Argument: 2. Antithesis

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Something is amiss with our democracy. You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. Winning matters more than governing well. We will never concede it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.

Since twenty fourteen, from Hungary and Poland to Trump's America and Putin's New Russia, We seem to have entered a terrifying world of powerful communicators who flout moral values and inflict an ever more divisive politics on their population. We're gonna build the wall. We have no choice.

If you take Donald Trump, on what set of rules of debating should he succeed? He's completely inconsistent. Any argument he makes uses a load of facts that are easily disprovable and you can actually point out that he said something completely opposite an hour ago. The former UK Chancellor George Osborne. And yet he succeeds and become president of the United States because he's such a sort of performer and he wows everyone with the sort of sheer audacity of what he says and does.

ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder. you know, in my view, terrible president, but a terribly effective presidential campaigner, which is why we should be a little bit careful of, you know, wishing only for great communicators. Governing well requires scepticism, open-mindedness, and an instinct for complexity. But modern politics, more than ever, demands loyalty, partisanship and slogans. not truth and reason, but power and manipulation.

In this episode, I'll try to explain how rhetoric was blamed for civil war, and how social media and the decay of parliamentary debate have brought new challenges to the whole idea of argument. History of arguments! Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok Episode 2, Antithesis Amen. We once believed with good reason that dialogue was central to democracy. Democracy is about giving space to different voices. It's about compromise, listening, persuasion.

Our civilisation and democracies were built on the idea that there should be a deep relationship between speaking well, thinking well and acting well, between good argument, good moral character and good government. We were optimistic about language and argument for two thousand years. Rhetoric was a central part of education in classical Roman Greece. It was central to the medieval schools and to Renaissance thought.

But in the seventeenth century as Europe was torn apart by religious war, critics like Thomas Hobbes began to attack rhetoric and associate it with the polarizing messages of religious fanatics. Come well, I beseech you. The king think that's not. Has this king forgotten the reformation? My way with us. Incredibly divisive politics in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mixed religious claims with political claims.

Brian Garston, Professor of Political Science and the Humanities at Yale University and the author of Saving Persuasion, a defence of rhetoric and judgment. Yeah. came to be blamed for exacerbating the polarization that was emerging. Gentlemen, an immovable parliament is more obnoxious than an immovable king. Godless self-seeking ambitious tricksters! You are no more capable of conducting the affairs of this nation than you are of running a brothel. You are a power!

But democracies were not really about equality, they were, as he said, aristocracies of orators, that is, the clever, persuasive, ambitious, popular leaders. Polarization for their own purposes, as part of their efforts for fame and power. And they tore the state apart into civil war. Hobbes and his successors saw rhetoric as something that encouraged conflict, misrepresented the public will, and was a challenge to scientific reason.

By the beginning of the 20th century, rhetoric had ceased to be a core part of school curriculums all around the world. Democracies, of course, continued to be based on parliaments with their debating chambers. But many began to dismiss the significance of what was said in those places. It's a romantic idea that I suspect was never grounded in reality. that the citizens of a country would assemble in the market square of Athens and listen to Pericles speak for two hours and then make a decision.

First of all, of course, they were men and they weren't slaves, and even then I suspect they weren't really running Greece at the time or ancient Athens. The same with those sort of romantic ideas that a Disraeli or a Gladstone would sway the British House of Commons with their argument. You know, the Commons at that time had parties and they basically people voted on party lines.

So what governed Britain in the nineteenth century was a emerging professional civil service, a professional military, things that the likes of Gladstone delivered on the ground as ministers, but not the products of Lengthy parliamentary debates in the same But I think George Osborne is missing something here. Rhetoric and debates did matter in the 19th century Parliament. So I defeat this. Amen. I'm in the fridge as they do once in.

That was William Gladstone speaking in a very grainy recording which catches his voice in the eighteen eighties. MPs like Gladstone put immense effort into composing their speeches. People competed for seats to watch them speak. The speeches were printed verbatim on the front page of newspapers and were quoted like lines from musicals.

Parliament was important enough for Benjamin Disraeli to spend most of his time as Prime Minister sitting in the Chamber. He ran Britain from the debating chamber. And a culture behind the scenes limited the power of the whips, forced parties to listen, be flexible, and compromise. It was a cross party culture too. Chamberlain was brought down by a conservative who shouted across at the labour benches Speak for England, Arthur. Words have proved to be insufficient.

To describe the vileness of those who have now staked everything on the greatest. Something has changed. When I was in Parliament, I and most other MPs were reading hurriedly written speeches to a half-empty chamber where most people seem to be on their phones rather than paying any attention at all. No Prime Minister today spends days in the chamber.

