Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Doug Henwood tried to mock Carrol Cox for chiding people about using logical fallacy in their discussion of Gore Vidal. Doug wrote:

Life isn’t about people. It’s about Historical Forces.

Yeah, it was a dumb comment because it really has zippo to do with Carrol’s theory of society. It has a lot more to do with Carrol’s ideas about ethical discourse among like-minded people engaged in political practice.

Eric Beck replied to Doug, chiding him for getting so exercised by Carrol’s structuralism:

Since you are a Marxist and have been, at least in the past, sympathetic to poststructuralism, I find it odd that you get so endlessly exercised about this aspect of Carrol’s thinking. Because he’s right: Life is about the interaction of forces, and people only matter as indexes to those interactions.

since i’m tired of Doug’s bullshit lately, I’m not getting involved at LBO. It’s a ridiculous debate because, instead of hearing what Carrol had to say, Doug turned it into a way to mock Carrol for what Doug thinks is Carrol’s superstructuralist position, and that mockery is all tied to Doug’s personal dislike for Carrol and personal belief that Carrol is the way he is because he’s depressed. Doug has tried to say, “But I’m depressed too, so I know what the old prick (Carrol) is doing. And because I’m depressed, too, I can get away with logical fallacy because I called myself depressed first.” Crap reasoning, that.

But I must say that, in response to Eric, the responses are endlessly childish. The whole thing is endlessly childish — the constant feuding between Doug and Carrol. It’s like watching two little kids bickering. Fuck no. It’s like trying to drive in heavy traffic while Sonshine and Starshine used to bicker in the backseat, picking at each other constantly.

But aside from that, I am endlessly amused by the positions Doug’s taking on the heels of his defense of Walter Benn Michaels. if he only knew what the guy says in his book, he’d be flabbergasted by how Walter Benn Michael’s are almost entirely aimed at Doug’s position on at least a half a dozen things I can think of. Hell, Doug’s introductory comments about the purpose of the LBO list? All of them are ideas that Walter Benn Michaels attacks in his book.

To boot, Doug’s response to Eric was some defense of the need for history and understanding it. I about choked on my coffee reading that. If I wasn’t a lazy ass, I’d grab WBM’s book and quote at Doug about Michaels’ denunciation of the uses of history.

So, I think it’s all rather hilarious! Especially since WBM’s book rests on the same idea Carrol’s after: it’s a logical fallacy to say someone’s idea are wrong because of personal things about them such as their identity; it’s also a logical fallacy to say their ideas are right because of personal things (like identity) about them. That’s the heart of his critique of identity politics.

Personally, my own experience is that, while gossip might be fun, it’s pretty damaging to social movements. In the feminist blogosophere, some people imagined that it would be OK to gossip about particular enemies within feminist factions or that it was ok to gossip about people who were anti-feminists. The latter was especially the case. I think the exemplar of the idiocy of this kind of thinking was Amanda at Pandagon. She got so expert at ripping on and trashing her anti-feminist, anti-progressive opponents, that she never knew how to turn it off when it came to her allies on the left. Instead, she aimed her logical fallacy generator at allies and did them in via trashing and other forms of unethical argument.

What happens is, the gossiping, the use of logical fallacy on your opponents, ends up becoming so normalized that it then gets used among your comrades. And it turns out that logical fallacies are a pretty damn destructive form of argument *within* social movements — as people like Jo Freeman and others can attest. It destroyed people. It was trashing.

You can recover from a criticism of your ideas. You cantake that criticism and improve your argument. But criticisms of someone’s person as a way to discredit their ideas? People don’t recover from that.

If you took this gossip thing seriously, then the fun thing to do would be to yammer away about how much $ WBM makes as a way of trashing the ideas in his book. Why not? It’s acceptable in a book review of Alan Wolfe’s work? Look for things he’s done or said outside of the arguments in his book and try to make him out to be a bad person. Happens all the time as a form of book review. Doug’s famous for it. It’s what he does. It’s his modus operendi. And people love him for it. But I suppose you love him for it, until he does it to you. Since most of us won’t write books and be subject to the treatment, we don’t care.

But how do you know you aren’t getting trashed in informal venues? You never know. That’s what I hate about gossips. The worst among them? It never occurs to them that as they nudge you in the ribs and yammer on about someone, gossiping, that maybe you, as audience, are wondering: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. What the hell does she say about me behind my back.

