Argument: 3. Synthesis

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Don't everything away. Don't want them. Well... No. Rowing! This is Elodie and Penny, my producer's six and four-year-old. As a parent of children the same age, I often tune these kinds of arguments out. But if you listen more carefully, you can see there is a special mental skill here, which is actually unique to humans. Coming is coming!

Each child is forming a representation of their siblings' mind and addressing them in a way which orients to what they think the other things. But that's when they're not just lying, of course, or ranting the other into It's Loki's away! For at least two and a half thousand years we've struggled with this tension between the capacity of dialogue as a unique human attribute and the use of rhetoric as a tool of deception or power.

Between arguments as a vital part of our legal systems and democracies and arguments as a tool for demagogues We've seen how political argument can provoke division, hide the truth, how it can also be elitist, bullying and gaslighting. But we have no alternative in the end, other than to speak to each other. In this series, I've been trying to explore this tension. In the first episode, we explored the positive view of rhetoric, championed by the ancient Greeks.

In the second programme I looked at how modern Europe turned against argument, and how social media have brought new challenges to the whole idea of argument or rhetoric.

In this final episode, I want to suggest how argument could still be saved to play a positive role in modern lives. Lump. History of Episode 3, Synthesis I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. I believe that is the right way to provide this country. with the strong, the stable, the good and decent government that I think we need so badly. I entered parliament in 2010, a time of surprising political consensus.

when there seemed to be very little ideological difference between parties and where most of the debates were still technical conversations about efficiency rather than values. And from 1989 to about 2014, the whole graph of public opinion was a belljar with the votes in the centre.

And then it collapsed like a sort of unstable souffle, into a U shape, where the votes were on the left and the right. This was the time of the emergence of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, of the Brexit referendum, and of course the election of Donald Trump. And we are going to make... Country great. Political arguments changed in a dramatically short period of time, and the psychiatrist Ian McGulchrist observes that this is because of a kind of vicious cycle.

If one party takes a very strong position that might be seen as extreme, it's not a good idea. Right! It will provoke an extreme reaction and party A will then point to it and say, See, that's exactly what we're up against. Save our children! Save our children! But in fact that's a position that has been adopted largely Pushed.

So you get extremists each blaming the other for their points of view, and each of them is in some way right. So what one needs to do is to take debate, discussion, I would prefer to say discourse or conversation to a better level. in which we say, Okay, we're not trying to score points here, we're trying to look at the good and the bad in different positions and there is a certain amount of good in this position that I don't agree with and these are the things that I would accept.

And in my position, however, there are things that you in your position can't see. Can I ask you to take those into account? But this does not seem to be what is happening. These voices are no longer debating with each other, but speaking past each other. I wanted to try to explore this with the Labour MP Nadia Whittam. I suggested that from my point of view it looked as though neither the left nor the right wanted to understand each other's positions.

I think that draws a false equivalence between the left and the far right. I mean when you look at the left We want decent secure housing for all. We want a properly funded NHS and other public services. We want a society where people can live happily and healthily, to have secure jobs, to have a good standard of living. And when you look at the far right, they want to whip up hatred against refugees, migrants People of colour, disabled people.

Well I I g I guess Nadia to to push back for it. They that isn't what they would say. I mean, so uh that's not how they characterize themselves. If they were sitting in the studio. They would provide an equally positive, convincing emotional argument for their position. They wouldn't say, you know. We believe in stoking up hatred against refugees. They would say we believe in liberty, we believe in opportunity, we believe in We believe that refugees should be deported to Rwanda.

Well I I suppose that the point is a point of imaginative empathy, which is that neither side sort of sit in private cackling evilly and thinking, I've got an evil agenda that I'm trying to push. Both sides believe that their position is right and the other side is wrong. I mean there may be a few people who cackle evily, but basically in order to get out of bed in the morning and

Face yourself in the mirror, you tell yourself that what you believe is correct. It's not that you're sort of playing a game. I suppose the question is then to what end? Dare to dream! that the dawn is breaking on an independent United Kingdom. A lot of people since the referendum and before said to me, Well Nigel, you know, what you did was to stir up hate. Nigel Farage. You stirred up division.

