Argument  

Fruitless Controversies

by Stephen Cox

Argument: A logical presentation of facts and data that utterly convinces the person who presents it.

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My father had many good qualities, but one of them was not a tolerance for argument. He didn't mind expressions of opinion. Sometimes he expressed an opinion of his own. But at the first sign of argument, no matter how reasoned, restrained, and amicable the argument might be, he began to exhibit strong signs of anxiety. Soon anxiety became alarm, and he said, in an agitated voice, "Well, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" That was the signal for controversy to cease.

I don't know which medieval thinkers, if any, used to debate the choreography of the seraphim, but from my father's perspective they were just doing what all arguers do — endangering domestic peace with contentions that can't possibly bear fruit.

I believe it was partly because of my father's opposition to argument that I grew up with a strong bias in its favor. I remember astonishing a friend, who had dared to proffer some kind of opinion about something, by telling him, "There are six reasons why you're wrong," then reciting the reasons, one by one, with appropriate subheads, corollaries, and illustrations. After that, my friend didn't speak to me for quite a while.

Being a libertarian added a lot to my argumentative spirit. I had two college friends who were radically opposed to each other in style of conversation. I'll call them Smite and Umble. Umble was quiet, introspective, disinclined to argument. Smite was aggressive and pugnacious, never tempted to let any matter drop. I was in the room, one day, when Umble called the personnel office of a local business to find out whether he'd gotten a job he'd been applying for. He was told, politely but firmly, that another person had been hired. "Well," he said, wistfully replacing the receiver, "I didn't get the job. Of course, if I were Smite, the conversation would just be getting started."

Libertarians are like that. We can't resist a chance to argue. We're no better at resisting it than the guy who reaches down to grab the dollar bill he sees lying on the pavement, not noticing that it's attached by wires to the bucketful of water teetering on the nearest window ledge. The only difference is that a libertarian wouldn't mind getting drenched. That would merely provide a happy occasion for arguing about whose property the water had now become.

Be that as it may, after spending five or six intellectual epochs as an aggressively argumentative libertarian, I began to wonder whether all the controversial steam was actually driving any pistons. I already sensed that my attitude was changing when I attended a libertarian conclave in Ann Arbor. I was sitting with Bill Bradford, the publisher of this journal, when a resolution was introduced and debated. It was intended to summarize the political philosophy of the assembled throng, and it contained about a million articles. One of them, devoted (as I recall) to denouncing Keynesian economic policies, observed that "you can't fight reality." The phrase incited passionate dispute. Speakers rose from every section of the auditorium, 50% of them asserting that the phrase was correct, because the true principles of economics ("reality") will always doom the state's attempts to circumvent ("fight") them, the other 50% maintaining that because any struggle against reality is itself a part of reality, the phrase about fighting reality was meaningless. All of them were armed with big sheaves of notes, which they kept beating against the microphone, like warriors pounding their spears against their shields. Thus armed, they were prepared to fight about "reality" till the cows came home. Bill and I weren't so well equipped. We started giggling, and when more serious people turned around in their seats and glared at us, we fled the room.

But if you don't want to argue about "reality," what do you want to argue about?

Perhaps you could argue about who really "discovered" America. There is always a big market for arguments in that field. Maybe it was the Indians, although that sort of undermines their status as native Americans, doesn't it? Also, it wasn't exactly "America" that they "discovered." They thought it was only a big island off the coast of Siberia — or they would have thought that, if they'd had any concept of "Siberia," which they didn't. The same problem arises when you talk about Norsemen discovering Nova Scotia and Columbus discovering San Salvador. They didn't know what they'd "discovered," either. So maybe Columbus just "encountered" America, as the political puritans want to put it. Maybe he was just playing around with stuff that other people had already discovered, or walked on, or whatever. But where will this logic lead me? People have fallen in love for a thousand generations, but does that mean I have to say that I was 19 years old when I first encountered romance?

