June 6, 2009
How Not to Argue
Yesterday on CiF was a piece objecting to Response’s “Nice People Take Drugs” bus campaign.
I’m going to pick on it, in part, because I’m opposed to drug prohibition in its current form. But the piece in question is also a stark lesson in how not to argue. Here’s why.
The author of the piece – Seth Freedman - correctly identifies Release’s aims, at least in part:
The intention behind the campaign is to attempt to break the societal taboo on drugs. According to Release, “the public is tired of the artificial representation of drugs in society” – informing passers-by that “nice people take drugs” will help “de-stigmatise drug use”, says Rubin.
I would also add my impression that Release want to prompt people to have a mature debate about drugs instead of one side shouting “Evil!!” and drowning out any other points of view.
In any case, Freedman promptly ignores this paragraph when launching into his next:
Which is all well and good, but the fact that “nice” people have their faults doesn’t mean that their failings should be decriminalised and tolerated by everyone else. Nice people also break the speed limit, download pirated music, and commit any number of apparently minor misdemeanours, but the law isn’t meant to bend to accommodate such immoral behaviour just because a critical mass of people partake in a certain activity.
The first sentence is a classic example of what philosophers call “begging the question” (a phrase oft-misused by Jeremy Paxman, who confuses it with “raises the question”). It means to assume in the course of making an argument the very issue which is being contested. When Freedman implies that drug taking is a “fault” and shouldn’t be decriminalised and tolerated, he begs the question by assuming that drug taking is a fault. Which I, for example, don’t happen to believe it necessarily is.
After all, in some cases smoking marijuana is a fault in nice people. It leads them to be apathetic, lazy and boring. But in other cases it’s not a fault at all: it leads to an amusing evening of watching dumb sci-fi films and relaxing. The point is, it depends on the person and the situation. The same logic, of course, applies to alcohol. Sometimes having a few beers is great; it helps you relax after a hard day at work. Sometimes a few beers lead normally nice people to become nasty. Then it’s a fault. My objection is that Freedman has done nothing to argue that drug taking is a fault, he has just assumed it. Which is precisely the stigmatised unreflective attitude Release are trying to challenge.
Notice that the rest of the paragraph continues to exemplify this intellectual failing. His description that the law isn’t meant to bend to accommodate “immoral behaviour” again just assumes without argument that taking drug is immoral behaviour. There’s no argument here, just dogma.
As well as the question-begging, there’s another argumentative device to be noticed here. Freedman is using highly emotive phrases like “immoral” and ”[personal] fault”. Part of the purpose of such phrases is to emotionally tug the reader into agreeing with Freedman, not because of the arguments supplied but because of the emotive pull of not wanting to be immoral, or to suffer from personal faults.
Of course, much political and ethical argument involves appeal to emotion. But there’s two ways it can be employed. The first is to show that a certain set of principles leads to an ethically unacceptable conclusion. Such arguments are powerful, effective and honest: they allow reason to reach a conclusion, and then ethical reflection kicks in to assess that conclusion. The second uses emotional reactions to subvert the rational process so that conclusions cannot properly be reached because discourse, debate and clarity of thought are clouded out by (say) outrage or a feeling of not wanting to be “immoral”.
What Freedman does is engage in the second kind of argument: rather than presenting the facts, arguing for a conclusion, and then allowing ethical reflection to kick in, he injects emotion into the argument before conclusions are reached so as to prejudice the outcome of the reasoning process. That’s not a good way to argue: it’s an attempt to manipulate people’s emotions so as to manoeuvre them into agreeing with you without proper reflection.
Freedman seems aware of this, however:
Defining what makes a nice person is, of course, an utterly subjective matter – as Release knows full well – as is determining at what point a person’s misdeeds turn them from nice to nasty.
But rather than address the subjective nature of evaluative judgements like “nice”, Freedman goes on to tell an anecdote and do some more question begging:
Using drugs as an escape route, or a quick fix to our problems, was not a “nice” way to behave.
Here the question begging takes the form of assuming that he and all his friends took drugs as an escape route to fix their problems. Maybe that’s true of Freedman – but why speak so quickly for his friends? As a teenager I took drugs (mostly just smoking pot). But I didn’t do it to “fix my problems”. I did it because it was fun. And nothing more. Freedman is begging the question by assuming that all people take drugs for the same, negative reasons. But that dogmatic pre-conception is one of the very things Release are trying to challenge.
And there’s more of the manipulative emotive manoeuvres to follow:
Implying that drug abuse is socially acceptable, as Release are doing via their adverts, is not a noble message to hurl at impressionable children and teenagers who are unable to spot the nuance and meaning behind the stark sloganeering.
“Noble messages”, hurled at “impressionable children” unable to spot “nuance and meaning”? This is low, low stuff. It’s designed both to make people leap up in defence of the vulnerable kiddies, and to imply that those who don’t agree with the author are monsters wishing harm upon innocent children. This isn’t argument, it’s propaganda.
Oh, and there’s hypocrisy too:
To claim, simplistically, that “nice people take drugs” masks the corrosive, corrupting nature of narcotics, as well as the underlying void they fill in users’ lives.
It seems fair to point out that treating all drugs alike, and implying that there are not good sides to drug use is also simplistic. It might also be corrosive. The pot appears to be calling the kettle black.
There’s also an awful lot of myopic argument. For example:
The desire to get wasted – to blot out reality and allow substances to numb one’s senses to the present – is a desperate urge, and one which has held vast swaths of society in a vice-like grip since time immemorial. Ridding people of that impulse would do wonders for both their mental and physical health; bowing to so-called public demand and sugar-coating the truth about the dangers of drugs simply passes off as acceptable a wholly insidious behavioural streak.
As well as multiple question begging (a “desperate urge”? an “impulse”?) and multiple emotional appeals (“bowing” to “public demand” and “sugar coating the truth”) the glaring short-sightedness of this paragraph is to assume without question that criminality is an appropriate way to deal with “vast swathes of society”. As well as whether mass-criminality can possibly work – when the evidence appears to be that it doesn’t.
Similarly:
I smoked skunk with my friends to achieve a deeper and darker haze: the legal status of cannabis was neither here nor there, just as those addicted to high-grade whisky or vodka couldn’t care less whether or not 3% lager is authorised for sale or not.
Well in that case why not legalise, regulate and tax it? Why not take the money and power out of the hands of criminal gangs and put it into schools and hospitals?
Things deteriorate as a conclusion is approached:
Addiction is a disease that affects tens of thousands of people in every generation. Allowing greater access to drugs will, as with alcohol and tobacco, only put more vulnerable citizens in temptation’s way – which neither Release nor anyone else should want to happen. Just as speeding laws shouldn’t be changed despite their impact on those drivers able to safely handle a car at 100mph, so too must drugs remain illegal to prevent risking the lives of the majority of the population.
Firstly, it is clear that prohibition has not prevented many, many people becoming addicted to drugs. It is also clear that criminalisation has pushed many of those people’s into downward spirals often ending in prison and death.
Secondly, the idea that decriminalising drugs will put “vulnerable” citizens (notice the under-hand emotive manoeuvre) in “temptation’s way” is only a good argument if we have established that taking drugs is bad (or as Freedman puts it, a “fault”). So we’re back to begging the question.
Thirdly there’s a very bad analogy with speeding. We have speed limits because we recognise that driving fast puts the lives of speeding drivers, other drivers and pedestrians at risk. Accordingly, we set a cap on how fast cars can go. Thus a compromise is made between risk to drivers and other individuals, and the benefits of individual car use to individuals and society. What we don’t do is ban all car use.
We don’t have such an approach to drugs (except alcohol and tobacco). For example, we don’t allow the smoking of cannabis or the taking of ecstasy, despite their harms being demonstrably lower than alcohol, both to individual user and wider society. Instead of trading-off the bad side-effects of drug taking (apathy, feeling crappy the next day, annoying people in clubs by being overly loved-up, funding international criminal gangs) with the good (drug taking being, erm, fun) and having a controlled decriminalisation, these substances are just prohibited outright.
For Freedman’s analogy between speeding and drugs to to hold, there would have to be no speeding laws at all because there would have to be no cars allowed in our society. Clearly, that’s not the world we live in.
And the grand finale:
Of the four words in Release’s advert, two leave too much open to interpretation: “nice” and “drugs”. “Good people smoke crack” would be a far more blunt and direct way to make the same point, but whether their message would be so blithely tolerated by the advertising authorities or the public is another matter – highlighting the essential error of drugs campaigning in the first place.
This is simply outrageous. It only begins to work by treating crack cocaine and marijuana as being identical. Anybody with any knowledge of the real world whatsoever knows that this is untrue and disingenuous. Given that Freedman has confessed to cannabis use himself, we can only assume he is being deliberately disingenuous.
The crowning glory to this supremely badly argued piece is the final sentence. It’s hard to know exactly what Freedman thinks he means. Perhaps he means that drug campaigning cannot distinguish adequately between different kinds of drugs? Or that it cannot be honest in its presentation, or else advertising standards would intervene? In which case the pot is most definitely calling the kettle black.
Is this the best the prohibitionists can come up with? Question-begging, myopia and emotional manipulation? If it is, then volumes are being spoken.
May 28, 2009
Dishonesty and Drugs
I’ve written before about my belief that the existing prohibition on drugs is not working, albeit in a narrowly focused way.
One of the reasons I don’t think it’s working is that, at present, there is no honest discourse on drugs. Now, that isn’t a necessary feature of prohibition: we could have prohibition as well as a grown-up, mature conversation about drugs that admits there are pros as well as cons to drug use. But at present we don’t have such a discourse.
For example, I have in front of me a leaflet entitled “The Truth About DRUGS”, with the tagline “Say No to Drugs, Say Yes to Life”. It appears to be funded, ultimately, by an organisation called Foundation for a Drug-Free World, which is apparently based in Los Angeles, of all places. Apparently it is part of an “international…drug prevention programme to educate young people on the truth about drugs.”
So, in its own words, this publication purports to educate the young on the truth about drugs.
It fails. Miserably.
For a start, take the section entitled “Why do people take drugs?” Apparently people take drugs:
- to fit in
- to escape or relax
- they are bored
- it makes them seem grown up
- to rebel
- to experiment
- because they want to change something about their lives
- because they think drugs are a solution
It’s probably true that people take drugs for all those reasons. But there’s another, rather important one. People take drugs – brace yourself – because…they have a good time when they take drugs!
They don’t die, they don’t kill anyone, they don’t hurt or maim themselves, they don’t jump out of windows, they don’t lose their jobs etc etc. What they do have is a good time. Later, they go to bed. The next day they wake up and, although they might feel rough (you know, like having a hangover), they carry on with their lives as normal, functioning members of society.
It is not “educating” the youth to leave out the main reason people take drugs: that it’s fun, it’s nice, and the world doesn’t end.
Yes, some people’s lives are destroyed by drugs. It would be ludicrous to say otherwise. But it’s also ludicrous to pretend that most people who take drugs have their lives ruined. They just don’t.
And remember, some people’s lives are destroyed by alcohol (which is legal, depsite being unambiguously more harmful than cannabis). Yet not everybody who drinks beer becomes an alcoholic. Likewise, not everybody who smokes a spliff becomes a heroin addict, stealing handbags to fuel their life-destroying habit. Which of course brings us to the fact that not all drugs are the same.
Furthermore, many aspects of this pamphlet are ludicrously sensationalist. For example, there’s a quote from “Ann”:
“Ecstasy made me crazy. One day I bit glass, just like I would have bitten an apple. I had to have my mouth full of pieces of glass to realise what was happening to me”
Anybody who has ever taken ecstasy, or been around people who have taken ecstasy, will know that to present this as a typical experience is farcical. People under the influence of ecstasy want to hug everyone and declare how much they love them. Eating glass is just about the last thing they are likely to do. This raises the question of whether this quote by “Ann” is perhaps completely made up – which I suspect it is.
It would be nice to think that this leaflet is an extreme case, funded by American nutters. But it’s not. I remember exactly this sort of dishonesty being taught to me as gospel truth in secondary school (though at that point I already knew, from personal experience, I was being fed lies).
At present, the prohibition on illegal drugs goes hand in hand with a widespread dishonesty about drugs and the people who use them. I don’t think it has to be that way. I believe prohibition is compatible with mature, honest debate and information. But I also believe that mature and honest debate and information about drugs will lead most people to realise that prohibition isn’t working. Why? Because it denies mature responsible adults the free choice of what they want to do with their bodies, puts vasts amounts of money into the hands of violent criminals, criminalises entire sections of societies and wastes money on a war that can never be won at the expense of worthier causes like hospitals and schools.
