Empathy and Arguments: Building Something Out of Not Much
Why Anecdotes Aren't Great Evidence, Part 3,257
If you read much Christian commentary online, you may know that R.R. Reno is no stranger to controversy, particularly during this pandemic. If you’re not familiar with Reno, he’s the Editor-in-Chief of First Things, a storied online journal of Christian thought and politics, albeit one which I regularly disagree with. There are good pieces and For the record, it’s not primarily the substance of the journal that generates disagreement: there is some of that, to be sure, but it is increasingly the rhetorical posture which the journal takes which I find both counterproductive to Christian witness, and inimical to careful thought.
Notorious examples abound here, but I’ll stay with Reno, who during the early spikes of the pandemic published a series of Karouac-esque travelogues of his walks through New York, puzzled by the ways in which people were taking this with such gravity, and nearly officious about the ways in which churches were suspending face-to-face services. His tone found a way to be both dismissive, aloof, and pedantic all at once. As a Catholic, Reno has more at stake in terms of face-to-face gathering: it’s not really possible to dispense the body and blood of Christ--the apex of the Mass--online. (For the record, I find it irritating how my fellow Baptists were willing to do it over Zoom with grape juice and Goldfish, but that’s for another time.)
In a piece published yesterday on a church in Calgary which is using vaccine passports for congregants, Reno once again entered the vaccine fray, and for the record, his opening point isn’t wrong: using vaccine passports as a way to demark church attendance assumes that vaccination both a) ensures that a person is free of present infection, and b) creates divisions within churches which are already fractured. The concern for the body of Christ is admirable, but quickly, this anecdote becomes the occasion for making a pretty brazen claim: prudential concern for health are indicative of Christians being disordered in their concerns for bodily safety. Here’s Reno:
Healthism is evident in our society. Exercise is a good thing. But most of us know someone for whom the many hours at the gym feed vanity about her figure or fend off his fears of aging. Or we know someone who suffers from painful, even paralyzing anxieties about getting sick that are out of proportion to any risk or danger.
In a very modest way, again, he’s not wrong. Christians, since the beginning, have proclaimed that there are worse things than dying. But there are two things on display here which run his argument aground. First, Reno’s tone frequently borders on dismissive, by conflating an excess of prudence with some other vice. In other words, yes--it’s extreme to have a vaccine passport, but the problem is an excessive of caution, not an excessive love of the body. By attributing the wrong vice here, Reno comes off unsympathetic and unyielding, trading “true talk” for empathetic listening.
But it’s the second and related problem which I think is more interesting: the mode of argumentation which quickly moves from anecdote to broad spectrum cultural problem. This comes in a variety of forms, but it’s always the same move: one quick story becomes the evidence needed to note a broad cultural problem that we should all be concerned about. Aside from being bad argumentation, it has the effect of simultaneously dissolving whatever is good and needs to be heard in our experiences into just ammunition for the argument you wanted to make anyway.
In this case, Reno uses the anecdote--and I do mean “use”--rather than being curious about the rationale here. In doing so, he commits himself to the first problem, and fails to rightly identify what’s going wrong with the situation. Having done this, he then cuts himself off from being able to talk with his opponents. Only by not having heard his opponents, and thus misidentified them, can he boil them down to a stand-in for a broader cultural argument, paint them as instances of a cultural vice we need to avoid, and keep his standing as the voice of sanity in a pandemic gone wild.
When we make anecdotes into evidence for something we think has gone wrong already, we miss the thing which would not only make for better arguments, but perhaps help us to move beyond the culture wars which, at this point (and probably at most points), are just not worth engaging in.