We can argue about all that, although the more you look at it, the less consequential it seems to be. Or perhaps we can take up "selfishness," a subject that libertarians have been masticating during the past six or seven decades, ever since Ayn Rand first suggested that selfishness is a virtue. She didn't mean it's a good idea to shove other people's faces in the dirt. She meant that you should respect your own individuality, your own capacity for reason, your own ability to make up your mind about what's good for you. She thought that "selfishness" might even prompt you to give your life for a cause that expressed your "highest values." In this regard, she wasn't very far from some versions of Christianity. Be that as it may, not everyone was convinced.

The philosophical attack on Rand proceeded in this way: Suppose that someone constantly defers to other people, conforms to the crowd in every conceivable way. He may seem "unselfish," but isn't he doing what he chooses to do, wants to do under the circumstances? Isn't he serving his own values? Isn't he fundamentally just as "selfish" as Howard Roark? So it's meaningless for Rand to exhort people to be "selfish"; we are all inevitably selfish, all the time.

Claim and counterclaim; and at this point, I submit, the controversy should have stopped, because this is the place where anyone with any imagination can see all the arguments that are likely to take shape on either side. Like the problems of "reality" and "discovery," the problem of "selfishness" is completely transparent. If you use "self" to mean something like "one's highest self," there's nothing paradoxical or redundant in Rand's praise of "selfishness." Not everyone lives up to his or her highest self. But if you define "self" in a less restrictive way, then she's simply wasting her breath; everyone has a self and acts in accordance with its choices. And that's the end of the philosophic story.

Curiously, though, the fact that you can see right to the bottom of a controversy doesn't mean that everyone will say, "Oh, I get it now," and move on to some other topic of conversation. The still, transparent waters just invite more people to jump into the pool. They see the argument — half of it, anyway — so clearly that they feel impelled to make the dive. They can't resist. They know the truth, and they must tell others about it.

The Deserts of Dispute are dotted with pools like this. The biggest one at present is the controversy about whether Islam is "a religion of peace" or "a religion of war." Here is a subject that everyone can discuss. True, few people in the West have read the Koran or possess any facts about Islamic history, and few people in the East are capable of anything like an objective, critical relationship to such matters. But don't worry about that. Anyone is free to assert, in the most uncompromising manner, either that Islam is a tolerant and pacific faith or that Islam is an intolerant and belligerent one. And everyone will be right. It's a religion of peace if you define it in such and such a way, a religion of war if you define it in such and such another way. This controversy can continue indefinitely, so long as no one feels a need for specific evidence about how to define such a large thing as a world religion.

Yet although it's natural to assume that controversy diminishes when evidence is found, the opposite is often the case. Many fruitless controversies thrive on evidence. They are hardy perennials, always ready to be revived by any "new fact" announced in the spring book lists; but they are fruitless nonetheless.

Some of them are deformed by over-pruning, at least on one side. I'm thinking, for instance, of the arguments about whether Oswald killed Kennedy and whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The people who foment these controversies try to promote a luxuriant growth of evidence on the "no" branches by hacking off all the established facts on the "yes" branches. In a way, this works. If you ignore the fact that the "innocent" Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to assassinate a right-wing general and succeeded in assassinating a Dallas cop, you can talk forever about such things as the properties of bullets, the arrangement of motorcades, the alleged fakery of the Zapruder film, and everything else that distracts attention from Lee Harvey Oswald. And if you ignore the fact that none of the alternative "Shakespeares" had anything like the talent necessary to write his plays, then any new evidence of their celebrity and of his obscurity in 16th-century England can be made to seem very telling indeed. But you're still a long way from a fruitful argument.

Unpruned facts are often just as disappointing. Virtually all arguments about the military history of the American Civil War are crippled by an unlimited supply of facts. These arguments generally start with a commonly accepted opinion. It appears, for example, that General A foolishly ordered an attack on General B's well defended center, thereby losing the battle of C, and therefore, possibly, the war itself. Then somebody discovers Document D, which reveals that General A had received a summary of secret intelligence from Major E, who assured him that General B had weakened his center by redeploying most of his troops to the right, in a belated attempt to turn General A's left flank. The intelligence was false, but how was General A to know that when he ordered his bold assault on the center? He now looks less like an idiot and more like a tragically mistaken hero.