And it would be almost inconceivable today for a Conservative MP to reach across to the Labour benches and ask them to speak for England. No one's listening to each other, no one's persuading each other, and the whips just drive through the Prime Minister's agenda. I saw this again and again over a decade in Parliament. If this great party stands for anything, it stands for respect. For parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law.

And I I would respectfully say my right honourable friend is tiptoeing onto a dangerous path. Amen. In twenty nineteen, for example, just after I'd resigned from the cabinet. The Supreme Court had just overruled the prorogation of Parliament. Brexit was on the line, the Constitution was on the line, the chamber was packed. I felt passionately about what I was saying. So I tried a bit of rhetoric.

He's pitting Brexit against Romaine, young against Olds, Scotland against England, and people against the Parliament and What?

My right honourable friend please reflect on the fact that this Brexit deal is not a deal just for the next five years. It's the foundation of our relationship with Europe for the next 40 years, and that requires us to speak with respect, with moderation, with compassion for our opponents, in order to provide a foundation that does not just appeal to a single narrow faction, but to every citizen and party in this great country.

Looking back I see I was being pretty long winded, but the problem wasn't the word. The ancient Greeks would even have had technical names for my rhetorical technique. I even knew some of them iambic trimeter, tricolon, correlative conjunction. But the problem is I wasn't persuading anyone. And Parliament had become a place where that kind of rhetorical speech was almost irrelevant.

What had happened? Well, first, television. In the 19th century, members of parliament were speaking primarily to each other. Today, we're often speaking to the cameras hoping to produce a soundbite which can be picked up on the news or retweeted. Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon. Now this is a once-in-a-lifetime chant. Russ to take back control of this country. Can you hear me at the back?

And the most significant British political debate of the 21st century was one not with a long, complicated speech in Parliament, but with a word slogan, cleaver like in its simplicity. Forcing a choice. Take back control, take back control, take back control, take back control, take back control. The ones I've been on the receiving end of are the ones on Brexit. Take back control. It was simple, it encapsulated a complicated argument about

Sovereignty and borders and the like that would normally have got lost in translation. And it was something that the Remain campaign couldn't say. It's not just all you know, politicians today they're not as good as the ones in the past. I think it reflects Slight shift. in the place that set piece speeches have in public life. And I think that's got to do with the change in media. Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator and author of You Talking to Me, Rhetoric from Aristotle to O.

Isn't it funny? You know, when I came here 17 years ago and I said that I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. I'm trying to think of a classic Fowler of speech and I remember that that instance where they all turned their back on or s or refused to stand for the playing of the Euroanthem. And it was greeted with real horror and shame.

wasn't really interested in that audience at all. In fact, showing his contempt for them was exactly what his overhearers and UK. That was what it was all about. You know, everything he says in this house is for his YouTube channel back home. Well I have to say, you're not laughing now, are you?

My argument is always that rhetoric doesn't go away and its techniques don't vanish, but it adapts sort of in a wonderful protean Jurassic Park Life Will Find a Way way to the means of its transmission and to its audience. He thinks he's Obi-Wan Kenobi. The truth is he's jab of the hearts. We're not simply experiencing a shift in media, our society is also becoming more anxious about the identity of those that are speaking.

I think that debate is absolutely fundamental to our democracy. The question is what we're debating, how we're debating it and who is debating it, who has the power and the platform to speak, and who doesn't. In twenty nineteen, Nadia Whitm, the Labour MP for Nottingham East. tweeted a response to an article about trans rights in which she said We must not fetish debate as though debate itself is an innocuous, neutral act.

The very act of debate in these cases is an effective rollback of assumed equality and a foot in the door for doubt and hatred. Editors of newspapers, of panel shows are always deciding who to prioritise and therefore who to exclude. And I think the problem is that we often have a democratic deficit there and that the people who are excluded, the people that don't have the opportunities to have that platform are often the people we need to hear from most. So when we're talking about

But the people I want to hear from and the people everyone needs to hear from are trans people themselves. But we don't really need to hear from someone who isn't trans. and doesn't know what it's like to live life as a trans person. Nadia seems to imply that somebody's identity or personal history may be more important than words in an argument, and that not everyone has an equal right to speak about everything. in real life, what we're talking about is

people's lives, people's health outcomes, people's access to good housing, to work, to benefits. That's the point that I'm making. Well why don't those two things connect? I mean I think in the classical tradition people would say that the best way to get to an answer on health outcomes benefits Is exactly through interesting ideas, creativity, critical debate, testing arguments. Oh, I completely agree. But those aren't the debates that we're currently seeing and that's the problem.