In a country that was really happy. No, the country wasn't happy. All I did really was to give voice to a very large minority in the country who weren't happy with that consensus. And I I Aweside reject. the idea that because you have a different argument that that's bad, wrong, or should be closed down. Don't don't don't Don't try and lecture the Irish people about the culture and history and precarious nature of peace on this island. You haven't got a clue.

Do you want to be an independent, democratic nation or governed by foreign bureaucrats? That's the question that I am willing to do. What worries me is the complete lack of understanding on the hard left of any concept of critical thinking, open debate, their superiority as such. Dwi'n credu bod yn ddweud yn ddweud yn ddweud yn ddweud i ddweud yn ddweud yn ddweud i ddweud yn ddweud i ddweud yn ddweud yn ddweud.

During our discussion I wanted to know why he'd been so reluctant to criticize Donald Trump. Oh, I criticize Donald Trump in s in terms of some of the things that he stands for and says, but I think his instinct are very, very important for the Western world. I think he's been a peacemaker as opposed to a warmonger, unlike the so called centrists, which they were for decades and decades.

I think his understanding of how free market economics works and why socialism is a failure is very important. He's very reluctant to draw any line between himself and far right America. He's a friend of mine, but I wish he would. Faced with Nigel Farage's defence of Donald Trump, it's easy to be tempted to say we should shut down the arguments between politicians and get back to the facts. The seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes felt the same temptation.

His hope was that you could have a sovereign authoritative point of view, which everyone would agree to accept just so they could escape the never-ending argument that led too easily to civil war. Brian Garston, Professor of Political Science and the Humanities at Yale University, and the author of Saving Persuasion, a Defence of Rhetoric and Judgment.

Increasingly, from China to the Middle East, I meet people who say that argumentative citizens get in the way of economic progress. But what's being lost along the way? I'm the kind of person who gets so absorbed in an argument with someone that I'll follow them down the road just to try to continue it. like, in the Black Panther Party at the time, which I sort of think, like, In fact, this is me and Ash Sarkar from Novara Media, who we heard from in the last episode.

level of political education. The way in which a parliament works or doesn't work. We were arguing about the ways that politicians communicate. Ash thinks I still have a naive and romantic faith in public argument. She believes there's a clear truth about the world and that some people are trapped in false beliefs. She thinks debate and parliament are largely irrelevant and the point is to challenge the power of big business and media companies and propaganda.

A politician's job, in other words, is not to reflect opinion, but to create it. I go back to Stuart Hall, who very famously says politics is not about reflecting majorities, it's about constructing them. I sympathize with her, but that's not how I experienced life as an MP. I loved visiting homes in my constituency, I loved addressing live audiences because I see an MP's role as listening, as reflecting, representing.

as well as challenging views, in short, arguing I was persuading, but I was also, I hope, open to being persuaded in turn, because I believed my constituents often knew more, had different experiences, or were invested in different, but equally valid things.

Rewilding is bringing back missing habitats. Environmentalists, for example, wanted to rewild a great deal of my Cumbrian constituency to improve biodiversity and carbon capture. But small farmers fought back on the basis that their families had been there for five hundred years, and that if they went, their farms would be sold off as holiday homes.

The traditional lake district landscape would be lost, the village school would go, the local community would die. Environmental benefits therefore were being weighed against tradition, beauty, and community. Was there an answer to this problem? Was one side being ideological and the other side factual?

Is there a matter of fact about whether the farms should be done away with? Well, that's the difficulty. It's not obvious that there is a matter of fact. So however many facts you know Isn't going to make a difference to those intractable cases. M M McCabe, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy at King's College London, she sees this as a fundamental ancient question about how we approach each other's values in society.

One of the things about morality is that it doesn't fit things, right? And it's at its best when it doesn't quite work. That's the point about how agonizing moral decisions are. It's the point about why tragedies are tragic. It's the point about what it is to be a human being. But being a human being then, you need to be able to see the the ways in which morality gets stuck and not think it's easy. There isn't.

an easy answer to any of those questions and how disingenuous it would be if you said, Oh well, you know, you've got an ideology, I haven't. It's nonsense. We've all got ideologies. All of us. It just depends on trying to figure out how they fit with each other. If there were just an authoritative scientific answer, we could escape this never-ending argument, which is so exhausting to so many of us.

doesn't admit of those sorts of answers. And that's the essential argument for the practice of rhetoric, for learning how to navigate the inevitable controversies that any real politics will have. in any society that's not completely homogenous.