But wait! Still more evidence turns up. A long-neglected letter shows that Major E, whose record was, or should have been, well known to General A, had been criticized on two prior occasions for purveying faulty intelligence. Now General A is in the doghouse again. Only a fool would have relied on the word of the mendacious Major E, and General A was that fool. Then fresh news comes hastening from the front. It's the newly discovered diary of Corporal F, 2nd Indiana Infantry, which discloses that Major E was not the sole source of the misleading intelligence. The other source was . . . Shall I go on? For all we know, the discovery of relevant facts will continue forever. This is what produces everyone's eerie sense that the Civil War is still being fought.

Many non-military controversies cannot be settled either, because there are too many plausible though inconclusive ways of settling them. Samuel Johnson was thinking of this kind of controversy when he mentioned a poem whose "true meaning is so uncertain and remote that it is never sought because it cannot be known when it is found." Even in literary landscapes as well trodden as the Divine Comedy one can find a lot of metaphors that can be explained in any number of ways. Critics sometimes say that these symbols are "rich" with meaning — and that's just the problem.

Yet (popular opinion to the contrary) fruitless controversy of this sort is much less common in literature than it is in other fields. A good author knows many ways of making sure that readers come to the right conclusions about his work. If you wonder how to tell the good people from the bad people in King Lear, you haven't been paying much attention to the play; Shakespeare provided plenty of signs to help us interpret the motives of his characters. But in daily life, not to mention the study of history, the signs of motivation are not so artistically arranged. At least they don't seem that way. From the available evidence, I can make a plausible case that Richard Nixon failed to burn the incriminating tapes (A) out of arrogance, (B) out of fear that burning them would make things worse for him politically, (C) out of a misguided notion that the tapes were the ultimate proof that he was innocent and well-intentioned, (D) out of a sincere respect for the tapes as historical records, (E) out of all four motives. One of these interpretations must be correct — but how do we know which one?

And the mysteries of our own motivations are often far more mysterious than Nixon's. Sex is always the best example. I am very skeptical about the idea that homosexual attraction, for instance, can be explained by any theory about genetics. But assume that someone finally does prove that it's something about DNA that makes Adam like Steve better than he likes Eve. Big deal. Does that explain why Adam isn't equally attracted to David and Jonathan? Or why Jonathan becomes attractive to him only when he's wearing tennis shoes? Or why he never even noticed David before he got that ultra-short haircut? And those are only the warm-up questions. I haven't mentioned any of the fruitless arguments that we can entertain about why people are attracted to the intellectual and emotional qualities of their would-be mates, or why those sterling qualities often appear so much less sterling immediately after the sex act is completed. You may think you know. Why, then, are you still performing experiments?

But to return. Some controversies are fruitless because they have already been settled to the satisfaction of any mind that is competent to consider them. There is no point in arguing about the validity of the labor theory of value (it's false), the authenticity of the Vinland Map (it's a fake), or the usefulness of the Aristotelian laws of thought (you can't think without them). And some controversies are fruitless because there is no way for competent minds to settle them. Consider, for example:

