Argument
"Facts are meaningless. They can be used to prove anything that's even remotely true." -Homer Simpson
Truth is a tricky thing to find. This has always been true in our world. We didn't need Facebook's susceptible platform--or the rest of the Internet machine, for that matter--in order for us to start disseminating misinformation. Or for some of us to start believing in it.
If you want to figure out what's really going on, you have to look beyond arguments. People debate things, and they state simple facts to make their case. But when the facts are at odds with each other, who is telling the truth?
I remember having a brief stint when I was interested in feminism. For those who have followed my reading before, you might be curious where I ended up on this. I'll satiate those few: I still self-identify as a feminist, and I do believe that gender equality is worth fighting for. But I gravitated away from it, for a few reasons. First, I don't know how to fight; social justice isn't really my forte. Second, I dated a girl for a while who was pretty adament that, as a man, I really don't understand the plight of women, and that my hope to use my own male privilege to help women was misplaced, even if well-meaning; while I disagree, I got out of the habit of discussing it, or even thinking about it, while dating her. Lastly, I got a job that took most of my energy away from extracurriculars.
More relevant to my point here is that when I first started looking into feminism, I first read several books on the matter. Then, I did a bit of searching around on YouTube for videos that might give an overview of the subject matter. It was this latter excursion that was the most shocking; a search for "feminism", "gender equality", or similiar search words surfaced pages of videos that were either attacks on feminism, or attacks on notable feminist figures in the community, arguing that they are all wrong. Several others were propaganda videos from think tanks which stated, with statistics, why the arguments of feminists simply aren't accurate. I remember one video with a woman making a case, with data, that there was no pay gap.
If you attack the character of the person making the argument, instead of their argument itself, this is called an ad hominem attack. This is a phrase that most people know due to the Internet, since they are so common in cyberspace that you would think Al Gore had also invented them. They are a fallacy; you cannot prove someone's argument wrong simply by disparaging who they are.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider how a person is making their argument when deciding whether or not it's valid.
Let's imagine a hypothetical world in which we have achieved perfect gender equality. This is not the world we live in, but let's imagine that we've gotten there. Men and women are equal legally, economically, socially, and politically. (Maybe including some other -ly adverbs too.) Despite this, in this world, there is a fringe group of women who call themselves feminists who are blind to the truth of this, and still argue that women are being denied equality. How would we treat these women?
I remember an episode of "The Office" where, for one reason or another, the main character of Michael Scott decides to use company time to run a fundraiser to help find a cure for rabies. A cure which, naturally, the world already has. As he pleas to this employees to help him in this effort, they roll their eyes and try to ignore him.
Experience tells me that's what the world reaction would be to this fringe group of women ignorant of the truth. Collectively, we might roll our eyes, but we'd try to ignore them. This is more or less the way most of us treat people with odd conspiracy theories about the government hiding aliens from us.
What would not happen, however, is much backlash. Just as conservative think tanks and angry young men don't make videos to disparage the beliefs of people who believe in UFOs, in a world where we had achieved perfect gender equality, there wouldn't be an exerted, or emotional, effort to discredit the few people arguing that we had not. They would just be dismissed.
This is what we see in the world. Women who argue for gender equality are not summarily dismissed. They are attacked, often with very sexist statements, with arguments that claim that what they are saying is false.
Does this prove that gender equality exists in the world? Of course not. The point I am making is that the way the debate plays out is not irrelevant to considering the question.
Many of the conversations I have had with religious people are unconvincing for similar reasons. I remember asking people about their own faiths, not to poke fun or find holes, but to ask their help in order to reconcile the holes that I had already noticed. How can the world really be less than 10,000 years old, given everything that we observe? Well, that was all put in place by God, so the world would look older than it actually is, in order to test our faith. What about all of the hominids who existed for thousands of years before Jesus came? Or the people who live in corners of the world who never hear about Jesus. They can't get to heaven; what of their fate? One woman gave me a long-winded answer to the latter question, which was one of the more complicated theological weavings I had ever heard.