But the thing is you're not talking about people who perhaps Yeah, yeah. Don't tell me what I'm talking about because I'll again I said you this before you came on air. I'll use the words I want to use. You don't get to tell me what words are. I will. Use my words and I know exactly what I'm Nadia Whiturn extends her critique to the parliamentary debating chamber. think you can see it when you're walking around Parliament.

My colleague Kate Green said that there are more portraits of horses in Parliament than there are of women. We're just talking about fifty percent of the population there not even taking into account race, class, Yeah.

Nadia's claim that the mainstream media excludes voices is made by both left and right. We've lost confidence in the idea of a common centre-ground of opinion. Modern politics feels a little bit closer to Thomas Hobbes' Civil War. I've been paid for not to the Spanish Inquisition! the Roman Catholic Church to have a seat. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore. What this is all about.

The United States looks from the outside as though it's almost teetering on the edge of a civil war, where the politics of persuasion seems pretty improbable. And this phenomenon of populism since 2014 has coincided with, or perhaps been driven by, the emergence of new forms of social media, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, which transform the way we communicate. My argument in recent years is that social media changed almost everything about social relationships.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. Sometime around twenty fourteen, plus or minus, there was a transformation. social life, political life moved on to social media. It's always the case in a democracy that the extremes are going to be more angry, more engaged. We're going to hear from them more. Let's say they speak up two or three times more than the middle fifty percent of the country.

Well, once everything was onto Twitter and Facebook, now the extremes are so aggressive they'll attack you and shame you if you say anything that departs from your side's point of view. So now the middle goes quiet. The middle 50% or 70% doesn't say very much, whereas the extremes can now say a hundred times as much. They can reach a thousand times more people than they used to be. And what is this doing, do you think, to the nature of political argument?

So we can imagine communication spread out along an array. And on let's say the far left edge, there's a private conversation between two people who are bound together by a shared past and a committed future. And they have real problems to work out and they have time to do it and they do it in privacy. So that's you and a friend, you and a spouse, you're working through

At the far opposite extreme are two people who have no past, no future, don't even know who each other are because they're both using anonymous names. They have only 240 characters to work it out on. They have thousands of people watching cheering for blood.

And they don't care about each other. They're not trying to persuade each other. All they're doing is performing at each other in order to get points and likes and support from the audience. That's not communication at all. That's zero on communication. That's just moral grandstanding, it's performance.

For Jonathan Haidt, the anonymity and the algorithms of social media reward extremism. They entrench us and they make it impossible for us to work out differences in public or persuade one another. But others believe that social media can still be a force for freedom. If anything, I see the amazing flowering of voices in many different styles on social media as being a great democratizing movement.

one grounded in greater participation and greater equality among formerly excluded groups than at any point in human history before. Daniel Krice is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Where I think the threats to democracy are are various groups that for a very long time held on to political and social and economic and class power and racial power trying to defend that.

For Daniel, it's not social media, but deeper structural forces over a period of thirty years that have led to the polarization we see today. economic strains, rising inequality, large-scale patterns of immigration, and an increasing, legitimate push for equality by many excluded groups around the world. I think what social media does is often make underlying conflicts between various groups over things like economic

and race and gender that makes them visible and increasingly visible in various ways. It becomes the contested grounds in many ways where these politics and these political battles are fought. And I think oftentimes we mistake what is visible for those deeper undercurrents that are actually driving, I think, a lot of these tensions between various and different groups.

I wonder whether i there isn't a possibility that it's a bit of both, that you can have these underlying currents, but social media can accelerate and amplify things in a way that may not have been the case in the past. Oh absolutely. And I you know, I think if you look at the global Me Too movement, for instance. Everywhere! Wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no. You look at the roads must fall movement. You look at Black Lives Matter in in the US.

Those movements all revealed how powerful social media is as a tool for witnessing, as a tool for accountability. As a form of organization, as a way for social movements to gather resources and muster resources, and not just on the left, I think also on the right.

We've heard two contrasting academic perspectives on the way social media changes the nature of political argument. I wanted to bring two seasoned practitioners of Twitter face to face in a room to hear their reflections on how it affects their interactions. Nice to meet you. Good, you? Well. Nice to see you. How are you? Christy. Thank you for coming.