• The Lizzie Borden Case. Who done it? Yes, it's possible to think of ways in which Lizzie might have axed her father to death, then taken the same approach to her stepmother, without getting a speck of blood on her own clothes. And it's possible to think of ways in which another person might have done it, then escaped into a closely built neighborhood, glaring with sunlight, thick with prying eyes, and failed to attract even the slightest suspicion. Given the nature of the evidence, however, it's just as easy to believe that the parents committed suicide.
• The mystery of the Mary Celeste, the ship that, on December 4, 1872, was discovered sailing across the North Atlantic without anyone on board. Pirates? Mutiny? Bad weather? A sudden panic caused by some hint that the ship was about to capsize? There isn't enough evidence to establish any of the plausible solutions, although there is enough evidence to keep people writing books. Every new version of the story tells us more things we do not know. It has now been learned that we don't even know why the boat was named the Mary Celeste.
• The mystery of the Ark of the Covenant. What happened to it? Was it in the temple at Jerusalem when the Babylonians looted it? If it was, did they take it with them? And what happened then? I'm prepared to testify that I don't have it — although the ark was pretty small, and I do have a way of losing things that I want to save.
• The disappearance of Judge Crater. No one knows what became of him. We do know that if, one night, you walk out on a New York street and vanish, "Judge Crater" is a perfect name for you. It is also poetically appropriate that Judge Crater should have vanished after buying one ticket for a comedy called "Dancing Partners." What Partner did he have in mind?
• The treasure of Oak Island. Is there something buried on the low little island off the coast of Nova Scotia? The evidence demonstrates that this must be true. No, no, the evidence demonstrates that this can't be true.
• The meaning of Revelation 13:18. According to the principles of numerology, "666" may mean "Nero." It may also mean "Harry Potter."
• The secession problem. Did the South have a legal right to leave the union? Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, published two volumes of arguments showing that it did. "Can any proposition within the domain of reason be clearer?" he asked. Yes, I suppose there can be, considering the library of arguments assembled on the other side. The truth seems to be that the Founding Fathers couldn't agree on a constitution, and get it ratified, if it either excluded or included the right of secession. Now where does that leave the "legal" arguments?
• The true meaning of the "full faith and credit" clause. If gay people get married in Massachusetts, is Utah constitutionally bound to consider them married? The answer is Yes, if you want to think so; and No, if you don't. When the Supreme Court "decides" this issue, the answers will remain exactly the same.
• The Manchurian press conference. Do politicians really believe the things they say? No, that would be impossible. But how could they lie all the time, and still maintain their self-respect? So it's impossible that they don't believe their own propaganda. Yet as Pontius Pilate said, "What is self-respect?" Pilate appears to have been a successful politician.

Naturally, we can argue about any of these topics, just as we can argue about whether our memories are reports of a genuine past or whether (to cite Bertrand Russell's bright idea) the universe was created only a second ago, with all our memories in it. We can engage in any number of fruitless arguments. And the realization that we can always keep on arguing has itself produced some of the world's most fruitless and debilitating arguments, such as the argument for deconstruction, which holds that we can never reach a "foundation" of determinate and reliable meanings because any meaning we posit can always be the source of further arguments.

You've probably detected the fallacy in this determinate (not to say dogmatic) denial of the possibility of determinate meanings. Still, serious people, especially serious young people, are often unsettled by the idea that there is no end of argument, no literally unquestionable "proof" of the basic realities of our lives. This concept fills the deconstructionists with a gleeful sense of their power to disrupt and destroy. It fills ingenuous young seekers with the dreadful sense that nothing means anything.

Their anxiety involves an interesting paradox. On the one hand, they assume that argument is the final test of truth; on the other hand, they assume that the very possibility of argument is a sign that truth cannot be found. Both assumptions give argument a lot more credit than it deserves. Even Hume, the greatest of philosophical skeptics, and one of the greatest of all arguers, lamented the fact that "there is no virtue or moral duty but what may, with facility, be refined away, if we indulge a false philosophy in sifting and scrutinizing it, by every captious rule of logic, in every light or position in which it may be placed." When we do that, argument becomes the enemy of human life.

What Hume is saying is that argument is not the same as reasoning, or having common sense, and that everyone has enough common sense and reason to arrive at sound conclusions about such fundamental matters as duty and virtue. No visits to the sophists are required. As Hume notes in other places, over-conscientious arguers may be paralyzed by doubts about the final "warrants" of reality, but they still have perfect confidence in the way things work in daily life. They are perfectly convinced that axe heads won't float and that murder is wrong — until they ask themselves how they would prove these things beyond the shadow of any doubt. Then they despair about the ultimate "foundations." It's easy to see that they are not engaged so much in an argument about philosophy as in an inconclusive and perpetual argument between the practical and the metaphysical sides of their own temperament.

Such are the fruitless controversies to which the intelligent and the scrupulous succumb. More common, down here on earth, are arguments that go nowhere, not because there are too many or too few facts, or because someone doesn't trust the usefulness of facts, but because the arguers didn't bother to look for facts to begin with.

