How Appropriate, You Fight Like A Cow

The under 30s world can be divided into those who played point-and-click adventure games as children and those who have known nothing but shooting and football on some godforsaken TV-based console; it will surprise you neither that I believe the former group are our future statesmen, philosophers and pioneers nor that I belong very much to the former group. King amongst the point-and-click games, of course, was Monkey Island, the rakish, mad, three-headed monkey infested series that made you feel cleverer than you should for essentially doing nothing but rubbing every item in your inventory against every surface in the area until something worked.

Most famous of those games' mechanics was probably the insult sword-fighting system. This most cerebral of martial arts functioned on the ingenious insight that since in old swashbuckling movies the banter between duellists was far more fun, suspenseful and basically more the point of the film than the distinctly impractical clash of weapons, it should be the purpose of combat in the game to outdo your opponent in witty repartee. 

The way it worked was that you wandered around the forest or the ocean or whatever finding new pirates to fight. As you fight you swap insults, with each insult having an appropriate rejoinder which gives you the advantage again, so "You fight like a dairy farmer" is met with "How appropriate, you fight like a cow".  At first you don't know any insults or rejoinders at all, and are promptly beaten in every contest. As time passes however, you collect more insults and become a force to be reckoned with until you're good enough to beat the final boss. It remains the only game I can think of that forces you to lose most of your battles, which gives winning an extra sense of satisfaction.

I wonder whether we should approach arguing this way. Usually an argument is framed as a straight contest between two sides, often with each person in standing as a champion for some wider community or tribe: when arguing against the case for God with a Christian, for instance, I know that a lot of the pride involved derives from the fact that we both represent larger communities that we want to gain victory for. We also want to win because we so desperately want to be right that we've already basically decided that we are before the argument begins so as to avoid the pain of accepting that we're wrong, rendering 99% of arguments fundamentally pointless. Nobody is playing fair.

We are so used to this model of argument by now that no one even notices their premises going in: it is simply accepted that arguments are a matter of pride and since arguments never have the kind of definitive, knockout-punch victory that characterises most human contests it is quite possible to grind them down to a stalemate, usually involving long digressions about the exact semantics or the methodology of the Laffer curve or what have you. Everything else is mainly about the verbal Flynning - the equivalent of the moves movie swordfighters make to make things impressive, be it quips or comebacks or clever metaphors. But when pride is at stake, nobody wants to lose the argument and so, because no-one ever actually plays entirely fairly, no ever entirely does.

But remove pride from the equation and arguing becomes a totally different endeavour. Looked at in terms of who gains what, the "loser" of the argument is in fact normally the winner. The traditional "winner" has not actually learned anything new. She has presented the information she already knows, let us say about the effects of Keynesian stimulus spending, and it has proved to trump the opinion of her opponent about the ineffectiveness of such measures. She has gained nothing from the encounter other than the satisfaction of educating another human being. Her opponent however, now knows more than she did beforehand. Having been defeated in this idealised rational back-and-forth, she now moves on ready to face her next opponent much the wiser. 

Note that this rarely means that fundamental values are altered. A liberal can lose to conservative evidence-based arguments a dozen times in a row and still maintain the priority to redistribute power from the weak to the strong, and her conservative opponents will still want to maintain traditional power structures. It is simply that the arguments about methods will henceforth be better. As I grow older I find myself happier and happier to lose arguments because I am more secure in my progressivism, not less. The basic leftish impulse is to redistribute power from the top to the bottom, and everything else is commentary. Because I know that bedrock is not going anywhere, I don't feel that admitting an opponent is correct is a tacit admission I'm becoming a Tory. That, I think, is the very understandable fear of a lot of people who argue - that by losing they risk becoming their worst nightmare.

The thing is, basic principles aren't part of a rational argument. I couldn't tell you why I think the redistribution of power and the promotion of human equality, dignity and happiness is my priority. It just seems bloody obvious. It's not going to be displaced by argument. Therefore, really, I should go into every argument wanting to lose. I'll put forward my best case, but if I see that someone has better evidence and better logic, I'll admit it and come out wiser than I was before. The cleverest woman in the world would be the one who has lost every single argument she has been in but never had to fight the same one twice.

Treating arguing like insult sword fighting is not going to catch on any time soon. We all have far too much pride bound up in our identities of religion and politics and everything else to admit that we're wrong. But the least we can do is admit to ourselves before going into an argument that our paradigm for rational back-and-forth is hopelessly broken and that we are engaging in a farce. That way, we might stop focussing, even for a few moments, on just how we can beat our opponent, and ask what they can teach us instead. It is the most you are going to get out of it, since you're certainly not going to change their mind.