions.
I see this emphasis, or lack of emphasis, playing out in the war in Gaza. Many liberal news sources talk about the deaths happening in Gaza, but don’t talk about some/many of those deaths being Hamas fighters or caused by Hamas. They don’t talk about the terrible things Hamas did on October 7th. They don’t go into any of the history Israel has with its less than friendly neighbors and the stated objectives of Hamas and Iran, i.e. the end of Israel as a state, and the death or removal of all Jews from the area. They allow you to believe that all Hamas wants is to live freely in peace. My friends told me that the tunnels that Hamas had built were there to allow them to sneak food into Gaza from outside sources. This was done because Israel was starving them. Hamas may in fact be moving some food or other supplies around via the tunnels, but the tunnels are really about smuggling weapons into Gaza. Wherever they are getting their news from, it is failing to paint even a remotely accurate picture.
So my friends, and probably me, are dismissing sources because of some rhetorical fortress but we are also failing to be critical at all of the sources or tribe we do listen to.
Substack needs a ‘love’ button because your comment describes the awareness, humility, and open-mindedness each of us needs when consuming news today.
As a humanities faculty in rhetoric/writing courses for the last decade, I can say you speak for so many parents/alumni who initially doubt their kids experienced anything other than their 1980s free speech college experience. I don’t blame you, had i not experienced what I had, I would doubt it myself. But I slowly began to surmise students’ parents thought they were sending their children to the same institutions they had attended 3-4 decades earlier. Most doubt the cancelling dogma of DEI and censorious social justice because it was simply fringe or nonexistent in their time, but it is sadly the professional norm in our time. FIRE and Heterodox Academy efforts to promote free speech and viewpoint diversity demonstrate that in spades.
So, I am documenting how academic journals in my discipline slowly contributed to that seemingly imperceptible yet inhospitable change since the 1970s/80s. This plus the media bifurcation that favors different aspects of the same event (like 10/7 or Biden’s doubted senility now on full display for deniers post-debate) results in us again imperceptibly needlessly talking past each other as you accurately described.
There is another aspect to all of this, both on the left and the right, where the position is 'I don't have to have a proposal about how to address this problem. All I have is my feelings.' Most practical politics, of course, start there and getting together a group of people who are unhappy about problem X is a good first step towards creating a policy for fixing it. The problem is that a great deal of worthless communication goes on where all that is communicated is 'I feel bad' and 'you people are to blame'.
As a practical matter, this means when it comes to discussion and debate it is always a good idea for the people who would like to solve problems to expel the people who just want to wallow in their outrage and hurt feelings. But neither the left nor the right are interested in this message. They both send the people with the right kind of 'lived experience' or 'traditional values' to prevent anybody from considering that the other side might have a few good ideas or made some good points in this disagreement.
If you get to design any more debates, can you try:
Resolved: Your feelings are not you. They are the buttons other people use to manipulate you.
I think that we will need to detach people from their identification with their own feelings before we can make a lot of progress on this front, but I don't think that anybody is interested in this aside from those few who are trying to find meaning in Stoicism and certain forms of Buddhism.
Giving up a life centred on your own feelings appears to be a hard sell.
Great post! Most of the commenters I read online are simply venting emotion and acting out aggressive behavior towards other online people. All of this is easy. Creating solutions to problems is hard work, requires a lot of thinking, willingness to be corrected by self and others, and willingness to compromise. Your idea of expelling all the people who won't participate in problem solving is excellent.
Hi Greg. I think there might be another kind of landmine for 'Right' efficiency - Religious Types. For example, Conservative Christians can quickly stop listening to an idea because 'they are Muslim' - and I suspect vice versa. Just an idea. Stephen Fyson
A really interesting report on this is from Nancey Pearcey's book "Toxic Christianity" (Nancey is a conservative Christian) - she says the research she uses points to 'sincere Christian men' doing well on many social indicators; but 'pretend ones' (the word she uses is 'nominal') do much worse in the social indicators like violence and divorce, etc. Her reasoning is that such men (and I would think Conservative Religious) use the religion for their own means - that is perhaps 'double efficiency' - rejecting others' viewpoints politically and domestically - this may be one step too far, but there may be reasonableness in it. Stephen
Condemagoguery. A term for the purifying ends of both the perfect and efficient fortresses. Using binary positioning and us/them thinking to reveal those insufficiently pure. Each side frantically builds their fortress on ever-shifting linguistic territory where they mistakenly believe there is one pure/true meaning of a word to be mined and owned. All those linguistic lepers who utter ‘incorrect’ meanings are impure and stand condemned…in order to vault the virtue of fortress occupiers even higher.
I am sure these are things covered somewhere in your writings, but let me pull them out again. The fortresses are concerned with how to avoid true argument. The other aspect is how arguments are supported or rejected once some level of dialogue is engaged or necessary.
- One rhetorical device often encountered is: "why do you care?" or "who are you to.." removing focus from the fact of a matter to the personal.
Other devices::
- In a recent interaction between a conservative politician, Nancy Mace, and a democrat witness Maya Wiley, the notorious "what is a woman?" question was raised. and the answer was two fold: one, "a woman is a person who says she is", the second: "and let me just tell you a story..."
The first part has a couple of easy to spot problems for those concerned with defining and addressing issues precisely, and simply asserts a meme. By repetition and from positions of power, memes can replace true investigation. The second, the story (that we did not get to hear) reflects the strategy of achieving persuasion by telling stories, usually ones evoking strong emotions. This of course relates to your 'thinking with your emotions' problem, but the more stories, the more availability heuristics can be tilted.
I keep on coming back to a reflection that such persuasion is utilized to advance a specific ideology (that goes under many names). It depends precisely on assigning truth value at birth to narratives based in specific group identities, excluding others. Once that is accomplished you do not have to rely on shared rules of evidence or "institutions of knowledge". It is a version of your fortress, but enshrined as dogma, not just tribal reflex or defensive move. It gives the dogmatic the sense that they have a better understanding of your position than you do.
Nice work! And very funny. You’ve got the chops to knock the lot of ‘em down a peg across the ideological spectrum. So keep that up - but duck the inevitable flak as needed. You know it’s coming. Meanwhile I think you might have some fun with a board game based on these clever acronyms and ideas. The gameplay goal could be to successfully navigate the perilous terrain and preserve one’s sanity and independence.
Both the woke and the conservative arguments are generally based on "morality" and religious dogma. These arguments cannot be effectively countered by rational debate. Religious beliefs, woke ideology included, are always derived from "revealed Truths" communicated by deities or by "inner true selves." These entities are believed to hold special knowledge that is beyond questioning and critique.
A wise man once said there is nothing new under the sun. All that is going on now in our culture as has always been in all cultures in all times is the reality of whether or not there is a God. Filter all of your ideology through the idea that God exists and it will tell you where you stand. It is so obvious at least to me anyway that the left does not hold to the fact that God exist. for those considering themselves on the right, I will assume for the sake of time that they are Christians or at least theist. Nothing can be solved by rhetoric no matter how precise it might be. As a Christian, I believe the Bible, and that we are living in a fallen world that has been cursed. the curse will not be lifted until the second advent. The purpose of this design of confusion, of course is of God and will ultimately Bring him glory. And by this, I mean that it’s all about him not us. So as I work on my relationship with my far left first cousin, I want to tell her suck it up buttercup, but I don’t. I actually try to get inside of her mind and understand how she reasons, this is not easy to do. It seems your book may help people like me.
Poppycock. If the Right was so effective, you would expect more wins for conservatives The current fiscal undisciplined spending by both parties is the biggest shared sin. Nobody advocates raising taxes or cutting spending because voters still believe they can have their benefits without any concomitant cost. It is madness, $33 Trillion in debt with no end in sight. I bet neither Trump or Biden will opine on this in the debate.
He's talking about the Right being effective at dismissing people and their associated ideas, not their effectiveness at enacting conservative policies.
It is a non-sequitur. If the Right was so good at dismissing people they would win the policy arguments. We don't. Andrew Breitbard always said politics is downstream from culture and the Left controls the cultural dialog. It is always on their terms.
