Movable claims

I get tickled when I spot patterns of reasoning that transfer neatly between political opponents. The example I've carried around for years is, "Banning it will just drive it underground." What's the first objection to any gun control law? "If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns." How about restrictions on abortion? "All prohibiting abortion will do is drive women to back-alley quacks or coat hangers." What strikes me about this is, the reasoning seems compelling to them on their pet issue, but it stops making sense as their feelings change. Why distrust a ban in one case, but think it's a constructive move in the other? Why is it that people who make the defiance/driving underground argument on the one issue don't thereby cultivate at least some recognition of its force in the other?

So this morning, I noticed another one: "Teach the controversy." That's the line taken these days by a certain stripe of politically active Christian on the question of what ought to be taught in high school biology classes. They realize they've lost the fight on outright creation science, so instead they argue that teaching evolution as though it's an undisturbed consensus is misleading, and instead educators ought to teach the controversy. Don't just stick to the scientifically-developed precepts of evolution through natural selection; instead, introduce objections to those findings alongside them, and leave students to sort out what they believe. But I remember reading James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and I followed the textbook wars in Texas, which was and is one of the primary national battlegrounds for culture clashes in K-12 curriculum, and on that subject, as with gun control vs. abortion, the arguments are neatly flipped: the right wingers want to teach a stable, pseudo-consensus view of history, and their opponents want to "teach the controversy" by including such disturbances as marginalized voices, unflattering accounts of the nation's founders, and stories about American war crimes. Here again, people will argue "Teach the controversy" on one issue, and "We've got the truth, so why contaminate it with nonsense?" on the other, and flip back and forth between those moves without any apparent internalization of their premises.

People are funny. And politics is not about good reasons. Political argument is very much kabuki theater. The forces that settle political disputes have very little to do with anything said for public consumption: the public arguments are engineered to lay on a veneer of deliberation, but the deliberation actually makes no difference. It reminds me of Milli Vanilli, who danced around and appeared to sing, but really had nothing to do with the production of their music. It also reminds me, as I wrote a while back and worked into my rhetoric class, of placebos, in the sense that many patients somehow manage to overcome their symptoms and right themselves in response to the appearance of medical intervention that actually isn't in any way bioactive.

And it seems to be the way of the world. Now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.