Jonas Doerr – Opinion Columnist
What would happen if someone accepted everything they were told for a day?
They would do pretty well in class. If they absorbed all of the information they heard, passing an exam wouldn’t be too hard. And in most social interactions, they would do just fine. Assuming people are lying isn’t a great way to keep friends around.
But things might get a little riskier if someone tried to persuade this hypothetical person. Every advertisement they saw would seem completely right. Soon they’d be convinced how amazing working for DoorDash is, that Miller Lite is much better than Michelob Ultra, and that Geico really can save you 15% or more on car insurance.
It would get even worse if shady people caught on. It would be too easy to convince that person to believe extremist politics, bully innocent people, and even commit crimes. Any argument would do.
Yet society is becoming more and more like this hypothetical situation. Avalanches of advertisements try to convince everyone to stop thinking too hard about what to buy and to listen to a celebrity. Internet forums convince people that entire other groups of people are inferior. And social media platforms are feeding users more and more polarized content from charismatic influencers.
Everyone is being flooded with arguments, but what does society do to prepare them for that? From a young age, kids learn that arguing is wrong. It’s better to get along with friends than to make a scene. Disagreeing with a teacher is often punished.
This continues through high school. It’s better to keep one’s head down during class rather than to stir the pot and challenge someone else. The cool kids don’t argue in high school.
In college, it’s much the same. Instead of debating ideas with people who disagree, people stay away from them. In class discussions, people tend to agree with each other. At the first sign of disagreement, someone usually backs down immediately.
What is this lack of arguing doing? It’s making people worse at making good arguments and more susceptible to bad arguments.
Without practice, people will not learn how to properly structure a verbal argument. Thinking on the fly is not an innate skill that some people have and some don’t. It’s a skill that’s honed by hours of practice, and if schools aren’t teaching kids to think on their feet, they won’t learn how. Instead, children learn how to spend hours writing out their ideas, confining their thoughts to the stifling cage of a page.
Without arguments, people also cannot learn how to avoid and spot fallacies. There are dozens of types of fallacies, and they are used all the time.
There’s the ad hominem attack: “He’s an awful person, so why should we listen to what he has to say?” It’s true that character is a good indicator of whether someone should be trusted, but attacking someone only deflects attention away from the point they were making. Many political ads do this; attacking candidates’ character instead of addressing the main issues of the election.
Another fallacy is the straw man argument, where someone distorts the opposition’s view to make it easier to rip apart. It’s often prefaced with “So you’re saying that…” followed by something they weren’t really saying. This sometimes happens, for example, in the debate over abortion, where each side accuses the other of either hating women or wanting to kill babies. Yet neither side would define themselves that way.
Perhaps the most common fallacy right now is the appeal to authority, in which someone uses an expert or a source to back up a claim, but the source is not actually relevant or accurate. It’s easy to add a link or share a post on social media or on blogs, but many people online offer advice on topics outside their expertise. It’s easy to use quotations or videos from people who are spreading misinformation.
None of these fallacies are easy to notice, at first. It takes some practice analyzing arguments to see through these common deceptions. But if people cannot see through them, they will be taken in by ads and videos that manipulate the truth.
We need to start arguing more. Most people will not learn how to spot fallacies and craft strong verbal arguments on their own, because it’s uncomfortable and a little weird to start arguments in normal conversations.
Instead, we need to create environments for healthy debate. It should begin in the classroom. One class I have spends full class periods encouraging students to discuss and debate relevant issues. However, most discussions in classes I have taken fall far short of a debate. Instead, most discussions consist of students inputting whatever thought popped into their heads or agreeing with someone else.
Classes need to implement debate into the structure of their courses. Replace one or two papers or an exam with debates. A debate still requires studying; an unprepared debater will not last long. And a debate will force students to consider both sides of an argument and rapidly adjust to a versatile opponent. A static, written paper cannot do that.
The world of work is constantly changing. Every argument in the workplace is in response to another, like a conversation. We must start training Gustavus students to fluently speak in that conversation, starting by arguing more.