This is Lawrence Fox and Ash Sarkar meeting for the first time in person. Lawrence is an actor, turned political activist, who tweets in favour of free speech and against the so-called woke culture. And Ash is senior editor at the left wing website Novara Media. I'm addicted to the validation and I wouldn't claim to be anything you know Yeah, but you follow how many likes you get, how many followers you get. I wouldn't necessarily say I count it, but

There is a physical sensation in my brain which comes with like the dopamine hit of the validation. I can literally feel this little spark in, you know, the back of my cranium. And then sometimes when, you know, I'm getting a really hard time, you know, someone's being very abusive and I mute them, it feels like someone's run like an aloe vera balm across the front of my skull. And the fact it's so physically sensational tells me this is doing something to me that has bypassed my own awareness.

Does that resonate with you? Yes, I think Ash is right. For me personally, I think I have to discipline myself not to be on it sometimes. Because, you know, you can just someone will say something ridiculous and you'll go, ha and you're in whereas you you know, in in life you might just walk past or stare at the trees. And do you find it easier arguing over Twitter than face to face? Or is it different? I mean what's the

It I think it depends on who you're who you're arguing with. I tend not to really argue on Twitter. I tend to use Twitter as a broadcast platform rather than a received

platform because there's so many people just jump on straight away. So um I quite like to be provocative on Twitter because I quite like to see who gets it and who doesn't. And that's quite a good way of because I think ultimately what really binds us together is So just run us through some of the big most controversial topics that you've been talking about. Mm. You were against COVID lockdowns? Uh yes, I'm deeply against him. And uh racial issues. And what have you been doing on that?

Well I am in court actually at the moment on that I was called a racist by some people on Twitter, on social media, so I'm currently in court. Yeah. You're being sued for defamation'cause you called them a paedophile. After being called a racist, yeah. I mean it's important to sort of disclose what direction the action is going in, right?

I critiqued Sainsbury's for saying that they were going to create safe spaces for their black employees And then that I was I said, you know, that's just proto segregationism so then I was um called a racist and then I said called them a pedophile and then straight after I said it's a rhetorical device. Who's paying for your court case? Um there's lots of people that are very keen on making sure that we know the meanings of these words. What business is that of yours, Ash?

Well, I think it's interesting because I pursued the defamation case and it was on a conditional fee agreement'cause otherwise I wouldn't have been able to afford to do it. So I'm just interested in who's paying for it. What I'll tell you is that there are a huge number of people in this world that are very keen to have this word taken. But who's paying for it? But why not? I thought you believed in color transparency, um black. So what what who's paying for your defamation case? Mm-hmm.

I'm pretty astonished by how calmly Ash handled that kind of attack. But it was at about that point that my producer came in to get us back on track. And I used the opportunity to try to ask Ash and Lawrence how they'd felt during that argument. Does it make you feel slightly uncomfortable when a stranger starts challenging you? I mean w what happens to you physically?

Yeah, I think you get a slight knot in your chest and then you also think, um, this is not we're not getting off onto a good footing here. So I'm not particularly interested in defeating my enemy as the person. I am interested in exposing their ideas. I saw you tweet about somebody going, when I destroyed that bird on... Good fun.

Pause pause for a second. Ash how about you? Do you enjoy arguing? I mean, does it make you remotely uncomfortable when you start questioning somebody? I mean, how do how do you feel emotionally when you had that interaction? Do you feel that it Oh I'm consumed by self doubt. I'm I'm genuinely consumed by self doubt and I think Um when it comes to

my personal life, I am extremely conflict averse. I hate having arguments. I hate I can't even argue with my sister. I can't argue with my partner. And I will do anything to try and avoid one. I'll go limp like a fish. Just get me out of it. And then there's something about when it's political I feel it's speaking to people who aren't just me. I feel it's speaking to an experience of economic inequality or racial inequality or something and that's when I can't let it go.

My thanks to Ash Sarkar and Lawrence Fox.

Dialogue is absolutely fundamental to our flourishing as humans. It's what allows us to decide on our common goals and build a better society and In a modern world where we're more than More and more. aware of diversity. It's through dialogue that we actually engage with differences. We acknowledge each other's identity. It's through dialogue that we find our way towards a compromise.

But it increasingly feels as though this idea of dialogue is a sort of romantic nostalgia, and that instead we may be doomed to a world of ever more trivial and meaningless debates in parliament and outside. Where one side questions whether argument is even legitimate, and the other insists on ever more extreme and divisive positions in which educated, bright public commentators are kind of living off the dopamine hits of Twitter.

In the final episode, how can we begin to rebuild the political and cultural ecosystem in which good argument and persuasion may be possible again? If you lock people together in a chamber with certain rules that encourage civility, they can do it. They can get out. But if you lock them together in a chamber and all they have to drink is bourbon and the only tools in the place are guns, you know it's not gonna work.