Comments Elsewhere

1. “You don’t HAVE an argument”, “There is nothing even remotely resembling an argument in what you have said,” etc. is useless bluster. I clearly do have an argument; that is, I gave general grounds (concerning, for example, the contexts in which courtesy is and is not obligatory) for drawing specific conclusions. You may disagree with my conclusions; you may think that my premises are undermotivated. Fine, but then your problem is you think the premises of my argument are themselves underargued, not that I haven’t got an argument. You’ve given no reasons above to suppose that the premises, if granted, do not support the conclusions. (If you have reasons for thinking my arguments are invalid or weak, and not merely unsound or uncogent, you should feel free to bring those reasons forward. In the meantime, your complaint is rather with the premises.)

2. The grounds for saying that the students were coerced has already been in evidence, both from myself and Roderick. You replied to the claim (but without claiming that the students weren’t being coerced; you just claimed that the school’s edicts shouldn’t be compared straightforwardly to the government’s laws) and were in turn replied to. At this point the question was dropped; you now come back and claim that there is “No answer” to the question of how the kids were coerced. Yes there is: the answer is that they are required to attend the damn thing and if they try to avoid it government officials will use force against them to make them attend or punish them for not doing so. You may think that this is not coercion; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. You may think that it’s coercion but that its coerciveness doesn’t erase ordinary obligations for courtesy; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. In neither case is it responsible to go around declaring that nobody has said anything to support the claim that they were being coerced into attending.

3. Nobody said that scholarly distinction is “required to speak at a school”; it is offered as one of the reasons that Blair’s appearance (which was a standard press conference for Blair to stump for his political campaign, using the school as a backdrop) is not plausibly connected to the students’ education. There are lots of reasons to bring in people of no particular scholarly distinction to speak at a school; there are even reasons to bring in people (such as Blair) who neither have any particular scholarly distinction nor any particular experience with what the students are learning about. But if you are bringing such people in then one wonders what connection their appearance does have with the students’ education. What were the students to learn by quietly attending to Blair’s press conference? What relation does it have to what the school curriculum aims to teach them? What are they losing out on by booing him? What would they have gained by not doing so? How does any of this justify the enforcement of mandatory attendance and standards of “decorum” on those who are thus forced to attend, as opposed to (say) making attendance purely voluntary or having the students spend the same amount of time watching Minister’s Questions on the television? All of these are important questions that need to be answered if you want to have a plausible case for claiming that a political press appearance of no particular direct connection to classroom work or curricular activities has an important connection to the students’ education. They are not answered above because you are too busy taking rhetorical swipes and unilaterally declaring “dialectical victory.” You may, of course, regard the conversation however you want to regard it, but you can hardly expect anyone else to care that you so regard it.

1. You claim that you are returning in kind the sort of discourse that people on this weblog promote. This would make sense if people on this weblog claimed that rudeness and bluster are appropriate in all rhetorical contexts. But they are not. Brady’s post does not entail or even suggest anything of the sort, and those of us who’ve replied to your complaints have specifically claimed that it was specific features of the situation that erased the ordinary presumption against acting that way (specific features which do not obtain, for one, in online discussions at L&P—nobody is forcing you to participate and the purpose of our discussion is argumentative give-and-take, not a press appearance). Decorum and politeness are intellectual virtues in some contexts and irrelevant in others. I take this to be a common-sense point of etiquette; if you disagree you can offer an argument against it, but judging from your claim to be responding “in kind” I take it that you don’t. We’ve already made it clear what it is that might excuse treating Blair like that at his press appearance; the question is what it is you think obtains here that justifies treating us like that. And why you think the two rationales are similar enough that it justifies the claim that you are merely “responding in kind”.

2. Supposing, however, that you were actually responding in kind, the question remains what purpose you could possibly have in doing so. If the level of discourse on L&P is bad, then what does “responding in kind” do? Improve it? (How?) Encourage someone else to improve it? (To what end?) Punish the offenders? (How, and to what end?) Amuse yourself? (Haven’t you got better things to do?)

Irfan,

The reply to you consists of six short paragraphs. You may find that a lot of space in which to discuss an argument. I don’t.

The point of it was that there are three potential worries about the students’ behavior which you seem to be raising, but none of them get a grip on the situation. (1) Booing or shouting down a speaker is a discourtesy, but the school was already far more disrespectful to the students by forcing them, as a captive audience, to sit as props for a campaign press conference for a politician that they loathe. Since there’s no particular obligation to be courteous to people who are coercing you, and no particular obligation to respect “standards” that are disrespectful towards you as a rational human being, the concerns about disrespect for the school’s standards of decorum are misplaced. (2) Neither Tony Blair nor any other government functionary is owed any special courtesies just because of his government office; this is part of the basic set of ideas about the proper relationship between citizens who hold offices and those who don’t in republican societies. So the concerns about boorishness towards an “important” guest such as Blair are misplaced. (3) It’s true that booing and shouting down speakers is not conducive to rational discourse; but Tony Blair was not there to offer rational discourse or anything at all plausibly related to the students’ education. He was going to the school, as a man of no particular scholarly distinction, to talk at them and give a press conference hawking his party’s campaign for maintaining government power. Since the event bore no plausible relationship to the students’ educations and offered no opportunity for intellectual discourse, the concerns about lowering the level of discourse are misplaced.

None of this has anything in particular to do with anarchism. I mentioned it in order to lay it aside. Since both I and many other people on L&P are anarchists, it might be thought that that’s the point of disagreement; but it’s actually not. (2) is the only one of the three points on which it might be thought to bear; but (2) is actually a part of the ideas about equality and political authority that come along with the rejection of feudal theories of sovereignty. I happen to think that the civic virtues that are sometimes priased as “republican virtue” turn out to entail anarchism in politics, but you don’t need to agree with that conclusion for point (2) to hold.

Note that these are in fact three separate points, each in direct response to a different aspect of your complaint against the students, none of which were responded to, except to say that (2) touched on an ancillary point while apparently misunderstanding the reasons given for it. It would be more edifying for you to reply to them than to nitpick my prose style, or to make blanket condemnations of the level of discourse on L&P as a whole.