But patient, empathetic dialogue between people is difficult in giant democracies when there is little intimate interaction between citizens. I think we face uh institutional challenges more than cultural ones. That is, yes, our culture is incredibly polarized and argumentative, but that's been the case throughout history in different ways. The question is can we find new ways of constructing spaces in which to draw out the best of our judgments? And I don't believe

that human beings have themselves become incapable of making good judgments. I think we've just forgotten how to create the spaces in which we judge both. Poling suggests that most people in Britain spend about seven minutes a week thinking about politics and have no live interaction with politicians, and at the same time, politicians themselves seem to have lost the space for debate and argument among themselves. What have we learned over the last three programs?

First, that there is a moral component to argument. It's not simply about asserting your truth. It requires acknowledging that there's nothing conclusive in the social and political world, that there are valid disagreements, different experiences, different moral values. So it must be about a dialogue, not a single voice lecturing, but instead a partnership of mutual listening. But equally, argument assumes that there are better and worse ways of approaching political truth.

There's not just an infinity of arbitrary statements. that there can be a creative, fruitful dialogue among people who have some things in common, who can reach a new understanding. In other words, Argument must find the middle ground between dogmatism and relativism. This brings us to a second requirement, improving the spaces in which we conduct our debate.

The world's richest man, Elon Musk, says he's abandoning his£36 billion bid to buy Twitter. A lawyer for the Tesla Chief Executive accused the social media company of breaching the original agreement, but Twitter says it will sue. For weeks Elon Musk has been trying to get information about how many people actually use Twitter. That's because Twitter has a problem with bots which imitate humans. Only yesterday, Twitter said it removed a million spam accounts a day.

I did suggest a couple of pretty substantial reforms, and actually nobody on Twitter seemed to object. And they are, uh most importantly, um authenticate all users. You can't just bring a bag of money to a bank and open an account with a fake name. Yet banks have no your customer laws, and I think major platforms should too.

It doesn't mean that you have to post under your real name, but at least there should be a way of authenticating that you're a real person. You're not a bot or a Russian troll or you know, you're a real person in a real country and that you're old enough to be using the platform, which I think should be sixteen or eighteen. So that would eliminate a lot of the trolls and fake accounts. That would make things much nicer.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. Then there are so many ways to incentivize good discussion or jerky aggressive discussion. And right now, Twitter's incentive structure is such that it incentivizes being a jerk.

And what I would like to see is the opposite, where you could crowdsource how aggressive, nasty, or jerkish someone is on a scale of one to five. And then the rest of us, we have a slider switch and by default it's set to four. So anybody who's a four on jerkishness or below, I see and they see me. But anyone who's a five, you know, they don't see me, I don't see them.

There's an interesting analogy in the rules of parliament. So for example in the House of Commons you can't call somebody else a liar. In other words, there are rules that are set in place, a bit like your slide of four to five, which excludes certain kinds of language from the chamber.

That's right, because the creators of our legislatures understood, they understood human nature, and they understood that 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.

As well as on social media, there is so much that we could do to improve the quality of debate in Parliament. I often wondered whether the problem actually isn't televising Parliament in the first place. Let us out. famous recent case of uh Senator Ted Cruz making a bombastic speech on the Senate floor. He sits down and somebody taking a picture from behind could see he was literally checking what people were saying about him on Twitter the moment after he stopped speaking bombastically.

So I think democracy is in big trouble in the age of social media. Has transparency and accountability undermined the thoughtfulness and honesty of debate? Might debate in Parliament or Congress be more sincere if it wasn't televised?

Could we not do much more to encourage debate outside parliament and social media? Among the deep divisions that followed the Brexit referendum, I found that the most fruitful places for debating the issues were not on television, but with small audiences face to face. In those meetings I often asked how many people had voted for Brexit and how many had voted remain. I asked them to put their hands up, and then I asked people to look around the room.

