Let’s play a game of “I totally was going to say it when I had time, but someone already got around to it, and said it better anyways.” In this case, it’s Daniel at Crooked Timber, on the Super-Freakonomics climate denialist bust-up that happened this week:
The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.
Yep, that’s about the size of it. For me, the big story here isn’t that the new Freakonomics book has a bunch of stuff in it that wasn’t particularly well researched and is there more for shock value than strong evidence. I’ve been reading the Freakonomics blog for a while now and the mixture of smug economic rational choice contortionism and smarmy contrarian dodginess is pretty common there. It’s worth putting up with because about one in four posts are actually pretty fascinating, but that’s precisely the stuff that was least likely to go into the new book.
No, the real story is the way it demonstrates the general ridiculousness which is contrarianism these days.
It’s a little rich to act like you’re telling truth to power and bucking trends when the crux of your argument is that we should just go on doing exactly what major economic movers and shakers want. And then there’s the Slate thing where you act like you’re a rebel because you brazenly accuse both sides of every single issue of being misleading. The subtext, of course, is that since the truth is always at the precise midpoint between any two positions, we should probably just keep on doing what we’re doing.
I’m exaggerating of course, but it does sometimes seem like there are only two types of argument that are allowed to appear on a public stage these days: 1) deliberate exaggeration of things that most people already wish were true in order to confirm what we expect, but in such a radical, cool way that it seems edgy. 2) a ‘pox on both houses’ style that suggests the impossibility of making actual firm judgments about important issues.
(I don’t even want to get into the recent Slate article suggesting that Creed is actually a good band. I have a friend who declared them the kings of suck-core back when they were big in the 90s and nothing since then has changed my opinion one iota. I’m far more willing to listen to the “Sarah Palin punched Putin’s big head when he rose over Alaska and thus is qualified to have her own personal nuclear arsenal” theory than an apology for Creed.)
Anyways, what is truly aggravating about all this is the way that those who make purely political arguments (made in a particular way in clear-eyed awareness of the way that subtext and connotations will help them sell, sell, sell) immediately fall back into this sense of victimhood – where the true villain is the ‘tone’ of arguments.
I’m not saying tone doesn’t matter. When you have people arguing in good faith, there are few things more damaging to legitimate debate than the intrusion of an antagonistic and angry tone. But when you have people attempting to manipulate other people to make a buck…
[End rambling]
While I’m on the subject of argument though (and given the 40th anniversary of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), how about a nice video for a palate cleanser: