The word “tankie” itself is a thought terminating cliche that allows people to presuppose a complete understanding of another person’s worldview, without engaging in the nuance of their actual position.
It should come as no surprise that the term alone clears the bar for “strawmanning” in some people’s minds.
This is a ridiculous position to hold. Can you name me a single appellation that isn’t used to summarize those thus described? That’s kind of the point of using labels, to categorize things together by their common attribute(s). If we spent all of our time engaging with every single person to the point that we fully understood their perspective and worldview, not only would we never get anything done, we’d be utterly at the mercy of anyone who engages in bad faith.
Not all discourse is intended to be (or even should be) civil, though. A hypothetical citizen of Strawmanslund who venerates Mao Zedong as a hero and visionary, who holds the position that his successes more than make up for his failures, is not a person I want to be laboring under the misapprehension that I could ever respect them.
That’s certainly your prerogative. Personally, I like to engage with as broad a selection of opinions as possible in an effort to avoid being propagandized. I try to not allow my respect, or lack thereof, for a conversational partner to allow me to retreat to a bubble of like-minded opinions. Only by engaging with a diverse range of opinions can I hope to arrive at a nuanced view of the world. Of course, you do need to be adept at recognizing when you’re engaged in bad-faith discussion.
One can listen critically to an argument without having to immediately make up one’s mind.
I understand you think this is the clearly the correct view to hold, and I do (sincerely) understand why you’d hold this opinion. On the surface, treating everyone with uniform fairness until you’ve heard out their argument is clearly the magnanimous way to do things. But this is the fundamental issue of the Paradox of Tolerance - shutting down a conversation with a partner who espouses views like the above Hypothetical Stramandian isn’t “retreating to a bubble of like-minded opinions”, it’s refusing to treat with someone who’s opinions are so fundamentally offensive to a peaceful ethos, so personally disgusting, that they absolutely should face social consequences for the opinions they hold.
“Always be polite” as a policy doesn’t work in the face of so very many political views or odious personal opinions because the lack of negative reaction can easily be recontextualized as positive reinforcement.
I’m not presenting it as the only correct view to hold. I’m explaining my thoughts, and engaging with you in an effort to expand my understanding while allowing my beliefs to be challenged; I apologize if I came across as attempting to bludgeon you with my righteousness. That was not my intent.
What you’ve said here is all perfectly fair, and is a great example of the ways in which the paradox of tolerance (something I like to discuss, as is clear to anyone who checks my post history) is so subjective and squirmy.
To use your example and further the discussion at hand, why might someone venerate Mao Zedong despite his many failures, and why does doing so make a person unworthy of respect?
(Apologies, that was poorly worded on my part - I just meant that this is the view you hold, and people don’t (okay, rarely) hold opinions that they don’t think are the correct opinions to hold.)
It’s sadly all too easy to present someone being excluded because of said odious opinions as the exclude-er only being comfortable in a friendly echo chamber. And unfortunately I don’t know that I have a solution to that! But to further further the discussion: I so intensely do not understand how a person who can look past the tens of millions of deaths that Mao is directly responsible for, that I don’t actually know why there are any people that can forgive him. I suppose claiming they just believe the propaganda would be the easy answer, or maybe it’s that they were on the winning side so the innate human tendency towards tribalism is to blame. Anyone who can look past the atrocities he was responsible for isn’t someone I want to understand better.
I think I understand where you’re coming from, and we’re beginning to circle back around to what caused me to engage here in the first place. Someone that breaks with western orthodoxy surrounding Mao’s leadership, and discusses any good things that may have come from his reign, is at risk of being labeled a “tankie”, which then serves as the justification for dismissal. They have pushed back against a “nonfalsifiable orthodoxy” (to borrow a phrase from Parenti) in an effort to engage with the nuance of history and perhaps expose another’s internalized propagandization.
A historian would necessarily want to look at the complete spectrum of Mao’s deeds and legacy, without the need to create a dualistic value judgement in the process. Wholly good? Wholly evil? We tread toward the realm of the propagandist in this desire to oversimplify. No lessons are learned in refusing to engage with opposing opinions, we simply affirm of our own self-righteousness and entrench ourselves deeper into nonfalsifiable orthodoxies.
There are people who celebrate Adolph Adolf Hitler. This is absurdity to anyone who values human life. Only through the exchange of ideas, however, will I have any hope of understanding why an individual might believe such a thing; Only through that understanding can I engage with them using the dialectical method. Often it turns out that these people are edge-lords arguing in bad-faith for a laugh, just kids trolling out of boredom. If, however, the person seems willing to engage genuinely, and if I’ve the time and inclination for such engagement, then perhaps we both might come away with a better understanding of the world and people around us. I do want to understand neo-nazis, because only in that understanding can I formulate persuasive arguments against their specific positions, perhaps in time leading to an attenuation of such beliefs in society.
Perhaps these Mao apologists you’ve met believe that, as Julie Burchill put it:
Communists may have killed more people than fascists, but we’re still not as bad. Communism commits evil when it goes wrong; fascism commits evil when all goes to plan. No one, not even Stalin, ever became a communist in order to do evil, whereas that’s the whole point in becoming a fascist.
