“Calm Down Rosa Luxemburg!”

Wit and education only give a bad argument the gloss of authority. The quote of the title comes from a criticism of the women’s rights campaigner Maryam Namazie. In the middle of an exchange on Twitter, concerning women’s rights in the Islamic world, @CordobaRises was reduced to this lofty slumming. It serves as an interesting example of the two, lowest ranks of argument; ranks of argument in a hierarchy that no amount of erudition can obscure. If you address the premise of an argument directly you get promoted to the top of the scale; if you bypass the premise and aim for the person, you are arguing from the gutter.

There is an argument that engages you, infuriates you, troubles you. There is also the person or group making the argument. The two form a unit in your mind so that the ‘message’ and the ‘messenger’ are hard to distinguish. When facing an engaging, infuriating, troubling person our whole personality is enlisted and the argument becomes more an emotional battle than a battle of ideas. We feel the need to win this battle because our basic survival attitudes are activated; we are not debating we are fighting; we are not in our minds but in our bodies. We become the Blefuscu Big-Endians or the Lilliput Little-Endians of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ who war and enslave because of an arcane, theological dispute over dietary law. There is an emotional escalation in which the argument descends the scale – from idea to person.

How do we address the idea and not the person? Here is a proposition: Leprechauns exist. Now immediately we know that the person making this statement is a sad, deluded fool who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. Actually we don’t know that, what we know is our emotional reaction to something that sounds so ridiculous – and we express it as a criticism of the person, not the proposition. A claim such as leprechauns existing has the burden of proof and requires evidence. If someone turns up with a video of a group of disgruntled leprechauns complaining about the constant shoemaking and the compulsory wearing of green, then we don’t have a deluded fool we have a scientist. But of course the chances of such a video are next to zero and we are justified in dismissing the claim from the beginning.

If we disagree that there are leprechauns, we can express our disagreement in one of five levels of argument:

1. Refutation. “There is no evidence for leprechauns”
2. Counterargument. “Your evidence is as scant as a leprechaun’s beard”
3. Argument Tone. “Even a leprechaun wouldn’t be that unreasonable”
4. Ad Hominem. “You only believe in leprechauns because you’re trying to sell me this red wig”
5. Name Calling. “Your mother’s a leprechaun”

You can see from the @CordobaRises comment “Calm down Rosa Luxemburg” that far from being sophisticated rhetoric it is actually at the bottom of the pile. It is ‘ad hominem’ in not addressing the argument but the person, and it is ‘name calling’ even if that name is Rosa Luxemburg. I actually tweeted this point to @CordobaRises who’s response was to tell me I had spelt ‘Luxembourg’ (sic) wrong – again ‘ad hominem’. Of course, the aim of this controlled, aggressive comment was to denigrate Maryam Namazie’s feminism and her communism and provoke a similar level of aggressive response.

You might think it fine to provoke low-level response and to name call – a House of Commons debate is full of MPs who obviously think so – but the actual result is a lowering of the debate to common denominators. It is not long before the argument is polarised and each side is hurling extreme criticisms at each other. Eventually all such arguments end in Godwin’s Law: “You are a Nazi”. At this point everyone should realise they have hit the basement and should stop descending – unless the other team really are Nazis!

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“Calm Down Rosa Luxemburg!”

165 thoughts on ““Calm Down Rosa Luxemburg!””