I think you’re right, but I think it could be useful to go into more detail on the first point. A key element of dismissing something on the grounds of “oh, you’re just a liberal” is conflating both different policy areas and different ideological groups with one another. It’s so common and so central to right-wing rhetoric that I’m having trouble to imagine what such rhetoric would look like without it. Some phenomena that the right loves to ignore:
socialists/anti-capitalists who aren’t “woke” and don’t care about identity politics or actively disagree with the progressive mainstream
people who are really woke and invoke identitarian rhetoric all the time but when push comes to shove love the economic status quo, free markets, etc.
The reality that some lefty positions are quite popular among Americans while others aren’t
At the end of the day, the left is probably more factional than the right is, yet critiques of the left often treat it like a monolith. AOC once said something like “in any other country, me and Biden would be in different parties” and she’s in this case right on the money.
It has been a while since I read either the Cancelling of the American Mind or the Coddling of the American Mind, so the idea I am trying to articulate may have been covered in one of these two books, and I have simply forgotten it.
My understanding of the concept of rhetorical fortress is that we can label other people as being “right wing” or “socialist” or something else, and safely ignore anything they have to say. In a sense, it is a group form of ad hominem attack.
I see one other phenomenon that I think is also a significant factor in how we view people and news sources, and it comes at bias from the opposite direction. It is survivor bias or what is not there.
Historically I had been liberal in orientation. I am college educated, live in a large city, am not religious, and have an upper middleclass income. My (previous) orientation is predictable. I graduated from college in the early 1980s.
A few years ago, my youngest son came home from college (Madison WI) complaining how woke his collage was. Every topic was a land mine. Woke? Really? My experience was college was a bastion of free speech. What are you talking about kid? Yea, I know college is a little on the liberal side, and Madison more than others, but come on….
A couple things happened to change my view. I retired and had more time to read, and I chose to read broadly. I happened to read the Coddling of the American Mind, many of Thomas Sowell’s books, and Abigail Shirer’s book “Irreversible Damage” among dozens of other books. The picture I got from these sources was different, and more in line with what my son was seeing.
Recently I was talking with several friends about political topics and new sources, and I told them I was far more skeptical now about news sources than I had been in the past. It should have been evident to them, if they were listening, that my previously more liberal views, had changed. They told me that both left leaning and right leaning news sources had some slant, but the right leaning sources were significantly more misleading than left leaning sources. Left leaning news sources were much more honest. They told me that the New York Times, certainly had a liberal opinion page, but the news pages themselves just told the news, no spin.
In some respects, the New York Times does just tell the news, but its political bias is visible if you are looking at both what is there, and what is not there. Part of their bias is what they choose to cover or not cover, and if they do cover a topic, how often. Part of their bias it is what is missing or not emphasized. If you watch Ben Shapiro, he talks about some of the obvious (at least to me) cognitive decline of Joe Biden. I don’t recall the New York Times spending much time pointing this out.
If I had a wall in my house that was 50% red and 50% green, but if I wrote endless stories about the red side of the wall, you might easily assume that the wall was mostly or all red. I would not be lying about the color of the wall, but I would be allowing you to draw the wrong conclusions.
I see this emphasis, or lack of emphasis, playing out in the war in Gaza. Many liberal news sources talk about the deaths happening in Gaza, but don’t talk about some/many of those deaths being Hamas fighters or caused by Hamas. They don’t talk about the terrible things Hamas did on October 7th. They don’t go into any of the history Israel has with its less than friendly neighbors and the stated objectives of Hamas and Iran, i.e. the end of Israel as a state, and the death or removal of all Jews from the area. They allow you to believe that all Hamas wants is to live freely in peace. My friends told me that the tunnels that Hamas had built were there to allow them to sneak food into Gaza from outside sources. This was done because Israel was starving them. Hamas may in fact be moving some food or other supplies around via the tunnels, but the tunnels are really about smuggling weapons into Gaza. Wherever they are getting their news from, it is failing to paint even a remotely accurate picture.
So my friends, and probably me, are dismissing sources because of some rhetorical fortress but we are also failing to be critical at all of the sources or tribe we do listen to.
Substack needs a ‘love’ button because your comment describes the awareness, humility, and open-mindedness each of us needs when consuming news today.