A couple of months ago I was lucky enough to have my radio on when a delightfully absurd moment occurred in a talk show hosted by Walter Williams. Williams, who is an African-American, was maintaining that the Constitution is not a "living document," to be given new meanings by successive generations of judges. The courts, he said, should interpret the Constitution as it was written by the founders. A (white) person called in to object. What did Williams think, he demanded, about the fact that slavery had been abolished by court decisions that reinterpreted the constitution so as to agree with the judges' own opinions? "Why, what court decisions do you mean?" Williams asked. "Oh," the caller said, "the Dred Scott decision." Williams had to tell him that the Dred Scott decision was famous for upholding slavery.

If you think that the caller's argument was unusually ridiculous, just press the next person with whom you argue for the specific facts on which he bases his claims. It is very probable that you will win that argument. There weren't any specific facts. But the argument, though concluded in your favor, will be as fruitless as any other, because your opponent won't pay any attention. He'll just go on to some other baseless set of claims, not minding his failure to convert you the first time around.

You might think that people who cared enough to try to get you to accept their views would also care enough to dig out the facts. But if arguments existed principally to change people's minds, nine out of ten arguments would never happen. I have a friend who constantly emails me articles ridiculing my ideas about religion and politics, prefacing the forwarded material with snide comments of his own. He sometimes sends me three or four of these messages a day. I used to reply, advising him that if he wanted to change my mind, this wasn't the best way to do it. He apologized, then immediately went back to doing what he'd done before. Gradually I realized that conversion is not his purpose. He knows perfectly well that I won't change. He also knows that I like him very much and am very unlikely to get angry with him, no matter what messages he forwards to me. So, whenever he has the opportunity to express his feelings, he happily presses the "send" button, and off goes another insulting post. It does no harm to me, and it seems to do a lot for his sense of intellectual superiority.

I am aware that some arguments are disinterested attempts to find the truth and communicate it. This spring, naturalists announced that the ivory-billed woodpecker, long considered extinct, had been discovered living and working somewhere in the sloughs of Arkansas. A few months later, a group of scientists wrote a paper disputing the claim: not enough evidence, they said. Then, in response to their arguments, more evidence was released. The critics considered it and withdrew their paper. Now, that was a fruitful controversy.

It is perfectly possible to debate in this way — calmly, clearly, without indulging in any of the evasions and logical fallacies that we normally use to score points in the great sport of arguing. The subject need not be ivory-billed woodpeckers. We can argue rationally with Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, or the next-door neighbor. We can even debate honestly and fairly with ourselves. During a normal day, normal persons may change their minds a hundred times, as they find new information or reflect on past mistakes. Very few will keep driving down Main Street after they discover that they can save 20 minutes by taking the bypass.

But when controversy touches any issue that bears in any way on a person's identity — and there are so many of those issues — the dispute quickly reduces itself to one simple question: Shall I change myself or affirm myself? That's easy: affirm myself, of course! The vast majority of arguments are purely matters of self-affirmation. We argue, not to convince anyone else, but to show who we are. In the words of Artie Ziff, a bit-player on "The Simpsons," "I would stop, but I love my voice."

I encountered a nicer but more feckless way of putting this a few years ago, at a conference where I sat on a panel (an odd image, when you think of it) that was supposed to give career advice to libertarian college students. A question arose about whether you should announce that you are a libertarian when you submit your application materials for grad school. "No!" I said. "Why tell them things like that? If anybody cares, he'll care enough to veto your admission." The students' reaction was precisely the opposite. Some believed that they were "morally bound" to report their views. Others said they thought that education throve on controversy, so why conceal one's controversial ideas?

What has gone wrong here? I wondered. Why should these people insist on starting a controversy, right off the bat, with a bunch of academics they don't even know? How many professors at Harvard or Yale are going to be converted to libertarianism by anything a student says? And if the purpose is not to convert them, why bring the whole thing up? Why, why? The answer, of course, is simply that the students were proud of their beliefs and wanted to express them, no matter what. And, needless to say, my arguments, which simply expressed my own concern with the practical aspects of professional life (i.e., getting a degree and making money), made no impression whatever on the idealistic young men and women.

I had no reason to be upset. They were expressing their opinion; I was expressing mine. If I had seriously attempted to convert them, it would still have been mainly an effort of self-expression. That's what most attempts at conversion are.