Which raises a final question: to what extent do the people producing systematic dishonesty about drugs – and I include here the tabloid media – want to prevent a mature and honest debate, precisely because they think it will lead to the end of prohibition? How significant is that, and what does it tell us about their attitude to letting people make decisions based on truthful information?
April 14, 2009
A Message to New Labour Strategists And Leadership
Dear New Labour Strategists and Leadership,
There’s something you need to know. I’m not sure how to put this. It seems like nobody else has tried to tell you – or perhaps many people have, and you just wouldn’t listen? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.
The truth is that you need to be told. I know this won’t be easy so forgive me. After all, the truth hurts.
You see, you keep trying to make friends with certain newspapers – you know the ones I mean. The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Express, The News of the World. I know you really want to be friends with them. And I understand why. These newspapers are popular, and you want to be popular too!
But the truth is, these newspapers will never be your friends. They hate you. It’s that simple. I know Tony and Rupert seemed to come to an agreement sometime before 1997, and that meant some of the gutter gang were on your side. But those days – like Tony – are long gone. All that’s left is hate.
Which makes your constant attempts to make friends with these newspapers ever more hopeless and depressing.
When Jacqui decided to ignore all scientific and medical advice and refused to downgrade ecstasy, what did it get you? Did you make friends with the Daily Mail gang? Did you see a poll bounce? Or did you continue an unworkable and in many ways deeply hypocritical absolute prohibition which puts a recreational substance as dangerous as horse riding on a legal and criminal par with heroin?
What about the reclassification of cannabis, again against medical and scientific advice? Did you get a positive reaction, swinging middle England to your side? Or did you divert police time and money away from serious police work to enforce a prohibition on a substance with no recorded fatalities and fail to make any friends in the gutter press?
And today you’re at it again.
Now, I know that you are upset about the McBride emails. I know it must be galling to have Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes held up as paradigms of political decency. But did you really think anyone was going to be fooled?
I mean, did you really think that relaunching a policy that you already announced three months ago would shift the spotlight? Honestly, did you really think your latest gutter-trawling lowest common denominator populist pitch – declaring that alcholics won’t get benefits unless they attend scheduled treatment – would garner you votes or popularity from the right-wing press? Did you really think the tabloids were going to fall for it and suddenly tell their readers to vote Labour?
Don’t get me wrong, I can see why it would be a good thing for unemployed alcoholics to receive treatment. Alcoholism is a crippling illness, its sufferers need care and assistance to prevent their lives spiralling into downward misery.
But that’s not how you want this to be interpreted, is it? Your message is very clear: Labour’s getting tough on scroungers (never mind that the UK loses 15 times more to tax-cheats at the top end). Those dirty benefit-alkies will no longer steal your taxes!
But what makes me so confused, dear Labour Top Brass, is how you can be so stupid. You want so desperately for these newspapers to be your friends that somehow you don’t realise that they see right through you. For the people who run these papers, are wily and devious and clever – even if their average reader isn’t. Having said that, I expect a lot of tabloid readers see straight through you as well. They’re probably not all as stupid as you think, you know?
They know you are pandering to them, and that’s exactly what gets them off. They’re stringing you along, letting you think you can win them over – and all the time knowing that you never will.
And in the meantime, it’s the poor, the downtrodden and the vulnerable who suffer. You know, those people the Labour Party once-upon-a-time thought it existed to help. You know, back in the distant past, before Tony decided that we are all middle class now (whilst presiding over a continuous rise in many key indicators of British inequality).
I’ve got to say, it makes me sad.
So please, stop all this. It’s probably too late, I know. But I’m strangely old-fashioned: I believe there’s still a principle here worth standing up for. Do you agree. Do you even see what I’m trying to say?
Yours
P Sagar
April 9, 2009
Is The Wire the Great American Novel?
David Simon, creator of HBO’s sublime “The Wire”, describes the show as many things: a 66 hour film, a Greek tragedy for the modern American City State, a book written in the medium of television (or words to that effect).
