Putting Stones in Shoes

One of the banes of just about every English teacher in the country is grading papers.  It is oh so very labor intensive, and you’re like me, you feel like putting a fork in your eye when you’re done.  I’d rather watch paint dry.  Last week I just finished a Santa-sack size load of research papers.  Some essays you can zip through quickly, but not these suckers.  It took me about 20 minutes to grade one of them…and I had 60 to grade!

You know, though, this time through I actually enjoyed the process a bit, because of the importance of both the topics the students were addressing and the skills I had to impart.  There were a few exceptional papers in the bunch, but by and large the overwhelming majority struggled in a few important areas: giving hard data and evidence to back up assertions, avoiding simple logical fallacies, and giving their opponents charity.

Most students could assert with the best of them, but they could not argue.  They employed rhetoric effectively, but lacked depth in their thought.  This is not surprising, since they are surrounded by so much surfacy stuff that passes for critical thinking.  When your intellectual diet consists entirely of MSNBC or The O’Reilly Factor (yes, I know some of you are fans, but you have to admit, many times, instead of level-headed arguing, he gives his audience a series of one liners and hand-wave dismissals.  Just because he yells louder and acts more outraged doesn’t mean he’s making a good point.), the depth of your own arguments tends to suffer.  Sound bites and status updates are the main mental diet of generation 2.0 (and that might even be generous, come to think of it), and this doesn’t bode well for critical thinking.

When one’s argument is full of assertions and devoid of evidence, it is pretty easy to defeat it.

The same overwhelming majority also struggled with giving their opponents a fair shake.  If they even addressed counter-arguments at all, they were typically summarized in a line or two, then done away with a simple upturned nose in the air.  Students on both sides of the hot button issues, conservatives and liberals alike, struggled with this.  This way of treating one’s opponents, of course, is not convincing.

Here’s an example: one girl in the class wrote in defense of same-sex marriage.  At one point in her paper, she brought up the Old Testament’s prohibition against homosexuality as a counter argument.  Though it is, strictly speaking, not centrally relevant to the legality of SSM, that was the main counter argument she addressed.  She responded by leveling a charge of hypocrisy against Christians.  Yes, homosexuality is condemned a few times in the Old Testament, she acknowledged, but the Old Testament also condemns things like picking up sticks on the sabbath, wearing certain clothing, as well as a host of other odd things.  No Christian today, however, takes those prohibitions seriously: many work long hours on Sundays and blithely violate most or all of the OT ceremonial law.  Her point was that if Christians don’t take all those commands seriously, why should society take prohibitions against homosexuality seriously?

Her response is a common one, and it is most of the time stated as if it’s plain as day.  Typically, most people who make the same points make little to no effort at engaging with the large amount of scholarship out there answering the question.  Most just act like it doesn’t exist.

Here was my response to her that I wrote:

When you do address counter arguments, you do not handle them well. Your treatment of the Bible is a case in point. I don’t think you took the Bible and your critics seriously. Seems to me like you simply dismissed their arguments with a handwave. Even if you do not think Jesus was God or anything of the kind, he was a smart guy. The same thing goes for the other New Testament players like Paul and John. Even though you might disagree with them in the end, please admit that they weren’t country bumpkins. If your charge of inconsistency were as obvious as you seem to say it is, don’t you think they’d notice? Do you think it’s possible that they might have information/perspective about those passages that you missed? The same goes for the Church Fathers after the apostles and all the biblical scholars since then. Again, though you might disagree with them in the end, they deserve to be engaged with. Christians have had 2000 years to figure out an answer to your charge, and there are some cogent explanations out there. In your rush to prove a point, you missed the meaning and nature of the Old Testament law.

Though I could have gone to great lengths to explain the OT law and how it functions in the new covenant today, I was under no compulsion to do so, since her assertions were formed so haphazardly.  The simple questions above should be enough to give her pause.  It is probably the case that no one has stopped her and asked her those common-sense questions before.

She also trotted out the same old-name calling assertions, calling those who think homosexual behavior is immoral intolerant and hateful.  This was my response to that:

You want to convince your audience with evidence, data, and reason, not alienate them. If your conclusion is offensive to them, so be it. You are not to be faulted for that. But if your method of argumentation is offensive, that is a different story. In your paper, it is your method that is offensive. When you blithely call your opponents bigoted, intolerant (page 2), and hate-filled (page 4), you alienate them. That is name calling, and name calling is not an argument. This sort of manipulation has no place in a principled discussion. Your opponents think that some lifestyles should not be encouraged, and they think that for moral, health, and public welfare reasons. They might be wrong, but how is that hate?

Again, she’s probably never considered the question before.  I’m glad she’s in my class, and I’m glad I had the chance to hopefully make her think.