How to have a good argument

The internet has many uses, but there is undeniably a group of people who go online as a way to find a disagreement, in the same way some people go to a football match just for an excuse to punch someone in the teeth.

Many people online are having arguments – in the sense that they’re having a sort of verbal fisticuffs. They think it’s a competition. What they are not doing is arguing, in the sense of argumentation.

The lost art of arguing

Argumentation isn’t about saying ‘No, you’re wrong, you knobhead’. Argumentation is about setting out your claims and then presenting justifications for those claims with logic and evidence.

For example: say you want to claim that soup is actually a naturally occurring resource and half of the supposed oil platforms in the world are secretly drilling to find these soup deposits under the ocean, under orders from a shadowy cabal of tinned goods producers. It’s on you to back up those claims with evidence. No one just has to accept that.

Justifying claims – or not

And we can already see why argumentation is going out of fashion. Because most of what people claim these days seems to be made up of pure guesswork or fantasy, and they have no justifications or evidence. There may be justifications and evidence, if you were to look, but they don’t have them. It didn’t matter to them to check.

If you look on the Trending section of X you should pretty quickly be able to find something contentious that people are fighting over. And if you read those messages you’ll notice something quite extraordinary: the people fighting ‘with’ each other aren’t actually engaging each other at all.

Although they aren’t physically in the same room, it wouldn’t matter even if they were; they’re perfectly content to scream at a wall instead. The fact there’s someone there to argue with is in many ways just a bonus.

Instead, some liberal will say something generic and horrible, for instance that anyone who’s ever been in a Waitrose is a scourge upon the Earth, and then a conservative will respond by claiming that everyone who’s ever heard the word ‘strike’ without vomiting up a little bit of bile is determined to trigger the collapse of civilisation.

The actual topic of contention is largely irrelevant. A mere MacGuffin. These people shout at each other for no reason; trying to relate what they’re saying to each other back to the issue at hand is as futile as trying to anchor a cruise ship with a jar of peanut butter.

Ruining it for the rest of us

But why does this matter? It’s only social media after all, right? Can’t we just let the angry people get on with it? The most extreme viewpoints talk the loudest, right, so is the problem really that big?

But it is. The loudest voices get the most visibility. If all they’ve got to show is vitriol and slander, the people on the other side of the debate will believe that is all anyone has to say.

Imagine you saw a flyer for the ‘come and get a free slice of cake club’. You may think that’s a great idea. But what if you opened the door and the room was just full of people shouting at each other over whether the cakes should be on napkins or paper plates? You’d back out slowly, right? The free cake suddenly doesn’t seem so good. The bad behaviour of the people who support the idea taints the idea itself.

Us-and-them thinking prevents unity

Bad argumentation stifles progress. The gulf between people with opposing viewpoints is widening. As more people who don’t know how to argue get involved in the debate, it becomes harder and harder for the other side to see any value in their views and beliefs.

Instead, everyone descends into ‘us and them’ thinking, where ideas are assessed not based upon their merit but upon who said them.

We can’t make progress when every even mildly contentious issue instantly descends into the most extreme forms of name calling. In fact, the current atmosphere is hostile to progress – people approach arguing like boxing; who can strike the most personal blow; who can floor the opposition with the force of their sarcastic retorts?

We deserve a better form of debate. Our progress towards a better world depends upon it.

And if you don’t agree with me, well, you smell.


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Header photo by Hal Cooks on Unsplash

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