All three are plausible, and in many ways all accurate descriptions. Commentators have heaped praise upon The Wire.
By the end of the 5th and final series, one certainly feels like one has reached the end of an epic film. As though each episode was a scene which, taken together, yield a coherent and unified whole.
David Simon’s description of institutions as the modern Hellenic gods is also extremely plausible and intellectually credible. Rather than having anthropomorphic gods sat on Mount Olympus hurling thunderbolts at mortals, the modern gods are institutions: the police force, the city bureaucracy, the education system, the drug trade, the union, the newspaper. And like the Greek gods, these institutions are not simple puppeteers: for though they effect each life they touch, there is an indeterminacy in how these effects will be realised – although the end result is, more often than not, tragedy.
Yet it is the last comparison that I find most interesting: that of The Wire as book written in the medium of television. Because if The Wire is a book, then it may well be the Great American Novel.
They say the Great American Novel will never be written. For my money, some authors have come close. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is practically unrivalled in both its depth of character, its socio-cultural analysis of a decaying society, and the melancholy of a lost and half-forgotten dream. But the anger, and the quiet resignation which is somehow simultaneous, bring it just short.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbyis a fearless dissection of the American Dream turned putrid – but it stands now as a judgement of an era (arguably one that returned again only recently), not the definitive gift to American art.
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath again comes close, weaving the pioneer spirit into a world in which capitalism has left that spirit behind, producing disaster and betrayal yet within which there nonetheless shines the beacon of human goodness. But, like Gatsby, it speaks most profoundly of a people in an era, not simply of a people.
Others might point to Updike, Faulkner or Hemmingway. But again, whilst they may come close, the mark never quite seems to be met.
Yet if The Wire is a book written in television, does it perhaps constitute the Great American Novel? Although The Wire at first seems vulnerable to the critique of being about a specific era, this may not be so. Firstly, although the setting of the Wire is modern Baltimore, it could have been set in virtually any American city of the past 30 years – and if Simon’s bleak analysis is correct, of the next 30 too.
Of course, this alone merely implies that The Wire’s sweep is of a prolonged era. What adds to the argument that it is not critically constrained by the period in which it is set is the simultaneous sweep of subject matters it handles. Crime, drugs, corruption, politics, policing, working class decline, racial segregation, education, the possibility of reform within established systems - all are handled intelligently, subtly, with depth and with realism. But The Wire does not operate only at the “macro” level, the level of socio-political determinants. It focuses, simultaneously, on the level of individuals. Thus sexuality, relationship, loyalty, duty, integrity, honesty and commitment (to one’s self, to one’s institution especially) are handled deftly, honestly and with care.
The result is a portrayal of humanity at two levels. To draw an analogy which Simon will doubtless endorse, we could say, taking our cue from Plato, that The Wire operates at the levels of both City and Soul. On the one hand, we are shown what humans do – and what happens to humans – when politics, police, journalists, bureaucracy, organised labour and all other components of a modern society collide. That is the City. On the other hand, we are shown what human beings as individuals are: how they live, love, work, play, fight and kill. This is the Soul.
And as Plato would doubtless have approved, the message of The Wire is that one cannot understand the City without understanding the Soul, nor the Soul without the City.
I believe The Wire will be watched in hundreds of years’ time. But it will not simply be a historical source informing future generations of how we lived. It will be a work of art, showing them how they live too. Just like Shakespeare and Sophocles are for us today.
We live in privileged times to witness the creation of such a thing, and for the above reasons, I believe that The Wire is the Great American Novel.
March 15, 2009
Skunk
The Observer has been getting its money’s worth from the “does skunk turn your teenager into a murdering psychopath?” issue. For those not in the know, the topic has been pushed by a number of newspapers since Julie Myerson published a book detailing aspects of her son’s “descent” into skunk cannabis “addiction”, culminating in her kicking him out…and then getting loads of money for writing about it all.
To be fair, The Observer’s latest offering is fairly balanced, despite the rather alarmist opening paragraphs and hyperbolic headline.
Having said that, I find this quote from Yuppie-on-the-way-up-religious-wacko-Tory-MP Charles Walker particularly infuriating:
“[Skunk] is clearly highly addictive both physically and psychologically”
I find this maddening because it is untrue. Though there is some evidence for psychological addiction (though what constitutes “psychological addiction” is itself a highly contested matter), the plain and simple truth is that there is no scientific evidence for physical addiction to skunk or any kind of cannabis.
