I'm not good at arguments. I'm very Midwestern, and as Garrison Keillor once said, to Midwesterners, arguments mean bitterness. Arguments make me worry that I'll come across like a jerk, so I usually avoid them. And if I do successfully have a real argument, I never fully recover from it, because some part of me always assumes that the other person carry it with him/her forever and secretly hate me.
I recognize that this is not a healthy way of thinking. And I'm trying to move past it, especially since I secretly love arguments. Or at least, I must, because those few times when I'm in them, it's extremely invigorating. And often, when I'm bored, I make up arguments.
They're usually political ones, these days at least. I'll overhear something on the radio or see some insane user comment after an online news story (word to the wise: Never look at user comments after online news stories, unless you want a life of bitterness), and then my mind will yearn to construct an argument against that person. And then, of course, when the person hears that argument, he/she will immediately see the wisdom of it, change permanently, and then the whole wide world will change, no one will ever use such terrible reasoning again, and we'll all join hands and teach the world to sing and have a Coke.
And that's a big part of why arguments unsettle me -- because I know that arguments are almost always either futile or downright counterproductive. Most people, when they argue, want to reinforce what they already believe, and force the other person to agree. And the other person wants the same thing. Almost no one argues as a way of exchanging ideas and refining their views. For most people, it's either a matter of shutting down some jerk, or, if they have clearly been shut down, finding someway to rescue their egos by telling themselves that the other person is just a jerk who can't understand and blah blah blah..
I feel like it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be such an ego-driven thing, like it's some sort of primitive battle for supremacy. Maybe if it were more like sports it could work better.
Granted, sports are basically just a primitive battle for supremacy, a complex game of king of the hill. I want to knock you off that hill, and will put all my talents and energies towards doing so. You will fight to death to remain king of the hill. Is the hill really worth all this effort? Well, not exactly -- it's just a hill. But wait, it actually is worth it, because lots of people want it. Therefore it's hard to get, and getting it proves your ability. Doesn't really matter if the hill has anything useful for survival -- it's valuable because lots of people have decided to assign value to it.
A lot of things in life are like this (it must be said -- a lot of things that men typically dominate in life are like this). But the great thing about sports is that there are scores and rules. There is some objective measure of success in it all. If you touch home plate after running around the bases, you have a run. The other side has to accept that you got one over on them. They will then use that experience to improve their approach. That's progress, of a kind I seldom see with arguments.
So arguments need rules if they are to ever accomplish anything. Here are a few that I think would be useful:
No "I know you are but what am I" arguments: This is where you say that Bob has behaved horribly, and Bob shoots back with "Oh yeah, well, what about that orphan you slapped last year!" Then you end up trying to defend your orphan-slapping fetish. And Bob ends up deflecting the argument, and the focus goes away from the whole point, which is Bob's horrible behavior.
I think arguments should always have to stick to the issue at hand, regardless of what other issues might be out there. And if you try to deflect the argument to someone else's problems, you automatically lose, regardless of how bad the other person's problems are.
The "I know you are but what am I" arguments are of course rampant in ordinary conversation, but they also come up in politics. It more takes the form of "This coming from the Democrats, who voted to legalize orphan-slapping last year" ... well, maybe they did. And we can discuss that later. But that's not the issue at hand. And by trying to change the subject using the "I know you are but what am I" gambit, you just admitted your own guilt.
No "grumpy old man" arguments: Grumpy old men are packed with arguments. Almost all of them are about how things nowadays aren't as good as they were when they were young. It really doesn't matter what we're talking about -- music, politics, community values, bowling venues, etc., etc. -- you can always be sure that a grumpy old man will tell you that it was all better in the old days, and whatever problems exist nowadays are due to getting away from the values he had as a kid.
This argument is almost always a load of crap. First of all, we all look on our youth with rose-colored glasses. We always remember the good things better than we remember the bad things -- if we didn't, all of us would probably be depressives.
And we tend to misremember a lot of things because they don't fit into our narrative. Ask any old conservative whether people worked harder in the 1950s, and I bet you anything he would say of course, that people then understood the value of a full day's work and etc. Never mind that people now work many more hours did they did then, with much higher productivity rates.
Secondly, the thing about youth is that you're sheltered from a lot of the bad stuff, because you were a kid. Maybe you remember a community of wonderful helpful neighbors, of the kind you just don't see any more in this age of email and cell phones and fax machines and etc., etc. But maybe you didn't know about the crazy alcoholic child abuser in that one house you always passed by but never thought about.
Thirdly, this argument usually comes from people who have not kept up with a changing society. They can't understand the new things, because they're too afraid to try them. They've found a basic formula for life that has given them some stability, and so anything new and different is seen as a potential threat to all that. So of course, it's not their fault that they can't work Twitter -- it's the world's fault. Because.... um ... let's see, how can it not be my fault ... well, it's that people aren't writing letters any more, because in my day people took the time to really get to know each other and blah blah blah.
No "slippery slope" arguments: Any change that someone doesn't like can be framed as a slippery slope to some catastrophic future. Obamacare is a slippery slope to socialism. Gay marriage is a slippery slope to people marrying dogs. (That was actually Rick Santorum's argument for a while.)
It's always a load of crap. It assumes that people have no control over what happens to them, that events must happen, against everyone's wills, along some trajectory that you pull out of your ass. Gay marriage won't lead to people marrying dogs, because we will not legalize people marrying dogs. The trajectory itself is nonsense, of course. But even if it weren't, you forget that future generations have the power to decide what to allow and what not to allow. If some lunatic says that he should be able to marry his dog because marriage has changed, we'll all say, no you won't.
That's all the rules I have so far. And I haven't even come up with a scoring system. Ugh, this is going to be a lot of work. Maybe I'll just try shouting instead.
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