Invincible Rhetoric

Okay, so this is a seriously cool idea about a seriously annoying phenomenon - the phenomenon of invincible rhetoric. People who use invincible rhetoric are always right. They will stress a point one way to be right in another situation, but then when you bring up an objection they have another stock answer for that one too. A quick example of the difference would be the two sayings "haste makes waste" and "the early bird gets the worm".

A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.

Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:

- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.

This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.

These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.

In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.

In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...

If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.

This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.

However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.

So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.

There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.