And this demonstrated that a friend sitting next to them had voted differently to them, might remind them that their children had voted differently from parents. And in this kind of smaller setting I often found that interesting solutions and compromises emerged. That was the original federal idea of the American founders, to allow decisions to be made at the most local level. The hope of federalism was to leave some practice for citizens at the local level in making decisions together.

Even if the decisions might be a little bit worse than they would be if made by a professional bureaucracy, it was worth it. The founders even tried to select politicians in this way. They didn't believe that hundreds of millions of people could choose a good president on the basis of watching a TV ad. Instead, each town would select its representatives from people they knew, and then those representatives would gather together and select a state representative from among themselves.

And those state representatives in an electoral college would then elect the president. So it was a series of face to face decisions, and at each stage people could select someone that they'd known intimately for years. So a more local type of democracy. And perhaps also a different type of conversation. We need to think more slowly. We need to think together with people, rather than separately. M M McCabe.

One of the prescriptions then, as it seems to me, is a kind of devolution. What needs to happen is something that becomes more particular, less Grand universal stuff and start to try and enable us to talk to each other in small places. Schools. Children are not being given the scope and the time to learn things that are difficult, intractable. irresoluble and all of that. So that's one of the things I think we need to do. We need to take things slower, especially in education.

I think our democracy would benefit hugely from more use of citizens' assemblies or juries, where groups of citizens selected at random get into the details of a political issue with support from experts, and they spend days doing it. By doing so they take the issues out of the polarized atmosphere and the whipping of parliament, and they have time for a much calmer and more measured debate, where their experiences and their values can contribute.

And then there is the importance of regaining respect or empathy in argument. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparents.

Persuasion is a complicated thing because on the one hand you are trying to change someone's opinion, trying to exert power over them, maybe even m manipulate them at the extreme. On the other hand, in order to persuade someone you have to

start from where they are, which requires attending very carefully to their opinions and commitments. And if you go very far in that direction You will be accused of pandering to them, of flattering them, of not changing their mind at all, but just repeating what they most want to hear. So persuasion can fall into either pandering or manipulation, but ideally it sort of navigates the space between those two. Let's own them. Out of many, one.

So an elected political leader is perhaps both ruling people and being ruled by them. And so at times you will feel as though you're maybe giving in a bit too much to your audience, but at times you will be pressing them to give in to you. And that back and forth is really what democratic citizenship is about. The answer to bad arguments is not to avoid argument, it's to argue better.

A clear moral perspective, regulation of social media, improvements to parliament, more local democracy, slower thinking, citizens' assemblies. and more empathy would all improve the quality of our arguments. But there is a final vital insight from the ancient Greeks. speaking beautifully can also have a power and truth of its own. I would like to see us educated in argument again. Partly for the reasons that the state school boys from Liverpool shared in the first programme.

I think in the long term I think it would say to maybe a better person. And partly because the poetic analogies and metaphors of truly great speeches allow us to encapsulate the ambiguity and tension of the world. in a way that a simple recital of the facts cannot. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. Dr. King's metaphor in his great I have a dream speech.

helps us to see ourselves in a different light. It grounds a particular moment in a much more fundamental psychological, moral and political truth. King is right to use the metaphor of freedom to describe the US civil rights movement. But British politicians who use the metaphor of vassalage or slavery. Vassal states. To describe the role of the European court in the EU-UK customs dispute. They are, I believe, engaged in a tasteless, distorted falsification, because it simply isn't slavery.

I felt the same actually with the other side in the Brexit debate too, when they sent me messages at the same time saying, This is an agreement with bigotry and racism at its heart. Exaggerated rhetoric, lack of careful thought, and false metaphors simply intensify resentment and division, whereas Dr. King's more apt metaphor calms and reconciles.

The Latin root of argument, argueri, means to make bright or enlighten, and it comes from a much older Proto-Indo-European word, arg, to shine or white. Great rhetoric, great arguments, great metaphors, like Dr. King's, clarify moral truths. Bad arguments, bad rhetoric, bad metaphors muddy and corrode the truth.

Rhetoric, the American philosopher Kenneth Burke says, can be, par excellence, the region of the scramble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, cloaked malice, and the subsidised lie. But it can also be crucial to persuasion, and thus to cooperation, to consensus, to compromise, and to action, and ultimately to sympathy, identification. And love.