As a humanities faculty in rhetoric/writing courses for the last decade, I can say you speak for so many parents/alumni who initially doubt their kids experienced anything other than their 1980s free speech college experience. I don’t blame you, had i not experienced what I had, I would doubt it myself. But I slowly began to surmise students’ parents thought they were sending their children to the same institutions they had attended 3-4 decades earlier. Most doubt the cancelling dogma of DEI and censorious social justice because it was simply fringe or nonexistent in their time, but it is sadly the professional norm in our time. FIRE and Heterodox Academy efforts to promote free speech and viewpoint diversity demonstrate that in spades.
So, I am documenting how academic journals in my discipline slowly contributed to that seemingly imperceptible yet inhospitable change since the 1970s/80s. This plus the media bifurcation that favors different aspects of the same event (like 10/7 or Biden’s doubted senility now on full display for deniers post-debate) results in us again imperceptibly needlessly talking past each other as you accurately described.
There is another aspect to all of this, both on the left and the right, where the position is 'I don't have to have a proposal about how to address this problem. All I have is my feelings.' Most practical politics, of course, start there and getting together a group of people who are unhappy about problem X is a good first step towards creating a policy for fixing it. The problem is that a great deal of worthless communication goes on where all that is communicated is 'I feel bad' and 'you people are to blame'.
As a practical matter, this means when it comes to discussion and debate it is always a good idea for the people who would like to solve problems to expel the people who just want to wallow in their outrage and hurt feelings. But neither the left nor the right are interested in this message. They both send the people with the right kind of 'lived experience' or 'traditional values' to prevent anybody from considering that the other side might have a few good ideas or made some good points in this disagreement.
If you get to design any more debates, can you try:
Resolved: Your feelings are not you. They are the buttons other people use to manipulate you.
I think that we will need to detach people from their identification with their own feelings before we can make a lot of progress on this front, but I don't think that anybody is interested in this aside from those few who are trying to find meaning in Stoicism and certain forms of Buddhism.
Giving up a life centred on your own feelings appears to be a hard sell.
Great post! Most of the commenters I read online are simply venting emotion and acting out aggressive behavior towards other online people. All of this is easy. Creating solutions to problems is hard work, requires a lot of thinking, willingness to be corrected by self and others, and willingness to compromise. Your idea of expelling all the people who won't participate in problem solving is excellent.
Hi Greg. I think there might be another kind of landmine for 'Right' efficiency - Religious Types. For example, Conservative Christians can quickly stop listening to an idea because 'they are Muslim' - and I suspect vice versa. Just an idea. Stephen Fyson
Good point. As an atheist since seventh grade, that is definitely something I tend to forget about!
A really interesting report on this is from Nancey Pearcey's book "Toxic Christianity" (Nancey is a conservative Christian) - she says the research she uses points to 'sincere Christian men' doing well on many social indicators; but 'pretend ones' (the word she uses is 'nominal') do much worse in the social indicators like violence and divorce, etc. Her reasoning is that such men (and I would think Conservative Religious) use the religion for their own means - that is perhaps 'double efficiency' - rejecting others' viewpoints politically and domestically - this may be one step too far, but there may be reasonableness in it. Stephen
The True Believers are actually the worst group of people to reason with or dissuade from destructive behaviors towards others.
Are you considering updating the audio book version with the changes for the paperback edition?
Condemagoguery. A term for the purifying ends of both the perfect and efficient fortresses. Using binary positioning and us/them thinking to reveal those insufficiently pure. Each side frantically builds their fortress on ever-shifting linguistic territory where they mistakenly believe there is one pure/true meaning of a word to be mined and owned. All those linguistic lepers who utter ‘incorrect’ meanings are impure and stand condemned…in order to vault the virtue of fortress occupiers even higher.
I am sure these are things covered somewhere in your writings, but let me pull them out again. The fortresses are concerned with how to avoid true argument. The other aspect is how arguments are supported or rejected once some level of dialogue is engaged or necessary.
- One rhetorical device often encountered is: "why do you care?" or "who are you to.." removing focus from the fact of a matter to the personal.