It's hard to think of anything that seems more aimed at conversion than the behavior of street evangelists, Mormon missionaries, and the guys with shaved heads who accost you in train stations. Many people resent any such public attempt to change their ideas. They consider it an unprovoked invasion of their space. It makes them angry; it makes them want to call the cops. But conversion is only the evangelists' ostensible purpose. If they really wanted to convert you, they wouldn't be yelling at you on a street corner or sidling up to you in the ticket line to ask if you were worried about "world conditions." They would know that this approach is exceedingly unlikely to bear fruit. But they don't care. Their true purpose is to dramatize themselves, to advertise their self-regard as religious persons. Jesus was talking about them when he condemned the Pharisees, who "for a show make long prayers" (Luke 20:47). But as with any other show, you're free to pass the Pharisees by without comment or retaliation. They're really not thinking about you anyway.

"How easily," says La Rochefoucauld, "we believe whatever we would like to." If evangelizing in an obnoxious way has become part of your identity as a Christian, a devotee of Krishna, a conservative Republican, an environmentalist, or (but no, that would be impossible) a libertarian, you are pretty likely to keep on doing it and believing that it works, whether it works or not. And if you spent your time predicting that the world would end in 1996, today you are likely to be preaching that the world will end in 2006, and thinking that somehow you were right both times.

Good news isn't good for people who aren't prepared to receive it. One of my best friends preaches the gospel of economic gloom, believing that the cost of everything is always going up, that it's harder to live now than it ever was before, et cetera. I've spent a lot of foolish hours handing her statistics about the rise in our standard of living, the accumulation of wealth by the middle class, the dwindling proportion of income that Americans spend on basics and the growing proportion that they spend on luxuries. Nothing makes any impression. Every cycle of statistics ends with her pointing to a phone bill or a receipt for ground round and saying in an agonized voice, "How can you think that we're doing so well when you look at prices like that?!" Confronted with the choice of feeling better about her life or worse about her viewpoint, she goes with the viewpoint every time.

When it finally dawned on me that virtually all "argument" is simply self-expression, I felt that I had begun a new phase of my existence. I admit that I continued to feel the instinctive response of Homo sapiens to people with opposing ideas: the hot flash of outrage against invasion of my intellectual terrain, the determination to show my opponents just how stupid they were, the chagrin accompanying the recognition that they might know something I didn't, the joy of transcending all such acknowledgments of reality with repeated assertions of my own ideas. But I no longer felt the burden of pretending that my real intention was to enlighten and convince. It wasn't. And I saw that it wasn't for other people, either.

This zenlike realization did not tempt me to reject controversy, in the way my father did, as a distressing waste of time. Argument remained a spectacle worth viewing, sometimes worth joining, and at all times worth learning from. I saw that even the generation of "philosophers" (Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and so forth) who tried to liberate themselves from the law of contradiction were doing just what they claimed to be doing — providing an education for the rest of us. They just weren't providing the kind of education that they thought they were. Actually, they were showing what happens when people mistake words for ideas, arguments for insights. They were showing how not to think. Considered in this way, the dead branch budded; their fruitless chatter became fruitful for me. "If others had not been foolish," William Blake reflected, "we should be so."

And ironically, some self-expressive arguments really can change people's minds, if the self-expression is interesting in itself. If you saw a street preacher devoutly singing a fine old hymn, as street preachers used to do, you would think better about his message than you would if he were screeching pseudo-biblical slogans. America, the world's most Christian nation, has a long tradition of admiring atheists and free-thinkers, people who, like Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, Harold Frederic, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken, were remarkable for their exuberant wit and humor, freely exercised at the expense of Christianity. Their readers may not have been converted — and it's not clear, in the case of some of those authors, what the readers would have been converted to — but they did learn to see things from a different viewpoint.

It's possible that no one ever really changes, that "change" simply means becoming more like yourself. In any event, if people alter their opinions, it's not so much because they're attracted by good arguments as because they're attracted by good arguers, people who show them what they could be if they only had more wit, or fervor, or learning, or even logic than they now possess. When they take the hint and try to develop those qualities in themselves, their opinions may change accordingly.

