On Doing Your Own Research

I usually hear the claim on a news show when the pundit or journalist takes the mic out onto the street to talk to the proverbial “people on the street.” I don’t know why pundits do this. I don’t know who they are expecting to cross paths with. If they really wanted to get informed ideas, they would try to find groups committed to discussing the issues they care about. That way, instead of showing how stupid and uninformed the average Joe is, we could actually listen in on what people who know something are actually saying. These people, who know what they are talking about and how to talk with others, could then not only inform us, but also become good role models for us of how to talk in public. 

Instead, as always happens on these shows, at least one of the people given the mic will claim to have done his/her/their own research. When pressed, they usually won’t explain what their research looked like. If they begin to describe it at all, they will usually mention a few websites they’ve visited–websites I always suspect someone else led them to look at. 

“I’ve done my own research.”

Not that having someone else lead you to a source is bad. That is also part of doing research. It’s just not the end of it.

In graduate school, I did my own research. I had to map out for my committee what my research plan was going to look like. I had to include a substantial bibliography, much of which I’d already read and summarized. Privately, I might have started with what I believed was a settled conviction, but by the time I reached this proposal stage, I was also bothered by a question, or questions, that I hoped my research project could at least address. I might have had certain feelings or leanings on my project, but I admitted to this so that my own opinion wouldn’t get in the way of a better one as I dug into every possible opinion and study from every possible angle on the topic. 

The people on the shows today usually don’t mean this. Usually, clothed in a red, white, and blue t-shirt that sometimes has the American flag and a picture of Donald Trump, their favorite politician, they will look surprised to learn that DJT began his life as president by paying off a 25 million dollar fraud settlement to students of his defunct Trump University. I note this not because I have Trump-Derangement Syndrome but because it makes their claim to having done their own research, given the statement on their t-shirts, deeply ironic: It suggests that they haven’t done any oppositional research. If they had, they’d know that Trump is a bum out to make money, and not someone who will save them from the Deep State or the Federal Government, or whatever it is they are against.

This really is the only question to ask those who have “done their own research”: Did they at least do what I require my first-year writing students to do? Did they at least do some oppositional reading? Did they read anything that might be credible from a point of view they might disagree with?

And yes, people who disagree with us can and do have credibility, and if the solitary researchers don’t see this, then they haven’t yet started their own research. 

Oppositional Reading looks something like this, but it isn’t sacreligious.

Say I want to write an opinion on abortion. And I’m pro-life (which I basically am. I also care about the life of the woman, and I don’t think that raped ten year olds should be required by the state to carry their pregnancy to full term). That means that as I compose my argument, part of my research for that will include reading the fairest representations of as many opposition views as possible. It will mean reading entire essays of opposing views with an openness to learn something and not simply to cherry pick wording or sentences that reinforce my own prejudices about the position I’m reading. It will mean being able to fairly summarize an opposing argument, including in my summary ideas that might make them look reasonable and even persuasive. I should also be looking at the evidence they have used. This will finally lead me to question the evidence that I have relied on for my position on the argument, because I know that others will do the same with my argument.  

This is most difficult–for everyone. No one I know likes to read opinions that run counter to theirs. We resist them. Even as we read, we are squirming with facts to marshal against the opponent, ready to reduce them to the shmucks they really are.

In fact, I generally like to carry on as though there are no reasonable objections to my views because I am simply right.

I don’t care who is doing oppositional reading. It is difficult for lawyers, journalists, politicians, the Pope, feminists, Democrats, Republicans. It’s just not in our nature to fully attend to someone who has an argument counter to our own position. It’s not. It is something we have to become trained to do. 

What Most People Today Seem To Do

In fact, this is so difficult to do that most people stop short of the task. Instead, they will do one of three things:

1) attack the messenger (“Oh, that’s just CNN, and they are fake news,” or “Oh, that’s just Breitbart, cheerleaders for The Donald”);

2) claim that the message has been altered (“I don’t believe that William Barr really said that about the election”);

3) reduce the opposition view to look unreasonable (“All Democrats favor all abortions, even after the child is born.” Yes, a congressional leader recently at least seemed to imply this of all Democrats); 

4) use devil terms to dismiss the opposition (We saw this during the McCarthy era during the search for “un-American activities.” Today, of course, in the thinking of some members of Congress, to be “un-American” is to not be white, or to be a Non-Christian). 

In the current political climate, we hear these, or similar, attacks on occasion. It’s not every day, but it does represent the thinking of a vocal minority. But to think this way is not argument in any classical or modern sense. It is not done so that we learn something. It is done agonistically. That is, it is  done to win and not to lose. Most of the time, people will draw on these bastardized versions of opposition, all of which are logical fallacies (1 is an ad hominem attack–attacking the character of the opponent, 3 is a version of the either/or dilemma, and 4 is what Richard Weaver would call a devil-term). And the intention is to win some social debate or culture war. 

Why Do We Argue? 

We have to ask this, because it simply sounds like much of our current public discourse is tending downward into what looks like actual, not symbolic violence. Our culture wars are moving, as some congressional leaders have recently suggested, toward civil war. 

This is disturbing and suggests that we are beyond arguing. It appears that we no longer know how to argue and not fight. 

So here is what we need to know. Argument, in the classical sense, was done not only to win something. It was also done to make a case for the best possible, most likely opinion. It was engaged in so that the debaters could match one opinion with another in order to find which of them was more aligned with real possibilities. 

People argued, in the classical sense, in order to learn something. And when they did, they were willing to change their opinions to the better one. This also suggests that they were open to change, to new ideas. 

People don’t argue like that anymore. They claim that they have already done their research, and now they want to win something. 

But before we run for the guns, what is most needed today, for our nation, for our politics, for our future, is for everyone to study argument and what it means to argue. And we need to learn what it really means to do our own research. I am not mounting an elitist argument here. I don’t mean that everyone needs to attend graduate school. But everyone should, and can, read. 

For our civic responsibility, collectively, it is time for us to require that all high school students study this lost art we used to call rhetoric, the art of defending the public good, the art of arguing in public about what matters most to us. 

The alternatives don’t look good. And I’m not trying to assert an either/or dilemma here. Surely there are still alternatives between civically arguing our positions and going to war. But before we reach that point, I have this vision that occasionally diverts me, and I hope it will divert our fellow citizens: It is the sight of the men or women on the street shown in a kind of intellectual humility as they weigh whether they have actually marshalled enough evidence. And as the microphone is placed before them, what they say is actually something like this: “Maybe I need to do more research.”