As for what I believe… I’m still in the process of pinning that down.
The word “tankie” itself is a thought terminating cliche that allows people to presuppose a complete understanding of another person’s worldview, without engaging in the nuance of their actual position.
It should come as no surprise that the term alone clears the bar for “strawmanning” in some people’s minds.
This is a ridiculous position to hold. Can you name me a single appellation that isn’t used to summarize those thus described? That’s kind of the point of using labels, to categorize things together by their common attribute(s). If we spent all of our time engaging with every single person to the point that we fully understood their perspective and worldview, not only would we never get anything done, we’d be utterly at the mercy of anyone who engages in bad faith.
I see this less as a dichotomy and more as a spectrum, with some labels being far more useful to civil discourse than others.
Not all discourse is intended to be (or even should be) civil, though. A hypothetical citizen of Strawmanslund who venerates Mao Zedong as a hero and visionary, who holds the position that his successes more than make up for his failures, is not a person I want to be laboring under the misapprehension that I could ever respect them.
That’s certainly your prerogative. Personally, I like to engage with as broad a selection of opinions as possible in an effort to avoid being propagandized. I try to not allow my respect, or lack thereof, for a conversational partner to allow me to retreat to a bubble of like-minded opinions. Only by engaging with a diverse range of opinions can I hope to arrive at a nuanced view of the world. Of course, you do need to be adept at recognizing when you’re engaged in bad-faith discussion.
One can listen critically to an argument without having to immediately make up one’s mind.
I understand you think this is the clearly the correct view to hold, and I do (sincerely) understand why you’d hold this opinion. On the surface, treating everyone with uniform fairness until you’ve heard out their argument is clearly the magnanimous way to do things. But this is the fundamental issue of the Paradox of Tolerance - shutting down a conversation with a partner who espouses views like the above Hypothetical Stramandian isn’t “retreating to a bubble of like-minded opinions”, it’s refusing to treat with someone who’s opinions are so fundamentally offensive to a peaceful ethos, so personally disgusting, that they absolutely should face social consequences for the opinions they hold.
“Always be polite” as a policy doesn’t work in the face of so very many political views or odious personal opinions because the lack of negative reaction can easily be recontextualized as positive reinforcement.
I’m not presenting it as the only correct view to hold. I’m explaining my thoughts, and engaging with you in an effort to expand my understanding while allowing my beliefs to be challenged; I apologize if I came across as attempting to bludgeon you with my righteousness. That was not my intent.
What you’ve said here is all perfectly fair, and is a great example of the ways in which the paradox of tolerance (something I like to discuss, as is clear to anyone who checks my post history) is so subjective and squirmy.
To use your example and further the discussion at hand, why might someone venerate Mao Zedong despite his many failures, and why does doing so make a person unworthy of respect?
(Apologies, that was poorly worded on my part - I just meant that this is the view you hold, and people don’t (okay, rarely) hold opinions that they don’t think are the correct opinions to hold.)
It’s sadly all too easy to present someone being excluded because of said odious opinions as the exclude-er only being comfortable in a friendly echo chamber. And unfortunately I don’t know that I have a solution to that! But to further further the discussion: I so intensely do not understand how a person who can look past the tens of millions of deaths that Mao is directly responsible for, that I don’t actually know why there are any people that can forgive him. I suppose claiming they just believe the propaganda would be the easy answer, or maybe it’s that they were on the winning side so the innate human tendency towards tribalism is to blame. Anyone who can look past the atrocities he was responsible for isn’t someone I want to understand better.
I think I understand where you’re coming from, and we’re beginning to circle back around to what caused me to engage here in the first place. Someone that breaks with western orthodoxy surrounding Mao’s leadership, and discusses any good things that may have come from his reign, is at risk of being labeled a “tankie”, which then serves as the justification for dismissal. They have pushed back against a “nonfalsifiable orthodoxy” (to borrow a phrase from Parenti) in an effort to engage with the nuance of history and perhaps expose another’s internalized propagandization.
A historian would necessarily want to look at the complete spectrum of Mao’s deeds and legacy, without the need to create a dualistic value judgement in the process. Wholly good? Wholly evil? We tread toward the realm of the propagandist in this desire to oversimplify. No lessons are learned in refusing to engage with opposing opinions, we simply affirm of our own self-righteousness and entrench ourselves deeper into nonfalsifiable orthodoxies.
There are people who celebrate
AdolphAdolf Hitler. This is absurdity to anyone who values human life. Only through the exchange of ideas, however, will I have any hope of understanding why an individual might believe such a thing; Only through that understanding can I engage with them using the dialectical method. Often it turns out that these people are edge-lords arguing in bad-faith for a laugh, just kids trolling out of boredom. If, however, the person seems willing to engage genuinely, and if I’ve the time and inclination for such engagement, then perhaps we both might come away with a better understanding of the world and people around us. I do want to understand neo-nazis, because only in that understanding can I formulate persuasive arguments against their specific positions, perhaps in time leading to an attenuation of such beliefs in society.Perhaps these Mao apologists you’ve met believe that, as Julie Burchill put it:
As for what I believe… I’m still in the process of pinning that down.