And the gossip gets away with it because most people think they’re special, that the gossip is their friends and wouldn’t say such things. Doesn’t matter that empirical evidence should teach everyone otherwise. People imagine they are special and that the gossiper doesn’t attack them behind their backs. I suppose you have to in order to get through daily life. You have to repress it and pretend it never happens.

At any rate, with regard to Walter Benn Michaels, he points at this very problem in his last chapter, which is an examination of all his foibles and things people might attack him for. As an example, Walter Benn Michaels says he wrote his book over a few months from an office at home from which he could observe a homeless man. The homeless guy bugged him; pissed him off sometimes. He didn’t want to see him. He was uninterested in giving him money or food. Basically, Walter Benn Michaels very candidly exposes all the “bad” things about his person that he knows book reviewers and intellectuals will use whenever they want to trash his person in order to trash his books.

Now, taking the principle of gossip to heart, we should rip into Walter Benn Michaels and have a jolly old time mocking him for the fact that, personally, he is a bad person. He has a view of a homeless man who had made his home under a bridge near his house! And WBM does not feed him or give him money, let alone actually invite him in for a sandwich.

But none of that, he rightly points out, has *anything* to do with the ideas in his book and whether he is right or wrong.

Long ago, on the femecon list, Doug wrote glowingly about Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay and book on maids. Since a number of feminists were offended with Ehrenreich because she said that, as feminists, women should avoid hiring maids and if they do hire them, then they should hire people from agencies like Merry Maids, etc.

Pissed off women at femecon jumped all over Doug’s case, asking him how rich he was and where did he get his money. They assumed that, with a book on Wall St., he must be some guy who made money in the stock market. They also wanted to know whether he scrubbed his toilet– or did he let his wife do it. The charge was that, as a white man, he was probably het, probably married, and probably let his wife do most of the work. Therefore, he had no clue about housework and was making a judgement from the position of male privilege. Whatever he had to say, then, about hiring maids was completely worthless on their view.

Doug knows from personal experience — since that is only *one* time that I know about. I’m sure there are more — that people will engage in public ridicule (a gossip fest) in order to attack him and his ideas. Instead of engaging the ideas directly, they try to attack his person.

And why not, actually? In Doug’s review of Alan Wolfe, he first set out to find dirt on Wolfe and his role at The New School. Then, he used that in his book review. He also tried to discredit Wolfe by noting that Wolfe had moved to the suburbs and, therefore, he’d probably always been a little fucked up — wanting to move to the suburbs when you had a family is, apparently, a conservative thing to do! I marks you as a bad person, with fucked up morality, and therefore incapable of writing a book with any value to the left or social analysis more generally.

A thread on Wolfe:

Doug’s review, a search turned up two versions:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2001/2001-April/007413.html

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/m-fem/2000m08/msg00243.htm

To me, this is one of the most fucked up things about the left. The art of the personal attack — trashing — is normalized. It’s considered the proper thing to do. I don’t know why, but there it is. Hardly anyone gets exercised about it. Hardly anyone gets called on it. When you do point out the problems with logical fallacies and trashing, people get defensive. This is especially true, I think, for folks who have made their vocational or avocational “bread and butter” so to speak out of the fine art of the trash.

But for mine? Fuck bullshit gossip. This never hit home to me so much until I had to work with a woman who was a horrible gossip a couple of years ago. I wrote about it at the old blog. She was what people would call a drama queen. She kept our team constantly on the edge with gossip about this and that. When she was let go at the end of the contract, everyone breathed this enormous sigh of relief.

And also? I know that the next line of defense is to say that people are doing it to public figures. Fuck that bullshit. My argument is that, by doing it to public figures and enemies, it is being normalized as *the* way to engage others. It becomes so normal that people see nothing wrong with it, and it gets used against allies. And allies do not recover so easily from that sort of thing. It contributed to the destruction of feminist orgs in the 60s. It contributes to the destruction of feminist orgs today. I’ve written about it here.

I suppose that the compromise is what Carrol has suggested: Go ahead and engage in it with enemies. But as Carrol has said in the past, make it a rule not to use it on political allies.