To Fling Poo or Not to Fling Poo...

by Steve Neumann

Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In the metaphorical agora of ideas, and especially in the clashes that take place in political and religious discourse, passionate emotions often rival, if not completely override, rational dialogue. This is not surprising, given the fact that we humans are primates. In the 2005 animated movie Madagascar, there are two minor characters, Mason and Phil, who are chimpanzees. Mason, who has a charming British accent, is Phil’s urbane interpreter; Phil is both mute and very temperamental:

Mason: I heard Tom Wolfe is speaking at Lincoln Center.

Phil: (Signs something vigorously at Mason)

Mason: Well of course we're going to throw poo at him!

So we humans come by it honestly. But, research indicating that poop-throwing by chimps may be a sign of intelligence aside, must civility be a casualty of the Culture Wars?

Not so, says my friend and fellow Nietzschephile (is that a word?) Dan Fincke of Camels with Hammers over at Patheos. Dan has published the Civility Pledge, and he is encouraging his fellow bloggers and other writers to sign it. So far the responses have been mixed: see here and here, for instance. I like the idea of a Civility Pledge not only because I think it has the potential to enable true progress in our discourse, but because it’s a piece of self-overcoming, at least for me. I am a very sarcastic person with my close friends and my two siblings. As the Facebook profile cliché has it: I’m fluent in sarcasm. It comes quite naturally to me, and it’s a self-conscious act on my part to modulate my delivery, whether written or verbal. To be honest, I’m not always successful. 

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to sign the Pledge; and unlike the two bloggers I linked to above, I’d rather focus on the nature of intellectual discourse in general in this post, instead of the merits or demerits of the Pledge itself. But if you’re a blogger or other writer, I encourage you to at least go check it out. 

No matter what the topic — sports, music, food, or politics — each of us expresses his valuations usually with the motive of convincing his interlocutor of our correctness. This tendency is so automatic as to be instinctual. But like an undersea artifact obscured by a couple millennia of aquatic accretions, it seems that the two notions of dialectic and rhetoric have been similarly disfigured. An Aristotelian understanding of discourse considered rhetoric to be a counterpart to dialectic. Rhetoric didn’t have the pejorative connotation it has today: e.g., “All I hear on TV anymore is the same old political rhetoric.”

Furthermore, rhetoric today, especially in the blogosphere and social media, seems to be rife with more or less ad hominem epithets. Just to be clear (and Dan Fincke is equally clear in his Civility Pledge), attacking an intellectual opponent’s positions with passion doesn’t necessarily mean one is engaging in ad hominem attacks. I do believe that impassioned dialogue tends to activate one’s psychological defenses more so than an equable discussion does, but I don’t see anything wrong with arguing with zeal per se. 

How often do we argue with the aim of getting at the truth of a matter (dialectics)? How often do we argue with the aim of persuading someone (rhetoric)? I’d be willing to guess that we tend to want to convince more often than we want to discover. Can we have it both ways? Presumably, most of us are arguing in support of our valuations because we believe they are true, and therefore others ought to value them as we do.

The Point

To get one’s point across —
across what, you might ask?
A vast, unbridgeable gap?
But what if you tried too hard and
overshot, as if hurling a hefty spear
or slender arrow, not aiming to maim 
or kill, just convince the other fellow?
The point in getting one’s point across 
still remains, ostensibly, for two to reach 
consensus, even détente, rather than 
an altogether senseless folie à deux.

We humans are constantly trying to change each other: we want our spouse to be tidier, our boss to be more respectful, our friend to be nicer. I’ve talked about the four quadrants of operant conditioning in a previous post. Operant conditioning describes how animals’ behavior changes in response to environmental stimuli. And we all employ tactics from these quadrants, whether we realize it or not, in varying degrees to change the behavior of others. We continually nag our spouse to put away his dirty clothes until he finally gets tired of hearing it (negative reinforcement) and puts them in the hamper; we take away our teenager’s gaming privileges if he comes home with a bad report card (negative punishment), hoping this will somehow motivate him to do better next time; we make our daughter do the dishes if she keeps picking on her little sister (positive punishment); and all too infrequently we buy our friend a nice bottle of wine for showing us some kindness (positive reinforcement).