When MPs like Walker spout untruth like this, no wonder we’re nowhere near having a grown up and mature debate about drugs in this country.
My second gripe is about the general idiocy of the “skunk turned my angelic child into a pawn of Satan!” declarations being banded about by (some) parents and politicians. To see this, let’s run through a simple reasoning process.
1. In normal healthy human beings, skunk – like all forms of cannabis – has the effect of sedating the user. It generally makes a person vaguely happy and quite hungry. It does not promote violence or aggressive behaviour, in fact quite the opposite. In some cases users may experience paranoia – but that ends when the drug’s effects fade from the brain.
2. So, again, if a person is using cannabis and they are psychologically normal, cannabis will make them relaxed and passive.
3. If a person is psychologically abnormal – suffers from or has a disposition to suffer from e.g. schizophrenia – then using a psychoactive drug like cannabis may well make their condition worse. But the medical jury is still out even on that question.
Conclusions for parents: If your child smokes skunk, is psychologically normal and happens to be a horrible little bastard – be grateful they are getting stoned! Imagine how violent and aggressive they would be if they didn’t have their skunk.
If your child smokes skunk and has psychological problems, then I’m very sorry for you. Their problems may well be exacerbated by the drug – but in that case, the drug is sadly part of a wider problem where other substances (e.g. alcohol) may well be involved. I hope you can get the help which is often sadly lacking for people with mental health problems
Either way the scaremongering about skunk is clearly misguided (or just plain dishonest, cf Charles Walker MP).
Like all drug paranoia crazes, what’s being obscured by the alarmism are some basic empirical observations anyone of my generation could relay to you. For example, I smoked skunk pretty regularly (i.e. at least once a week) from the ages of 14 to 17. Guess what? In the words of Bill Hicks, I didn’t kill anybody, didn’t rape anybody, didn’t maim anybody, didn’t lose one fucking job, laughed my ass off and went about my day.
The same was true of all the people I knew who regularly used cannabis (and later harder drugs, though I cautiously lagged behind on that front). Sure, some of my friends smoked too much and had problems with parents. But in every case, that’s because they had problems with their parents stemming from deeper family issues.
And that’s the rub. In the vast majority of cases when middle class kids go off the rails at their parents, there are likely to be deeper familial issues at work. But then, blaming skunk is such a convenient way to avoid talking about stuff like that.
Personally I stopped smoking skunk regularly from 17-19 because I wanted to get on with my life and do well in college. The worst thing about skunk is that it makes you apathetic and lazy. Many of my friends preferred being apathetic and lazy, and so didn’t stop. They may not have gone on to prestigious universities, but as far as I am aware they are all pretty happy with their lives regardless of that.
At university I again took up smoking skunk occasionally, but given its mind-numbing qualities I treated it as an occasional indulgence. Rather unsurprisingly, my usage did not spiral into uncontrollable addiction, and I left with a First Class degree, not a “dangerous psychological and physical addiction”. The hysteria-mongers will say “you were one of the lucky ones!”. But that’s ludicrous, given how overwhelmingly the odds were stacked in my favour.
The hysteria currently being perpetrated about skunk is reminiscent of the 1980s “crack epidemic” panic of the USA, when middle class parents became convinced that their children would all turn into pipe-huffing zombies unless Action! was taken. Of course, what actually happened was that the vast majority of middle class kids – you know, those with futures to live for and parents who cared about them – stayed well clear of such a course and grew up to be just fine. A few fell through the net and got into hard drugs – but that’s inevitable given the sheer numbers involved.
The picture, you might note, is generally different for poor, working class children with less invested in their futures and generally worse parental/familial backgrounds. Note that it was those children who really did suffer a crack epidemic in the USA (and still do). But the present rash of editorials and op ed pieces haven’t been concerned with poor children. Skunk is a decidedly middle class concern. And that tells you and awful lot about the nature of the hysteria, and how frivolous it is.
What a shame that nearly 30 years on from the “crack epidemic” madness, we’re still going round in circles whilst watching politicians and middle-class parents squawk madly like chickens on speed.