Other devices::
- In a recent interaction between a conservative politician, Nancy Mace, and a democrat witness Maya Wiley, the notorious "what is a woman?" question was raised. and the answer was two fold: one, "a woman is a person who says she is", the second: "and let me just tell you a story..."
The first part has a couple of easy to spot problems for those concerned with defining and addressing issues precisely, and simply asserts a meme. By repetition and from positions of power, memes can replace true investigation. The second, the story (that we did not get to hear) reflects the strategy of achieving persuasion by telling stories, usually ones evoking strong emotions. This of course relates to your 'thinking with your emotions' problem, but the more stories, the more availability heuristics can be tilted.
I keep on coming back to a reflection that such persuasion is utilized to advance a specific ideology (that goes under many names). It depends precisely on assigning truth value at birth to narratives based in specific group identities, excluding others. Once that is accomplished you do not have to rely on shared rules of evidence or "institutions of knowledge". It is a version of your fortress, but enshrined as dogma, not just tribal reflex or defensive move. It gives the dogmatic the sense that they have a better understanding of your position than you do.
Nice work! And very funny. You’ve got the chops to knock the lot of ‘em down a peg across the ideological spectrum. So keep that up - but duck the inevitable flak as needed. You know it’s coming. Meanwhile I think you might have some fun with a board game based on these clever acronyms and ideas. The gameplay goal could be to successfully navigate the perilous terrain and preserve one’s sanity and independence.
Both the woke and the conservative arguments are generally based on "morality" and religious dogma. These arguments cannot be effectively countered by rational debate. Religious beliefs, woke ideology included, are always derived from "revealed Truths" communicated by deities or by "inner true selves." These entities are believed to hold special knowledge that is beyond questioning and critique.
A wise man once said there is nothing new under the sun. All that is going on now in our culture as has always been in all cultures in all times is the reality of whether or not there is a God. Filter all of your ideology through the idea that God exists and it will tell you where you stand. It is so obvious at least to me anyway that the left does not hold to the fact that God exist. for those considering themselves on the right, I will assume for the sake of time that they are Christians or at least theist. Nothing can be solved by rhetoric no matter how precise it might be. As a Christian, I believe the Bible, and that we are living in a fallen world that has been cursed. the curse will not be lifted until the second advent. The purpose of this design of confusion, of course is of God and will ultimately Bring him glory. And by this, I mean that it’s all about him not us. So as I work on my relationship with my far left first cousin, I want to tell her suck it up buttercup, but I don’t. I actually try to get inside of her mind and understand how she reasons, this is not easy to do. It seems your book may help people like me.
Poppycock. If the Right was so effective, you would expect more wins for conservatives The current fiscal undisciplined spending by both parties is the biggest shared sin. Nobody advocates raising taxes or cutting spending because voters still believe they can have their benefits without any concomitant cost. It is madness, $33 Trillion in debt with no end in sight. I bet neither Trump or Biden will opine on this in the debate.
He's talking about the Right being effective at dismissing people and their associated ideas, not their effectiveness at enacting conservative policies.
It is a non-sequitur. If the Right was so good at dismissing people they would win the policy arguments. We don't. Andrew Breitbard always said politics is downstream from culture and the Left controls the cultural dialog. It is always on their terms.
"If the Right was so good at dismissing people they would win the policy arguments."
This is like saying, "If the Right was so good at sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting 'la la la', they would win the policy arguments."
If you want to post silly arguments try Reddit. Otherwise, adios.
I think you’re right, but I think it could be useful to go into more detail on the first point. A key element of dismissing something on the grounds of “oh, you’re just a liberal” is conflating both different policy areas and different ideological groups with one another. It’s so common and so central to right-wing rhetoric that I’m having trouble to imagine what such rhetoric would look like without it. Some phenomena that the right loves to ignore:
socialists/anti-capitalists who aren’t “woke” and don’t care about identity politics or actively disagree with the progressive mainstream
people who are really woke and invoke identitarian rhetoric all the time but when push comes to shove love the economic status quo, free markets, etc.
The reality that some lefty positions are quite popular among Americans while others aren’t
At the end of the day, the left is probably more factional than the right is, yet critiques of the left often treat it like a monolith. AOC once said something like “in any other country, me and Biden would be in different parties” and she’s in this case right on the money.