Go deep enough into inquiry, and your gut starts to tell you that something simply doesn't feel right. You ask a child "Did you eat the cake that was sitting on the kitchen counter?" The child assures you that they did not, even as they have frosting on the corners of their mouths or chocolate under their fingernails. You ask them to explain the frosting or chocolate, and they come up with some elaborate reason that doesn't involve them eating the cake.
This is what lies sound like. The story just keeps being twisted and contorted, further and further, in order to fit reality. It becomes this shapeless, formless thing that clearly has no comfortable place to exist in the real world.
In my discussiions, even if you get past all of these odd answers, eventually I would hit upon a question they had never considered before. Instead of admitting that they hadn't considered the question before, and stopping to think about it, they'd keep talking, clearly making things up as they went along, in order to satisfy my curiousity. It typically ended with them telling me that I shouldn't be asking so many questions because questioning God this thoroughly is heresy. (My bad; I just worked through Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life and learned that God's purpose for me is to be curious about everything.)
These kinds of inconsistencies are present in the feminist debate. Feminists don't seem to agree with each other on everything; some say men are inherently evil, and some say they are not. Some believe women should be superior to men, and some believe in equality. There are inconsistencies, but the fundamental premise is generally the same.
Not so with those who oppose feminism. On the one hand, the notion that gender inequality exists in our world is a pernicious lie. On the other hand, it does exist, but it's better that way, because, for example, patriarchy is more pleasing to God for religious reasons. So does it not exist, or does it exist but ought to because it's inherently "good"?
Being aware of this doesn't make getting to the truth of any matter any easier. If you're digging around the Internet, you still have to wade through a lot of information in order to figure out what to believe and what to reject. It's also not foolproof; I've certainly met people epousing viewpoints that I knew to be wrong who were making their argument in a calm, seemingly well-reasoned manner. I've also met people who argue on behalf of the truth who are lacking in charisma, to put it mildly.
The hardest part of finding the truth is that many of us never even start the search for it. I've lost count of how many times I've been browsing the Internet and noticed a link to an article. Sometimes the headline or title of the article will contain an implicit assertion, which I accept without realizing it, and later, I recognize just how heavily this influenced how I thought about the subject matter for the rest of the day. It's alarming to me that this happens so effortlessly.
Truth is a tricky thing to find. This has always been true in our world. We didn't need Facebook's susceptible platform--or the rest of the Internet machine, for that matter--in order for us to start disseminating misinformation. Or for some of us to start believing in it.
If you want to figure out what's really going on, you have to look beyond arguments. People debate things, and they state simple facts to make their case. But when the facts are at odds with each other, who is telling the truth?
I remember having a brief stint when I was interested in feminism. For those who have followed my reading before, you might be curious where I ended up on this. I'll satiate those few: I still self-identify as a feminist, and I do believe that gender equality is worth fighting for. But I gravitated away from it, for a few reasons. First, I don't know how to fight; social justice isn't really my forte. Second, I dated a girl for a while who was pretty adament that, as a man, I really don't understand the plight of women, and that my hope to use my own male privilege to help women was misplaced, even if well-meaning; while I disagree, I got out of the habit of discussing it, or even thinking about it, while dating her. Lastly, I got a job that took most of my energy away from extracurriculars.
More relevant to my point here is that when I first started looking into feminism, I first read several books on the matter. Then, I did a bit of searching around on YouTube for videos that might give an overview of the subject matter. It was this latter excursion that was the most shocking; a search for "feminism", "gender equality", or similiar search words surfaced pages of videos that were either attacks on feminism, or attacks on notable feminist figures in the community, arguing that they are all wrong. Several others were propaganda videos from think tanks which stated, with statistics, why the arguments of feminists simply aren't accurate. I remember one video with a woman making a case, with data, that there was no pay gap.
If you attack the character of the person making the argument, instead of their argument itself, this is called an ad hominem attack. This is a phrase that most people know due to the Internet, since they are so common in cyberspace that you would think Al Gore had also invented them. They are a fallacy; you cannot prove someone's argument wrong simply by disparaging who they are.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider how a person is making their argument when deciding whether or not it's valid.
