If You Want to Beat Bad Arguments, You Need to Get Ready to Wait
Emotivism, Bureaucracy, and Two Versions of A Springsteen Song
We live in a world characterized by a lack of reasonable debate and bureaucracy, meaning that reason never stands much of a chance. Until it does. Some assistance from Bruce Springsteen. Ordinarily, these pieces are paywalled.
Emotivist Arguments and Bureaucracy: Twins From Birth
In his classic After Virtue, Alisdair MacIntyre offers an account of how moral reasoning has fallen into disrepair. It’s a book worth working through slowly at some point in your life, if only because so many of the things he talked about in 1981 have been proven to be true1.
In Chapter Two, he discusses emotivism, a form of moral argumentation which is “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments , and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.2” You can sum up the critique as something like “This is wrong” really means “I don’t like this.” Examples of this kind of argumentation should be abundantly clear to us3.
But emotivism’s effect has a long tail, according to MacIntyre, and adopting it as a cultural presumption has consequences. The payoff to this comes in two ways:
It produces interminable moral debate. If debates over rightness and wrongness are ultimately just expressions of a person’s emotional sensibilities, then there is no true common ground for discussion. The roots are inaccessible to me, and ultimately, can’t be resolved insofar as I only have access to your reasons, which are after the fact justifications for sentiments.
It can be resolved only by force. If reason cannot adjudicate our disagreements, then it also cannot give guidance to the passions necessary to sustain disagreement. MacIntyre takes the key feature of emotivist discourse is not to persuade a person of the errors of their thinking, but to “align the attitudes, feelings, preference and choices of another with its own.4” Whereas rational discourse presumes that my gut instinct about something may be wrong, emotivism takes these intuitions to be apt and thus defensible. There’s no convincing you of how I feel: there is only making you feel as I do.
**
The version of force which MacIntyre presumes here is one which is not limited to physical violence, but expands now into rhetorical means and importantly, structural forms to mediate the disagreements. Rhetorical means in moral arguments of this kind are done to the emotions of the hearer into line, bypassing reason and going straight for the gut intuitions.
This is bad, and not just because it diminishes people as reasoning beings, and forces us to take the cheap shortcut of “the heart has its reasons”. This kind of reasoning begins quickly to affect the contexts within which these debates take place. These debates never take place in zero-stakes situations, but within situations in which our economic, political, and social relation to others is bound up with our moral disagreements, and disagreement of the emotivist kind—because moral positions are ones which we feel deeply—will have ramifications.
If we have disagreements, then, and it’s largely in an emotivist form, I’m disagreeing not just with an idea but with you. And when I disagree with you in a particular context—be it job, church, or online space, it will have social, economic, and political ramifications. The public spaces begin to wobble, no longer places which can accomodate these differences, but begin to be themselves characterized by emotivist reasoning. For how we argue in public, the consequences are pretty staggering: personal anecdotes now take the place of conceptual disagreement5, and public statements of ethics are now calibrated in terms of what causes more or less emotional harm6.
But they also come with a very unexpected side-effect: the rise of bureaucratic forms of life.
It may seem bonkers that bureaucracy would be the social form which accompanies a world which has gone all in on emotivist reasoning, but hear him out. The rise of emotivism as a dominant form of argument means that we then need a new class of people capable of cultivating and maintaining that kind of world: the aesthete (one concerned with cultivating appearances-as-identities), the manager (one concerned with providing some semblance of order in an otherwise chaotic world, and the therapist (one concerned with helping bring order into the self).
Of these three, only the manager deals in public life: people telling you how your identity relates to others (the aesthete), and those concerned with helping provide order to private lives (the therapist) deal with predominately the relational or private life. Only the manager is concerned with holding this unruly mess together. Bureaucracy may seem a weird match for an emotivist world, except that bureaucracy bears the same kind of marks as emotivism:
Bureaucracy does not pretend to be rational. In one sense, bureaucracy offers a rational account of operations: this is how to do things most efficiently. But the logic for this kind of efficiency versus another is obscured from view: it exists as an algorithim which few have access to, and even those who have access to it may not entirely understand.
Bureaucracy operates by force, not reason. If you don’t fill out the paperwork, you don’t get the treats. Them’s the rules. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the police department, the HR department, insurance companies, or committees at church: there are rules and outside those rules, there are only the exceptions which the inscrutable bureaucracy determines are acceptable.
The formal characteristics aside, bureaucratic cultures exist to manage difference, and so, it presumes that you are an expressivist individual. It makes no assumptions that you are similar to your neighbors, but actually that you are very much unlike your neighbor, and it is only formal, unviolatable rules that bind us together.
As
astutely observes, for bureaucracy to deliver on its promise, it has to be totalizing. We could identify any number of sub-bureaucracies, minor principalities—social media, educational systems, even governments— but the one which seems to lay claim to this possibility is the ubiquitous form of commerce. The case would take too long to lay out here, but I’ve done it in brief elsewhere (with a rejoinder from ). Say what you will: how we think about internal goods of a particular place do not exist apart from how we think about trade—which means that commerce is the tail wagging the dog.Or for our purposes here, the constant crush of goods that we need to sustain our lives is the thing which functions as the Ur-Bureaucracy. In the contemporary scene, one doesn’t have to go full Marxist to insist that our ability to be expressivist is largely a function of how much self-expression we can pay for7.