This is the way in which minority movements in thought are sustained from generation to generation. Mainstream movements don't require a lot of arguments to support them. If they did, there wouldn't be an admirer of the New Deal left in America. But the unsanctioned, non-endowed minority needs to express itself vividly if it wants to remain alive. The radical libertarian movement was kept alive by a few people — Mencken, Rand, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, others — whose determinedly individual styles of argument attracted other individuals and encouraged them to check their logic and their facts, and act up to the conclusions that followed. Should libertarianism ever become the nation's authorized philosophy, people like that will still be needed, to keep the mainstream flowing.

The key word is "individual." You can argue from the assumed authority of some privileged class or majority tendency and, perhaps, succeed in inspiriting the people who already agree with you. I hear almost daily from friends and colleagues who read the New York Times and believe that there's something great and new in every issue. So what? When they folded the paper, they had exactly the same views that they had when they unfolded it, views indistinguishable from those of everyone else in their demographic group. If you want to change people's ideas, you need to dislodge them from their demographic and allow them to see themselves as individuals. But if your arguments don't project your own individuality, and do it in an interesting way, there's nothing for them to latch onto.

After President Reagan made his "evil empire" speech, Henry Steele Commager, a leading huckster in the history trade, said it was "the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all." This was an extraordinarily feeble attack. For one thing, Commager's words were patently false. No sensible person could believe that even a senior professor of history had read all those speeches, or that Reagan's speech was indisputably the worst among thousands. But making all possible allowance for the hyperbole that Commager probably thought would individuate his statement, one notices a bigger problem: Who is this Professor Commager, anyhow? He talks like an authority, but his remarks don't make him look like anyone who deserves it. What if he did read those speeches? Didn't he have anything else to do? One pictures him hanging out in the faculty club, sucking a pipe and making superior remarks about Benjamin Harrison's second State of the Union address — a sniffy old spokesman for the brahmin caste. The "I" did nothing for his argument.

Mencken, by contrast, didn't need to use any "I" when he defined democracy as the idea that "the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." He relied on the iconoclastic force of the statement itself, its intrinsic proof that its author was an individual, beholden to no caste or class or accepted ism. He left it to his readers to accept or reject what he said, knowing that his boldly careless expression of his ideas had the best chance of attracting them, and pleasing himself.

Some arguers do become notable because they operate within a movement and are so strongly identified with it that the movement and the person seem inconceivable apart from each other. Socialist ideas, which were very widespread in the 19th century, were bound to find an encyclopedic advocate at some time. It happened to be Karl Marx, who had a special talent for expressing the socialists' anger and hatred, while supplying a dogmatic and mystical authority for these emotions. Yet Marx was such a bad arguer that generations of commentators have found lifetime occupations trying to force his thoughts into some kind of sensible relationship to the world outside. And there have been Marxist "scholars" who never managed to read a whole chapter of "Das Kapital." Louis Althusser, esteemed the greatest Marxist of his time, speaks of "a few passages of Marx which I had studied closely."

But the appeal of most thinkers — I'm not counting cultural dignitaries whose only claim on one's attention is the possibility that their works will appear on the final exam — starts with the reader's interest and pleasure in their approach to argument, not in the outline of the arguments themselves. Johnson's philosophy survives in his aphorisms, Voltaire's in his satires, Jefferson's very largely in his personal correspondence. None is known for a great work of systematic thought. What gives life to their propositions, which are often the merest common sense, is the fact that nobody else could have expressed them in the way they did. As for systematic philosophers, Jefferson was right to credit Hume's "fascinating style" and Plato's "elegance" of "diction" for making people enthusiastic about their ideas (ideas that he considered pernicious). Their arguments, he thought, wouldn't have gotten very far if the reader's sense of beauty hadn't been enlisted on their side.

I'm not saying that if you can't express yourself like Plato or Hume, Mencken or Jefferson, you ought to give up arguing. I am saying that the best arguments, as well as the worst, are assertions of self. The better this is understood, and the more vigorously arguers rise to the challenge of honest self-expression, the more chance of fruitful controversy there will be. And if it's not fruitful, it may at least be entertaining.

Those are all the arguments about argument that I have for today. If you're not convinced, at least I've expressed myself.

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