Let's imagine a hypothetical world in which we have achieved perfect gender equality. This is not the world we live in, but let's imagine that we've gotten there. Men and women are equal legally, economically, socially, and politically. (Maybe including some other -ly adverbs too.) Despite this, in this world, there is a fringe group of women who call themselves feminists who are blind to the truth of this, and still argue that women are being denied equality. How would we treat these women?
I remember an episode of "The Office" where, for one reason or another, the main character of Michael Scott decides to use company time to run a fundraiser to help find a cure for rabies. A cure which, naturally, the world already has. As he pleas to this employees to help him in this effort, they roll their eyes and try to ignore him.
Experience tells me that's what the world reaction would be to this fringe group of women ignorant of the truth. Collectively, we might roll our eyes, but we'd try to ignore them. This is more or less the way most of us treat people with odd conspiracy theories about the government hiding aliens from us.
What would not happen, however, is much backlash. Just as conservative think tanks and angry young men don't make videos to disparage the beliefs of people who believe in UFOs, in a world where we had achieved perfect gender equality, there wouldn't be an exerted, or emotional, effort to discredit the few people arguing that we had not. They would just be dismissed.
This is what we see in the world. Women who argue for gender equality are not summarily dismissed. They are attacked, often with very sexist statements, with arguments that claim that what they are saying is false.
Does this prove that gender equality exists in the world? Of course not. The point I am making is that the way the debate plays out is not irrelevant to considering the question.
Many of the conversations I have had with religious people are unconvincing for similar reasons. I remember asking people about their own faiths, not to poke fun or find holes, but to ask their help in order to reconcile the holes that I had already noticed. How can the world really be less than 10,000 years old, given everything that we observe? Well, that was all put in place by God, so the world would look older than it actually is, in order to test our faith. What about all of the hominids who existed for thousands of years before Jesus came? Or the people who live in corners of the world who never hear about Jesus. They can't get to heaven; what of their fate? One woman gave me a long-winded answer to the latter question, which was one of the more complicated theological weavings I had ever heard.
Go deep enough into inquiry, and your gut starts to tell you that something simply doesn't feel right. You ask a child "Did you eat the cake that was sitting on the kitchen counter?" The child assures you that they did not, even as they have frosting on the corners of their mouths or chocolate under their fingernails. You ask them to explain the frosting or chocolate, and they come up with some elaborate reason that doesn't involve them eating the cake.
This is what lies sound like. The story just keeps being twisted and contorted, further and further, in order to fit reality. It becomes this shapeless, formless thing that clearly has no comfortable place to exist in the real world.
In my discussiions, even if you get past all of these odd answers, eventually I would hit upon a question they had never considered before. Instead of admitting that they hadn't considered the question before, and stopping to think about it, they'd keep talking, clearly making things up as they went along, in order to satisfy my curiousity. It typically ended with them telling me that I shouldn't be asking so many questions because questioning God this thoroughly is heresy. (My bad; I just worked through Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life and learned that God's purpose for me is to be curious about everything.)
These kinds of inconsistencies are present in the feminist debate. Feminists don't seem to agree with each other on everything; some say men are inherently evil, and some say they are not. Some believe women should be superior to men, and some believe in equality. There are inconsistencies, but the fundamental premise is generally the same.
Not so with those who oppose feminism. On the one hand, the notion that gender inequality exists in our world is a pernicious lie. On the other hand, it does exist, but it's better that way, because, for example, patriarchy is more pleasing to God for religious reasons. So does it not exist, or does it exist but ought to because it's inherently "good"?
Being aware of this doesn't make getting to the truth of any matter any easier. If you're digging around the Internet, you still have to wade through a lot of information in order to figure out what to believe and what to reject. It's also not foolproof; I've certainly met people epousing viewpoints that I knew to be wrong who were making their argument in a calm, seemingly well-reasoned manner. I've also met people who argue on behalf of the truth who are lacking in charisma, to put it mildly.
The hardest part of finding the truth is that many of us never even start the search for it. I've lost count of how many times I've been browsing the Internet and noticed a link to an article. Sometimes the headline or title of the article will contain an implicit assertion, which I accept without realizing it, and later, I recognize just how heavily this influenced how I thought about the subject matter for the rest of the day. It's alarming to me that this happens so effortlessly.