To put all this together: bureaucracy becomes the shadow twin of an emotivist culture. It becomes the white knight to rescue us from the chaos of a culture which has lost its common language, appeals to rational debate, and the like—and has the gall to be honest about it: what is needed, by bureaucracy’s lights, is not deliberation, but a clear rule which coincides with the right form.
And as MacIntyre points out, the emotivist begins to internalize this reality: their ability to sustain an emotivist identity depends on there being some kind of mechanism that binds it all together. The Aesthete needs there to be a rule-based, if opaque, social media machine that they will be inevitably banned by. The Therapist needs for their clients to have some kind of diagnostic mechanism to facilitate their movement into better or worse kinds of institutions of care. And the Manager needs there to be some kind of orderly form of product dissemination to meet the endlessly specialized desires of the emotivists.
We get the expression we want, but at the cost of having a culture which is only bound together by the force of a bureaucracy that we do not understand but need anyway.
The Boss Against the Bosses
If emotivism gets reinforced by bureaucracy, then we’re in a pretty bleak place. It seems that there’s no place to begin breaking out of this. For if one rejects emotivism and starts banging away on reason again, they’re unlikely to find many hearers. On top of that, the defining bureaucracy is happy for you claim reason as your form of self-expression: just make sure you fill out your forms and get into the proper line.
To help us see one way out, I want to turn our attention to the history surrounding Bruce Springsteen’s best known, and most often misunderstood song: Born in the U.S.A.
To be honest, I still don’t understand how this song is misunderstood. All you have to do is listen to the words to realize that it’s a protest song—it’s not an anthem extolling America’s virtues so much as establishing that the Vietnam vet is still here, despite the brutality that war, dehumanizing jobs, and cultural malaise have done to him. Watch Bruce in his heyday below, which conveniently has the words overlaid:
Despite the song’s clear lyrics, the synthesizer overtakes it, along with his charisma, and the song became one of Springsteen’s most commercially successful. And…. thus destined to be taken up into the machine. Within the year, it was being used by the Reagan campaign—who was promoting the very policies the song decried. Springsteen’s protest against its use was unsuccessful. A song with a clear argument, taken as one expressivist form of Springsteen’s opinion, was given a defined place by the unrelenting bureaucracy of a political-economic form. This pretty well tracks with what MacIntyre predicts happens.
The hegemony of fundraising forces—then and now—love a good emotivist anthem, and it kind of helps if you just hear the chorus and not pay attention to, say, the actual argument of the song. The way out for this song, though, was not to give up on argumentation—to begin adopting expressivist modes to beat this problem8—but to wait.
In the years to come, Springsteen would increasingly go solo, adopting a quieter approach than the arena rock, and keep talking about the same things. The way out was not to give up on the argument, but to play the long game. And so, thirty years later, Springsteen redid the song entirely, befitting an older man’s voice and energy. But in not giving up the song or, importantly, the argument, the song was finally able to be heard. Behold the clear contrast:
My point is not that Bruce the person found a way outside the fundraising mechanisms. Bruce has been unapologetically supportive of the DNC for many, many years. My point here, though, is that the argument of the song did, and that it was time and only time that enables the argument to break through the cycle of emotivism and put the message front and center in a way which now troubles its adoption by fundraising mechanisms. It’s a different song, a quieter song, a haunting song which is best heard and then mulled over.
There are many lessons here about what it means for reasonable people to have to put up with a world drowning in emotivism on the one hand, and a bureaucratic world which makes emotivism more and more possible on the other. But two of the key ones are just persistence and patience. I’ve been thinking a lot about the dynamics of the least sexy virtue—fortitude—for a while, so unsurprisingly, I think that these two components of fortitude are part of what are needed.
But it’s also because these virtues are just true. Preach the word in and out of season, don’t get discouraged by itchy ears, be willing to abandon the clever overlay of synthesizers for a very simple steel guitar. Bureaucracies do not last forever, because inevitably, the multitudes they try to contain will wobble to the breaking point. Then, and only then, can something clear and reasonable have its say.
Maybe After Virtue will be our next book club discussion…
After Virtue, 2nd ed., 12.
To be certain, ideally, our emotional responses and our intellectual judgments follow one another—and increasingly, it’s unclear to me that one necessarily needs to precede the other. Much of the psychological literature I’ve been reading over the last year has made a compelling case that much of our thinking—and indeed, the moral judgments we make—is done at a pre-cognitive level before we deliberate about the question at hand. This doesn’t mean that all of our rational argumentation is just feelings on stilts, as Jonathan Haidt’s work has popularized. But it does mean that emotivism is on to something in identifying the role that what Daniel Kahnemann called our “Track One” thinking—our automatic thinking which operates by shortcuts and paradigms—plays in how we morally evaluate things. None of this was news to moral philosophers from the Stoics through Aquinas: they just held that reason’s job to order the passions, as opposed to concede that all of our morals are basically linguistic gymnastics for feelings.
Ibid., 24.
Yes, I’m thinking of the example that you’re thinking of.
No one is saying we should aim for more emotional harm. My point is that “emotional harm” references something which can only be judged by the individual, and is thus, a black hole of a target. I can literally never know if I’ve hit the mark, and arguably, the person I’m trying to not harm can’t tell me either, given that they don’t know whether harm can be caused by something until it does!
This doesn’t mean that we don’t get ideas on who we are from entities that aren’t directly economic, but that most of our ideas come to us in commercialized forms: television shows, social media apps, class-based social arrangements, etc.
Shorter: if you have an audience that is too interested in expressivist stuff, don’t adopt your good work to expressivist modes to get a hearing. It will not go well.