Experience shows that all four methods of operant conditioning are effective in changing behavior, but to varying degrees. Punishment is by far humanity’s preferred method, though it is unreliable in most cases; and it tends to engender other undesirable fallout: evasion, secrecy, fear, mistrust, etc. The subject who is punished usually doesn’t learn anything from the punishment, other than how to avoid punishment in the future! And the punisher himself gets reinforced every time his punishment seems to work. It can be a vicious cycle. 

Karen Pryor, author of Don’t Shoot the Dog and one of the co-founders of clicker training for animals (especially dogs), espouses a philosophy of positive reinforcement for behavior change. She offers some steps for being a “changemaker”:

1. When they ignore you, find allies and persist.

2. Don’t be misled by lip service. Find allies and persist.

3. Meet resistance with persistence. Move around the resistance; try other avenues.

4. The stage of open attack is a touchy time. People can get fired, for example. Keep your head down, but persist. Don’t take the attack personally, even if it is a personal attack. Attack is information; it tells you:

a) You're getting somewhere: change is happening, causing extinction-induced aggression.

b) Your attacker is frightened. Empathize.

c) Your attacker still believes in the efficacy of aversives.

5. Absorbing and utilizing: this stage can last a year or more. Maintain generous schedules of reinforcement.

6. They're taking credit for your idea? By all means let them; your goal is the change. Credit is a low-cost reinforcer and people who want it don’t satiate. Give it away in buckets.

7. Are they pitching the change? Good. If you want to change something else, you now have new allies.

Her outline here is meant primarily for effecting change in a work environment; but with a few adjustments one could apply these principles to any kind of change, really. And nowhere does she suggest or encourage bullying, berating or intimidating. 

In my job as a guide dog mobility instructor I not only train dogs, I teach visually-impaired human students. Whether I’m teaching a new student or one who has had a guide dog before, there is often much behavior that needs to be either taught or changed. There are essentially two options open to me: I can either constantly tell them what they’re doing wrong, or I can positively reinforce what I want them to do right. I can nag and berate them; or I can identify an objective, highlight it, and then reinforce it — Yes! Good! There is an organization, a movement, really, called TAGteach International whose aim is to educate teachers in all disciplines in the use of concise, effective positive reinforcement. Essentially, its paradigm is one of applying clicker training principles for animals to humans. And it works.

But what about the relation between belief and behavior? We all try to change behaviors, but in the Culture Wars we also try to change beliefs. How are they related? Does behavior simply flow from belief, or is it more complex than that? Do we need to change beliefs first, and then assume that behavior will change? Or is our only recourse to try to change behavior and not worry about changing beliefs?

Let’s take marriage equality as an example. Generally speaking, those who are religious tend to oppose it, while those who aren’t religious, or lack a strong religious belief, tend to either support it or remain neutral about it (i.e., live and let live). Personally, I support marriage equality: I see no good reason why two people of the same sex shouldn’t be allowed to get married. Further, I think that religious objections to marriage equality don’t hold water. And, I find it unfair that opponents of marriage equality attempt to legislate their religious morality and try to use the force of the State to prevent same sex couples from getting married. 

Assuming change is what I’m after, and not simply winning an argument, should I try to alter the belief of my opponents? Or should I merely try to convince them not to lobby and vote against marriage equality, and leave their belief untouched? Or should I try to lobby to prevent them from legislating their belief? No matter which tack I choose, it doesn’t behoove me to engage in ridicule and condescension. If my opponent cites the Bible in defense of his position, I confess that my first impulse is to ridicule. But this happens, in my case, because his citation activates in me a constellation of judgments on propositions and assertions related to all things biblical. And my reaction is immediate because I know I’ve already rejected them, finding them to be unsupported, generally refuted, or facile. 

Ultimately, if change is possible at all, I think it’s easier to change behavior rather than belief. Beliefs are so essential to who we are, or at least who we feel ourselves to be. And as social creatures, we humans are literally awash in configurations of reinforcement and punishment as we navigate that social environment. Also, our behavior can be so protean as to be undetectable; or at least the reasons for changes in our behavior are often occluded from our reflective Eye of Sauron. 

When we consciously intend to change the behavior of others, we don’t really need to resort to name-calling, caustic sarcasm, or condescension, even though it seems to exude from us as naturally and surely as salty effluvium on a hot summer’s day.