How to Think About Social Issues: Tips 23-24

23. Ad Hominem attacks do not advance intellectual arguments:

            When you are considering a thinker’s argument, you should always focus your intellectual energy and critical thinking on the thinker’s ideas instead of on the life or personality traits of the thinker himself. Even if the thinker happens to be a serial killer, if he articulated an idea that, considered on its own, seems to be a very good one, the fact that the thinker is a serial killer should do nothing to discredit that idea. Of course, one might question how many brilliant ideas serial killers will come up with, given their day job, but that is another question entirely.

            

           The intellectuals most notorious for dedicating themselves to attempting to discredit ideas via Ad Hominem attacks are the Marxists. Indeed, this has become of the central tenets of their school of thought. Marxists claim that society is divided into antagonistic social classes and that for every period of history, one of these social classes is the dominant one. As the ruling class, they build up a ‘superstructure’ of ideas that legitimises their dominant position in society. Since economics developed as a separate and sophisticated area of scientific inquiry in the late 18th and 19^th centuries, the era of capitalism dominated by the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capital-owning’ classes, the economic theories they developed were automatically considered to be apologies for the dominance of the ‘bourgeois’ classes. By discrediting economists as ‘sycophants of the bourgeoisie’, Marxists spared themselves the necessity of actually entering into a serious intellectual critique of these economists’ theories and ideas in order to make their point. Instead, all economic ideas up to that point, except those penned by Marx and his followers who of course wrote in the spirit of the ‘working’ classes, were deemed irrelevant by the Marxists because they were written by members of the bourgeois classes, in the interests of the bourgeois classes.

            

           Intellectually, this ploy does not have any merit. The social class backgrounds of all the great thinkers of history and the ‘interests’ they were supposedly representing could all be ‘unmasked’, but does that mean that all their ideas are worthless? The implications are absurd. However, it is true that non-intellectual motives such as who was patronizing their work, where they stood in their society, etc… could well have influenced the thinking of these writers. How then do we decide which of the ideas of these thinkers we should retain and which we should discard? The answer is: by subjecting them to the test of reason, the test of empirical confirmation, or both of these tests. In other words, by evaluating the ideas as ideas.

            

           Besides the Marxists, there are many others who use different variants of the ad hominem attack strategy. If a white male criticizes affirmative action policies, his ideas are sometimes disregarded because he is ‘privileged’ and ‘does not understand’ the plight of people whom affirmative action is supposed to help. It should be clear though that if his whiteness or maleness is impacting his proper reasoning on this issue, the supporter of affirmative action should be able to point out the flaws in his reasoning and thus discredit his ideas in that way. Attacking the thinker is of no avail because either his idea makes sense or it does not. If it does not, engage in a scientific debate with him. If it does, then pointing out that the originator of the idea is white or male does nothing to make it a worse idea. If the disagreement is a valuational one, then simply explain to him your own valuations of the ends that are pursued with affirmative action policies and try to bring him around to your way of thinking.

            

           Another example is trying to discredit the ideas of a thinker because the thinker is ‘inexperienced’. Perhaps the thinker is younger, or has not been in the business world for as long, or has not visited as many foreign countries as his intellectual opponent. Simply pointing out this fact does not constitute an argument though. In order to make it such, the ‘more experienced’ disputant should explain how his particular experience serves to refute the argument of his opponent or supports his own argument. In this way, the one disputant’s experience serves as just another intellectual weapon in his arsenal of empirical knowledge on the subject. It definitely does not, though, serve as an intellectual trump card that confirms that everything the ‘more experienced’ disputant says is true while everything the ‘less experienced’ disputant says is false.

           

           Ad hominem attacks are intellectually meaningless and do nothing to advance an argument. While investigating the biographical details of a thinker may be interesting for an intellectual historian, such details can never automatically discredit the ideas of that thinker. Ideas must be combated with other ideas, not with personal attacks.

24. Old ideas are not necessarily obsolete ideas:

            It is a common myth that new ideas are always better than old ideas. In the natural sciences, the myth is not as destructive because it is easier to see when a new idea is an ‘advance’ based on the material manifestations of the idea when the new theory is applied. Thus, either a new idea can lead to the creation of telephones or television sets or not, and any layman can see the material results of such an idea. In the social sciences though, the superiority of some ideas over others is not as evident to the layman. For one, in the social sciences, in order for someone to appreciate a new idea as an ‘advance’, they must understand the idea and the argumentation behind it. As mentioned earlier, knowledge of just the hard facts of history does not immediately translate into knowledge of which ideas on social questions were better than others. This is because history has so many complex, non-isolatable variables operating on it that it is almost impossible to isolate the social policies pursued by government as variables and assess these policies based on historical statistics alone. The layman observer does not need to understand the complexities of astrophysics in order to understand when an advance in that field led to the building of a better rocket ship. By contrast, in the social sciences, the observer must understand the theoretical framework of the science in question in order to decide for himself when a new idea is an advance or not.

Secondly, valuational disputes tend to play a bigger role in the social sciences. Most would agree that the ability to create safer cars or faster internet connections are good things, but whether an increase in general economic efficiency at the expense of some egalitarianism is considered a good thing or not depends on the valuator.

For these reasons, by and large, new innovations in the natural sciences do, on average at least, tend to represent advances over older ideas, and thus the myth that new ideas are necessarily better than old ones is not as destructive in these sciences. In the social sciences though, because familiarity with the science in question and a fair amount of critical thinking is necessary in order to determine when a new idea or policy recommendation is an ‘advance’ or a ‘retrogression’ in the science and because of more subjectivity in judging social policies and ideas, the myth is deadly and must be rejected.

For example, a common argument one hears against returning to a monetary system based on a gold standard goes like this: ‘The gold standard was the monetary system of the 19^th century. In the 20^th century though, every country in the world, aided by advances in monetary theory, realized that a fiat paper money system was much more satisfactory. Returning to these outdated, 19^th century monetary ideas in the 21^st century is out of the question, we must advance, not retrogress.’ This is really no argument at all though. A supporter of the gold standard could argue that while there were many advances in the 20^th century in terms of technology and standard of living, there was no advance and in fact a retrogression in monetary theory and monetary systems, accounting for persistent problems of inflation and business cycles in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. One does not have to advocate for a return 19^th century transportation techniques (horse-and-buggies) in order to advocate for a return to 19^th century monetary techniques (the gold standard). It is entirely possible that while there were advances in transportation technology, there were also retrogressions in monetary systems and ideas. Though historical periods can only be compared by taking ‘the whole package’ of economic, social, political, and technological and comparing that to the ‘whole package’ of another historical period, the social thinker is, thankfully, under no necessity of either advocating for one ‘whole package’ or the other. He can pick and choose based on deductive reasoning, perhaps aided by some empirical studies, and his own valuations, which policies or ideas represent ‘advances’ and which ‘retrogressions’.

Thus, don’t be afraid to support ‘old’ ideas if you think they are more correct than ‘new’ ideas. In the social sciences especially, ‘old’ does not necessarily mean ‘obsolete’.